Saturday, my daughter got married! What a beautiful and emotional day. Family and friends gathered in love to usher the new couple into their next phase.

Sunday morning, I hosted a wedding brunch for overnight guests, and then Sunday night, I found myself on the red-eye to Los Angeles. I was scheduled to give a workshop at the Social Mission Alliance Conference on Monday morning. And yes, I did wish I had managed my calendar a bit better. I arrived tired but excited for this conference that highlights what really matters.

Beverly Malone opened on Monday, and I woke all the way up. She brought the energy in a big way. If you do not know her name, you should. She has been president of the American Nurses Association, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health under President Clinton, and the first African American to serve as General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing in the UK, leading 400,000 nurses. She spoke about identity. About what it means to be a healer. About integrity and excellence.

She named four kinds of power. Legitimate power the authority that comes with your degree, your license, your position. Charismatic power is your presence, your smile, the way you make someone feel seen. Coercive power, the threat, the “you’d better.” And mentor power, which she called the ultimate power play, because it is the only one that multiplies when you give it away.

As Black women, we are rarely taught to think about power explicitly. We are taught to work hard and hope it is enough. She was naming something most of us have never had permission to name out loud.

Dr. Malone told us about sitting at a dinner with the man who is now King Charles, back when she was leading UK nursing. She asked him where did he dream. He said no one had ever asked him that question, and said his garden. It’s the place he went to slow down and dream.

She told us we have to make space for that. That transformation cannot only happen in meeting rooms and conference halls. It requires somewhere quiet, somewhere you let yourself imagine what is possible before it exists.

I thought about the weathering framework, which grounds everything I write here. We know that chronic structural stress accumulates in Black women’s bodies over time. We know the physical cost of always being on, always delivering, always proving. Beverly Malone was not just offering inspiration. She was offering a prescription. Make space. Your body needs it as much as your spirit does.

The conference theme was transformation. Every session circled the same hard question: how do we hold health equity work right now, when so much is being dismantled? The Flexner Report came up more than once. That 1910 document did not simply reshape medical education. It systematically closed Black medical schools and closed pathways for Black physicians for generations. Knowing that history is not pessimism. It is a point of beginning so we can reshape and revise.

We cannot do this work alone. Colleagues from Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine traveled with me, prepared with me, and showed up for me. Beverly Malone said that co-creation, the idea that the things worth building require community support, so we can build them together. That's what I’m trying to do with this newsletter: build better health for our future together with you.

FROM THE WRITING DESK

The workshop I led was called “Writing Toward Justice.” I asked participants to write a witness moment of a specific scene from a clinical encounter where the system failed someone in plain sight. To practice seeing it clearly and connecting it to something larger.

Story does what data cannot. A statistic tells you Black women die from pregnancy-related complications at three times the rate of white women. A story tells you what it felt like to be that woman in that room. Feeling leads to action.

Think about what Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy did for public understanding of mass incarceration. What Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks did for bioethics conversations trapped inside academic journals. What Toni Morrison’s fiction does by making interior lives undeniable.

When you write your specific experience, that can lead to change.

What is a moment you witnessed that you have never put into words? Maybe give it a try?

ODDS & ENDS

World Health Day, April 7th. This year’s theme is “Together for Health: Stand With Science.” For Black women, standing with science means demanding that science stand with us. It means having access to trusted voices, accurate information, and yes, vaccines. It means newsletters like this one.

I took a red-eye to LA and a red-eye home. Both times, I sailed through security in about 15 minutes and said a quiet, "Thank God." If you have traveled recently, you know what I’m talking about.

Speaking of LA, guess what I saw? A Waymo driverless car gliding through traffic with supreme confidence. I am not sure how I felt as I saw the no driver car speeding beside my Uber.

Passover begins Thursday. Easter follows in a few days. If you mark the season, or don’t, there's something in the air like reset and renewal.

This week I’m recommending Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Lauren Olamina is fifteen years old when the world around her begins to fall apart. She responds not by surviving but by imagining. She builds a philosophy, a community, a future that does not yet exist. Check it out if you haven’t, or maybe re-read.