Nancy Smith is a retired Registered Nurse. Though she moved through the many domains of hospital nursing, most of her work took place in an Intensive Care Unit. Her co-workers noticed that she would place small strips of paper with poems by various authors on her locker from time to time along with the pictures of her family. Her poem “When Patients Die” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.
The kitchenette was often dim, lit only by the under-cabinet soft, yellow fluorescents. There were trays with packets of saltines and smooth peanut butter and grape jelly. The industrial coffee maker provided just enough warmth to enhance the mirage of coziness. It was around the corner from the main hall in the ICU. The coffee was fair game but the saltines were there for the patients, not the nurses or other staff. Even so, as the salt of the crackers and the bright molecules of the coffee hit my tongue, I knew I was still alive.
My transgressions were performed in my own bit of ritual space where the need to rebalance “who I am” came in relation to the vulnerable others and processual chaos of the ICU.
What I noticed in Rachel Reichenbach’s “Creating Space for Narratives in Breakdown to Speak: Death, Liminality and An Ethical Re-Imagining of Narrative Medicine” (Fall 2020 Intima) was that she seemed to be asking: Who is served by narrative medicine?
She took us into the spaces of cool TV lights, endless waiting, and failed attempts of speaking and listening between the “others” who are dying and the wavering otherhood of caregivers. Into this space of liminality– the betwixt and between, a place where structures melt—I heard her call for inclusion. The liminality of a ritual space allows the possibility of redressing and rebalancing conflicts and failures. Powerful policymakers, ordinary citizens and marginalized persons can be welcomed into the kaleidoscopic learning of the liminal space where they and the dying meet—in the flesh or in the imagination. I wondered if liminality may be understood as a precondition for an experience of subjectivity. At first there might be psychological incoherence as we engage with the face of the dying; but the phenomenon, per Levinas, of the “curvature of intersubjective space” might emerge. This would not foreclose the rebalancing but may enhance an ethical turning to responsibility in the culture at large for how it holds the dying. As a young nurse, I was taught to say “I go with you” whenever a dying patient expresses an immediate sense of passing away. To me this was the language of “communitas.”
© Just Laundry by Brina Bui. Spring 2020 Intima A Journal of Narrative Medicine
“Just Laundry” by Brina Bui (Spring 2020 Intima) is a visual representation of the liminal space. It shows radical equality. Through the patient gown, a symbol of rest and vulnerability, and the doctor’s coat, a symbol of action and knowledge, an intimation shows how the wearers of the clothes may eventually understand the space. The doctor and patient exchange their roles for a sense of mutuality. They may pull each other through, as a rebirth. Or be in mutual witness to the unknowable.
In my piece, “When Patients Die” (Fall 2020 Intima), I exhibit a desire to hover above, not really wanting to enter the rooms. Only one person in the poem was given a name, the social worker Laura. She was the one who held the boy and was the conduit for the emotion that filled up the space. My observations, though tender, are from afar. My individuality, I, becomes a “we”, the unseen, who are all those others who’ve stepped into that arena.
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Nancy Smith is a retired Registered Nurse. Though she moved through the many domains of hospital nursing, most of her work took place in an Intensive Care Unit. Her co-workers noticed that she would place small strips of paper with poems by various authors on her locker from time to time along with the pictures of her family. She is a mother and grandmother. She and her husband live in rural Maryland where she maintains a part-time acupuncture practice. Her poem “When Patients Die” appears in the Fall 2020 Intima.
©2021 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine