I was invited to submit something for the issue of Literature and Medicine, a front matter section that had the theme of “Forgetting.”
I decided to write a poem about “Not Remembering” that reflected the four years I spent gathering data about women medical students and some of the challenges of remembering all their words and stories.
During this four year span my mother was also diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, so I included how she and I both faced challenges in remembering things, in different ways, and how the landscapes around us, where we were raised (for her, Maui, for me, Oregon) might help us remember and also potentially heal. It’s a poem about time, forgetting, the importance of place, and the difficulty in facing uncertain change.
Read the poem here.
