Writing Contest
Student Winner
Rebecca Stepan
University of Minnesota Medical School-Duluth
Rebecca Stepan’s winning poem began with the end of a story—one that started when she was working in an oncology infusion clinic in St. Cloud during a break between undergraduate and medical school.
As a nursing assistant, Stepan got to know the patients who regularly came in for chemotherapy. One young woman with severe metastatic disease and a 10-year-old daughter was especially unforgettable: “I remember her being very upset because the cancer wasn’t diminishing as they hoped. She was scared, and she knew there wasn’t much more they could do. She started to face the reality that she wasn’t going to be around very much longer for her daughter, and that was hard.”
The woman mentioned to Stepan the idea of donating her body for research as a way to give one final gift.
Those conversations came back to Stepan when she started medical school last fall. One of the cadavers she studied during her anatomy class was that of a young female. “It made me think of her,” she says of the patient, not knowing whether she ever did become a donor.
Stepan, who says writing makes her “feel a little more human” at a time in her life when she’s immersed in science, wrote her winning poem “Gone, but Not Forgotten” in honor of both the patient and the young woman whose body she worked on. “In one way, we are mutilating these people’s bodies; but at the same time, we’re learning so much from them,” she says. She read it at a ceremony on the Duluth campus to honor the people who donated their bodies to the medical school.
“It brought some closure for me,” she says of writing and sharing the poem—something she rarely does with her writing. “It allowed me to express my gratitude and move forward.”
Gone, but Not Forgotten
By Rebecca Stepan
I am gone, but not forgotten
By my friends, family, and loved ones.
I am gone, but not forgotten
By your bright young minds.
You used me as a tool
My body gave you knowledge
You wondered how I lived
You wondered how I died
You explored my insides
Places normally unseen
What were my hopes?
What were my dreams?
I am gone, but not forgotten
For my legacy will live on in the minds of these students.
They will take the knowledge they learned
And care for my family, friends, and loved ones.
I will live on.