Hospitals and Healthcare

The hope at the root of my self-destruction

“Imagine this is the last day of your life. You won’t know which day it is but you will have a last day. Between now and then, carry yourself as if this is that last day.” So says Stephen Jenkinson, professor of theology at Harvard University and author of Die Wise and Come of Age.

In his five years working in palliative care – which he dubs “the death trade” – Jenkinson met hundreds of dying people and their families, and witnessed a ‘wretched anxiety’ around the end of life. He describes himself as a grief monger and exhorts us to die wise and well, unlike the masses in aged care institutions and hospitals all over the Western world.

Another way to say that you are grieving is that a part of you is stuck in a moment in time. 

 Sometimes the cause of the stuckness isn’t the grief itself, but the fact that you don’t even recognize that you’ve lost something and that you need to grieve. 

Grief is a word that is used interchangeably with bereavement, but grief is not exclusively about the physical death of a person.

Grief doesn't fit in a box, either. Some forms of grief take years to work through, other types take a few solid months, some take a single moment of deep acknowledgement.

In a talk that's by turns heartbreaking and hilarious, writer and podcaster Nora McInerny shares her hard-earned wisdom about life and death. Her candid approach to something that will, let's face it, affect us all, is as liberating as it is gut-wrenching. Most powerfully, she encourages us to shift how we approach grief. "A grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again," she says. "They're going to move forward. But that doesn't mean that they've moved on."