Mental Health

 

 Art of Grieving

 

From helping patients prepare cards and letters for their loved ones to assisting with practical arrangements, such as funerals and legal documentation, Meg Hagerty’s role as a Palliative Social Worker involves assisting patients and families to say goodbye and preparing things for their new reality.

While the loss of each patient is part of the job, its inevitability does not soften the impact.

“In palliative care, caregivers bear witness to many heart-wrenching losses,” said Meg, who works in the Mel Miller Hospice at the Edmonton General Continuing Care Centre. “We journey with and companion our patients and their families and, ultimately, we lose those patients. Then we must move quickly to the next patient and the next task. So, what do we do with our grief?”

Meg’s question led her to Covenant Health’s 22nd Annual Palliative Care Conference last October, where she was joined by her friend and West Coast artist Monk. Together, Meg and Monk offered conference goers an artistic venue for expressing the losses they may experience in their jobs every day.

One by one, stroke by stroke, each willing participant was invited to paint on Monk’s canvas, in dedication to someone they had lost.

“I love the metaphor that process conjures because each person offers this disparate drop of paint that somehow, with Monk’s artistic brilliance, becomes a whole and beautiful composition,” said Meg.

The idea came to Meg following the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, where Monk was one of the commissioned artists. Following the death of Georgian Luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, Monk found herself spontaneously collaborating with Games observers on a large painting near the crash site as a way of expressing individual and collective grief.

Monk’s story got Meg thinking about how a concrete, visceral action can unlock emotions, and the two women worked together to recreate this experience at the conference. They invited the practitioners, volunteers and leaders who came to paint to talk about their thoughts and feelings. As part of the process, each participant also signed the back of the canvas with a message or statement about the loss.

“The back of that canvas became so full of dedications, eventually each of those individual statements blended into the rest. I realized the back of the painting symbolized our common journey as health care providers. It became its own muted, common, collective expression of grief. Somehow it held the energy and hope of a prayer and the heartfelt wish of a sympathy card,” said Meg.

She reinforces the importance for healthcare providers to continually find ways to not carry around the distress and loss they may experience in their work. For Meg, that involves setting boundaries and finding work-life balance. She also says there’s a gift in understanding the brevity of life.

“The gift is, for some reason, I get to go home and sleep in my own bed tonight. Every day needs to be lived in a meaningful way. Life is short, no matter what.”