Como se sente algo quando não existe uma palavra para aquilo? Reflexões sobre o Pesar no Brasil: ensino, enfermagem e pesquisa

Abstract

My first meeting with the country of Brazil occurred during an invited week of lecturing to undergraduate, graduate, and faculty of the Escola de Enfermagem at the Universidade de Sao Paulo. The opportunity to present on my research related to grief, bereavement, and family nursing was a privilege as I had a first glimpse into the beauty and contradiction of what is Brazil.I have always maintained that grief is a universal phenomenon that crosses cultures and locations. It is a human condition in which, because we have the capacity to love and attach, is unfortunately inescapable in our lifetimes. In my discussions with Professor Bousso and her students, I learned that in Portuguese there is no equivalent word for grief. This lack of language to name and signify something is an interesting condition. Grief is a difficult thing to define and to articulate. It is something that escapes simply being an emotion, activity, or experience. It is physical, emotional, social, relational, spiritual, psychological, cognitive, and behavioral. In our best efforts to try to define grief through our research, we were left with only metaphors that tried to somehow represent and carry the complexity of it. For example, some authors(1) suggested the metaphor of a houseguest that arrives without invitation, infiltrating all aspects of lives, families, relationships, and health. In this insidious infiltration, grief has the potential to take over lives and relationships and the more the effort is made to force it out, the more intrusive it becomes.If, however, room is made for this houseguest, its presence becomes expected at times, its comings and goings are not surprises, its intrusions not unanticipated. In time, its presence even becomes welcomed as something familiar… its very absence and presence serves to sustain a mutable, evolving, sometimes intermittent, but lifelong relationship with the loss (1) .The tendency of describing or finding words to define grief seem not to be limited to the experience of grief itself, but even to the betrayal of words in trying to articulate what it is we, as health care professionals, do to be therapeutically helpful to the bereaved. In research interviews with grief counselors, we encountered this struggle to find language that captured the work that they did (2) . This mystery of the human condition that is located in loss reminds us that language in all its certainty is not always enough to capture the inbetween nature of grief.Grief is something that lies in the in-between, reminding us that things -life in all its complexity -are never clearly quite this or quite that. Grief is universal and individual; benign and malignant; life-giving and life-requiring; active and passive; internal and external; a state and a process, heart and head: inarticulate and poetic; celebration and bereavement (2) .That there is no Portuguese word for grief is perhaps profound. Perhaps our efforts to name and define such an inarticulate life event of human suffering is demonstrative of one of the ways that...