From Pain to Peace: The Role of After-Death Care in Healing Grief

What's your experience with caring for someone or making any arrangements for someone after they die?

This was supposed to be the ice-breaker question in a recent Willow Workshop® about how you want to be cared for after you die, which we call, Departure Directions®. There was so much to say about this that the five of us in the intimate Zoom event talked about this for the entire two hours!

Read the stories below to discover how deep the healing journey can be when you actively engage in after-death care. 

No Need to Rush

When Deb’s husband died, she “was not a part of anything.”

Like most people, she allowed the hospital and the crematorium to take everything over because it felt like ‘way too much’ for her. She left the hospital within minutes after he died and never saw him again! 

From that point onward, she has regarded being part of the dying and after-death care as an important part of her healing journey. Today she encourages people not to rush to ‘do’ anything after a person dies. The emergencies are over, and there’s time and space to sit for a while with your person.

She told us, “I love vigiling with folks who are actively dying and being a part of the community that's supporting them.”

She believes that being present with your loved one in the moments immediately following their death can be a profoundly meaningful and healing part of the grieving process.

Death as a Communal Activity

By contrast, Denise, who is from the Buganda Tribe in Uganda, described how death is a communal activity in the village where she’s from. When someone dies in her culture, there is always a vigil of at least 2 days. The deceased is usually in the lounge or a public space, so that everyone in the community can say goodbye. Before burial, the deceased and the family are never left alone. Stories celebrating the person who died, singing or music is constant.

Denise’s mother died when Denise was just a teenager. “I wanted to get away from it but I was told you can walk away but you will want to hear the stories. And so I stayed because the stories kept me there. And it is those stories that I hold very dear.”

This reminded me of my culture’s tradition of sitting “Shiva” for seven days after a Jewish person is buried. It is also a time for the community to comfort the mourners by bringing them food, telling stories about the deceased and in some cases, by joining them in a religious service. 

Marking Death Positively

Patty and her brother were with her mother at her faith-based care home, as her mother took her last breath. 

The staff offered Patty to sit with her mom for a while before cleaning her up. In the beautiful on-site chapel hung a hand-made quilt. The next thing she knew, her mom was lying on a gurney covered with this beautiful quilt. The quilt, it seems, has the purpose of helping usher people who have died out of the facility. The head nurse told her, “We’re going to bring your mother out the front door. Your mother walked into this community through the front door and she’s going to leave through the front door.” 

(In so many cases the dead get shuffled out through the loading dock.) 

When they wheeled her body away, every staff member who was on duty came to respectfully watch her leave. Patty recounted, “That became for me the lens into how it can be a celebration, and that death is really something to mark in a positive way.”

The Importance of Planning Ahead

Lorelee’s family benefited from the legacy of her grandmother’s pre-planning for her after-death care. 

Speaking openly and positively about death and making arrangements went a long way to give family members the space and time they needed to grieve. This is where Lorelee’s learning began about the importance of taking care of things and making decisions while everyone is well. In Lorelee’s words, “That is a big part of why this kind of work is something I want to pay forward in whatever way I can.”

When her father-in-law died in hospice, the staff accommodated the family to come and say goodbye even into the next day. Like with Patty’s mom, Lorelee’s dad was wrapped in a special quilt and carefully carried out of their home when the time came. Due to family circumstances at the time, they arranged for the big celebration of life to happen a year later at a special venue when all the friends and relatives could be available. 

There was so much more that was shared in the two hours we had together. There were tears and laughter, and stories that are best left between us. The time together in fact, felt like an extension of the death care we’ve each engaged in. By retelling our experiences and stories we felt the love as we held space for each other to continue the grief healing process.  

What About You?

What stories do you have of engaging in someone’s after-death care? What impact did it have on you? 

Feel free to share your response with me, or use this question as a prompt in your journal. If you write about it, don’t forget to reflect on how this makes you feel, and write about that too.

Learn more about Willow EOL Educators® on Willow’s new and growing Educator Directory.