Sandra Stone, an award-winning poet, is the author of Cocktails with Brueghel at the Museum Cafe (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1997). Her work has appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the New Republic, and the International Poetry Review, among other publications. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she collaborates with architects on concepts for public landscapes and buildings. In addition to poetry, she creates mixed-media constructions.

Stone says, "This poem was generated not only by my feelings for the deceased and his family, but also from the cumulative effect of observing so many of my old crowd at several funerals preceding, so that it seemed to me this was a wave of collective feeling. Caregivers, nurses, staff, while hardly alluded to, were very present as part of the theater of mourning." Contact author: [email protected].

Art of Nursing is coordinated by Sylvia Foley, senior editor: [email protected].