Seamus Heaney reads 'An Appropriate Place' for the IHF Hospice Friendly Hospitals Programme
Channel: Irish Hospice
Date: 2017-04-26

Seamus Heaney reads a sonnet he wrote about his mother on her deathbed. This was filmed for the Irish Hospice Foundation video 'Journeys To The End Of Life'. Its purpose is to underline the importance of dignity and appropriate surroundings at the end of life.
“I was thinking of when a tree is cut down for a moment it’s as if the air is shaken and there is a new space in the world… an emptiness. So that clearances that stood open when the spirit goes that’s what I was thinking of. 
I think that it is very important that for the survivors, that they are there when that clearance happens, when that tree falls and when the moment of change is registered in them… it’s very simple, very mysterious, nothing like it ever happens anywhere else.”