World Hospice and Palliative Care Day
It’s an extraordinary privilege to work with patients, their carers and family to deliver palliative and end of life care. On Tuesday October 17, 2023 our team acknowledged this privilege and World Hospice and Palliative Care Day. We reflected on the lives we have impacted over the past year.
It is not easy work…yet it is
- rewarding,
- respectful,
- compassionate,
- patient centred,
- a great responsibility and
- an honour to work with people at this powerful time in life.
Our reflection together was this beautiful poem by Maya Angelou…
When Great Trees Fall
When great trees fall, rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down in tall grasses, and even elephants
lumber after safety.
When great trees fall in forests, small things recoil into silence,
their senses eroded beyond fear.
When great souls die, the air around us becomes light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly, see with a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened, examines,
gnaws on kind words unsaid, promised walks never taken.
Great souls die and our reality, bound to them, takes leave of us.
Our souls, dependent upon their nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed and informed by their radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of dark, cold caves.
And when great souls die, after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always irregularly.
Spaces fill with a kind of soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be better.
For they existed.
Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash
