I have recently moved to a new community, Fairhaven, MA, a place steeped in nautical history and it seems every other house has some sort of historical plaque or sign describing an important personage who either built the structure of lived there at some point. One of those signs, described the historical house owner as "Captain of the Flying Cloud", arguably the most famous clipper ship of her era. She sailed from New York to San Francisco in less than 90 days at a time when many sailing vessels required as much as 200 days to accomplish the same journey.
No question that Capt. Creesy had a fast ship. However, he also had a close partnership with his navigator wife (quite the progressives both of them for 1851) AND the benefit of a new text, 'Explanations and Sailing Directions to Accompany the Wind and Current Charts', published that very same year.
The author, Lt. Matthew Maury, had used scientific methods to compile thousands of measurements of wind and current as recorded in the log books of naval and merchant vessels. From this, he could begin to deduce the larger patterns at work in the formation of winds and currents around the globe. As a result, 'Flying Cloud' steered a course considered at best radical, if not downright dangerous by the prevailing and accepted wisdom of the time. Instead 'Flying Cloud' sailed straight into history and made its owners and captain significant sums of money during its voyaging life.
Just as Maury compiled his 'Sailing Directions' to better describe what *really* happens with wind and current, so that a ship can sail the most effectively, I would ask whether anyone has done something similar for grief and memory and recovery? I know that psychology and the behavioral sciences have come a long way in the last few decades. Perhaps someone in those sciences can give us in funeral service a better set of directions to aid us in helping families and in the process transform our ability to create value for families. If so, it might save us many more years of trial and error and blind guess work.
So, who do we need to talk with? That's what I want to know. Where do we begin to unravel the mysteries of the mind so that we can serve people far more competently and effectively than we do now?
Impossible to understand? That's what they said about wind and tides in the 1800s, gifts from God to come and go as "he" pleased. We know differently that that today. Whatever the origin of the earth and its weather, we now know that air and water follow complex though understandable patterns. It only took someone to look beyond the hearsay and begin the process of organizing and describing those patterns.
The same will come for the psychology of grief. Someone will (and probably already has) describe the patterns of emotion and loss (that is beyond the seven stages of grief we learned in funeral service school, it will take more than that) we should know and follow to better serve our families. In the process, we may gain a chance to service generations we may have thought lost. Yet it will take a different level of thinking and observation to get us there.
I want to see us in funeral service collaborate meaningfully with the scientific community in order to find these new insights and solutions required.
To me, the single most helpful thing to remember about grief is that it's not something we get over (imagining an impossible mountain to climb), but something we walk with. This simple yet profound shift in perception often enables the bereaved to begin to get on with the rest of *their* lives without worrying about leaving their loved ones behind (the other side of the mountain).
Posted by: tp | July 14, 2006 at 08:20 PM