Communicating with metaphor: a dance with many veils

Health practitioners face many challenges when caring for and communicating with dying persons. As truth-tellers, we search for ways to communicate with honesty, sensitivity, and compassion. Creative use of language is one aspect of caring. Metaphorical communication can be a healing modality, one consistent with communication as an art. This article suggests that metaphor is a powerful and sensitive form of language that offers a range of characteristics particularly suitable for the art and the challenge of communicating with dying people. Metaphor, as figurative language, provides a permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. It allows us to share a truth without the glare of reality. This author contends that metaphor is mysterious, creative, invitational, safe, open to interpretation, respectful and playful. The creative and judicious use of metaphor provides health care practitioners with many veils--veils that shield the dying from the glare of their prognosis, veils particularly valuable and suited in communicating with our palliative patient population.