BLUEBERRIES | Toshita Kumar
Just today I felt your presence again—my friend, the brilliant neurologist, whose mind I once watched map the human brain while I navigated the chaos of critical care. We started together in intern year, learning to survive nights that never seemed to end, laughing quietly over cold coffee, whispering jokes only we understood, patching each other up after near misses on the floors.
The song we used to mock and sometimes sing—“SexyBack,” dated, indulgent, dumb—came on in the hospital corridor as I was leaving. I stood still, caught between memory and rhythm, the echo of nights and jokes long past.
I remember one particularly tough night: a young mother in her forties, stomach cancer, crying bitterly, “I don’t want to die.” I hesitated, wondering if a small dose of morphine was the right choice, the protocols spinning in my head. Then you came in. You held her hand, spoke softly about Jesus and trusting the plan, and somehow, she calmed. Just a little benzodiazepine, taking it one day at a time. You made it feel possible. You always had that way—melding precision with grace, knowledge with humanity. You squeezed her hand, counted slow breaths with her, and whispered stories of resilience I didn’t know you knew. I watched, frozen between protocol and awe.
You could see patients and immediately know where their neurological injury lay. You spoke in your wonderful Caribbean accent—and never once made fun of my Indian one. You reminded me that we, as immigrants, carry our emotional baggage: the hopes, disappointments, and resilience silently passed from patient to doctor and friend. Neurologists aren’t typically social, but you were different—disarming people within minutes, drawing them in with humor and warmth.
Later, outside, I saw it: a red Maserati idling at the curb, the exact shade you once described in reverent detail. I never understood your obsession with cars. “Engineering is poetry,” you’d said. I’d rolled my eyes.
A friendship that lasted over two decades. You saw me through everything—kept me from making some very bad decisions. A witness to my life, through human babies and fur babies alike. I had no idea it would end this way—so suddenly, just ripped away.
At first, it almost seemed like you were sharper. Faster. Your clinic notes became denser, your lectures electric. You interrupted colleagues mid-sentence, finishing their thoughts before they could. We joked about mid-onset genius.
Then you started drawing blueberries. On margins of charts. On prescription pads. In the corners of consent forms. Small, clustered circles—over and over. When I asked, you said they were neurons. “Look,” you insisted, tapping the paper. “See how they bloom?” They did not bloom. They accumulated, pressing against the edges of every page.
I had watched you notice the tiniest details in patients—the tremor in a hand, the hesitation before a word, the subtle flicker of an eye. Every gesture precise, deliberate. And now, I saw those same habits turning inward.
Then came the forgetting. A misplaced pager. A missed clinic. You laughed it off. “Sleep deprivation,” you said.
But once—only once—you brought up a case. We were in the cafeteria. You stirred your coffee long after the sugar had dissolved. “Fifty-five,” you said casually. “Rapid cognitive decline. Myoclonus. MRI changes.” I looked up. “That’s young.” You nodded. “What would you tell the family?” I chose my words carefully. Ruling out reversible causes first—thyroid disease, B12 deficiency, autoimmune encephalitis. Waiting for certainty before taking away hope.
You watched me. Not the words. The tone. “How long?” you asked. “Depends” I answered- but you already had your answer. I was a little surprised. This was not an unusual case for you.
Later, I realized you weren’t asking about a patient. The MRI showed changes no one wanted to name. You stared longer than the rest of us. “Cortical ribboning,” you said quietly.
By the time the myoclonus appeared, there was no more pretending. A sudden, violent jerk mid-conversation. Startle-induced. You looked almost offended. As if your neurons had broken protocol.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Even saying it felt obscene. So rare. Rapidly progressive. Fatal. You lasted four months.
The decline was a landslide. Aphasia. Ataxia. Executive function dissolved. Perseveration. And the blueberries multiplied.
In the end, the woman who mapped the brain for a living could no longer map the room. Your eyes tracked movement but did not land. Cortical blindness. Your hands picked at invisible threads—purposeless, as if trying to repair something only you could see.
A cruelty that felt almost deliberate. I couldn’t understand why your God would do this.
Akinetic mutism followed. Wakeful. Unreachable.
I was trained to fix things—to diagnose, to intervene, to restore order. But I couldn’t fix this. Not you, not the disease, not the slow unraveling of everything we had once joked and labored through together. I could only stand witness, carrying both awe and grief in equal measure.
The blueberries stopped. But now I see them everywhere. Clusters of headlights. Buttons on monitors. The constellation above my driveway.
Grief is an opportunist; it turns coincidence into communion. Sometimes I let it be signs. Sometimes I let it be a memory.
And today, leaving the hospital, the same song came on again—“SexyBack.” I stood still, and for a moment, you were there.
Toshita Kumar writes to bear witness when circumstances cannot be changed. Her work explores the space where medicine, memory, and emotion intersect—where ambiguity resists resolution and lived experience cannot be neatly quantified. Through writing, she seeks to preserve empathy, both for her patients and for herself, and to remain present within systems that often move too quickly to conclude. Her work holds contradiction, uncertainty, and emotional truth, honoring what cannot be fixed but can still be seen.