WELCOME TO THE SPRING-SUMMER 2025 INTIMA:
A JOURNAL OF NARRATIVE MEDICINE

Springtime is a time of renewal and joy, a span of time lasting from March 20 to June 20 in 2025. It is also a time of transformation, and our contributors made offerings of transformation and renewal to match the season.

In her short story, “A (Con)versation,” preventive medicine physician Janet Greenhut unravels grief in a scene about a chat between two strangers set among cherry blossom trees. The Japanese concept of hanami (gazing at cherry blossoms) comes up, to which the narrator comments, “Imagine celebrating the impermanence of life.”

Much of our new issue confronts this sentiment—in work that expresses the impermanence of health and what it means to be human.

Fellow fiction contributor Nivedita Gunturi also addresses impermanence in the natural world in her meditative prose piece, “Desk Peach.” She weaves a tale of devastating beauty only a palliative care physician can tell. One can feel the shock of tragedy with the abrupt loss of a loved one in lines such as “your long arms, the ones that changed the living room light bulb the day before.” Juxtaposed with decaying fruit, life is not the same for one couple after a brain tumor’s discovery.

 Aspiring neurosurgeon Angela Tang-Tan creates unexpected beauty in her juxtaposition of brain to landscape in the digital mixed-media piece “View from the Lateral Ventricle.” Death Valley is layered with an immunofluorescence stain of a mouse brain in a marriage of “neuroscience and nature.” Tang-Tan fashions a novel method of seeing the world in combining the visible and external with the invisible and internal.

 Then there is the parallel world that is returning home to care for an ailing parent in Woods Nash’s poem “Our Current Journey Through Cosmic Zephyrs.” It is a strange yet beautiful full-circle experience for Nash, who teaches health humanities at the University of Houston College of Medicine: “It’s my turn to nurse dad as he once sponged toddler me.” After performing tender tasks for his father, “we calibrate the shifting physics of bridge and abyss.”

There are new realities to navigate, like so many of the narrators and worlds crafted by our thoughtful contributors. For instance, in the non-fiction essay, “Blink Once,” writer and graphic memoirist EG Shields explores the reality of caring for her mother, whose speech is impacted by ALS. “She hasn’t been able to speak for years now,” Shields writes, “but I never think about how much she actually says.” For her mother, blinking becomes a language of consent, willpower and perseverance.

 After a life-altering stroke at the age of 27 poet Elly Katz navigates her new reality in her authentically raw poem, “Kafka’s Toolbox.” She laments her lost youth and the entrapment of living in a body happening to her: “Does the voice spoil before the body, or does the body spoil before the voice?” In the essay "Kind of Blue: Improvisations at the Bedside," Tyler Jorgensen writes about a similar situation but from his point of view as a doctor, reflecting on loss and seeing a young patient make a decision he can't understand.

Similarly, in the poem “Korsakoff’s,” Willa Schneberg’s speaker tells of alcoholism and memory loss in a plainly painful rendering. “I sit at the same table which isn’t mine with the same people.” The speakers in both of these poems have no solutions to their situations yet perhaps their burdens can be shared in reading and witnessing, the essence of narrative medicine and the close reading we do as editors for Intima.

Like much of the fine work in our Spring-Summer 2025 issue that features voices who refuse to succumb to pain and suffering, so does the mesmerizing hand-cut collage, “An Ode to Undrowning” (above) by artist Jenna Grauman. Inspired by the book, “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals,” Grauman challenges the history of slavery and media representation in this black-and-white piece. A pregnant body with an orca for a head, sand dollars and vertebrae, ear and coral: Grauman’s collage confronts the shared oppression of humans and animals.

Resistance also looks like trying to hold steady in a world unraveling. In “A Caregiver’s Dilemma,” non-fiction contributor Cathy Beres describes the rhythm of morning rituals and the challenge of tending to a spouse as his memory fades. “Here it would start, this caregiver’s dilemma: to tell the truth, or a version of it, or a flat-out lie?” The piece is a tender meditation on the white lies we tell to protect and to soothe when the truth feels too sharp to bear. 

Where there are stories of steadfastness, there are also those of surrender. In her essay, “An Otherwise Ordinary Day,” writer Amanda Le Rougetel reflects on her mother’s choice to die on her own terms through medical assistance in dying. Surrounded by tea, crosswords and croissants, Rougetel and her sister witness their mother’s final act of self-advocacy. “My mother had given me life,” said Rougetel. “I helped give her dignity and peace in death.” In doing so, Le Rougetel points to the ways in which death’s arrival can be both ordinary and surreal.

Several Field Notes pieces explore the tensions of witnessing through parent-child relationships. In “The Lingerie Shop,” gynecologist Colleen Cavanaugh describes visiting a charming store in Rhode Island that her mother secretly frequented in the Sixties for post-mastectomy prostheses. In the wake of her mother’s passing, Cavanaugh processes her grief by searching for connection and understanding at the beloved place, leading to discoveries about her mother that mark the shop as a site of intimacy and remembrance.

Other pieces in our issue similarly explore moments of deep connection through what remains unspoken. Psychiatry resident Chloe Nazra Lee delves deeper into that idea in her poignant essay, “‘I Love You’ in Cantonese,” which contains the curious line: “My father and I don’t say, ‘I love you,’ to each other.” Love, instead, looks like the father-daughter duo treating one another to ice cream, and Lee learning to witness her father in his fullness—a skill that directly shapes how she, as a clinician, listens to her patients. These powerful pieces remind us that in moving through grief, sometimes one must look backward in order to move forward.

Like many of our contributors in this issue, Fiona Dunbar, a pediatric occupational therapist, approaches caregiving as quiet devotion. In her Field Notes essay, “Prescription for Grief,” Dunbar demonstrates that mourning can be rhythmic and culinary. “Breath, sing, push, repeat,” she says, pressing her fingers into sticky dough – her private ceremony for a child she once knew.

In moments of ritual and remembering, something sacred emerges.

 Across poems, essays and art, our contributors reflect on care, witnessing, memory and impermanence. Like spring, these stories beckon transformation, renewal and new beginnings – gentle and quiet, like the grass deepening in color, insistent like the fresh buds awakening. With joy and profound gratitude to our contributors, editors and readers, we welcome our Spring-Summer 2025 issue. 

—Angelica Recierdo and Zahra Khan for the Editors of the Intima