Sophocles, Hospice, and the Call of the Body

Suffering and dying bodies speak. They call out to us, demanding that we see them, listen to them, recognize them. The voice of the suffering body has no specific language; rather, the voice speaks a wordless yet intelligible body language. With neither syntax nor lexicon, the charged language of the body, voiced in tones of human suffering and plaintive personhood, “says” many things at once. The voice of the suffering body calls to every human person who comes near. Time might occasionally heal a wound or two, but time cannot blunt the edge of human suffering or its pointed call