We see death so often as healthcare providers. I think often about the cognitive dissonance it brings to our lives: coming in such intimate proximity with it, discussing it in depth with people about themselves or their loved ones, and then returning and retreating to our own spaces and people and homes as if we can be safely tucked away from its harsh reality.
In Ryan Boyland’s poem “Omens,” he touches gracefully on the discomfiting grief that we are faced with daily—a grief that sometimes isn’t even ours, that we become bystanders to or a strange part of in these brief glimpses we are afforded with our patients in their last, most vulnerable moments. He writes how, “while I am awake, he still alive.” And then in the next verse – “I walk by his room and see the blood / is gone. The linens are fresh. / His bed is empty.”
At my hospital, I often walk past a room I still think of as a specific patient’s room—a patient I took care of two years ago now, a young man who I watched slowly die before my eyes from complications of HIV. That room on the 10th floor, regardless of who is in it, will always be his to me. I will always close my eyes and see his face in his last moments, the embrace his mother gave me after I pronounced him; the lingering remembrance of the fact that this unit, this room, this persistently sticky flooring will be permanently etched in their minds as one of the worst days of their lives. And yet, I continue to move on—with my day, with more patients, with walking up and down the halls where he stopped existing—a clean bed, clean sheets, an empty room. Much like Lauren Fields’ poem “Learning Pronunciation,” which highlights how “we return to floor work / and the exigencies of the day, / as the slow closure of eyelids / replays itself”.
In both pieces, I feel the same grief and bittersweet liminality I feel every time I walk through the 10th floor. I think of how we become interwoven in the grief of these patients and their families and yet there is always a new day and new patients and new linens, and all we can do is continue onwards with these experiences in our pockets, hoping that it will make us better for the next time.—Jennifer Li
Jennifer Li, MD
Jennifer Li, MD, who completed both medical school and residency training at Emory, is an academic hospitalist at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta, GA. Li graduated with a BA in English literature from Emory University and was on the founding editorial board of an arts organization and literary magazine on campus. In medical school, she was an editor for the online journal in-Training and was part of an advisory board focused on diversity called Mosaic in Medicine. Aside from medicine, she enjoys playing piano and tennis, attending indie concerts, watching sad art films, consuming Asian American media and spending too much time in coffee shops. Her essay "Remembrance" appeared in the Fall 2022 Intima; her poem "The Spaces Between" appeared in the Spring 2021 Intima. Li joins the editorial board in 2025.