Navigating the Crossroads of Palliative Care & Dementia: A Poet's Perspective
NOTE: This post is a bit longer than usual & contains a 10 minute presentation. I recently had the enormous privilege of presenting poetry at the 2024 Palliative Care Summit: 'Navigating the Crossroads: Building the intersection between Palliative Care & Neurodegenerative Disease'. The summit was hosted by Palliative Care WA in the Pan Pacific hotel in Perth. I mention this because it's the place I was held in quarantine while my mother died in a nursing home just a few kilometres away. Perth's hard border control at the time was brutal. While many people have understandably just wanted to move on and forget about the pandemic, it's taken me a bit longer to do that. For a long time, the sorrow and grief seemed knitted into my skin. Of course, I could have said no to the summit. But I sensed that this occassion was bigger than me, that these poems might serve others, that performing them might also help me work through residual grief, resentment, and an...