Ten-Finger Exercises

Poem for the Poet

This long day began with a funeral for a friend and co-worker who retired from the hospital several years ago. She was a great neuro/rehab nurse, fast, efficient and caring. She immediately became a volunteer, and how great it is to have a volunteer with all that know-how and skill! Then she came down with lung cancer. Her respiratory therapist son said they hadn't expected her to live more than a few months. She made it five years and died without having to move out of her home where she lived alone. She was a hospice patient.

Of more interest is the fact that she was a poet. No free verse or obscure references, just light hearted rhymes with careful meter and great subjects. She wrote something for every major event around her unit: birthdays, births, retirements, doctors coming and going. They were witty and insightful, sometimes tender but never maudlin.

It was a privilege to be asked to conduct her funeral, and I wrote a poem about her to include in it. The difficulty I hadn't encountered before was that it was a graveside service, an incorrect term but I can't think of another.
She had been cremated, and her ashes were to be inurned in a niche in the "memory garden" wall. It was quite windy, and there was no podium to put my Bible or prayer book or papers on, so a bench nearby had to make do. It all turned out all right and nothing blew away, but I felt like I was having to pay more attention to those details than I could to what I wanted to say or read next.

About six of us who worked with Jeanne at one time or another and who hadn't seen each other for some time had a chance to talk and share afterwards at her son's house. It was great. Jeanne would have loved it.

One of the nurses brought up the subject of the driving around here, and how many people have been running stop signs. She pointed out how terrible the injuries are from these T-bone accidents that happen as a result. There had been an article in the paper about the bad driving recently, and it mentioned the problem but didn't make much of it.

Linda called up the staff writer and told him it was a bigger problem than he'd alluded to, and he disagreed. She went to someone else in the community to rally support, and is planning to do some research. All of us said we'd help. We'll monitor certain intersections for certain lengths of time to come up with some statistics.

Linda has a teenage son who is a new driver, and she said she told him that green doesn't mean 'go.' It means 'look both ways first' and then 'go.'

Good advice and a great project, don't you agree?