Moving Through Grief
What I do in the war
Because I cannot carry your dead child,
I sweep the deck of my friend
and fling the dry pine needles
to the messenger breeze, and the strike
of my broom down the steps to the sea
is the shovel for digging the grave
and the birdsong is the keening
of your family and clinging companions
Instead of joining you to claw the rubble
in search of your buried mother,
I will bring bread to my neighbour
who will serve it to her children,
and I chant your name in rhythm
to the shouts and earth movers
with the warm loaf in my hand
and the autumn air gripping my chest
I will serve tea to this welcome company
and offer a fragrant, poignant
impotent wish for peace,
an as-salaam aleikum with each
touch of the cup to silent lips,
while you grip your phone for news
and prepare to sleep on dark roads,
upon carpets that once had homes
Nothing in me can help you know
if your daughter is alive or dead,
or which of those is worse,
so I will whisper b’shalom b’shalom
with each step up this mountain
from where my strength comes
and where my cries are left
and where the eagles loft and lift
You cannot bear witness to my sorrow
for those I love whom I do not know
so I will ring the Japanese garden bell
to reach all those unjustly taken away
I will listen to its resounding song
which ears hear for ten slow breaths
but which trees hear forever
and I pledge to each of you who suffers now
a place in its vibrating prayer
- Amir Peter O'Loughlin
Hello dear friends,
When I was in nursing school, I met an angel in the form of a CNA on my very first rotation at Laguna Honda Hospital, also known as God's Hotel as according to Dr. Victoria Sweet.
I hate it that the ten years since then has eroded her name in my mind that was once clear as day. For today, I will call her Esther, because that's as close as I can get.
Like many nursing home type facilities, most of the staff was highly distressed, overwhelmed, and burned out. New to nursing, I was shocked to find staff hiding in patient rooms on their phones any chance they got. Now of course, I have more empathy and less judgement and can understand their attempts to get through. I am sure they were beyond sick of having to teach nursing students who were gleeful at the idea of giving a patient a bath or ambulating a patient to the bathroom.
However, Esther took our energy and matched it. She had so much to teach us about how to care for the dignity of each patient. Some had been there for decades, and would be the most uninteresting of patients from a medical point of view. But to her, she bathed and tended to each patient as if they were her own kin, and literally so.
She explained to us, as she stood over and bathed one particular patient who had suffered a gunshot wound and had been in a coma for a long time about her own brother back in Africa, who had suffered the same injury and also was in a coma, but had come out of it. She told us that because she couldn't care for her brother back home, she took care of the one in front of her as if it was her own. She always sang over him, talked to him, prayed over him and wished him every good thing with tenderness and warmth.
Maybe it's a simple lesson, but a profound one for me as a young nurse. We are all interconnected. When we feel powerless to aid or change global events, there is always something or someone within our reach to make a meaningful difference. Esther's hope was that someone was caring for her brother back home like she was caring for the man in front of her.
This poem shared to us above from Brother Toby a Starcross Monastic community from Sufi Poet O'Loughilin captured this sentiment.
With our penchant towards perfectionism and somewhat pathological desire to do good in the world as healthcare workers, we probably all feel like we are not doing enough right now in these times of war, violence, and strife. Anu and I are particularly pained as healthcare workers as we we read about what our fellow sister doctors and nurses on the front lines are experiencing.
But today I offer you Esther's outlook that the work you are doing today. By caring for the sick and injured here and now, you are also tending to the grieving, lost, and injured across the globe. That's how Brene Brown defines spirituality at least:
"Spirituality is recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. "
In a wild turn of events only orchestrated by God, or the universe, or what have you, about five years later, I saw Esther on BART. I had always wanted to thank her, and I am grateful I got my chance.
With love and gratitude,
Anu & Laura
Inspirations
“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.”
- Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert
Together by Vivek Murthy
Over the past several weeks, I've been re-reading Together by Vivek Murthy, our current surgeon general. In his book, Murthy shares about the public health impact of loneliness and how creating spaces for community and connection surprisingly become one of the platforms of his tenure as surgeon general.
Laura and I think a lot about how to build community spaces for healthcare workers and we realize how hard it can be, in our busy lives and schedules, to feel a sense of connection. I've been thinking a lot about the factors it takes to build relationship- one of the most important being the ability to feel at peace with ourselves. I love this quote by Merton which highlights the interconnected nature of community and inner peace.