Heartache in Medicine and the Limits of Elegy

Health care is rife with seemingly inevitable loss, where suffering and death often lurk behind symptoms, differentials, and patient outcomes. Processing such tragedies or even paying tribute to their occurrence can be challenging, but also redemptive, for both patients and clinicians. Poets have named and revisited grief to honor the dead and to humanize loss, usually in the form of elegy. In “8 Weeks, No Discernible Cardiac Activity,” the speaker seeks some way to mourn in a poem that unsentimentally memorializes a miscarriage. Using literary apostrophe, dialogue with the “you” who is gone poignantly juxtaposes the pain of early fetal loss with daily life. This plainspoken anti-elegy of sorts, said aloud but refusing to sugarcoat or monumentalize, shares the aftermath of what is typically shushed; poetry, with its trademark elision, helps set stigma aside, allowing the speaker to wistfully “wish” and “wonder” without external judgments or expectations. She does not mention courage, higher powers, or inspiring next steps to soften the diagnosis but instead provides sober recollections of emotional connection with understated frankness (“I wish there had been/another way to say goodbye”) and examples of solace through togetherness, relating bittersweet escapes of kid-friendly “rice with rainbow sprinkles” with her toddler and more grown-up, warming “chai lattes” with her partner. Articulating unrealized dreams and genuine sadness, the poem includes us in experiencing heartache with the speaker and in turn an understanding that begins not to fill, but perhaps to ease, a void created by the unfathomable, yet all too real.