In the essay “My Father’s Doctor” (Spring 2016 Intima), Pennsylvania pediatrician Jennifer Chianese purports to write about her father’s relationship with his female doctor and the ways in which that relationship is both rooted in and transcends the traditional roles for women that is his cultural heritage. Her father sees future opportunity for his own daughters in this doctor who would later make headlines by killing her elderly parents. But the secondary story is that of Chianese’s relationship with her father, who became terminally ill when she was just 10 years old, and how she processed through his impending loss. The doctor tells her, “This is a difficult time for your parents. You need to be on your best behavior.”
Read moreLiving Alongside Loss: A reflection on grief, rituals, and gratitude by Diego R. Hijano
© Womb by Johanna Glaser. Acrylic paints, linocut prints, tissue paper and pens.
“I made this collage as a gift for a pregnant friend using a mixture of acrylic paints, linocut prints, tissue paper and pens. It is inspired by and directly draws upon elements from a portrait of a young dead woman by Egon Schiele. At the time, I was in the middle of a palliative care fellowship and personally recovering from a severe IBD flare. It is a meditation on birth, illness, joy, pain and death; an expression of awe as to how humans can simultaneously be wounded, age, heal, celebrate and create throughout the seasons of our lives.”
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.
Read moreWhat is Grief-Sight? Writer and researcher Valk Fisher reflects on what prompts it.
I began to see grief everywhere.
A diagnosis started it, though I didn’t know, exactly, what I was seeing. I had no words for the gnawing inside my gut, the tightness beneath my sternum, the exhales that were just that much heavier. Grief was everywhere, but nameless. It became larger and louder until I could sense it, name it, be with it, speak about it. Only then did I begin to smile – really smile – again.
Grief will require it be Seen.
Read moreHospital Hallways: Physician-Poet Jennifer Li Reflects on Grief
We see death so often as healthcare providers. I think often about the cognitive dissonance it brings to our lives: coming in such intimate proximity with it, discussing it in depth with people about themselves or their loved ones, and then returning and retreating to our own spaces and people and homes as if we can be safely tucked away from its harsh reality.
Read moreWitnessing Grief by pediatric hospitalist Sophia Gauthier
Grief walks in many forms, and its footsteps are padded and quiet, imperceptible even, except to those who lay awake at night, counting its tip taps on the upper floor.
Read moreScripting Death: When Words Fail – In Conversation with Liana Meffert’s “Death is Usually an Easy Diagnosis” by Paula Holmes-Rodman
“A medically assisted death, such as I recount in my essay “Mercies, Or, the Mostly True Tale of a Narratively Assisted Death” (Intima Spring 2023), is the antithesis of a traumatic ending in an ER. It is highly anticipated, fully orchestrated and well rehearsed – on everyone’s part but my own.”
Read moreGetting it Right, Even When it Feels Wrong: A Reflection by poet Ceren Ege
In his video “Inside Anxiety and Depression,” William Doan’s words “writing is drawing” were a reminder of my existence as a poet and artist, and how the latter is an identity I felt uncomfortable with for a long time. I squirmed at the creation of “art” out of another’s suffering, even though my father’s illness felt like the only thing worth writing about. Now I sit with a different question: whether anyone’s suffering is entirely separate. I think owning suffering defeats the very aim of why we move it to articulation—to release it, to divide the burden of it, and to comprehend it with others.
Read moreDiscerning Different Shades of Grief by Jeffrey Millstein, MD
In my essay, “Remembrance,” I discovered my own grief for a recently deceased long-time patient while continuing to care for her widowed husband. John Jacobson’s piece “Now and Then” (Fall 2018 Intima) brought me deep into the chasm of a different type of grief, from loss of someone who was, and to a more attuned place from where to offer empathy.
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