Victoria Hospice Spiritual Care Practitioner Elizabeth Barnard recently spoke at the 2025 Annual General Meeting about grief and finding light in the darkness.
We gather together today (in-person and virtually), a few days after the Autumnal Equinox, a day on which daylight and darkness are of roughly equal length. Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are entering the time when the hours of darkness increase, the temperatures grow colder and the end of the year is nigh.
But we who work in Hospice know that endings are as important as beginnings, just as we know that, with love, comes grief.
The natural rhythms of the earth teach us to honour the darkness as well as the light, for darkness and endings can also be a times of reflection, of new creation, of gestation. Time in the darkness is often fruitful, even if it doesn’t feel like it when we’re there.
We face a time of much uncertainty, of crisis in our healthcare system and in our nation, a time in which it is easy to focus on what is lacking, on what is troubling, a time in which the light in many ways seems scarce and it is easy to be ruled by fear and anxiety.
As you gather this afternoon, may you each know that you matter. Your work together enables us to bring tender care into the dark hours of peoples lives and we are grateful that you stand behind us.
One of the things I love about hospice is that it’s a place where we still know how to treasure the darkness as well as the light. Much of our medical system is focused on fixing and changing, on clinging to the daylight even as the sun sets. But in hospice we know that the darkness has its own songs to sing. We know there is much value in bringing loving, compassionate presence to what we cannot fix or change.
There’s a beautiful Inuit word, “qarrtsiluni.” It means “sitting together in the dark, waiting for something to happen.” Much as the poet Ranier Maria Rilke wrote, “I love the dark hours of my being . . . there I can open to another life that’s wide and timeless.”
In hospice we know the value of sitting together in the dark. When we encounter people who find themselves in the darkness, we meet them there, bringing our compassion, our listening, our palliative tools and our abiding presence, because we know that the darkness is a lot less lonely and scary when someone is holding our hand. Now more than ever, the commitment we have at Victoria Hospice to provide compassionate, skilled, whole-person and family-centred end-of-life care is essential in a system in which more and more patients feel like numbers, not people. As one person said to me recently, “here, I feel like I matter.”
As you gather may you be blessed with the wisdom and insight that arises in the presence of compassionate listening, may you be blessed with the trust that comes from leaning into love more than fear. And may each of you, in whatever dark hours you may face, be met with the unexpected blessings that only the darkness can give.
Thank you for your time, and wisdom and commitment to Victoria Hospice. ~ Elizabeth Barnard