Last week, I concluded our discussion on the four tasks of coping with dying: physical, social, psychological, and spiritual. This week I want to outline how these coping tasks can differ for each of the five phases of living with a life-threatening illness. This connection between coping with dying and stages of living with a life-threatening illness was first describe by Ken Doka in 1993.
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Welcome back to another installment of In Due Course. This week I will continue our discussion on coping with dying and delve into how it is best described as a group of tasks.
As we saw in the posting Dying: What is Coping?, coping is an active, choice-laden process involving analysis, redefinition, avoidance, problem solving, expressing emotions, etc. As opposed to being merely an automatic response or defensive reaction to something, coping is the attempt to adapt to and to accommodate life’s challenges. Thinking of coping in terms of tasks helps reinforce its proactive nature, recognizes that coping is not a step-by-step formula, and a person can choose which of the various aspects to work on and when to work on them. In other words, using a task-based model implies that the person coping with dying is an actor, not a re-actor, and has some power over how they adapt to the situation.
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Welcome back to my discussion of mourning. As I wrote last week, characterizing mourning as a series of stages and phases has significant drawbacks. Stages and phases are unproven, they leave the impression that mourning is a passive occurrence, they perpetuate a feeling of victimhood, and they create unnecessary standards that some people compare themselves to. In their place, I prefer to consider mourning to be a group of “tasks” or “challenges” to be undertaken. The idea of tasks or challenges has the advantage of characterizing mourning as an active process requiring decision-making participation by the bereaved person. Read more…
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