Shortly after reading Vigil, I stumbled upon Sara Baker’s poem, “What Do the Dying Want?” (Spring 2015). In this work, Baker explores the titular question by wondering how healthcare professionals, hospice workers, or even caregivers and family members can properly address the needs of the dying – is the correct way through words and stories, reminiscing, music, meaningful touch, or just holding space and being present?
Read moreWays of Knowing (and Not Knowing) When the Prognosis is Terminal by writer PK Kennedy
"Right in here, remove your clothes. Underwear and bra can stay on but put the robe on so it's open in the back, not the front, okay?"
The words are coming at me in a torrent; I can’t understand any of them, but I know the drill.
I throw my stuff in a bag, take a deep breath, and open the door to the inpatient surgical waiting room. It smells like alcohol and ice and has no memories I can sense. Am I the first person that’s ever come here?
“You’re here for the lumbar?”
I cut her off before she could say puncture. "Yes."
Read moreHow a poem entitled “All the Girls Were There, and Gorgeous” helps us reflect on illness, morality and memories by Andrew Taylor-Troutman
Andrew Taylor-Troutman earned a certificate in Narrative Healthcare from the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative through Lenoir-Rhyne University. He is a Presbyterian pastor serving a congregation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His story “Cups and Such” appears in the Spring 2018 issue of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.
A year ago, a half-dozen older women gathered in a church fellowship hall. The coffee percolated as copies of “All the Girls Were There, and Gorgeous,” a poem by Carlene Kucharczyk in the Spring 2017 issue of Intima, were passed around our circle of chairs. As facilitator of this narrative healthcare workshop, I read the poem out loud. The gas logs hummed for a moment in the silent room. I was about to launch into questions specific to Kucharczyk’s remarkable poem when this participant spoke, quietly yet clearly: “Do you think it would be easier to have Alzheimer’s or ALS?”
A year later, her question came back to me and I wrote my little story, “Cups and Such,” not as an answer, but to continue the conversation.
Her question proposes a binary. In some ways, “Cups and Such” is the mirror opposite of Kucharczyk’s poem – a woman awake in her life, though / she doesn’t know it compared to a man fully aware of the betrayal by his body. But both poem and story deal with the same haunting theme: What is our relationship to our past? Memories flit and flash in and out of our consciousness like fireflies. Is hindsight really 20-20? Or, is it that we are continually revising our story to make meaning? “Revision” means to look again; etymologically, so does “respect.”
Skilled poets, like Kucharczyk, write with clarity yet focused ambiguity, thereby asking readers to look again and again for interpretations. We read and continue the conversation. A year later, I remember how the workshop participants were divided as to the moral character of the narrator: We do not like to visit her, / I hope she does not know. Was the narrator a “good granddaughter” or not? What is expected of us when a family member has a terminal disease? Could it be that the way the sick perceive us changes, say, from a bright shining face to the appearance of a moon? Is that cold and distant? Or, could the transformation be a natural reflection of a previous light?
And I still wonder, in Kucharczyk’s words, about the part that is elsewhere. Time is not linear. Perhaps there are moments, even in pain (whether physical or emotional or spiritual), when all the girls are gorgeous, when all is whole again and saved.
Andrew Taylor-Troutman earned a certificate in Narrative Healthcare from the Thomas Wolfe Center for Narrative through Lenoir-Rhyne University. His recent essays have been published online at Mockingbird (http://www.mbird.com) and his poetry at Bearings (https://collegevilleinstitute.org/bearings). He is a Presbyterian pastor serving a congregation in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He and his wife have three children. His story “Cups and Such” appears in the Spring 2018 issue of Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine.