Previously I wrote concerning the importance of faith communities as well as professional support in addressing mental health in our congregations. I advocated using a holistic approach, addressing the spiritual, emotional, physical and social aspects of the whole person. Today I am going to look at practical ways that churches can do that. Continue reading
I recently attended a conference on trauma and grief along with members of my CPSP chapter. The impetus for the event was the shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, which was where our group met where some members were leaders.
While it wasn’t discussed, I realized that one of the things that makes traumatic grief so painful is that those who are going through it are so vulnerable to continued pain. Our speaker talked about how triggering events, images and even sounds can bring trauma back to the surface even years after. Some participants found that even discussing traumatic grief was difficult for them in the context we were in and had to leave the room to gather themselves. Continue reading
I had a request from one of the facilities we serve to visit one of their residents. This man had some tremendous losses in the past year. His wife, who had dementia, had died rather suddenly some months ago. He also had a stroke which affected his speech and mobility, requiring him to move in to the facility as well. I spoke with his daughter before visiting and she spoke of how concerned she was for him, saying he had talked with his physical therapists about how depressed he was. Continue reading
One of my readers sent me an email regarding my last post on helplessness and hopelessness. She had actually written a song very relevant to the discussion and shared it with me and I wanted to pass it along. She shared some of her valuable insights as well.
“I wrote it because my friend was struggling quite a bit in her grief, following the loss of her mother. She expressed to me that she didn’t want to sound like “a broken record,” by talking about her mom’s death so often. But she just couldn’t stop thinking about it. My reflection was that this language of “broken” language is problematic. What if there isn’t anything wrong with the record at all — what if it’s repeating itself because what it’s saying is important?
Perhaps, like you wrote in your post, a grieving person just needs a different listening ear after a while, to help them process it?”
You can listen to her perform the song here on Bandcamp.
Thanks Katie!
“My life’s been like a Stephen King novel.”
That was how “Shelly” described her life to me, and it turned out to be fairly accurate.
I had been requested to see Shelly at a skilled facility by the staff there. She had been the roommate of one of our patients who had died recently (I’ll call her Mrs. Bea), and the staff felt that she could use some support. I don’t get requests for visits like these often, and usually when I do I find that it’s more often the staff that have issues with coping rather than the person they’re directing me to. That was not the case here. Continue reading
Every so often in hospice you get asked a baffling question, one that you don’t have a ready answer for. Sometimes it’s because the answer is simply beyond fathoming or beyond a simple explanation: “why is this happening to me?” or “why does God allow so much evil in the world?” Other times I’m baffled because the answer seems so obvious that I’m trying to understand why it’s asked at all. Such was the question I had posed to me a while back:
“Why does God have to take my mom? She never did anything wrong!”
Artist Motol Yamamoto, who created labyrinths of salt to help express his own grief at the loss of his sister due to brain cancer. Click on the image for more information.
In my hospice, as well as in many others, when someone dies we consider the family members involved and rate their grief as low, medium or high. The thought being that if someone is on the low end, they will generally be fine. On the medium and high end though, we need to be more involved as this person may not cope well.
And I’m starting to think this is really missing the point.
There has been research recently in regards to complicated grief – grief that becomes debilitating to the point of becoming a chronic, life-limiting condition. This is the kind of grief that we in hospice are trying to identify, monitor and assist with. It differs from normal grief in that it is much more of a clinical condition, however it has many of the same characteristics as normal grief. The main determinants between the two, putting it simply, are duration of symptoms and the severity of them. Normal grief can involve impulsive crying, sleeplessness, rapid weight loss or gain, and even auditory or visual hallucinations. But they tend to subside over time and generally do not interfere with daily functioning. Complicated grief resembles PTSD, in that it can have these same symptoms but amplified and intrusive to the point where they cannot function normally. Continue reading
The Chaplain's Report 