Echoes of Our Humanity
By Kennedy Sparling
- Mortality whispers through the wards
2. Drowned out by metrics and protocols
3. Life reduced to cell counts and vital signs
4. As if numbers could build walls
5. Holding back
6. What we cannot bear to see
7.
8. We tread through the halls
9. Without listening
10. To the mind that struggles
11. To the quiet plea of an unheld hand
12. As if the pulse of life
13. Could be measured without feeling
14.
15. It is dangerous—
16. This detachment adopted as PPE
17. Shielding us from mortality’s shadow
18. Depriving meaning from each breath
19. Distancing ourselves from the unknown
20. That defines existence
21.
22. In stripping humanity from the body
23. We wear away our own
24. Convincing ourselves, perhaps unconsciously,
25. That we are exempt from death’s reach
26. Telling ourselves there’s more time,
27. Always more time.
28.
29. Yet the air is thick with quiet truths
30. And one last measure
31. slips to borrowed time
32. In this void, we lose sight
33. Of what our “healing hands”
34. Were truly for
Kennedy Sparling is a 3rd year medical student at the University of Arizona, College of Medicine – Phoenix. She appreciates the intersection between art and medicine and is also pursuing a degree distinction in Health Humanities.