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When I worked on my dissertation, there was a focus on the healthcare staff that attends to thousands of conversations that build up, breakdown, and challenge the one’s giving care to the dying, their families, and the colleagues on the hospice team and healthcare system they serve daily. When dying becomes routine rather than sacred care, then we as an enlightened society have lost our way. We are not as enlightened as we assume.
Those of us in the healthcare system and pastoral care aspects of death/loss struggle to help a death denying society who often need self/soul care. The frontline workers striving to help in their roles of medical, social services, and spiritual care become the embodiment of caregiver fatigue. We are ignorant of what it means to finish well. We are neglectful of the key components it takes to grieve appropriately. There are decades of stories to pull from personally and professionally to make these points and reveal a pattern that proves we are human beings living lives laced in fearfulness, death denying, grieving poorly, anxious, and uncomfortable with grief, loss, and lament stories in our lives.
Studies (in 2013) reveal that 80% of Western society is not prepared to grieve loss and unwilling to make end-of-life decisions until the medical community runs out of curative efforts. There is an uneasiness within the medical community to have these end-of-life conversations. On those occasions when the medical community strives to have the end-of-life conversation, it is often to deaf ears. This book doesn’t have all the answers. This minister hopes this read will simply start the conversation about end-of-life decision making, renewal after loss, and grieving has its own opening and invitation to spiritual growth. Another study (in 2013) reveals that over 65% of whites will refuse treatments when all efforts to an illness have been exhausted. And over 50% of Hispanics will continue to ask the medical community to save their lives at all costs, and over 60% of the African
American community will likewise request the medical community to save their lives at all costs regardless of the trajectory that the illness is not going into recovery. These were the outliers of stats that spoke to a grief adverse society and a death denying one that would see the medical community as the technology that helps us live forever, we naively hope. That was 2013. When I began this grief book in 2013 and hoped to publish in 2016, life got in the way and this work was put on a shelf.
Now it is 2021, and we have had a historical pandemic in 2020 that has devastated the entire globe. In the USA, the grief and deaths are piling up by the millions, and a simple search in 2013 revealed how unprepared we are to address our grief and death losses. The 2020 event on a global and national pervasive level will take years to come to grips with our grief and losses in death. We were and remain woefully unprepared emotionally, financially, physically, socially, culturally, and especially spiritually.
