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| Donna Ashworth - Her poem appears below. |
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
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