Thank you to everyone who joined us for this session!

For this session we look a close look at a scene from “Wit” by Margaret Edson, posted below.

Our prompt was: “Write about an articulate kindness.”

Participants are warmly encouraged to share what you wrote below (“Leave a Reply”), to keep the conversation going here, bearing in mind that the blog of course is a public space where confidentiality is not assured.

Also, we would love to learn more about your experience of these sessions, so if you’re able, please take the time to fill out a follow-up survey of one to two quick questions!

Please join us for our next session Monday November 23rd at 6pm EST, with more times listed on our Live Virtual Group Sessions.

Wit by Margaret Edson

I’m learning to suffer. That’s what I’ve been doing here. Suffering. Not thinking or analyzing or teaching. Just being a patient. Funny, isn’t it?

A lifetime devoted to precision, words, intellect… and now, I can’t even hold a pen. The doctors… they talk around me, about me. I’m no longer  Vivian Bearing, John Donne scholar—I’m “stage four, advanced.” It’s clinical. Clean. Detached.

But it’s not.

(Pause.)

I miss the dignity of being known. Humanized. Someone touches my hand and says nothing, and suddenly that silence is the most articulate kindness I’ve felt in weeks.

Donne said, “Death be not proud.” But he never sat in a fluorescent room with an oncology fellow telling him about toxicity levels. I thought I was brave. Brilliant. But bravery isn’t a line in a lecture. It’s lying here, hairless and hollow, and still hoping that kindness might come.

(Long pause.)

I understand poetry now. The spaces matter more than the words.

Credit: Margaret Edson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.