Adam Lalley is a graduate of the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and an incoming Emergency Medicine resident at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. He is a winner of the Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Award, and the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition. His short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction have been featured in Narrateur: Reflections on Caring, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and The Eagle and the Wren Reading Series. He was a finalist in the 2020 NYACP Story Slam and is currently working on a book-length work of non-fiction about how patients find meaning in illness. His essay “And Not To Be” appears in the Spring 2020 Intima.
In the short story “Good As New” by Andrew Taylor-Troutman in the Spring 2020 Intima, the site of a teenager’s accidental death becomes a healing destination. At the little white cross beneath an oak tree, cancer is cured and the wounded throw off their wheelchairs. But when a line of pilgrims stretches into the next county, the miracle dries up.
Some, but not all, are restored. The inequity mirrors the disparities of our very own bodies— our health, even the lengths of our lives, are doled out unequally. There’s no earthly justice in our bodies.
And yet we are bound to them. Because flesh is harder to fake than a name, our faces and fingerprints identify us. The language of our feelings is visceral: emotions emanate from the gut, heart and bones. Words falter on the tips of our tongues. We succumb to knee-jerk reactions; our skin crawls; our hair stands on end. Our appearance influences who loves us and how we love. Based on gender and skin tone, which we do not choose, we may be powerless in one context, empowered in another.
Our bodies are more than vessels—they are rudder, weather and climate. But they are not, at least not entirely, us. As I write in my essay “And Not To Be” (Spring 2020 Intima), there is no clear “self” within the body, a notion that challenges death’s finality. Years before her brain cancer, my grandmother had been ready to pass on, but her body marked its own timeline. Though we answer to them, we are not our nephrons or neutrophils, not our microbiome, not our desires or addictions. In an age of convalescent plasma and vaccines, we are not even our immune systems.
We are, however, our reactions to each other. Weeks ago, we began facing the prospect of becoming asymptomatic vectors of a germ that spares some and kills others. Now, in the wake of a senseless death in Minneapolis, we have reignited the debate about how much melanocytes influence our fortunes. History may reveal that our biases are even harder to alter than flesh, but it is within our power as a societal body—a body politic—to fashion some earthly justice. We did not make us, but we own what we do with each other, to each other, to ourselves.
Adam Lalley is a graduate of the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell and an incoming Emergency Medicine resident at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. He is a winner of the Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Award, hosted by Baylor College of Medicine, and the William Carlos Williams Poetry Competition, hosted by Northeast Ohio Medical University. His short fiction, poetry, and non-fiction have been featured in Narrateur: Reflections on Caring, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and The Eagle and the Wren Reading Series. He was a finalist in the 2020 NYACP Story Slam and is currently working on a book-length work of non-fiction about how patients find meaning in illness. Learn more about his work at adamlalley.com
©2020 Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine