HW 53 - Independent Research A

1.

A Doctor at the Funeral

Death is something doctors see all the time. However, I sometimes find it hard to deal with the death of a patient, especially one I have known for a long time. I will sometimes go to the funeral, but it is hard to know where I fit in amongst the patient's family and friends. And it never gets any easier.

Grief, Unedited

In books and pop culture, we often see the image of a widow or widower who takes a very long time to get over the death of their significant other. As it turns out, several studies show that people who lose their spouses may not actually bemoan this loss for as long as we think. Many people begin to get over their loss after six months or so, which conflicts with the popular notions people have regarding the grieving process. Perhaps these studies will change these notions.

Analysis:

Both of these articles brought up topics that were different than the ones addressed in Stiff. The book focused more on various practices of caring for the dead, and veered more toward the direction of scientific descriptions and commentary rather than the feelings of those who have lost a loved one. Both of these articles are about how people grieve. The first article is from the perspective of a doctor, which is interesting because this is someone whose feelings aren't normally considered, although they should be - some doctors have known their patients since they were born. The author mentioned that while people at the funerals she went to were usually perfectly nice, it was sort of awkward to be there - she felt like she was intruding. The second article talks about a survey that asked people about their feelings after their spouse died. This article was interesting, because the results of the survey contradicted the widespread idea that people take a long time to grieve. The writer even mentioned that many people did not believe the findings, which shows how people often find it hard to get used to a new idea.

2.

I went to the Riverdale Funeral Home (Which, interestingly enough, is not in Riverdale) and spoke with Jim, who is the office manager (he works with families to see what they want and orders things for them). Because I already knew about embalming and cremation from reading Stiff, my questions were more focused on the day to day life of working at a funeral home. First I asked why he had started working there, what got him interested in the job. He said he had been working there for almost 30 years, and he had started working there when he was a junior in high school, because his brother knew the owner from little league. He also said that his grandmother was taken here, and he had always had a curiosity about this line of work. He is also a high school English teacher, and he said that the jobs were alike in the way that "you can't bring things home with you" -  you have to be able to separate yourself from it. This is especially hard because sometimes he has to arrange a student's funeral, or the funeral of a family member or close friend (it is a family - owned funeral home, so they know a lot of the people coming in).

The reason I asked more personal questions as opposed to general ones was because I wanted to get a sense of what it was like to work in a field where you're seeing something all the time that most people only get a glimpse of, when someone they know dies. It does seem to give people a different perspective, but not as much as I thought. Working at a funeral home always seemed to me like it was something that would define the way someone lived, the way having a very specific job or passion that required a certain lifestyle would. I didn't think about the fact that it is a nine to five job like many others - that people do get to go home at the end of the day.