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Storyline Health Navigation, Wake Forest, NC (2026)

09/12/2026

In the Iliad, Ares takes a spear that Athena steered into him and bellows like nine or ten thousand men, then flies to Olympus to complain to his father, who tells him that of all the gods he likes him least. I think about him in family meetings, where nobody is Ares and intensity still has a way of producing more intensity. People can love the same person enormously and disagree about what that love requires. Add fear, exhaustion, and a decision in which every choice costs something, and volume begins to sound like certainty even when nobody is certain.

The medical reality is often exactly as hard as it looks: several reasonable options, each with its own burden, and no lovely third door. What can change is the space around the choice. In a French trial from 2007, which this corner of medicine still leans on, families of dying patients in 22 intensive care units were given a more deliberately structured conversation, with a brochure on grief to take home, and they spoke for a median of fourteen minutes instead of five. Ninety days later, fewer of them carried symptoms of post-traumatic stress, 45 percent against 69. The choices had not acquired a painless option. The room had been built.

None of which makes the decision easier. It makes the room better, and perhaps that is why deciding where everyone will sit is not such a small thing after all. If you have sat in that room, on either side of the table, tell me what the seating chart looked like. The whole of it is on the Substack this Sunday.

09/10/2026

Medusa gets considerably more complicated once you know what happened before everyone started calling her a monster. Hesiod gives us three sisters and very little else; Ovid supplies the part nobody put on the shield: a beauty, a god, a temple, and a punishment that landed on the wrong person. Knowing that does not make the story gentler. It gives the monster context, which is different, and then Perseus arrives with one of mythology's stranger solutions. He does not look. He watches her in polished bronze.

I think about that shield whenever a frightening sentence lands in an exam room. A 2003 review found that most of what patients are told is forgotten almost at once, and half of what survives is remembered wrong, which I find less alarming than forgiving. Of course we need another look. The person who came with you, the summary on the kitchen table, the 2:14 a.m. message with the question that finally showed up: none of it is elaborate. It is a reflective surface, and it earns its keep the night every possible interpretation demands equal attention. Tell me what your shield has been.

09/09/2026

Our September of Greeks has arrived, on schedule, at Persephone, who of all of them would understand a calendar. The story was built to explain winter, which it does adequately enough, but its melancholy honesty reaches far beyond agriculture. Her return is no less beautiful because it will not last, and her descent does not mean spring failed. The myth makes room for joy that knows something about sorrow, and for sorrow that can come around again without erasing everything that grew in its absence.

Chronic illness makes that seasonal quality of being human especially visible, and the chart handles it badly. I have charted people that way, a flare and a stable visit with nothing in between, and I have sat beside people I love while their charts were written the same way (the electronic record and I continue to have a complicated relationship). What Persephone offers is permission to take recurrence seriously without calling it defeat. Tell me if you have learned the turning of your own seasons, and how you knew.

09/08/2026

When Persephone was taken, the old hymn says Demeter searched for nine days with torches in her hands and would not eat. As the goddess of grain, the crisis was both maternal and agricultural (the Greeks did not do small stakes). But the fields did not fail right away. Before she withheld the harvest, Demeter walked into a stranger's household and became nurse to another woman's child. She kept something alive while she could not reach her own daughter.

Roughly one in five adults in this country is a caregiver, and the sequence probably sounds less mythic than familiar. Illness does not pause the world. Dinner still arrives at the usual hour. The person receiving care is living inside it too, trying to stay recognizable to themselves while the body rewrites the terms. We grieve while we care and while we are cared for, and the CDC adds a stark footnote: in 2021 and 2022, caregivers fared worse than noncaregivers on thirteen of nineteen measures of health.

A green field can hide a great deal. We tend to notice caregiver grief only after the harvest fails, when the crisis finally has a name and a form to fill out. Demeter asks whether we might look sooner, while someone is still out there tending. Tell me who is tending the field where you are.

09/06/2026

Aging in place is the phrase, and it has always sounded to me like a plan to hold very still while the rest of life advances. Nobody wants that. What people mean when they say they hope to stay home as they grow older is people who could find their way to them in the dark: the neighbor who notices that the lights have not come on, and a history that does not have to be explained from the beginning at every new desk.

