By ERIC WEISSMAN

Grief has nowhere to go when the grieving lack access to a release valve. Simple language, however, can provide that release, transforming individuals and institutions along the way. Eavan Boland discovered this firsthand as poet-in-residence at the National Republican Hospital in Dublin, Ireland, a decade ago. She described her experience to a packed house Feb. 11 at Fairchild Auditorium as the 14th Jonathan J. King lecturer.

Boland, the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in Humanities and the director of Stanford’s creative writing program, delivered a talk titled “The Science of Curing and the Art of Healing: a Poet’s Experience.” Her presentation focused on a support group she helped organize for young parents whose infants had been stillborn or died soon after birth. Her presentation, like all those in the Center for Biomedical Ethics-sponsored King series, explored humanity, empathy and patients’ rights.

Eavan Boland, director of Stanford’s creative writing program, spoke on medical compassion. Photo: L.A. Cicero

“I had no credentials in medicine or science,” Boland said, recounting her first days in her new role. “The hospital had sought out the arts and I wanted to explore the common ground that language provides between the institution and the individual.” Immediately, the imposing power of the institution struck Boland – its ability to dwarf the individual, rendering people faceless, powerless and unheard.

The challenges Boland and the new support group faced were considerable. In Ireland, the death of an infant traditionally triggers a reflex of shame and isolation. Up until 1994, the government didn’t issue official certification of stillborn infants, as if to negate the existence of a life. In the hospital, mothers routinely were refused upon asking to see their babies after they had died.

As a matter of course, stigmatized parents faced prejudice, lacked organized support outlets and at best were told by doctors and nurses that they were still young and could try again – words Boland described as “the most wounding comments.” The onus of responsibility in the crisis, she said, rested on embarrassed parents who were pressured to “move tastefully past the death” without acknowledging its impact. Often, they were left feeling like they had lost not only their babies but their communities as well.

The support group corraled a spectrum of individuals across the social and economic classes in Ireland, each member sharing one thing in common: the death of a child. “People in the group wanted very much to name their babies,” Boland said. “They wanted others not to move past this small life.” Additionally many of the parents felt shock upon having lost a life in the precise location where they anticipated life to begin, then returning alone to homes that had been prepared to welcome a new life.

Despite the staggering patient volume at the hospital (Boland noted 1 in 12 Irish citizens, including both her daughters, were born there) the nurses and doctors, like all those in Ireland, were historically untrained in dealing with an infant’s death from an emotional perspective. The problem wasn’t a peculiarity with that one hospital, rather it was a fact of the hospital being woven into Irish society. But, she said, the times were changing, both in Ireland in general and at that hospital in particular.

In 1994, the Irish government began issuing certification for stillbirths. The hospital also launched a far-reaching effort to accommodate parents, not only by sponsoring the support group and programs such as the artist-in-residence program but also by bringing in mortuary services and making its chapel available for funerals. Mothers were not only permitted to see and name their babies who had died but families were encouraged to take the babies home for a day or overnight.

Boland explained that in accepting the poet-in-residence position she had wanted to explore the power of language within the institution, particularly how it related to the difference between curing and healing. “People in my group could not be cured,” she said, “but could they be healed? That was the question.”

After recounting one story of a man who drove along a seaside road with his daughter in the car, knowing that if he could have shown her one thing while she had been alive, it would have been the ocean, Boland thought she had her answer. “Language did its work,” she said. It represented the ideas it was intended to represent. And most importantly, a human connection was forged within the institution.