I am interested in the juxtaposition between my use of poetry to shed traumatic experiences and memories from medicine, and the description of William Carlos Williams by Britta Gustavson (“Re-embodying Medicine: William Carlos Williams and the Ethics of Attention,” Spring 2020 Intima).
Read moreMothers and Daughters: A Reflection on Cancer, Caring and Seeing the Whole Picture by poet Kathryn Paul
—After ‘Macroscopic” by Adela Wu (Spring 2021 Intima)
My mother and I were not close. I knew she wanted us to be, but I couldn’t do it her way. For most of my adult life, I kept my distance, emotionally and physically. We lived on opposite sides of the continent. In her 80’s, the creeping dementia my mother never discussed was overtaken by a cruel and much more terrifying diagnosis: Stage IV ovarian cancer.
Aided by her cancer-free twin sister, Mom endured multiple surgeries and two lengthy and debilitating rounds of chemo. Each time, her cancer came roaring back within weeks. Her surgeon suggested an experimental Round Three. Mercifully, her oncologist suggested hospice at home instead.
During the first year of Mom’s illness, I was trapped by my own cancer treatment, unable to participate in her care. I called daily, spoke with her, spoke with my aunt, asked about her pain, her “tummy trouble,” her ascites, and her white count. I took notes and dictated the questions to ask at her next appointment.
As soon as my doctors cleared me to visit her, I did. I was always on the verge of moving in with her, but never quite needed to do so. I flew back and forth. The more debilitated she became—by her cancer and her dementia—the more often I visited.
Adela Wu’s Studio Art piece “Macroscopic” simply and eloquently captures the changes in how I experienced my mother during those last months and weeks. The simplest things gave her joy: A small dish of ice cream. A pain-free nap on the down-stuffed cushions of her couch. Cuddles with her cats. A bird visiting the feeder outside her window.
Even as her disease spread through her body, even as she faded, my mom seemed to crystallize. She became, ultimately, the Essence of herself. And—just at the end—I finally saw her.
Kathryn Paul
Photo by Andrew Givhan
Kathryn Paul (Kathy) is a survivor of many things, including cancer and downsizing. Her poems have appeared in Rogue Agent, Hospital Drive, The Ekphrastic Review, Lunch Ticket, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Pictures of Poets and Poets Unite! The LiTFUSE @10 Anthology. Her poem “Dementia Waltz” appears in the Spring 2021 Intima.
The Body in Bloom: Thoughts on Two Artworks by Simona Carini
(c) Floral Anatomy by Kristen Kelly. FALL 2018 Intima
As a writer, to give life to a story, I reach for my pen and notebook, craft words into images, lines, sentences. I find it inspiring to explore how other artists use their preferred media to tell stories. In my poem “Young Woman Listens to Cyndi Lauper During Dialysis” (Spring 2021 Intima), I open a window into an experience of eating disorder. In contrast, two artists in the Fall 2018 Intima show us how our body can be seen as a garden of elegant shapes and rich colors.
Read moreHow a Doctor Learns to Act: A Reflection by Claire Unis, MD
“Am I becoming / something unfamiliar?” asks Lauren Fields in her poem “My First Mask Was a White Coat” and in that simple question she brings back for me the struggle of becoming. With our first medical school clerkships we don white coats and mimic our preceptors: some false confidence here, a prayer for invisibility there. Silent reassurances never spoken aloud: It’s okay to pretend at doctoring. That’s how you learn.
Read moreOn Fathers, Love and “Exit Wounds” by psychiatrist and essayist Greg Mahr
I regularly attend a poetry critique group in Ann Arbor, MI called the Crazy Wisdom Poetry Circle, named after the bookstore and tea shop where we used to meet before the pandemic. The experienced poets there have come to accept the sad and overly personal poems and flash pieces I write and help me craft them into something that sometimes almost sounds like real writing. One of them once told me, “You always write from a place of longing. That’s a good place to write from.” I realized he was right. I find it hard to share what I write with the people I love. When I am in a good relationship, I write about bad ones; when I love someone, I write about missing them.
Read moreCaring for Our Caregivers: A short reflection by poet and hematology-oncology nurse Nina Solis
Caregivers deserve patience, gratitude and comfort just as much as those they support. As healthcare providers, we all could use a reminder to advocate for these irreplaceable members of a patient’s team.
