Tempting to not worry about Covid when so much else will kill you

[lauradi7dw]

No, I'm not going to stop trying to avoid the current plague. I am just in the anger part of the much-quoted but also much-criticized Kübler-Ross model. A longtime friend of Arthur's just died. He had had a variety of health issues over the years, but when he last emailed Arthur three weeks ago, he was thinking of getting a dog, which is a many-years commitment, so he wasn't feeling that his time was short. Another friend Arthur met through juggling died in July (fuck cancer), which was sad, but Todd was special to Arthur. Arthur's father lost a bunch of friends almost like dominoes when they were in their 50s (Arthur's father is now 92). Arthur has started to wonder whether this year is going to be like that for us, with folks in their 60s instead. On the other hand, my mother reported the other day that she has been having repeated dreams recently about her friends who have died in the last year or two. It doesn't end, no matter how old you get.

Comments

[bitterlawngnome]

Even EKR criticized EKR :)

[lauradi7dw]

She was right about anger, though, at least for me. Things in Todd's life that were not related to his cardiac system had been going well lately, and this just makes me mad.

[bitterlawngnome]

I think the great thing she did was supporting people to feel all the emotions, not just sad. Even she acknowledged that people don't go through them one at a time in series, but that grieving is chaotic and unpredictable on the day to day level. But up to that time there had been the assumption that you cried a bit and then it was done, maybe a bit of denial if you were crazy, and you certainly didn't feel angry or bargain with god etc. It gave the gloss of science to grieving, too, which meant that it was OK for men to grieve because Science. People hate on her but the real harm was done by insurance companies and their pet clinicians who liked the idea of there being a predictable etiology and timetable for grieving behaviours, so you could dole out a set kind of support for a limited time and then pronounce the bereaved as being cured and ready to get back to work.

Thinking back on working in a hospice setting, I don't think it would have been possible without EKR. In many ways she shifted the center of the dying process away from doctors back to patients and families merely by saying, look grieving and dying is a normal human process, not mainly a failure of the medical system. A lot of people fought hard against that. I remember patients being ashamed of dying, if you can imagine ... because they had failed to stay well or failed to respond to all the care, and you could see that doctors approached them differently once it "went palliative". God, the puffy fragile egos of doctors in those days. That's what she was up against. A woman navigated that. Imagine the strength it must have taken.

[lauradi7dw]

And when writing about the feeling of losing multiple people in one's age cohort, I did think of the exchanges you and I have had about the worst of the AIDS era (which is ongoing, of course, but not in the sense of everybody who gets sick dies fairly soon).