Live More Fully by Planning for Death |
Planning for death is scary business—but getting it done ahead of time is priceless.
Accepting illness is a gradual identity shift, not a linear or instant process.
Thoughtful planning eases the burden on grieving family and brings peace to the dying.
I've written some posts recently about the impact of losing clients—and even losing one's therapist—to death, and it strikes me that despite its ubiquity in our lives, death still seems to be as taboo a subject as it ever was—even within clinical conversations.
One of my clients, who had a degenerative disease, passed away last week, and I was reminded of this afresh as I spent time with her preparing for her imminent death.
I can't say that I'd ever specialized in dealing with death in my practice, but I was plunged right into the deep end, as my first clinical work took place against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic. With so many of my clients and their friends and partners dying, I received a crash course on dealing with terminal illnesses and helping people prepare for death.
Dealing with a terminal illness
One of the most challenging aspects of serious, long-term illnesses is your self-perception: You're losing your identity as a healthy person and shifting to perceiving yourself as a person with an illness. This is incredibly tricky to do, and it's a process, not an event; the grief of accepting and incorporating illness into your identity can take a long time.
Give yourself ample time to feel whatever you're feeling, to experience a shift in your identity. You may find yourself vacillating between being "fine" and feeling sad and preoccupied. It isn't a linear process; it's jumbled and painful, and yet many people come out of it realizing they can function and carry on with life where they might have assumed they couldn't. Achieving normalcy in the midst of chaos is an important........