Moving On.

By Helen Watson White in All Sorts

new perspectives on death, dying and grief are discussed

MOVING ON
An article in last year's Pentecost issue of Anglican Taonga (the equivalent of Catholic Tui Motu), gave me some new perspectives on death and "moving on." It addresses the idea that after someone has died and you've grieved for a certain period, you might expect to "get closure" and "move on". But the subject of the article, Alister Hendery, considers grief doesn't necessarily work like that, and I agree.

Over 35 years in ministry, Hendery has taken over 1500 funerals, and last year published a book called Earthed in Hope-- Dying, Death and Funerals, A Pakeha Anglican Perspective. His experiences have shown him "how we approach death, how we mark it, what we believe about it, what we do with our dead, has changed radically over the past four decades". Death, he says, is a subject we don't talk about enough, many or most being seduced by society's "obsession" with youth. Of course youth matters. But not at the expense of ignoring the elderly, and putting things like ministry to the dying and the dead into a second tier." [And I would add, it's not only older people who die; the young and beautiful can also have their lives cut short. Younger people with terminal illness are sometimes put in rest-homes or hospitals for the elderly, because there is no provision for their different needs.]
Putting those two points together, I'm hearing from Hendery that if we don't have a sufficiently widespread social discussion about death and dying, many in our society are poorly prepared for the death of close friends and family, and what comes after in the way of re-adjustment. Then the other tendency kicks in, that many people -- probably for their own reasons -- seem to want the bereaved to be able to "move on" more quickly than they can. One of my friends felt the pressure of this very keenly. After her husband's death at 50, she did in fact "move on" in the way of professional life, re-training and then working as breadwinner in an area they'd talked about when her husband was alive. But the pressure she felt was in the area of "getting over it", which I agreed was another matter entirely.
How can other people know how long it will take? If it hasn't happened to us before, how can we ourselves know how long, and in what way, we need to grieve? In my worst-case scenario I know that I would want to go into a period of silent retreat at first, then again at regular intervals, possibly for the rest of my life. The trouble is that after the death of someone close to you, there are umpteen practical considerations to deal with, and 40 days in the desert just don't cut it in
the way of meeting your obligations to living family members of the one who died. And what about the case of multiple deaths?
Alister began research for his book in 2010. "Within a year, Pike River and the first of the Christchurch quakes had happened. Suddenly, with Pike River, you had what one commentator has described as the first expression of public grieving on the social networks. I was able to download literally thousands of postings, and a picture very quickly emerged... I can tell you that neo-Platonism, the belief in an immortal soul, is alive and well. People are reverting to ancient images of the ferryman crossing the Styx. There is no concept of the Judaic-Christian belief in the resurrection of the body. It simply is not out there." Can the Anglican funeral service cope?
After Pike River, Alister says he got tired of hearing the word closure used as a certainty. "Grief is a time of utter chaos," he says, and we each grieve uniquely. "It can't be stylised in the form that the media present it. You never find closure to grief. It's always a part of you."
It's the "linear model" that Hendery refutes: that you grieve, then that period is over, then you "move on". Friends report to me that it's much more cyclical: grief comes in waves, that may become less frequent in time. Those who lived through the Christchurch quakes -- and aftershocks -- may have thought they could put that experience behind them. But this year's February shock will have meant it's all come back, to be lived through again. I feel for them. We all do.
-- Helen Watson White