Read morePoetry Helps Healing: Writing Poems on the Road to Recovery by Ellen Goldsmith
“Anatomy in Nature” is a gift that encourages appreciating the beauty and miracle of our bodies and the correspondence between forms in nature and what’s inside us—our heart, our lungs, our brain, our spine. What keeps us alive.
Memory, Dementia and Finding ‘Original Happiness’: A Reflection by Rhiannon Weber
They Tell Me It's Normal Grief by Makoto Ogawa. Spring 2018 Intima
What if a loved one losing their memory made them happier with themselves, others, the world? If all their past abuses, transgressions, phobias, biases, etc. slowly faded away and a smile emerged? Not a senseless smile of ignorance or foolishness but of peace, patience, and serenity…could we accept this?
Read moreAnatomy Lesson: See the Face of Those Before You by Rodolfo Villarreal-Calderon, MD
For those with the privilege of having participated in a longitudinal cadaver dissection, the connection you build with the donor’s body is known to be a truly unique experience. That bond is part of what I attempted to capture in my poem “Through Damp Muslin.” Especially reflecting on how to express gratitude to the person who once was—and now who is, or at least whose body is—lying before you.
Thresholds and Transgressions, a reflection on ICU chaos, communitas, liminality and Levinas by Nancy Smith
Nancy Smith is a retired Registered Nurse. Though she moved through the many domains of hospital nursing, most of her work took place in an Intensive Care Unit. Her co-workers noticed that she would place small strips of paper with poems by various authors on her locker from time to time along with the pictures of her family.
Read moreFinding What's Essential in Just Laundry: Painting and Poetry in Dialogue By Alexis Rehrmann
In both the painting and the poem, these particulars are gone but the objects remain and hold an impression of that past life. There’s honor in caring for these objects, in both our daily work and our creative lives.
Read moreGlobal Citizenship: The Complex Emotions of ‘Going Home’ to a Place You’ve Never Been by Violet Kieu
Going to Vietnam was a formative time of my life–and also a reminder I am not entirely of that place. I am distance, and culture and language apart. Doing a medical elective in Saigon was a paradox: both familiar and foreign.
Read moreRemembering Fathers: Raspberry Picking, the Silence of Roses, and Taking a Breath: A reflection on two poems by Mark Hammerschick
Memory serves as an anchor in our lives, those brief, isolated moments of awe create a sense of warmth, safety, comfort.
Read moreFire, Cake and Stone: A Wayfarer’s Guide to Remembering by Deborah Burghardt
Though different cultures and different pastries, the narrator and I both bake in our memories. We share the human desire to displace grief and make our sweetest moments last.
Losing Touch: How COVID-19 Has Interfered With the Way We Bond by Adam Lalley, MD
The intimacy of touch is deeply rooted in vulnerability, and COVID-19 is reminding us that this vulnerability is biological as well as emotional. For Dr. Vlasic, touch was an act of trust, but nowadays trust seems best measured by how far apart we stand and how carefully we obscure the lower half of our faces.
Read morePoetry and Music: How Each Word in a Poem Reflects an Emotion by Anna Delamerced
Life is full of joy and sorrow. The melodies of life involve not only high moments, but low ones, too. My grandmother has lived through more than ninety decades. In those years she has endured war, found love, mourned the loss of relatives, suffered illness, survived a train crash, and discovered new happiness in grandchildren.
Each day carries a crossroads of pain and hope, suffering and healing. In my poem Evening Music, I sought to portray these crossroads. Words like “pillow”and “wooden bench” were written in the same line to juxtapose the softness and harshness of life. “Paper fan” and “electric fan” are used to show the fragility and strength in my grandmother. I wrote the final line, “She plays the piano even in the dark” to show that even if my grandmother has suffered much, she still sees light in the dark and makes something beautiful.
Ellen Sazzman’s poem Assisted Living Lullaby (Fall 2016 Intima) resonated with me and echoed similar sentiments. The words “lullaby” and “assisted living” brought together images of youth and old age in my mind. Life seems cyclical, as we sing lullabies to both infants and seniors. Music compels us to meditate on life, stirring memories of a wide breadth of emotions, from sad memories to happy ones.
Working in the medical world has reiterated the juxtaposition of the sorrows and joys of life. Each day in the hospital sees both life and death. How do we navigate all this? Do the sorrows make the joys all the sweeter? I do not have all the answers, but perhaps it is in poetry where I can wrestle with these thoughts and experiences. Writing allows us to wade in the gray, to make music in the dark.
