When I first encountered Alexandra Miner’s “What Remains” (Spring 2021 Intima) in the early days of my own glioma diagnosis, I finally exhaled a breath that I’d held deep down. My physicians did care! Despite losing so much function, and my grief over the life I’d built, the questions I spiraled on were valid! There is a priceless comfort in feeling seen in the uncertainty and cruelty of receiving a life-limiting diagnosis as a young(er) adult (YA).

Some voices outlast the people who spoke them. In his Crossroads blog, “The Voice that Lingers,” (June 19, 2026 Intima) Kenneth Iserson, a professor emeritus of emergency medicine, tells it as a physician: the dead mentor keeps speaking in a student's stethoscope, in a resident's patience at two in the morning, even in the margin of a machine's report that has learned to wait before it concludes. The voice refuses to be deleted — not because anyone saved it, but because it had gone in too deep, beneath the skin, beneath the name, where not even death goes looking.

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.

With the same hands that now hold and annotate my textbooks, I once read and reread my mother’s biopsy results. With those same hands, I helped her rise from her chair when the chemotherapy was too strong, and with those same hands, I now care for my patients. 

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.

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.

No one decides to become a role model. That is rather the point. As psychiatrist Jacob Freedman observes in his Crossroads essay “I am not a Role Model,” only a Charles Barkley can disown the title; the people who actually shape us—parents, grandparents, the half-remembered branches of a family tree—never get the option. Freedman’s father did not announce himself as the reason his son became a physician. He simply was the reason, the best person in his son’s entire world, and the choice followed as naturally as breathing. The acts of the forefathers, an ancient maxim holds, are symbolic for their children. Identity is inherited before it is chosen.

My father was a raconteur, and as his dementia advanced, he often got caught in anecdotal loops. In the middle of a familiar story, he would forget that he had told the beginning, repeat it, then charge through the middle before backtracking again, cycling through the tale until some kind of interruption saved him and his listeners.

Reading Samantha Stewart’s poem “Stingray” (Spring 2022 Intima) made me think about how experiences can become anecdotes, which may turn into stories, which may evolve into legends. And I saw how personal legends connect the dying to the living.