The good shepherd
Pallavi Tatapudy South Kortright, New York, USA “Mr. Yankees stayed silent, but his eyes all the while were yelling, ‘O, my Good Shepherd, please don’t do this to me. How could I have gotten three strikes so soon? Give me the strength to continue playing in the game of life. I beg you to […]
How we love
Linda Clarke Guelph, ON, Canada Photo by James Sullivan The communities of health care and medicine are richly storied. For almost three decades, I have invited people in those communities to tell me their stories and they have been generous in their telling. A story told can be image-laden and many of those images […]
Ushers of life
Genevieve Kupsky Washington, D.C. USA Our obligation to our patients continues into the sunset of their lives. The sun sets on the cherry blossoms of Washington, D.C. in springtime. Photographer: Rami Halaseh “You are on holy ground. Time is sacred, and the veil is thin.” The chaplain left the newly-oriented volunteers with these words as […]
The talk
Akshay Khatri Valhalla, New York, USA Photo from Pixabay I walked into the emergency department with a sense of trepidation. The patient I was evaluating was Mrs. G, a woman whom I had cared for in the hospital a few months earlier. Now she was back from the nursing home with more shortness of […]
An act of cowardice
Michael Shen Indianapolis, Indiana, USA Charon carries souls across the river Styx. Alexander Dmitrievich Litovchenko. 1861. Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. In autumn, the leaves turn yellow and die. The cirrhotics in the unit do the same. Their path already charted, their lives like leaves in the wind, we carried them as long as we […]
La Pieta
Rachel Fleishman Philadelphia, PA, USA La Pieta, 1498-1499, Michelangelo, St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City. Wikipedia A mother holds her dead child. His body flops open without resistance, freshly dead. His head is cocked back, shoulder lifted, arms release the last vestige of grip. Her face sullen, her hand beside him open and offering, she […]
The book that galvanized a health care transformation
Sherrie Dulworth New York, USA Dulworth, Sherrie. On Death and Dying Changed the Health Care Conversation. March 22, 2019. Mount Kisco, New York. One of the major health care sea changes of the past half-century did not originate from the usual sources of scientific research, technological development, or even clinical trial-and-error. Instead, a book […]
A good man
Tuhina Raman Philadelphia, PA, USA The Liquor Bar by Wharton H. Esherick. Illustration for the book Song of the Broad-Axe by Walt Whitman. c. 1923. Philadelphia Museum of Art. My heart sank as soon as I saw it — tumor nodules in the trachea and a mass eroding through the stent in his airway. […]
They would rather go alone
Kera Morris Denver, Colorado, USA La Solitude du Christ by French artist Alphonse Osbert, 1897. Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain Dad had been in and out of hospice for years. It had not occurred to me that you could go into hospice and come out on your own two feet, but it was apparently the case. When I got […]
Where am I when my digital footprint persists indefinitely?
Naomi Rachel Oldham West London, United Kingdom “Dead Prescence in the Digital Age” by Naomi Rachel Oldham Exhibited in the Blyth Gallery May 9-24, 2018 Our digital selves remain present in the world even after we have died. Social media and email accounts, websites to which we have subscribed, photos, videos, and voice messages […]