Anna Delamerced is a medical student at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University. She received funding through the Bray Medical Humanities Fellowship to pursue a year-long project, focusing on poetry for kids in the hospital. Her works have been published in KevinMD, Medscape, Abaton, Plexus, Murmur, Cornerstone and in-Training. She is passionate about listening to people tell their stories. Her poem “Evening Music” appears in the Spring 2020 Intima.
Seeing is Believing: Reflecting on Miracles by Andrew Taylor-Troutman
A reflection on “My Grandpa” by Meghan Wang (Poetry / Spring, 2013)
I see his body, but I do not see him
So begins Meghan Wang’s poem and her words cut to the core of the grief I have known in watching an aged loved one. I have lost people before their actual deaths. I know that sight is a metaphor for understanding. That is the double-meaning of the poem’s line:
It’s hard to see him like this
Holding Vigil: The privilege of putting death off for another day by Elizabeth Lanphier
Stella’s speaker is running from patient to patient, hoping to catch some sleep in the call room; for my speaker it is only the mind that is running, keeping her awake.
Read moreAging and Memory from Two Poetic Perspectives: A Reflection by Larry Oakner
As I age into my late sixties, I’m experiencing the blips of short-term memory loss that are common for many people my age. I find the experience a little frightening and disconcerting because I have always had great recall throughout my life, with deep detail and clarity of memories, right down to the emotions at the time.
Read more‘New Normal. Precious Normal.’ A Reflection about Loss and Love in the Wake of COVID-19 by poet Sophia Wilson
In her poem “Oxygen” (Fall 2018 Intima), Hollis Kurman captures how poignantly the proximity of illness or death can alter the way we view others and the world:
‘…he lies
wordless, feet stilled and arms bound.
His glasses have been removed,
His pockets emptied. A life fills
those pockets, the tokens and coins,
Addresses and appointments. Cash, still.
Hints of barter expired.’
Currently, here in New Zealand, the combination of a small population (total five million), and nationwide lockdown has flattened the initial COVID-19 curve. There have been no new cases for most days over the past two weeks. The country has re-opened schools and businesses. Domestic tourism is being aggressively encouraged. There’s been a rush on fast food. Traffic is back on the roads in force.
Simultaneously, there is a risk of complacency and resurgence of infection.
It’s almost hard to recall, how we felt at the beginning of lockdown. As circumstances brought about by the pandemic change rapidly, so too, do our emotions and responses.
While the focus in New Zealand is on a return to ‘normal,’ there is also a sense of the importance of moving forward differently, in particularly with regards to the environment and each another. Today, as it happens, is not only the release date of the Spring 2020 Intima, in which my poem “Don’t Leave” appears, but the day my husband (an essential worker and subject of the poem), moves back into our home—a cause for celebration. It’s also the day I receive news that a close relative is intubated in intensive care in a Sydney hospital, with suspected COVID-19 infection. He’s forty-five years old with no comorbidity. Our loved one was well when we spoke to him last week. It’s an acute reminder the nightmare is not over.
What wouldn’t we do to keep those we love safe and close? As Hollis Kurman so movingly writes:
‘Wait, we’ve not yet
spoken today; wait, take my oxygen;
wait, the policeman called you “sir” in the
middle of the night, carrying you back to bed.
Wait.’
Both our poems express an acute appreciation for the preciousness of other people, those so familiar to us we have come to take them for granted. In my case, as for so many of us right now, this heightened appreciation has been catalysed forcefully by COVID-19. I hope that, like the quiet, paused moments of lockdown, it does not slip away amid the hustle and bustle of a return to ‘normality.’
Thank you, Hollis. Your poem will stay with me. And thank you, Intima, for all the brave and inspiring work you support and share.
Sophia Wilson is a New Zealand-based writer and mother of three with a background in arts, medicine and psychiatry. Her work has appeared in StylusLit, Not Very Quiet, Ars Medica, Hektoen International, Intima, Distāntia off topic poetics, NZ Poetry Shelf, Poems in the Waiting Room, Corpus, The Otago Daily Times and elsewhere. In 2019 the manuscript for her first children’s novel, “The Guardian of Whale Mountain” was selected in the top ten for the Green Stories Competition (UK). She was shortlisted for the Takahē Monica Taylor Prize and a finalist in the Robert Burns Poetry Competition. She was winner of the 2020 International Writers Workshop Flash Fiction Competition and is the recipient of a 2020 Creative New Zealand grant.