My Life in Death

I am an introvert. Large gatherings and parties are not my jam. Small talk makes me want to crawl into a hole. I’ve never been good at chit chat about topics that I consider meaningless; the weather, sports, reality television shows, etc. Over the years, I have found ways to avoid these situations. One of the most successful tactics has been to be brutally honest about my profession. I am the bereavement coordinator at a children’s hospital. Before that, I was a bereavement counselor at a hospice agency. If I don’t want to talk to someone, being honest about my profession has a 98% success rate at making them go away. The 2%? They want free counseling. The benefits outweigh the risk. Most of the time. If I find someone mildly interesting or if I can sense the crazy, I will very carefully parse out information about my job. It generally goes like this:

Them: “So, what do you do for work?”

Me: “I work at a children’s hospital.”

Them: “Oh! Are you a nurse?”

Me: “No, I’m a therapist.”

Them: “Like a speech therapist? My cousin does that.”

Me: “No, I’m a counselor.”

Them: “Ooooooooh! Do you help kids with cancer?”

Me: “I work more with the families of patients.”

Them: “Yeah, it must be hard for them to be in the hospital.”

Me: “Yes, it is hard.”

Them: “So, how do you help them?”

Me: “I provide emotional support. Mostly, I just listen. I also help them improve coping skills and work on self-care.”

Them: “Oh.”

Silence.

Sometimes, they will move off of the conversation and onto something else. Usually, this is where I can transition them into talking about what they do for a living or onto some other topic about themselves. But sometimes, they just keep digging. So then, the conversation goes like this:

“How often do you visit families?”

“It depends. When they are in the hospital I check in every other day or so.”

“Do you see families when they are out of the hospital?”

“Yes, if their child has died.”

“OH!!!!”

“I’m the bereavement coordinator. I work with families before, during, and for two years post death.”

At this point I get either this:

“OooOOoOoOOoOOoOOOOooOoH! That must be SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HARD! I could never do that, I’m too emotional. I would just cry all the time.”

Or this:

“Wow. That sounds very difficult. How did you get into that line of work?”

With people who are “far too emotional” to do my job, I tend to find a way to work myself out of the conversation as I don’t generally have the mental fortitude to explain that I am actually an empath and feel all of this very deeply. That this ability is actually what allows me to do the work that I do. The very small minority who acknowledge the difficulty level of my profession and seem genuinely interested in how I got here get this some version of this:

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a lawyer. While I was in high school, I decided that I wanted to be a J.A.G. Officer in the Navy. “A Few Good Men” was popular and I was in love with Demi Moore. I was also in my high school Navy Junior ROTC program. It’s all very cliché and thankfully I grew out of it. In college my degree was in criminal justice. At first I enjoyed my classes, but the higher level courses were much more administrative than I cared to endure. I had very much enjoyed the courses that were cross categorized with Sociology. So, in the middle of my senior year, I switched my major and added an entire year to my college education. But, I was much happier and doing far better in my coursework. It turns out that you are more invested in something you are interested in.

After graduating from college I went to work full time for the law firm where I had been employed part time throughout my undergraduate experience and I started studying for the LSATS. In the midst of this I experienced my first significant death loss. The mother of a very recent ex-boyfriend died unexpectedly. We had dated for two and a half years and I learned a lot about substance abuse (more about that fun experience in another post). His mother and I had become very close. I don’t currently have a relationship with my own mother and at the time it was very toxic. My ex’s mom showed me what true unconditional love and support was supposed to look like. Her life and death have had a profound impact on my life and career. I had little to no coping skills with which to process and experience my feelings surrounding her death. I moved back to my city of origin, got a new job, new apartment, and a new boyfriend. After two and a half years of being a heinous bitch and almost losing out on an amazing opportunity I realized that perhaps I needed some assistance. My counselor was very gentle and supportive. She helped me work through my feelings of guilt and profound sadness. I cannot recall her name, but I will always remember the safety of her office and how she allowed me to feel my feelings without judgment or condemnation. I had never been allowed to express all of my feelings in this manner (another deep seeded childhood issue that we will perhaps examine at another time). With this therapist’s guidance, I was able to clear out the unexpressed emotions and move forward in my life in a much healthier manner.

The new job had been in my county’s family court system. I had not yet come to the realization that my own family was tremendously dysfunctional, and at the same time, was horrified at the dysfunction that was put on display day after day in our courtroom. I had taken the LSATs twice at this point and had not been accepted to any of the law schools that I had applied to. I decided perhaps that I should take an intermediary step and began researching masters programs. Marriage and Family Counseling and Child Therapy seemed to be exactly what my super hero complex was looking for. I was set to pivot slightly from my original plan to help save marriages and children in the court system while I continued to pursue law school. In the midst of my program I moved to the county sheriff’s office where I interviewed people who were incarcerated in order to determine their custody level while they were awaiting trial. Through this work, I was exposed to some harsh realities of the world. A lot of children don’t make it through junior high or high school. This was baffling to me. As dysfunctional as my family was and is, education is very highly valued and my parents made it clear that I was to not only attend, but also do well. So, I started to ask the people I was interviewing to elaborate about the circumstances of their lives. I wanted to try to understand what had allowed them to leave school at very young ages.

The information that I gleaned from the people I talked with was heartbreaking and eye opening. One young girl in particular indicated that she had difficulty in school and no one was around to help her, due to drug use and/or incarceration, so she just stopped going. These discussions started undoing the judgments that I had learned from my family of origin and started me on the path to becoming a more accepting human being.

The final year of my masters program was meant for an internship. I secured mine the fall before we were to start the following February and I was prematurly proud of myself. There were roughly 24 students in my cohort and about a dozen internship spots. The only agency to call me for an interview was a hospice agency, but I didn’t care, I was going to complete the internship and be done with my program so I could go save the world. Somewhere in January, I started to have panic attacks. How was I going to help people when I had failed SO miserably at my own grief process? My clients were going to see right through me. Thankfully, I had a very strong support network around me who propped me up and kept me from quitting my entire program.

This next part is going to sound like a lot of unicorns, rainbows, puppies, and glitter; all things I love very much, but do not make this any less true. When I sat down with my first client the lightbulb went off. It became very clear to me that this is what I was supposed to be doing with my life. My personal grief experience had given me a perspective to help support people that my clinical education had not provided. It was an overwhelming feeling. The other part of the equation was that I was working for two organizations at the polar opposite ends of the employment spectrum. The sheriff’s office was very harsh and unsupporting; to the degree that my direct supervisor was trying to sabotage my attempts at finding a job within my newly chosen field. The hospice agency was the epitome of love and support. It was so warm and fluffy that I’ve vowed to never leave.

Which brings us up to today. I worked at the hospice agency for 9 years. The majority of my work was with adult death bereavement. Every once in a while I would receive a referral for a pediatric death loss, but the conversation always ended quickly when they realized that they had never met me and I didn’t know their child. The opportunity at the children’s hospital was the obvious next step in my career; I would be able to build a program nearly from scratch and meet families prior to the death of their child. This has allowed me to build relationships and rapport with parents and siblings which has translated into the ability to provide comprehensive post death support. It also allowed me to keep my promise to never leave the hospice agency. I work for both organizations so that I can transition between them to support our families. I have the best of both worlds!

All of this to say, that I am passionate about helping people and about educating about grief. There is so much misinformation in the world that is used to condemn people who are grieving instead of lifting them up. I spend the majority of my time with clients undoing what some “well intentioned” family member or friend has inflected on them. My plan is to use this platform to do both.

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