The wish is nearly universal; the confidence is not. In a Pew survey published this February, six in ten older adults living at home said that if they came to need care, they would want to receive it there, and only 37 percent of them thought that was extremely or very likely to happen.

Today's essay lives in the distance between those two numbers.

Read it here: https://substack.com//note/c-330304070?r=25krby&utm_source=notes-share-action&utm_medium=web

09/05/2026

Hestia has almost no stories, which is the first thing to notice about her. Zeus has more than anyone can reasonably be expected to keep track of; Hestia receives a fire and a chair, the seat at the center of every house, and the first and final pour of wine at every feast. She is the center, and she is the one nobody writes about, perhaps because staying put is not considered much of a plot. We do something similar with home. In 2024, three in four adults age fifty and older told AARP they wished to remain in the home they already occupied, and we call this aging in place, a phrase that has always sounded faintly bureaucratic, as though a person were attempting to hold a position against an advancing weather system. People usually mean something far more specific than a building. They mean familiar rooms, neighbors who know where the silverware is, a pharmacist who has watched the family change over time. They want to remain rooted among people who already know the way to them.

This is also where care has always lived. Before it became a care plan, a service line, or a field with its own acronyms, it looked like someone making dinner, noticing that a medication had run low, and answering the same question without making a person feel foolish for asking it again. Medicine enters that room at necessary moments, and then the appointment concludes and the person returns to the place where the plan must become a reality. Someone still has to remember the instructions, arrange the ride, decide whether the new symptom is concerning, make the soup, and keep the atmosphere of home from collapsing entirely into the atmosphere of illness. The Greeks built houses around the hearth because the center was the condition that made the rest of the household possible. Tell me who keeps the fire where you live.

09/04/2026

Athena never had to learn anything, and she is the one we keep building the system around: wisdom that arrives whole and in armor, usually at two in the morning.

The rest of her story is a bit less abrupt. She is the goddess of the plan drawn the night before, and of weaving, and the Greeks did not find that combination strange, because to them wisdom was a craft. The first time the word appears in Homer it belongs to a carpenter, and he has the skill, the poem says, because Athena taught him. That is the part I find hopeful. The loom was never reserved for gods.

We have a habit of accepting the quick things as proof of the slow one.

Cleverness passes for wisdom in a hurry, and so does a confident voice, and I have leaned on both.

But the conversation you had early, while there was still time to be slow, is the oldest kind of wisdom there is. So is the handoff you built so that one person's memory did not have to carry it all.

Neither looks like anything from the outside, because nothing went wrong. Tell me about yours anyway.

09/03/2026

Atlas is what happens when a story declines to hand us someone uncomplicated to root for.

He belongs to the defeated order. Zeus and the Olympians win, the cosmos is rearranged under new management, and Atlas, having backed the wrong side in a war he did not start, is assigned the heavens as a punishment. That alone makes him more interesting than the statue in the lobby lets on. We inherit Atlas through a world shaped by the side that won, and mythology, to its credit, never seems especially interested in pretending that victory and virtue are the same thing.

Then Heracles arrives, on an errand, as heroes tend to be. He needs the golden apples, and Atlas, who has some relevant family connections, is the one who can fetch them. So they strike a deal that should have been a red flag for everyone involved: Heracles will hold the sky, briefly, and Atlas will pop out for the apples. And Atlas does. He even comes back, which is more than I expected of him. But standing there, apples in hand, shoulders unburdened for the first time in an age, he arrives at the conclusion available to anyone who has ever set down something heavy. He would rather not pick it back up. He offers, with what I imagine was tremendous generosity (wink and a nod), to deliver the apples himself. Heracles, who did not get this far by being easily fooled, agrees, and asks only that Atlas take the sky back for a moment while he finds a cushion for his shoulders. Atlas obliges. Heracles collects the apples and leaves, and the Titan is exactly where he started, minus the apples and plus a lesson about heroes.

