The bunny drew me in first. She is a well-loved stuffie, fur lightly matted even sketched in pencil, form slightly squashed from years of use.

Danica Snyder’s “Memento Mori, Memento Vivere” (Spring 2025 Intima) is in vibrant conversation with my essay “Maybe It’s Beautiful,” which I am pleased to have published here a year later in Spring-Summer 2026.

What I love about Snyder’s work is her riotous use of color and pattern and the unresolved ambiguities that lie underneath. A skeletal figure—ambiguous in meaning but celebratory in hot pink—is standing on a magenta field. In the far right corner, a drape of acid green is the background to the lush green leaves of a houseplant. She layers patterns: pebbles of little white pills on top of the blue book cover with repeated stamps of an anatomical heart. The book is Frankenstein and again this ambiguity: Is there horror here, stamped on its spine?

Snyder draws everyday objects: books, pill bottles, a necklace, things one might find on a bedside table. But these objects are carefully attended to, her composition implies a private altar or ofrenda, an offering, whose meaning is personal, perhaps obscure to the viewer. Everyday here does not mean small or inconsequential; note the background of this illustration. A black mountain range rises against a field of stars. There is something transformational happening with scale. On the left side of the drawing, the orange glow of a salt lamp could just as easily be a rock canyon wall.

This stretch to hold opposites together: size and scale, color and darkness, speaks deeply to stories which appear in “Maybe It’s Beautiful.” In this essay, I explore the rituals we create to represent miscarriage and pregnancy loss to ourselves and in the world.

Many of the themes that appear in these stories are illustrated in Snyder’s work.

First, there's that bunny. In miscarriage and pregnancy loss ritual, we often use objects of childhood to remember a child who never arrived. We find ways to mark the passing within the joyful riot of childhood rituals, with birthday cakes and little toy horses.

Our stories often feature small objects of everyday life—a small stone, or a basket—and our rituals can play out against the backdrop of mountains, ocean or sky. Like Snyder’s work, we put a small discrete object in context of a larger expanse.

Both these works find creative ways to hold life and death together. Both understand the deep wisdom, that these two opposites are always in close proximity. That the presence of death teaches us how to live. Memento Mori, Memento Vivere.

Alexis Rehrmann is a writer, editor and narrative medicine practitioner who has pursued the connection between story and healing throughout much of her creative and professional life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, Portland Monthly, PDX Parent, Intima ("Your Little Heart Still Stands," Non-Fiction, Spring 2022), the Journal of Medical Humanities OHSU Digital Collections, and Anastomosis. She is program manager at the Lewis & Clark College Center for community and global health and an affiliate of the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative. She holds a CPA in narrative medicine from Columbia University and a BFA in theater from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

NOTE: The stories “Maybe It’s Beautiful” were gathered with the support of Brief Encounters, a non-profit community pregnancy and infant loss support group in Portland, Oregon. Stories are included with permission from the story teller. This essay is part of a larger work, Conception: A Miscarriage Journal, forthcoming in 2027 from University of West Virginia Press as part of the Connective Tissue, a health humanities and narrative medicine series.