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Last Friday, I heard physician/poet Sonia Rapaport speak to the Osler Literary Roundtable at Duke Medical Center. Her poignant and powerful poems struck a profound chord within me. Why?
Many of her poems chronicle her journey through medical school, internship, and experiences making hospital rounds. One poem talked intricately and intimately about what it was like as a physician to go through anatomy class as a first-year medical student. I held my breath as she spoke, to words that on some level, I needed to hear.
What is it like to be on the other side? I remember receiving my invitation to the Memorial Service organized by the medical students through the University of Alabama Donor Program. The service was beautiful with music, poetry, writing, and the calling out each donor’s name. Afterwards at the reception, one doctor I spoke with was in tears as he thanked me. What was it like for him, in his class?
As I have been working on Chrysalis: Colors of the Rainbow, the memoir about the time after my mother’s death, I have been moved by the work, whether it has been working and reworking the different aspects of my own grieving process with pen and paper, re-addressing some difficult places in my childhood with my father, coming to terms with the stonewalling of my ex-fiance’s family, I am still struck by the nature of the other side of the wall. What is it that we don’t see, choose not to see, turn away from?
What do we bring into our own aspect of the experience? How does it affect how we perceive an experience and our reaction?
Recently, a TAF member passed along this article By Philip Gerard. As much as we think we know the story, very often, we don’t because we are so wrapped up in our story, the story we experience right in front of us, the story we tell ourselves, the story we want to believe.
And yet, how do we overcome our own version of the story to create a more complete picture, a whole story? Is there such a thing?
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