To Not Move the Flowers: Presence, Loss, and the Limits of Professional Care at the End of Life.

Abstract

This poetry essay presents three shorter poems and one longer poem exploring what social workers, caregivers, and families face in end-of-life and palliative care in Indonesia. The poems are informed by field experience and cultural understanding, particularly that of communities in Central Java, where people do not speak plainly about death and dying is burdened by what is unseen. They do not attempt to explain or diagnose. Instead, they try to approximate the feel of caregiving: the silence in a hospital corridor, the grief that precedes the leaving of the body, the hands that perform tasks no policy statement lists. Poetry, as both a form of inquiry and a mode of bearing witness, is not simply an addendum to social work knowledge but a way of knowing that which clinical language alone cannot comprehend.