Remembrance

I imagine the universe began the way my own life begins: on a balmy summer evening, the first whispers of a fall breeze against my cheek. I am walking the path between two college courtyards, the grass wet with dew, a dim, perfect halo encircling every streetlamp. I am walking the three blocks from the 96th Street subway station in New York City to my apartment on 98th Street, past the graveyard shift fruit vendor and the darkened grocery stores, the vacant basketball court still echoing with pickup games past. I am thinking about what Junot Diaz wrote in his story, “The Sun, The Moon, The Stars”: as soon as you start thinking about the beginning, it’s the end.

There is no representative moment for the end of medical school—no photograph, memory, or quote that sticks with me because, approximately one week before commencement, time abruptly accelerated, the earth spun off kilter, and all my mind really registered was, it’s happening again.

Every commencement is tinged with the same shades: relief, sadness, gratitude, hardships overcome, hardships not overcome, loved ones, lost ones, a terminal nostalgia palliated only by the knowledge that we’re here. We did it. When I graduated from college, a seemingly endless ten weeks of summer stood between me and medicine. I had all the time in the world. I wondered then, as I do now, if the best years of my life were before me or behind me. Would I have fun anymore? Would I make new friends? Would I love medicine the way I loved literature, find beauty in structures as in sentences, read illness as language, body as poetry? Could I become both physician and writer?

Medical school, as it turned out, was not half bad. In fact, I am fortunate to say that, for me, it was actually rather good. I did have fun. I did make new friends. I did manage to write (on occasion). And, most surprising of all, I loved medicine. It was, without a doubt, the most challenging four years of my life, yet I cannot shake the feeling that I am still dreaming. And perhaps it is the subversion of expectation that makes the end more alarming. Four weeks of summer stand between me and the start of my training in Boston as an obstetrician-gynecologist. I still have all the time in the world.

I still wonder if the best years of my life are before or behind me. I wonder when I will see my friends and classmates again, soon to be scattered, a constellation from coast to coast, the miles between us incomprehensible. A friend remarked, “The only way I survive goodbyes is by remembering that I survived them in the past,” and it becomes my mantra in the remaining weeks, days, hours between being hooded at David Geffen Hall to leaving my apartment for the last time. I imagine, as my friends and I board our respective flights at John F. Kennedy Airport, that we are, temporarily, if not stars in the sky then tiny sparks of light, sustained by our own mythologies in the never-ending struggle against entropy. The illusion makes things bearable.

It is hard to convince myself that this is not the end of life as I know it, that my existence will not be given over to sleepless nights and beeping pagers, every season a tableau of missed birthdays, births, weddings, reunions. I feel—preemptively, irrationally—a loss for things not yet lost. Irrational, because life will go on, I will be present for (most of) the things that matter, I will find my own joy. The evidence, as we say in medicine, is reassuring.

I cannot know what other life I would have lived, what literary career would have taken the place of my medical degree, how my sense of time and of self would have been altered. What now seems absurd might have otherwise been commonplace—three-day weekends, two-day weekends, going to the gym and cooking a meal, owning a dog. In that other life, I certainly would not have cherished them so.

Here are the things I do cherish: biking among windmills in the Dutch countryside, exploring the palaces of the Alhambra on a crisp morning, standing captivated before Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. I am walking the streets of Tokyo at sunrise, feeling for once that I am not a doctor but a
human, without rank or trade or name. I hoard these precious, underserved moments as a bulwark against the chaos to come.

The chaos has its moments, too. One day, I catch a glimpse of the heart beating on the other side of the diaphragm, so close that it takes all my willpower not to reach out and touch it. I watch a fetal heart beat on an ultrasound until, almost imperceptibly, it stops.

In another life, I am breathless, running from a thunderstorm in Seville. In this one, I am listening to my patient’s breath when I catch the sunrise from her window. Her breath becomes a wave against the shore of a land I have never seen. I think of all the people on the street below, the lucky ones still adrift in their dreams.

And I think, without rhyme or reason or rationale, that I would never, ever trade it for this.