“Sorry for Your Loss” and “Facing the Maudlin and Morose”

 

Donna Ashworth -
Her poem appears below.

“Facing the Maudlin and Morose” – Wm. Darius Myers

 

Mortality makes me morose.

 

A steady diet of dying and bereavement,

my own,

and not just that of patients’ families

whose deeper losses fail to make mine less painful,

renders me “sullen and ill-tempered,”

            as Oxford identifies “morose” as meaning.

 

And so I provoke those around me,

too often for most,

to join in my maudlin mood—

that state in which

a clear understanding of mortality

leads to self-pity,

sentimentality,

and a significantly regretful nostalgia

for the days in which I could still act

as though I believed

everything would last forever.

 

But,

I know now,

very few things last forever.

 

And yet,

there are,

            of course,

some things that do last forever.

 

Thankfully, though,

the maudlin and the morose

are not among them.

 

 --------------------

All of which brings me to consider Donna Ashworth’s poem,

“Sorry for Your Loss.”

 

When I say sorry for your loss

it may sound perfunctory

trite even

 

but what I mean is

 

I am sorry

that you wake in the night

gasping for breath

heart racing in agony

 

I am sorry

that you will know a lifetime

of what ifs and

could have beens.

 

I am sorry

that you ache

for one more minute with your love

knowing it can never be.

 

When I say sorry for your loss

please know

my soul is reaching out to yours

in understanding

and trying very hard

to take away

just one little ounce of your pain.

 

 ------------------------

Our hospice agency has a bereavement coordinator. She provides services to families after the death of the patient, helping them to experience their grief authentically, and pursue their mourning effectively.

 

But each of us on the care team (nurses, aides, social workers, volunteers, office and support staff, and chaplains and counselors) all face the daily challenge of providing services to both patients and families who are already experiencing losses. Can we help them to experience their grief authentically, and pursue their mourning effectively, even before the death of the patient? Probably so. And in doing so, perhaps they would see that we are “trying very hard to take away just one little ounce of your pain.”

 

Maybe that would become clearer if we were to say, to the patient, as well as to the family: “Sorry for Your Loss.”

 

 

 

 

Donna Ashworth’s book, Loss: Poems to better weather the many waves of grief, is available here: https://www.amazon.com/Loss-Poems-better-weather-waves/dp/1785304429/ref=sr_1_3?crid=1SHNES3SURQKP&keywords=loss&qid=1698425033&sprefix=loss%2Caps%2C179&sr=8-3

Thoughts on a Reason for the Hatred of Hamas (and Zionists, and 19th Century European Nation-States, and—in fact—all humans everywhere in every era since Genesis 3).

 

The fundamental intractability of the Arab-Israeli conflict (from the inception of a people identified as "Ones who struggle with God" - the literal translation of the word Israel) stems from the same struggle we each face whenever we distinguish “me” from “you,” and “us” from “them.” For Israel, the importance of these distinctions is heightened due to Jews being defined as "other than" all other peoples. They are historically "the chosen people," set apart by God, for God. While the idea of struggling "with God" stems from the Patriarch Jacob's literal wrestling match, refusing to let go of God until he received a blessing, there is also the sense that Israel struggles "with God" as His ally, seeking to pass along His blessings to (and/or impose His will on) all other peoples, including the Arabs who "occupied our land" for 1,878 tears (70 CE until 1948).

 

It is this "set-apart-ness" that many Europeans found objectionable during the 19th century as nations began to differentiate from one another by certain commonalities within distinct geographic borders. In short, those who lived in Germany were Germans, those who lived in France were French, those who lived in Spain were Spanish, but the descendants of Israel ("sons of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob")--no matter WHERE they lived--were all one with one another as Jews (short for followers of Judaism or, formerly, inhabitants of Judah--one of the twelve tribes of "The Hebrews").

 

Persecution against Jews in Europe arose as nationalists reacted to "The Jewish Problem in Europe." In the 1930s, under Hitler's Nazi regime in Germany, most of Europe—with support from North Americans—agreed on "The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem in Europe." But the solution proposed was not Zionism, the emigration of Jews to a new nation-state of Israel to be located in Palestine. The solution implemented by Nazi Germany was extermination—the attempted murder of every Jew in all of Europe, with roughly six million Jews dying as a result.

 

With that as background, the Zionist argument seems reasonable. "Yes, it is VERY inconvenient for the Palestinians to be expatriated from their homes and forced to live elsewhere. But the alternative, when we Jews lived elsewhere, was for others to exterminate us, and leave us with nowhere to live anywhere." Subsequently, though, most Palestinians have come to find the Israeli position sounding something like, "You're in our way, you Palestinians. So we will herd you into settlements, starve you, and occasionally kill some of you, so that we feel safer from all those others who are still trying to exterminate us."

 

Ironically, the underlying belief motivating much of Israel’s Palestinian policy, that “in this place there can only be ‘us’ and none of ‘them,” is the same underlying belief that caused the 19^th Century European Nation-States to identify all Jews everywhere as a “them” that needed to be separated or eradicated from among “us.” Even more difficultly, it is the same underlying belief that infects all humans everywhere: “We are other than, different than, and therefore more important than them.” The disease stems from the third chapter of Genesis, in which we determined that “I am other than, different than, and therefore more important than you.” So, if you or they are in the way, we conclude that I and we have the right to identify and implement a solution to that problem…unless we find the commonality of us all being “we.” Could that possibly result from our common condition and mutual acceptance of our fearful tendency to war against the “them?”