Discussing Death and Dying Creatively

Olwen Minford End of Life Care Facilitator Integrative Arts Psychotherapist Culture Health and Wellbeing Conference June 2013

“I didn’t want that”

Dying Matters videohttp://dyingmatters.org/page/i-didnt-want-that

Choices? Do you want to have a say ?

Have you made a will?

Where do you want to be cared for and to die?

Burial or cremation?

Any other wishes for end of life?

Crazy coffins

Discussing your wishes?How comfortable are you talking about death?Have you discussed your wishes about Eolc with

another person?Only 29% of us have talked about their wishes (Dying

Matters, 2009)75 yrs+ talk most (but even among this group

conversations are not common)

The Elephant in the room

DEATH AS TABOO

Euphemisms200 in English language-practice of using

euphemisms to do with belief that to speak the word death was to invite death

Examples “kick the bucket”

Death Denying Society

Death, Dying, Dead→ Unconscious expression through language

Dismantling the tabooAs many poets and writers have talked about death as birthDeath as lonely & isolating or sorrowful, happyCan be a social event- a drama with people playing rolesWalt Whitman “Come lovely and soothing death”Ben Franklyn “Nothing is certain but death and taxes”Francis bacon “Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark”Bible “ the valley of the shadow of death” “the angel of death” “ the last enemy”

Henry Holland “Death is nothing at all”

Beliefs & InfluencesHistorical→Current Co-op approach

Medicalisation & Professionalisation of Death

Religious →All faiths and none. Muslim, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Sikh

Cultural influences→Staithes. Covering Mirrors/pictures. Bengali tradition of going home to die.

Traditional customs→women not attending graveside. S. Africa-HIV

ReflectionPost card exercise- choose one to symbolise

what/how you currently feel about deathShare in pairsFeedback

End of Life Care Strategy (2008)

Advance Care Planning (ACP) 5 things to do before I die

A Good Death? Contentious4 aims of an appropriate death (Weisman, 1972)Reducing but not necessarily eliminating conflict.Making dying people’s dying compatible with their

own views of themselves and their achievements.Preserving or restoring relationships as much as

possibleFulfilling some of the dying person’s expressed aims.

Poem for Everyman by John Wood I will present you

parts of my self slowly if you are patient and tender. I will open drawers that mostly stay closed and bring out places and people and things sounds and smells, loves and frustrations, hopes and sadness, bits and pieces of three decades of life that have been grabbed off in chunks and found lying in my hands. they have eaten their way into my memory, carved their way into my heart. altogether-you or I will never see them- they are me. If you regard them lightly, deny they are important or worse judge them I will quietly, slowly, begin to wrap them up, in small pieces of velvet, like worn silver and gold jewellery, tuck them away in a small wooden chest of drawers

and close.