© Mitwelt Melt Series 3. Jennie Vegt. Spring 2024 Intima.
In the healthcare field, providers are sometimes required to grapple with the loss of patients. For many patients, our mission is to provide care and prevent death. For others, our goal is to ease people into a peaceful passing. This grief extends to the patient's family and other loved ones who experience the loss most intimately.
While death is a universal truth, this does not make it easier to bear. The challenge becomes finding ways to process death and find a nuanced perspective of loss: one that prevents us from dwelling in despair but honors the depth of grief. It is through conversation and connection— interactions with people, self-dialogue, or creating art—that we may begin to process grief and find that nuanced perspective.
Tessa Palisoc and Andrew Murdock
Tessa Palisoc and Andrew Murdock are MD candidates at Drexel University College of Medicine (DUCOM), where they participate in the Medical Humanities Scholar Track. They are members of the DUCOM dance club Impulse where they serve as board members. Palisoc studied contact improvisation, Mande dance, and aerial arts and acrobatics for 4 years at Brown University, where she earned an Sc.B. in immunobiology. Their multimedia dance, “The First Patient,” appears in theFall 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
The Mitwelt Melt Series, by Jennie Vegt, explores grief through stunning paintings, in which the transience of life is symbolized in a melting ice cream cone. The collection, taken as a whole, has this sense of zooming out and a long journey. As the pieces progress, the figure moves further into the background. In the painting shown above, we see the figure standing in a multicolored puddle, observing the pale, unknown landscape far in the distance. The experience of grief has expanded into a lake of melted ice cream, connected with the universal grief that touches all human lives. The lake feels both consuming and comforting, like an embrace. There is a sense of feeling quite small against so much loss, but also a strong peace in accepting it.
Our piece, The First Patient, also recontextualizes grief to help process death. In our choreography, we depict two journeys. First, a medical student learns gross anatomy for the first time – through human dissection. Second is the experience of the donor body, whose final act of autonomy was to take up the role of teacher. The dance explores a nuanced view of grief.
Recognizing agency during periods of loss is a major theme of both our work and Vegt’s paintings. In our piece, we view dissection as a learning experience and an active conversation with the donor. Similar to the journey in Vegt’s paintings, the donor body and medical student embark on a journey that is uncomfortable and at times sad, but we find something growing from the loss.
THE FIRST PATIENT | Created and performed by Tessa Palisoc and Andrew Murdock. Music: Sleeping at Last. “West.”