A Conversation with Bridget Sumser, MSW, LCSW
What led you to pursue a career in social work, and what drew you specifically to palliative care?
One version of the story is that I knew I wanted to help people at the end of life, so I went to social work school as a way of doing that. Another version is that I wanted to be a therapist, and I thought that by working with people at the end of life—or in and around the space of death—I’d be more helpful to people across the lifespan. I figured death anxiety is a pretty central human experience, so let’s go learn something about that.
In either version, I was already oriented toward—and open and curious about—end-of-life care because I’d been with many people in my family and community when they were sick and dying. From a young age, I repeatedly had this experience of looking around and seeing everyone freaking out, and I didn’t feel freaked out. I thought, “That’s weird.” Well—maybe it’s not weird. Maybe it’s capacity. And maybe I should go learn about it.
That was how it ended up being that, very specifically, end-of-life care was what I wanted to spend space and time in.
What skills or qualities do you think are most important for a social worker in palliative medicine?
Communication skills. Being able to really see and hear everyone in the room—understand where they’re coming from. The facilitation skills to help people come together across realities that may not make sense, or that may even be in conflict. And they’re doing all of this under high, high stress.
What do you wish more healthcare professionals understood about the role of social workers in palliative care?
So many things…
What comes to mind today is that I wish healthcare providers really understood how powerfully a social worker holds space between medical providers and families. It’s this very educated lay position—you know enough medicine to understand and help families anticipate what’s coming, and you also usually know what you don’t know, so you can ask good questions and help clarify the patient and family experience.
There’s this capacity to be a tuning fork for both sides. Not that the sides are necessarily polarized, but especially inside a hospital—where patients and families are dealing with so many providers and getting so many different messages—palliative care social workers have this amazing ability to hear from everyone, synthesize, identify, ask questions, and help clarify a thing—or two, or five.
That communication capacity, and the ability to bridge between realities—that’s one of the superpowers of palliative care social workers. Of the many!
If you weren’t a social worker, what do you think you’d be doing instead?
There are a lot of things I can imagine doing, but at the top of the list: I think I would’ve been great at running a restaurant. As a mom now, I don’t want to work at night—but the community-building, the nurturing, the beauty of the space, the camaraderie of the team, making people feel at home… I love all of that. I’m also a very, very social person—extremely extroverted!
I would have loved restaurant work. It’s also very type A—similar to a hospital. I like spaces that are a little urgent, a little crisis-y.
What kind of restaurant? California food. Like “New Californian.” A lot of vegetables. Beautiful flower arrangements. Wood. Loud music! You know the vibe!
What’s something your coworkers would be surprised to learn about you?
I’m a dancer. I grew up dancing and co-produced the San Francisco Hip Hop Dance Festival for many years. I performed in the first two and then stayed involved, helping out behind the scenes for a long time.
Hip hop was the main dance form that would have me—as a 6’1” person!
How did you become such a staunch social justice advocate/activist? We’d love to hear more about your community work as well.
When I was ten, we moved from outside Baltimore to Mill Valley. My parents were like, “We’re going to California!” It was the place of places.
I remember so distinctly driving across the Golden Gate Bridge into Mill Valley and thinking pretty quickly, “This place is really white.” I had grown up in a community that wasn’t incredibly racially diverse, but there was a very large Black community and a very large white community. So at 10, I was just like—“Wait… you can live in a place that’s just mostly white?” I didn’t like it. I felt really uncomfortable and confused, and my parents couldn’t really talk to me about it adequately.
Other than formative relationships with close family friends of color, the biggest experience that shaped me was moving to Marin and really feeling like, “I don’t understand this place.” Then in high school, seeing how different groups of kids converged—you had kids coming from schools that were basically white, and others from schools that were mostly kids of color. This was also very formative for me.
I majored in Ethnic Studies in college. That work and that lens have always been with me.
After Hurricane Katrina, I did some work with the People’s Institute, and that launched a decade of work around whiteness and white privilege.
To be honest, my community work took a bit of a pause during my first five years in palliative care. Personally, it was because the learning curve was so steep—I had to learn the medical jargon well enough to even participate meaningfully. There were no healthcare providers in my family. I didn’t lose my lens, but I put it aside to learn palliative care. And honestly, that says something about palliative care at the time. In 2010, justice wasn’t a centralized lens in the field.
But once I had some fluency in the work, I started reorienting back toward justice. Over the past handful of years, I’ve been involved in a few spaces in our division. The biggest project right now is the Ambassador Program with the Palliative Care Workgroup—getting to liaise and facilitate connections between our faculty and staff and community-based organizations. I also get to do a lot of that teaching myself. It’s been awesome—working with frontline community health workers, hearing about their experiences and their grief, and tending to it. That feels like really important justice work to me. It’s a fusion of my psychotherapeutic and facilitation skills and my desire to support the people who are out there supporting the most vulnerable in the city.
Can you share one activity that you would recommend that helps keep you grounded in the midst of a busy or stressful day?
I think I stay connected to the reality that this is all very fleeting. That doesn’t feel big and scary to me—well, sometimes it does—but more often it feels orienting. Like: “My child is not going to be three and screaming forever.”
It doesn’t work all the time. I lose it a lot. I think that’s really important to normalize. So many people in our world don’t think it’s okay to lose your shit. Of course, it’s not okay to be harmful—but we’re human. We’re messy. I’m really messy with my kids.
Something that really keeps me grounded is my belief in the fact that we can repair most things. Yesterday I lost it on my son—he’s six. It was an absurd scene. My daughter runs into the living room, trips, and smashes her chin on the floor. She’s hysterical—can’t catch her breath. I scoop her up, and for a second, I think, “Look at me, I’m such a nurturing mom.” And then… she pees all over me.
Our floors are slanted, so the pee starts running like rushing rivers toward all the exercise equipment. I ask my son to get me a towel. He just stands there and laughs. I scream at this child, but stuff like that happens once, sometimes twice a week. And it’s okay. We’re okay. I can talk to them about it afterward. I don’t have to be perfect. I’m not going to be perfect. I try to make peace with that—or at least normalize it for myself. It’s so humbling.
Let’s do a quick fire round of this or that questions:
Burgers or tacos? I definitely eat way more tacos, but I prefer a burger
Going out or staying in? Both
No internet or no running water? No internet
Coffee or sweets? coffee
Domestic travel or international travel? Without young children—international. With young children—domestic. Physical book or e-book? Physical! No e-book. Can’t do it.