Nancy Glass’s Field Notes essay “What Did La Abuela See?” (Fall 2019 Intima) put me back inside a room I had stood in once, half a hemisphere away, on a wooden floor that smelled of cedar and boiled water.

Glass writes as a hospice physician at the bedside of a dying eight-year-old. The boy’s great-grandmother, of Mayan heritage, enters and begins the Rosary, and Glass catches herself counting the beads, estimating how long the whole prayer will take. Then she notices the child’s breathing ease as the prayer fills the room. The boy dies fifteen minutes after she leaves. Her essay closes on a question: “What had La Abuela seen? Did I miss something?”

My essay “Ilha das Flores” stands at the other threshold of a life. I was thirty, a physician on an island in the Brazilian Amazon, called to a first birth I was certain I could manage. The woman who managed it was a Baniwa midwife who looked at me a long moment and decided which corner of the room I could occupy. I spent that morning swallowing the things I had been trained to offer. At one point I caught my fingers tapping a Leopold’s maneuver against my thigh, and made them stop.

Glass and I were each handed an elder whose knowledge arrived before ours and outlasted it. La Abuela read the nearness of death in a body; the midwife read a birth in one. When the baby came I gave him an Apgar score anyway, silently, inside my head, because that was what my training did when it had nothing else to do. Nobody asked. Nobody needed it.

Our essays end differently and yet identically. Glass closes on a question; I close on a flat sentence, a boy was born that morning, and I was there. The question and the sentence are the same gesture, a doctor setting down the pen, because some knowledge is older than the chart, and the most honest entry is sometimes a blank one.

La Abuela saw what the midwife knew. I am still learning to say its name.

Guilherme Coelho is a family physician and doctoral candidate at the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil. His narrative medicine writing has appeared in Family Medicine and Hektoen International. Coelho trained in medicine at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and completed his residency in Family and Community Medicine at UNICAMP. From 2020 he worked as a physician in São Gabriel da Cachoeira, in the Upper Rio Negro of the Brazilian Amazon, an experience that continues to shape his clinical and literary work. His current doctoral research examines the effects of climate on maternal and perinatal health in Brazil.