Johanna Glaser’s collage “Womb” (Fall-Winter 2025-26 Intima) challenges the idea that life unfolds in emotional stages. Instead, it holds simultaneity:

Birth beside illness.
Joy beside grief.
Healing beside wounding.
Presence beside absence.

That duality emerges in writer and educator Valk Fisher’s Field Notes essay “Diary of a Plunge Year” (Spring-Summer 2025 Intima) and my short story “The Other Son” (Spring-Summer 2026 Intima). Both explore how rituals, whether running beside the ocean or gathering around a table, allow people to live alongside loss without being entirely consumed by it.

“There is no way to run from grief… though there is a running through it,” says Fisher, who along with being a writer, teaches writing-for-well-being workshops. Her runs and plunges into cold water become daily anchors in a life shaped by illness, displacement and the death of a child. The rituals do not restore the illusion of safety. They allow her to keep moving alongside grief. Even as fear reshapes her relationship to motherhood and the future, movement becomes necessary, revealing how love and loss coexist.

Her essay helped me better understand ritual in “The Other Son.” In my fictional short story, a family gathered around a small table outside a hospital room becomes something larger. The table becomes a place of belonging, fracture and peace. For Manuel, grief is not only the loss of José, but feeling unseen within his family. Years later, he builds a life through rituals mirroring the ones he once lost: marriage, children and overlapping voices. José remains part of the family.

What resonates across Fisher’s essay, Glaser’s collage, and “The Other Son” is the understanding that healing does not require leaving grief behind. Having lost both parents in a car accident at 18, I have experienced how time does not make loss smaller. Milestones like marriage, parenthood and joy itself sharpen the awareness of who is missing from the room. In all three works, healing comes from allowing sorrow and gratitude to coexist.

In the final scene of “The Other Son,” the family gathers around a crowded table. Children move easily through the room, with José watching from a portrait nearby. Manuel sees his mother crying and realizes her tears are not only for the son she lost, but also for the son who remained. The grief has not disappeared. Nor has the love. They now share the same space at the table.

Diego R. Hijano is a pediatric infectious diseases physician at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. His clinical work focuses on the care of immunocompromised children, particularly those undergoing bone marrow transplantation, and the prevention and management of viral infections. Beyond his clinical and research efforts, he is deeply interested in the human experience of illness, especially the ways in which patients and families navigate uncertainty, suffering and healing. His writing explores the intersection of medicine, narrative and meaning, often reflecting on themes of identity, trust and connection. As both a physician and an immigrant, he brings a perspective grounded in empathy, cultural awareness and a commitment to seeing patients and families as whole, beyond their diagnoses.