There is something almost embarrassingly human in the whole exchange (yes, I say that fully aware that Atlas is a Titan, and that Titans are, strictly speaking, not human). Humanity appears to be a condition rather than a species. Atlas behaves badly; he is also desperate. Those two truths can sit beside each other, and perhaps part of growing up is letting them.

Hard seasons do strange things to our tidy ideas about character. Illness will bring us there, and so will grief, and so will caring for someone we love, or standing inside a life transition we did not choose and cannot hurry through.

Pressure reveals courage we did not know we had, and then, with no regard for pacing, it reveals the edges of that courage instead (which is considerably less inspiring, and probably more useful to admit).

We have tried to make room for this. No offense to Taylor Swift, but I am not sure the antihero quite solves it. The antihero is still one kind of person, only a darker one, and the flaw is usually the whole point. The Greeks gave us something messier: beings capable of strength and fear in the same story, often in the same scene, without insisting that one quality cancel the other out.

Maybe that is part of what mythology has been keeping for us all along. Human beings have never been particularly tidy creatures… least of all when the sky gets heavy.

09/03/2026

We moderns are very fond of believing we have outgrown the ancients. We have better medicine, better plumbing, and a small glowing rectangle that can deliver nearly the whole archive of human knowledge while we wait for coffee. And yet, I keep wondering whether we are mostly the same ol’ humans with very fancy tools.

C.S. Lewis wrote that while reason is the natural organ of truth, "imagination is the organ of meaning." That distinction holds so much. We can know an astonishing amount and still struggle to understand what any of it means for the business of being human.

And it often feels that, somewhere along the way, we seem to have lost both ends of wonder: the ordinary moment has become a blank space to fill with something more productive, and even our wildest imaginings now arrive through a screen. We have become extraordinarily good at rendering things; we are perhaps a little less practiced at being enchanted by them.

So! To mythology! But a word about the stories themselves, because they tend to get flattened in the retelling. These are not Disney princesses. Nobody in a Greek myth gets a musical number and a tidy ending. The heroes are proud, frightened, frequently wrong (in absolutely horrific ways), and loved anyway, which is to say they are people. The gods hand out impossible tasks, the monsters are rarely defeated on the first try, and the oracle is always, always ambiguous. (I have met the oracle… she works in scheduling… there might be an appointment in four months but no one really knows.)

Healthcare has a particularly effective way of exposing all of this. The chart may be digital, but the body is ancient. Illness, aging, and caregiving return us to questions humans have been asking for thousands of years: what happens when our plans meet our limits, what love asks of us when circumstances change, how we go on living when certainty refuses to cooperate.

The Greeks and Romans gave those questions gods, heroes, monsters, and impossible tasks. We give them portals and prior authorizations. Civilization marches on.

So September will be a small experiment in re-enchantment — borrowing some very old stories to look again at very modern lives, especially the parts healthcare has a habit of revealing.

Maybe we need the ancients because they remind us that humanity was never a problem technology was going to solve. Perhaps awe begins there too, with remembering that we are still ancient creatures standing in modern rooms, asking very old questions.

09/01/2026

We say the art and science of medicine so easily that I have started wondering whether we have built healthcare as though we believe both halves.

Science gives us extraordinary ways to understand what is happening in the body. Art asks another kind of question: what does that knowledge mean once it enters an actual human life? Once the diagnosis has to coexist with work and family, once the evidence meets fear or hope, once the care plan leaves the exam room and has to survive breakfast.

Aristotle’s idea of art as attending to the “inward significance” of things has stayed with me because medicine constantly engages with that inward world, even when our charts and dashboards can only hold part of it.

The longer I sat with that idea, the less the art of medicine looked like a lovely extra called bedside manner. It started to look like a design question. If relationship, context, continuity, imagination, and moral agency matter, then eventually they have to influence the forms we build around care.

Wendell Berry wrote about the difficult work of form, the point where a beautiful idea has to become something sturdy enough to live inside. Maybe that is part of the work ahead for healthcare too: creating enough structure for safety without flattening the very human thing the structure was meant to protect.

The full, rather wandering rabbit hole is now on Substack.

Storyline Health Navigation

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