Creative Writing Awards 2024: “Grief as a Circular Staircase” by Austin Lee

The 21st annual Creative Writing Awards (cwa) were held on April 24, 2024, a celebration of the liberal arts deeply embedded in the science and clinical practice of the Yale Cchool of Nursing (YSN) community. After a keynote speech by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Pam Belluck, each of the three winners read their work aloud. Three honorable mentions were also saluted.

Grief as a Circular Staircase

by Austin Lee ‘26 MSN

I felt that grief is often an untouched subject in the field of medicine. We are trained to diagnose, intervene, and save lives…but what happens when you come face to face with death? It’s distressing, it’s like a cold slap to the face with ice water. Hey, you can’t save everyone. So you hold this grief inside of you, sometimes you don’t know where to put it. So what happens to it? What happens to grief that you can’t place anywhere? Does it fester and spread, does it permeate and consume, what can you do with it? … I think it’s important to look at the underbelly of medicine and talk about the things that we couldn’t do, the lives that couldn’t be saved, and put a name to grief and allow it to take form and shape. Let it wash down, drown, flood, fall back like a drop in an ocean. Just like anything in life, it will grow and move on eventually, as all things do. Time heals.

Student nurse,

You can’t save everyone.

And all the things that light touches, so does grief. So does life. So does love.

And they touch you too.

Were they half alive or half dead? Was the glass half empty or half full?

Someone says: Really, it doesn’t matter now.

I am doing fine, really, I am.

Which is just another way to say that I am okay and doing just enough to survive from the grief. Grief is a circular staircase, is there a way out? There must be, somehow and somewhere. Is there a cure? Go talk it out. Lay down and close your eyes. Go on a walk. Take a bath. Scrub the grief out from under your fingernails. Go see a shrink.

I am alright.

Maybe there isn’t a cure and you must simply learn to live with it

like a dead twin or a dog bite that just won’t go away, your skin

scarring in five little teeth marks.

I can’t describe it. The fear of loss.

Not for mine, but for my mother, father, friend, a stranger, life in all its different faces.

I can’t describe it.

A hospital room. A malignant tumor. Metastasis. Stagnant water. Dirty plates at home. Withering things. Forgetting your own dinner.

Tenderness that can no longer be reciprocated…

Get well soon. I need to feed the dog at home. Hang on there. I’ll come back.

Thank you for all that you do.

Three candles at the church this Sunday for the three of you nurses.

Thank you for everything that you did.

So you can’t save everyone,

but no one expects you to.

And sometimes the smell of blood lingers.

So red, it’s like a memory you wanted to forget for so long.

I imagine my grandmother waking up in the comfort of darkness alone: What time is it? Why is it dark outside? Where did the sun go? I’m starving.

And me, reaching my hand towards her endlessly through the blanket of silence, the sterile quietness that separates us between life and death: I’ll love you forever and ever.
 

Did you get to eat? Did you get to see the sun on the other side? Is it warm there? I was not there when you passed.
 

But I am also red inside, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Grief feels like a circular staircase, but surely there is a way out.

There must be, in this endless thread of life in all of us.

Entangled, bright, and red, spilling over one another– the color of life, the color of a sunrise, because everything begins and ends at one point.

Oh look, and the sunlight is returning now.

Despite it all.

Despite it all.   

Read More CWA 2024 Winners