Poetry as Self-Care and Palliative Care

These three poems reflect the joint effort between the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University and Summa Health System's Palliative Care and Hospice Program. Two Wick facilitators meet monthly with a group of eight to ten palliative care providers to jointly and individually reflect on trigger poems and write their own. The act of assisting health care professionals in writing poetry offers a unique form of self-care for palliative care providers while honoring the patients and families they serve.

This method and medium serves two distinct purposes: process and pause. In process , the writing allows the health care providers to reflect on, evaluate, and illuminate the experience of caring for individual patients. Those patients may elicit emotions, memories, and dynamics that aren't apparent at the time of initial encounter, and can only be reflected on and appreciated later. The pause allows the team and the individual health care provider to honor a patient and/or a family whom they have served. The business of working in health care often prevents one from stopping to honor and appreciate patients and families, the richness of their lives, and the challenges they often face with such grace and dignity. The act of writing poetry provides the opportunity to deepen what we learn from them.

Why poetry? Team members could write reflective narratives regarding patients and experiences, but prose itself can be intimidating. As one participant said, “Writing narrative feels as if you have to spit out a fully formed and finished four bedroom house on paper. Poetry provides team members the opportunity to pitch a tent on a thought, an idea, or an image, and build from there. This allows the details to collect, the emotions and memories to be attached, and the structure to grow.” Poetry also has the unique ability to express emotional experiences that the listener of the poetry has known but may have never before articulated. When this is done in a group, the discussion and sharing that follows can facilitate a deeper processing of the experience.

At its root, self-care is a process of maintaining and/or restoring one's wholeness. Stress and our characteristic response to it often leads to a kind of splintering in which we alienate a part of ourselves so that we can continue to function. The classic compartmentalization that many health care providers practice in order to wall off distressing or toxic experiences so that they do not “contaminate” the rest of their lives can, over time, lead to self-alienation and burnout. As if one could really wall off a part of the self from the whole self! Indeed, we are more likely to harm ourselves and others when we are splintered than when we are awake to our own pain and challenging experiences. Poetry has a special capacity to facilitate the reintegration of ignored aspects of ourselves so that we can again function as whole, fully integrated persons.

Utilizing poetry workshops as a prescription for self-care may not be for everyone, so multiple options must be available to team members. But if we don't believe in the power of poetry, then we don't believe in the power of words. If we don't believe in the power of words, then we have never had a patient or family retell repeatedly a single turn of phrase from the physician or nurse days, months, or years later, upon which the entire course of their loved ones illness and demise appeared to hang. It often seems as if our professional identities do hang on a few such words which can be turned for the better when words are used to honor and heal.

Hold It

Even though it hurts,

even though she just died,

hold this vision –

the ferns frosted and brown,

the spinach birthing through soil.

Hold the tender cheeks of a baby,

soft and kissable.

Hold the tight, can't-let-go-of hugs.

Hold a tear on the lower lid.

An eye desperately avoiding mine.

An unwanted mass.

Hard, stuck, life-sucking.

Hold the hand that refuses to let go.

Hold the heart wide open,

ready to listen and feel.

Hold the hours of knowing,

the difficult “you're dying.”

Hold all the goodbyes

that bring us to another hello.

Palliative Care Team

Summa Health System

Amazing Grace

She sat so diligently by your bed

wondering when you would go.

There were so many waiting to

celebrate your arrival to the

perfectly crisp air.

Here she hovered, the room stale from frustration.

Frustration with the very long days,

the exhausting nights,

     And why…

Why you wouldn't say goodbye.

I asked her to leave, “go get some food:”

life, sustainment, sustenance.

I knew your song, your favorite

hymn, I sang it to you then.

You inhaled, you exhaled – that new

perfectly crisp air.

Melissa Soltis, MD

Palliative Care and Hospice Services

Summa Health System

Earth Prayer

For this dry creek bed

that I call my heart

may the rain fall

and the water flow

For the empty cave

that held my love

may the light shine

and hope sparkle

For the broken bones

that carry me

may the earth mend them

that I may walk with dignity

For the stolen breath

taken when you died

may the breeze blow

and my tongue trill with song

Rod Myerscough

Clinical Psychologist

Summa Health System

View audio and animated video at http://vimeo.com/41032765