Brainstorm or Light Drizzle?
Do you get any new ideas about OT practice from your recreational reading? Maybe doing this blog has made me more alert, but I've been seeing OT themes in many unexpected places. I say "themes" because not every idea I get is directly transferable to OT practice – that is, I'm not suggesting that OT practitioners can be all things to all people. But if anything I say helps you expand your thinking about how OT can help people identify and pursue occupations that wouldn't otherwise have occurred to them, then this blog has served its purpose.
I recently read an article1 that compared and contrasted the author's (Max Alexander) experience with a funeral process that is considered "typical" in U.S. culture, and one called "home after-death care", which advocates suggest is more meaningful for the survivors, not to mention less costly. As you can imagine, calling something "meaningful" raises my OT antennae. So does information about saving money, especially when it comes to expenses arising from emotions that can be more focused on healthy grieving, rather than on how death expenses affect the families' budgets and economic futures. Alexander pointed out that most Americans spend "an average of $6,500 for a funeral, not including cemetery costs....That's 13 percent of the median American family's annual income."
Did you know that many states do not require bodies to be embalmed before burial, and many also allow do-it-yourself burials? This information is particularly relevant for the families of people who choose to die at home, with or without hospice services. Being able to forgo embalming affects the rituals – and their flow – the survivors will participate in. For example, the way Alexander described the body in the open (home-made) coffin resonated with me: "[he] looked unquestionably dead, but he looked beautiful." The first time I looked into an open coffin, I had the startling thought that there'd been some mistake: the person looked better than she had alive, and therefore, couldn't be dead. I was so repelled by the idea of makeup hiding the person's natural (dead) color, I've never been able to approach an open coffin since. I know my reaction was irrational - I had no difficulties facing the cadavers in Anatomy Lab - but I'm not going to risk a shock like that again. Even after that experience, I didn't recoil from my dad when mom and I visited him in the hospital morgue before his body was transported to the crematorium: because no one had tried to alter his appearance, I knew what to expect. If I ever attend a visitation where I know the body hasn't been altered to look "not dead", I will consider taking a final look.
Home after-death care opens up possibilities for additional activities to honor and memorialize the dead. Alexander describes building the coffin from scratch with his son; and then preparing his father-in-law's body for the visitation (before cremation). There are so many ways an OT practitioner can contribute to the family's consideration of and experience with such activities. Alexander also describes the bureaucratic hoops his family had to jump through to keep his father-in-law's body out of the typical funeral system. Many people, in their "anticipatory grief", could not deal with the institutional barriers to facing the "physical reality of death" without support. Think about how an OT practitioner could help relate the infuriating and exhausting "hoop-jumping" to meaningful occupations associated with preparing for and grieving someone's death.
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1 Alexander, M. (2009) "Which Way Out?" Smithsonian Magazine, March, 2009, pp. 86-93