***Catherine Read is a medical student at Eastern Virginia Medical School and pursuing a career in surgery.***

What does it look like to become intimately associated with the face of death? This is the question that both my piece “Teatime” (Intima, Spring 2022) and Joshua Atlas’s series “Anatomy Lab” (Intima, Spring 2022) both wrestle with. As medical trainees, and eventually as practitioners, we are brought into close, almost daily, association with death. This begins on our very first days as medical students when we are brought into the anatomy lab and asked to make a cut on another person for the very first time.

It is a clear mental image in the mind of every student and every physician that I know: the smell of the formalin, the cold metal tables, the faces sunken with age and further paled by death. It is humbling and painful to see the reality which will eventually befall each of us as well as our patients. It hurts to acknowledge that no matter how valiantly we wage war against death, we will never truly be the victors. But, for the sake of preparing for the practical, we are forced early to put aside this uncomfortable realization of mortality. We learn to set it aside, to value efficiency and productivity over our own humanity.

Atlas’ portrayal of this struggle is visceral and provocative, reminding each of us of the decisions we have made in the name of our career, despite not being a provider himself. Atlas is instead an outside observer of the process, an observer of the complex emotions among the students in the room. It is a reminder to each of us that, though we deal with death every day, we do not have to become desensitized to it. Instead, we can choose to delve deeper into our own humanity, let it affect us, and come out better practitioners for it.

Catherine Read is a medical student at Eastern Virginia Medical School and pursuing a career in surgery. Read is also a writer, coffee aficionado, rare plant collector, wife and dog mom.