Family mourns death of Yale doctor, professor Barry Zaret - New Haven Register

WOODBRIDGE — Dr. Barry Zaret helped shape the understanding of how blood flows in the heart that saved countless lives. While he worked hard, he balanced his life between his medical career and his love for literature.

Barry Zaret, 82 and of Woodbridge, was traveling southbound on Route 8 when the car suddenly veered onto the median. The car then traveled over a dirt mound and struck a metal guardrail before plummeting off the overpass above Winthrop Street, crashing into a concrete wall, according to state police. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

"While it ended way too short, it was a very, very, very well lived life," Elliot Zaret said. "And I mean, that's always shaped me in how I approach my life."

Barry Zaret was the former chief of cardiology at Yale New Haven Hospital and a professor emeritus of internal medicine at Yale University's School of Medicine. He also was a published poet.

Another son, Owen Zaret, who has been practicing medicine for more than 20 years as a physician assistant, said his father was "an inspiration, a hero and an idol" for him who sparked his interest to enter the medical field.

"When I was younger, he would take me into the hospital with him and I would get to see patients with him or just tour around the department meeting people," Owen Zaret said.

Like many fathers and sons, they had ups and downs and arguments, Owen Zaret said, but it still was nice to be able to have some commonality in medicine and talk about experiences they had with patients and reflections around the practice.

Elliot Zaret said his father was a doctor who truly cared about his patients and showed it through how he interacted with them.

"Nobody was a chart to him, nobody was a disease to him or condition to him," Elliot Zaret said. "Everyone was a human being with hopes and dreams and families and history."

Barry Zaret almost didn't become a doctor in college but felt the responsibility to as a son of a Jewish immigrant, a culture that defined success at the time as being a doctor, a lawyer or a business owner, according to one of the sons. His actual passion was for literature.

And he fulfilled it during "the second half of his life," his son said.

Elliot Zaret called it "the second half" because his father had been in a near-fatal car crash many decades ago on Amity Road. 

It "gave him a new outlook on life" and made him realize that he needed to do what was meaningful to him on top of 12 hours a day at work, and those included practicing Judaism, traveling, painting and publishing poetry.

"This driving force along with medicine, he found the balance; he would say to me, your avocation doesn't have to be your evocation, so, in other words, what you do for your job doesn't have to be everything that gives you pleasure and love," Elliot Zaret said.

The sudden death came as a shock for everybody in the family.

Adam Zaret, another of Barry Zaret's sons, said the death made him wonder "if life has any meaning at all." He asked "how can somebody with his stature and with so much more to give could just be taken in a blink of an eye?"

Just a couple weeks ago, Adam Zaret and Barry Zaret got together in Connecticut, and talked about Adam Zaret's daughters who also are heading into medicine. It was a great memory Adam Zaret said he had with his father before the crash.

"We got to watch the Giants beat the Bears, which was a great capstone," he recalled.

Owen Zaret said his father had just sent the most recent poetry book off to the publisher and the family was very excited about it.

"For me, it continues to feel somewhat cosmically wrong, it doesn't feel like the appropriate way for my father to have left this physical world," Owen Zaret said of the crash. "My father lived such a large life."

Elliot Zaret, currently living in Grinnell, Iowa, said his wife, Dr. Zoe Zaret, an obstetrician-gynecologist, just signed a contract with Griffin Hospital in Derby so they could move back close to his father again.

The three sons agreed in separate interviews that their father was just "a good person" who always helped people in need ,and shaped his sons to the best version of themselves in their career, family and marriage.

"My father was always out there in the community helping friends with various things, whether it was just lending medical advice or just being someone available to be helpful," Owen Zaret said.

chatwan.mongkol@hearstmediact.com

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