DECENCY FOR TORRID TIMES
ONE of the most difficult things for me is to have to bring bad news to people.
It has happened me more often than I'd care to remember.
You come across an accident on the road and a poor person has been killed. More often than that I'll be asked to accompany the police personnel to break the bad news to that unsuspecting family.
On other occasions I've been called by the emergency services to attend a person who has taken their own life.
I was reading recently about a police officer in Canada. He's the chief in a rural town. He was writing about how difficult he found having to break bad news to people.
He has to do it regularly. He wrote that he has now become a student of doors on how to approach them. From his experience he's learned never to knock loudly. Women look out to see who's there before opening the door.
Men simply open it and children, quite rightly, never open the door. If he's wearing his uniform it's a giveaway.
And at the very sight of him people suspect it's going to be bad news. To help him in his job he has had to study grief, anger and shock.
He says that if he has a choice he won't go during the night but will wait until morning. If the person is on the road he tries to wait until someone else comes before he leaves.
But the part that I recognised most was when he said that you have to listen because people want to tell their stories or the story of the person who's dead.
He wrote: "I've heard thousands of these stories. Friends tell me that I should write them down but I say they are a private matter and it wouldn't be right.
"People always want to discuss the facts of the death," he wrote.
"It's a difficult job and it wears you down. I try to do it with as much dignity as possible. The hardest messages to deliver are about the deaths of children. There is nothing I can say - other than the facts - to a mother or a father in that situation. So I don't try."
And then he said a most extraordinary thing. He said: "I always take my hat off when I'm going into the house and when I put it on
the people know I am ready to leave. But before I put on my hat I usually add that I will pray for them and give thanks for the life of the deceased."
He said he made it clear that he was doing this as a private citizen and not as a police officer. And he makes the point of going to his
church and praying in quiet for that family in their hour of need on the very day that he has broken the bad news to them.
He added: "It's become a form of closure for me, a way to hand over the pain."
I thought it was a wonderful way to approach your work. In moments like that we need all the help we can get.
A simple prayer can work wonders.
IN London I had an opportunity to see a play at the Noel Coward theatre called Enron.