Simple ritual helps recovery from grief
Aides and nurses are sometimes hit hard by a particular patient’s death, and when this happens, one health care professional suggests giving the employee a ritual to help release the pent-up grief.
"People tell you to get over it, but you don’t get over it — you get through it," says Sherry Showalter, MSW, bereavement care coordinator for VNA Community Hospice of Arlington, VA.
"You have to look at the death through different eyes and realize that time and rest freshens a person’s perspective, and there’s no magic timetable for acceptance," she adds.
Showalter recalls one aide who had a very rough time accepting the death of a patient to whom she had become very close. "When you work in this field, sometimes you see yourself mirrored in the person you’re caring for; maybe you’re the same age or both have two kids."
This patient’s death was very difficult for the aide, and she told Showalter, "I don’t think I can do this anymore."
Write a note to the deceased
So the two sat and talked about what death means, and Showalter asked her to write to the man who had died, telling him what he meant to her as an individual and what gifts he’d given to her, which will help her professionally with her next patient.
"She thanked him for those gifts, and then she told him how she would use them," Showalter says.
Showalter asked the aide to put the letter away for three weeks. Then they met again, and this time Showalter asked the woman to take her pen and paper and use herself as an instrument to write a letter from the patient to herself.
The aide was asked to put this letter away also. A month later, Showalter met with the woman, and they read the two letters together.
While doing so, the aide re-experienced an incident when the patient’s feeding tube came loose. "The aide was hysterical, thinking she’d caused this to happen, and the patient had laughed and told her that she wasn’t responsible for it, and then she laughed too," Showalter relates.
Then they disposed of the letters in a Cherokee-style ritual of burning the letters.
"The idea was that the smoke would send up the words to the spirits," Showalter explains.
"The writing itself took the pain of her heart out of her heart, and she was able to write it, release it, and send her message."
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