The Ordinary Part

Rahul Kumar

This summer I came home and went back to the hospice center where I used to volunteer. I am not sure what I went back for. Inside, almost nothing had moved. The same chairs. The same window, and the afternoon light coming through it at the same low slant. I had thought the place would feel different, and it did not. That was the part I was not ready for. The room had kept everything except her.

A hospice manager I recognized told me that Martina had passed.

I think I said I was sorry. I do not remember exactly. I had come in as a visitor, not a volunteer, and the news did not give me anything to do. There was no chart to open, no question that would change it, no next step to offer. I stood there with my hands at my sides, holding the kind of information that changes nothing about the room and everything about why you are in it.

In medical school, I am learning to walk into rooms looking for the problem. The mechanism, the missed finding, the plan. Standing there, I kept reaching for that reflex and finding no use for it. There was no diagnosis for me to uncover, and no plan I could write that would change what had happened.

Before medical school, I thought being useful meant knowing what was wrong and what came next. Hospice did not give me that kind of usefulness. Martina was a teenager with a progressive neurologic illness that had taken much of her movement. She had played the violin. By the time I knew her, that was already in the past tense, the instrument somewhere she could see and not hold. Her world had become smaller in the way illness can make a young person's world smaller, not because she had stopped being a teenager, but because fewer parts of being a teenager could still reach her room.

The first weeks she was polite with me and not much more. I was not there to measure anything, and at first that made me feel useless. I did not know what to do with my hands. So I asked what she used to play. That was the first useful thing I knew to do, and I almost did not do it.

Later we arranged for musicians to come. Someone placed the bow in her hand. I helped steady it. The sound that came out was uneven, and she laughed before anyone else did.

For a while, I thought that afternoon was the story. She had laughed, and I had been there for it, and it was easy to tell myself I understood what had mattered. I did not. It was only the part I knew how to explain.

After that, the visits changed, though not in a way anyone walking by would have noticed. She loved watching videos of a violinist she followed online. Sometimes we would watch the same one more than once, and I learned not to ask whether it made her sad. Some days it did. Some days it was just music.

She talked about people from school, and I could never keep the names straight. She would correct me, not annoyed, just certain, because to her the difference between them was obvious. I remember realizing that I had been treating those stories like background, as if they were small because I did not know the people in them. They were not small to her. They were the ordinary details of a life that had not stopped being hers.

We started an audiobook we never finished. Sometimes I brought music. Sometimes there was nothing to bring. Somewhere in there, I stopped being a stranger she had to be polite to, though I could not tell you the day it changed. Mostly I sat in the chair beside her and did not try to fill the quiet.

Nothing in those afternoons looked like medicine. There was no exam, no plan, no note to write afterward. That was why I kept mistaking them for something less important.

Since starting medical school, I have become better at asking what something means physiologically. I am less practiced at asking what it means to stay when there is nothing to solve.

I have been trying not to turn Martina into a lesson. Even writing this makes that difficult. The shape of an essay wants her to become the person who taught me compassion, as if that were the reason she was there. She was not there for me. She was a person, and then she was gone, and I am the one left arranging it into meaning.

Walking out, I did not know what I was allowed to feel. I had known her for one season of her life. I was not family. I was not clinical staff. The grief did not come with a category, so I carried it out the way you carry anything you are not sure belongs to you.

I do not know what those afternoons were to her. I only know that when I went back this summer, the room had kept no record of them. The chairs were still chairs. The light was still the light. Martina was gone. The violin was the part I knew how to explain, but it was not the part I kept remembering. I kept remembering the hours after it, when a song played from my phone, or a chapter stopped mid-page, or she talked about someone I would never meet. I kept remembering how little I had to offer, and how, for once, the point was not to offer anything.

There was nothing to fix. I stayed anyway.

Rahul Kumar is a second-year medical student (MS2) at UMass Chan Medical School. Before and during medical school he has volunteered in hospice care, an experience that shaped how he thinks about presence and theparts of medicine that resist measurement. He is drawn to surgery, and to the question of how to stay useful to a patient when there is nothing left to fix.