If the objective is to minimize suffering, yours and mine, as patient and healthcare professional, how do we gesture to each other around the barriers of an imperfect system? Is there any gesture of care too small?

In Mariana Ndrio’s “Chronos: Mind and Heart” (Spring 2025 Intima), crimson and white wires coil together, capturing the intricate relationship between thought and feeling. This symbiosis reminds me of some of the patients who informed my artwork titled “Pericardial Mnemosyne” (Fall 2024 Intima). Patients sometime delay treatment for their metastatic breast cancer because the diagnosis exhumes memories of family or friends who had complex experiences with breast cancer treatment and those who hadn’t survived. Without treatment, however, cancer cells can secret fluid into the sac around the heart – an effusion that swells and stifles the heart from pumping. During hospital stays, the treatment team not only drains the effusion but also opens up the conversation about treating cancer.

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.