February 24, 2019
Rose she was
And still is
And through me
Grandma lives
Jenelle Jindal, MD
“As some of you know, my grandmother passed away earlier this month. She was a force so important to me and it was very sad to let her go. At the same time though, her spirit is within me, and it inspires me every day, and the poetry I write is an expression of that. Who of your family or close friends is an inspiration to you? 🙂🌻”
Jenelle Jindal writes poems the way a physician works toward a diagnosis: through close attention to what presents itself. Her work uses the compressed lyric to examine the craft of medicine, asking how we describe, teach, and measure what resists easy instrumentation in care. At its deepest, that attention becomes presence, a quality both poetry and medicine demand but cannot fully teach. She studied biological sciences and linguistics at Stanford before training in medicine and neurology at Yale and at Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital.
The Poet Doctor