Thirty-eight years ago today, a hospital caregiver delivered into my ears seven of the happiest words I ever heard. It was the days when almost all husbands were still relegated to the waiting room as their wives were wheeled away from them for the sacred moment of delivery. As I sat back in the empty, sun drenched waiting area, I closed my eyes a moment, tried to imagine my wife in the delivery room. Then, I heard the softest of whimpers.

     The nurse spoke my name and these seven sweet words, "Would you like to meet your son?" It was 7:56 a.m. Sunday, July 28. (click on photo to enlarge)

     The poet William Blake advised us that he who "kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in eternity’s sunrise." That day, (and for some days after as you can see in the slightly damaged old photo above) I kissed and hugged joy in every way I knew how. There before me was our precious son. Could anything be happier?

       One of the great joys of being a maternity nurse or doctor is the chance to deliver good news. I got equally good news three years and three days later when our daughter was born. And that time, with some effort, campaigning and persistence, I got to see her first precious seconds in the world in person – starting at the minute of her birth, 10:20 a.m. These kinds of moments are precious to loving parents and they are precious to healing caregivers for whom each birth is a sacred event…

         Yet, clearly, caregivers, including maternity staff, must often be both the recepients and the carriers of tragic news as well. As doctors scan x-rays, blood tests, and the results of myriad scanning machines, they may discover what no one wants to see: cancer, blocked arteries, damaged organs. Naturally, we think of the impact on the patient. But there is a cost to the compassionate caregiver as well – the one who must absorb this news and then deliver it.

     Caregivers live as close neighbors to both joy and pain. They are present not only at birth and death, but at those hard times in between when the challenge becomes how to find healing words.

     Ultimately, the best words will come to those who are most present to their humanity. Caring people don’t need instructions or scripting. Their words are guided by their compassion. There is no perfect way to tell a patient they have a terminal illness. But there are ideal ways to feel and to be a loving presence to a patient devastated by such news.

    All of the Journal meditations on presence are directed at one goal: to guide and support caregivers as they prepare themselves, each day and night, to approach their work as a series of sacred encounters.

   Thirty-eight years ago, I got to hear seven sweet words. The son born that day, and the daughter born three years, three days later, have been sources of continuous joy. At other times I have heard words we all hear and don’t want to: news of violence, hatred, and injustice.

   What is clear is that to hear joy and embrace beauty, we need to find the courage to hear tragedy as well. The ear closed to injustice can never truly hear the triumph of love. The eye closed to the pain of another can never witness the arrival of joy.

REFLECTIVE PRACTICE:

• What secret pain do you carry that requires your attention so that you may heal?
• What joy lives within you that has never been fully expressed?
• Take ten minutes now, eyes closed. Listen to your breath. Rest in your now.