“Radiographs serve as distilled moments of a human narrative,
An illness experience in greyscale” (From “Remnant” by Tia Forsman in the Spring 2022 Intima)
Sea glass/cutglass/eyeglass/stonefish/boomerang, Forsman’s remnants
Arrayed/x-rayed on the nightblack ocean floor of shapes and shadows.
From the French : to “rest”; to “remain”, “left over”; an underwater x-ray.
Overlapping, edges blurred, tenderly floating in an uncertain narrative.
This isn’t an x-ray. It just looks like one. Like medicine, a “grey area”
Forman is bilingual.. She paints in watercolor. She speaks in radiology.
Shapes and transparencies, her metier, her watercolors of radiology
abstractions of anatomy/ Lucy in the Sky diamond studded remnants appear prehistoric. The elegant arc of a dancer’s leg a grey area
of modernism in an otherworldly terrain, a moonscape of shadows
highlighting the “uncapturability” (TF) of everything in a medical narrative
an inconvenient truth she sees in the x-ray.
© Remnant 6 by Tia Forsman. Spring 2022 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine
Chests riddled with a lifetime of smoking said the x-ray
A young girl I sat on the top step in the office of the radiologist
Who would decode the inside story of the body narrative
My father peered into the view-box studying forms and remnants
There was something there, do you see a shadow ?
Shapes spectral and spooky he pointed and said “behind the grey area.”
Immersed in the cerulean blue of cyberspace deciphering the grey area
Of a breast , or a nodule, radiologists reside in reading rooms reading x-rays.
I loved these dark rooms, where I stepped into the shadows
I can still hear my father’s sonorous “don’t breathe, don’t move”, the radiologist’s
Instruction, behind the lead lined wall of my room, a soundscape memory remnant
Distilled from my childhood narrative.
It’s a long time from that childhood narrative
In my 70+ years I’ve come to live in the grey areas
The x-rays I sponge-dried splayed across the living room walls, remnants
I still live with as art on our walls, hands atop a chiming clock, an x-ray
Of my mother’s arthritis. Now the familiar has become foreign as the radiology
Reveals the inconvenient truth of my husband’s colon cancer, there was a shadow.
This was unexpected, the presumed diagnosis diverticulosis, but the biopsy shadow
told a different story. Many stories, Bad prep, repeat in 3 months, many narratives.
How I wonder would Forsman paint colon cancer radiology.
Bad prep, repeat in 3 months, surgery one and done. Like I said. Grey areas.
Drip drip chemo infusion begins today. There will be more x-rays
The photo of my dad holding the x-ray to the light a potent remnant.
The current narrative will shadow me the rest of my days.
We will live in the grey areas,
We will go to the radiologist for x-rays.
And I will pray there are no remnants.
Lynn Lawrence is a psychotherapist in private practice in New York City. A graduate of Columbia’s Narrative Medicine Program, she is a co-editor of Narrative in Social Work Practice: The Power and Possibility of Story. Her chapter in that book, “Garden at Vaucresson: It’s Not all a Bed of Roses,” represents a lived experience of how the close reading of Vuillard’s painting in concert with reflective writing uncorks a family trauma. Her most recent article, “Mourning Becomes Elect[ronic]”, published in SYNAPSIS (2021) traces technology as an aid in mediating bereavement from Victorian mourning photography to the use of FaceTime during COVID. Her work has appeared in Intima (2011), The Psychoanalytic Review (2014) and Smith College Studies in Social Work (2016), among other journals. Her poem, “Sestina for My Father” appears in the Spring 2024 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine