If you’re a long-term care person, your first thought on waking might be a little different than most folks.
Perhaps you open your eyes pondering business survival, for instance. Or Medicare pay cuts. Or an impending wallop of Biden administration nursing home reforms. Even for the most eternally self-actualized optimist in this profession, I doubt your day begins with soothing thoughts of butterflies and kittens frolicking across a limitless horizon.
Me, I awoke this morning thinking about cremation. How’s that for a feel-good wake-up call?
It was prompted by the recent Washington Post report about a significant societal shift in body disposal preferences from burial to burning. “Some say the world will end in fire,” wrote the poet Robert Frost presciently way back in 1920, and a century later, it turns out he was right. Because in 2020, for the first time ever according to the article, cremation became more popular in America than traditional casket burial, and is now twice as popular as it was just 20 years ago.
Obviously, many factors are at play, not the least of which is cost. But experts seem to be genuinely shocked by this change in attitudes in an increasingly death-phobic nation, and some are concerned with its implications on the necessary human processes of grieving and honoring the end of a life. “This is the first generation of our species that tries to deal with death without dealing with the dead,” said a funeral director quoted in the piece.
“There is this hyper-optimism of America,” added Boston University professor Stephen Prothero, who also wrote a book on the history of cremation. “You’re supposed to look on the sunny side of life, which also mitigates a full experience of grief. Mourning is not always accorded its due.”
As our out-of-sight-out-of-mind society seems more and more unwilling to look death straight in the eye and recognize it as another life transition to be accepted and celebrated, one profession remains willing and committed to keep doing exactly that — long-term care. Particularly during the pandemic, virtually anyone working in a facility probably has a story or ten to tell about colleagues who chose to beautifully engage with beloved residents in their final moments.
I’m remembering the physical therapist who not only volunteered to take CNA shifts during the worst of a COVID-19 outbreak, but also sat up multiple nights at the bedsides of several dying residents, quietly holding their hands. I’m thinking of the admissions director who asked permission to leave work early one day, but declined to say why — later admitting he’d gone to a local hospital to be with a former resident in his last hours, because “no one should die alone.”
Our highly distractible and grief-averse civilization may seek ever more creative ways to escape from or minimize the reality of this final chapter. But long-term care people will never shy away from that ultimate human responsibility and privilege — to be fully present in life, and in death.
Things I Think is written by Gary Tetz, a two-time national Silver Medalist and three-time regional Gold and Silver Medal winner in the Association of Business Press Editors (ASBPE) awards program, as well as an Award of Excellence honoree in the APEX Awards. He’s been amusing, inspiring, informing and sometimes befuddling long-term care readers worldwide since the end of a previous century. He is a writer and video producer for Consonus Healthcare Services in Portland, OR.
The opinions expressed in McKnight’s Long-Term Care News guest submissions are the author’s and are not necessarily those of McKnight’s Long-Term Care News or its editors.
