Death - Corpus

Most of us experience the death of a parent or grandparent and the loss of the past it brings. The death of an elderly family member, however, does not threaten the family’s reason to exist, and its future hopes and dreams remain. The death of a child, however, brings with it the death of part of the parents, and the psychological death of the family. In bereavement literature there is agreement that the death of a child is almost beyond the parents’ endurance. The parent-child bond is arguably the strongest bond there is. The concept of the child as an integral part of the parent’s self is logical in that the survival of the child depends on altruistic parenting. If mother and baby did not become strongly attached the baby would die. The purpose of attachment, therefore, is the survival of the species. Thus, parenthood is deeply challenged by the death of a child.

The language of grief

15 May 2017 1 Comment

Sandra Arnold

Knowing what to say to bereaved parents can be extraordinarily difficult. Language often fails in this context because of unfamiliarity with death, the decline of mourning rituals, and an increasingly secular, urban and mobile society. Language can also fail when we try to describe a bereaved person. Phrases commonly used, such as ‘breaking down’ and ‘losing control’, are those used in describing dysfunctional machinery. Grief is spoken of in the same terms as an illness from which people ‘recover’ and ‘return to normal’.

Ambushed by grief

27 March 2017 Leave a Comment

Max Reid

It has been a challenging few weeks, a time when I have been caught between competing professional and emotional obligations – conducting my mother-in-law’s funeral on the one hand, and grieving her death on the other. Funerals should be familiar territory for me. As a Presbyterian minister for over a decade, during which time I also had a period as a Hospice Chaplain, I conducted hundreds of funerals, reflecting and writing extensively on that aspect of my ministry.

Coordinating the funeral arrangements – both practical and pastoral – for my mother-in-law drew me back into a professional space I had left many years before. All in the midst of grieving for someone who had become my second mother, indeed a mother whom I had come to know and love and relate to for longer as an adult than I had my own mother, who had died 25 years earlier. My wife – a nurse – found herself facing a similar tension in the days leading up to her mother’s death. One cannot shake off one’s professional role and obligations any more than one can shake off the emotional ones.

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Navigating a way through grief

20 March 2017 Leave a Comment

Sandra Arnold

In 2002 my youngest daughter, Rebecca, died of a rare appendix cancer at the age of 23. For a whole year afterwards I couldn’t say her name and the word ‘died’ in the same breath. Though I am a writer, I lost not only the capacity to articulate my feelings, but also the capacity to write. I stopped dreaming. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to be inside my skin. The silence of my own home, the beauty of my garden, the breath of my animals, the quiet paddocks and the river walks provided no refuge. They were all empty spaces that reverberated with Rebecca’s absence. This new territory was so bleached of colour, so arid and alien, so lacking in anything recognisable that I had no language to negotiate my way through it. And I could form no response to comments such as “Gosh, you’re coping so well.”

No more with the deathly silence

17 October 2016 Leave a Comment

Sue Wootton

Death, especially unexpected death, is the lure of much of the click bait we are offered in online news headlines. Likewise, sudden and/or violent death is central to the plot of many television shows, films and video games. Sometimes the resulting corpses are even autopsied for our viewing pleasure. A Martian watching us watch our screens would surely consider us a death-obsessed species. But it’s a revealing obsession: the kind of half-horrified half-titillated fascination that comes from flirting with the forbidden. Ours is, in truth, a death-denying culture.

But things are changing. Perhaps it’s because the baby boomers are getting old, and waking up to the fact that there’s no special dispensation for anyone: the petals of even the most beautiful former flower children eventually wither and die. Whatever the reason, people are beginning to talk, seriously talk, about death.

Two of many recent publications that tackle the subject are We’re all going to die: a Joyful book about Death by Dr Leah Kaminsky, and Death’s Summer Coat: What the History of Death and Dying Teaches us about Life and Living by historian Brandy Schillace.

“Do you have anything for me to see?”

3 October 2016 1 Comment

Dr Janine Winters

When I started my career shift from Hospital Medicine to Palliative Medicine in 2004, my mother asked me “Why in the world do you want to work with people who are going to die? That is so depressing.” My answer then and my answer now is the same. “I am a doctor, I already work with people who are dying—and I know it can be done better.”

Grieving the death of a child

24 July 2017 Leave a Comment