When Katie Farris’s Standing in the Forest of Being Alive was published by Alice James Press last year, I couldn’t put it down—and after I finished reading through it, I didn’t want to put it down. I kept it in my car as I drove to the National Institutes of Health for a bioethics fellowship;…
Author: Sarah Roth
Sarah Roth (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and graduate of the JHU-NIH Genetic Counseling Training Program. Her writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Hot Metal Bridge, and elsewhere, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University of Notre Dame.
Suspicious Findings
One summer morning, I found myself in the hollow tube of an MRI. A technician pressed foam earplugs into my ears, gingerly placing oversized headphones on top. The hospital’s artificial breeze rustled my gown. Into the imaging machine I went: face down, breasts out. As contrast dye entered my veins, I tasted metal. A symphony…
Rethinking Pink: U.S. Breast Cancer Activism in the 20th Century
Sarah Roth // Gracia Buffleben, a queer woman living with metastatic cancer, ascends the stage to receive an award at the Women and Cancer Walk. It is 1996 in San Francisco, and hundreds of women, families, and supporters sprawl in a park in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. Tables are set up around…
Hope on Trial
Sarah Roth // My parents shared a broad, brown desk in their home office. In the years of my mother’s struggle with ovarian cancer, a foot of papers, envelopes, and printouts were stacked on the desk, documenting clinical trials for which she might be eligible. For a time, the desk, with its thick layer of…
Grief at a Distance
Sarah Roth // This week marks the anniversary of my mother’s death, and my family had planned to gather at her gravesite in Florida. For the past year, her plot has remained unmarked: a rectangle of grass with a hint of a pale line at its edges. We had spoken of unveiling the gravestone, attending a service to recognize her Yahrzeit, and coming together for a week of shared feeling and mourning. The past year has been measured with reference to this point, like the sign of a lighthouse marking a horizon thick with fog. Like so many other families in this season of coronavirus, as the date grew closer, our plans became ever more uncertain. Today, on her anniversary, we remain scattered across the country. Some of us are in Florida; others are in Washington or Colorado or Maryland. I write from my apartment in Baltimore, where I have hunkered down for the past months, and where I will remain for the foreseeable future.
Light and Shadows: Through the Window
Sarah Roth // It is Sunday in Florida, and my family holds our breath as my mother breathes. We watch the rise and fall of her chest.
“Let us confess it”: Review of Amala Poli’s Writing the Self in Illness
Sarah Roth // What does it mean to give voice to an experience of illness in literary form, and what modes of attention are asked of a reader as she engages with what is written?
Light and Shadows: On Care and Loss
Sarah Roth // My mother and I divide up her Hospice bags: two nondescript fanny packs holding morphine, liquids, and nutrition. Artifacts of the land of the critically ill, they are contraband here in the clinic.
Reading into Diagnosis
Sarah Roth // The Genetics Department at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. displays hundreds of pamphlets in the waiting room, stacked at every corner table. Some of them I recognize, having revised them back in the office. The pamphlets have titles like: What is My Family Tree Telling Me? and PKU and You….