|
|
| |
|
Home
> Elder Care >
Shared knowledge..... |
| |
| |
| |
 John
F. Tomczak is the author of Shared Knowledge - Dealing With
Bereavement.
John's passion is to make all Canadians
aware of how hospice societies can help
them and their loved ones at a time
of need.
John
has been recognized for his many
exemplary contributions as a board
member of Victoria Hospice Society and
the Independent Living Housing Society
as well as a founding member of Canada's
first bereavement self help group.
John is
the owner of
bereavement.ca
|
| |
Shared Knowledge Walking Groups
By John F. Tomczak
For some time I have been at a loss
to explain why the Walking Group Program at Victoria
Hospice has been so successful. I have been involved
in this Program since 1988 and in all that time I
have heard nothing but appreciation from the more
than 750 bereaved folks that I have met. It has
always been a mystery to me how perfect strangers
can meet in a Walking Group and become friends for
life in a very short time.
I had asked my friend Elmer for his
understanding, or his explanation of why the Walking
Group Program at Victoria Hospice has been so
successful. However when you ask Elmer for an
opinion you have to be prepared to wait for the
answer. Finally this is what Elmer said, “walking
and talking is a form of palliative care that is
little understood except by the bereaved.”
The key words here are, “except by
the bereaved.” and that leads to the question why do
the bereaved appreciate and understand this benefit?
I am fond of saying that bereaved people are best
helped by bereaved people but that is an observation
and does not explain why.
John Ralston Saul in his book “On
Equilibrium” explains why bereaved people seem to
have the ability to help perfect strangers who have
in common with them the loss of a loved one.
Saul uses the analogy of the monarch
butterfly to explain this phenomenon. These
beautiful creatures, with a brain the size of a
pin-head, winter in Mexico, summer in northern
Canada and reproduce in the United States on the
way. It takes three generations of the monarch to
make the round trip over thousands of kilometers
which means no single monarch makes the round trip.
Yet they fly precisely the same thousands of
kilometers year after year.
What Saul is describing is not
instinct. There is no element of the intuitional
choice. There is no conscious choice of risk taking.
They are not making up their minds to follow the
nomadic life. Nor is this a product of
understanding. It is, if anything, shared knowledge.
It is innate shared knowledge.
Why should it be so difficult to
accept that what a butterfly can do in a
non-analytic and essentially inexplicable way, a
human ought to be capable of doing?
I have been involved with the Walking
Groups at Victoria Hospice for 15 years. During all
this time I have not understood how it is possible
to meet a person who has also lost a loved one and
have an almost instant rapport with them. The folks
I met in 1988 mean the same to me today as they did
on that first day in a parking lot at the University
of Victoria.
I have no idea why I have been saying
for many years that bereaved people are best helped
by bereaved people. I have no idea why my friends
mean so much to me. Perhaps it is as Saul points
out; we all have a shared knowledge. Humans have
been around for quite some time but individually
humans are here only for a brief time, like the
butterfly. None of us have travelled the entire
journey, so to speak. Yet we all have the capability
to love, we share a measure of compassion and a lot
of what we know and are comes from shared
knowledge.
I have no doubts about Saul’s
explanation of how “shared knowledge” enables us to
understand and to relate to the experiences of
others. However the mystery remains to me as to why
people, unless they have experienced the same
trauma, are unable to empathize with the situation.
Perhaps it has to do with our inbred reluctance to
put ourselves in the place of our friends and their
troubles. If people understood the bereaved
condition we would not hear so many of those
ill-advised and somewhat trite remarks the bereaved
are used to hearing.
As Saul has pointed out we all have a
measure of “shared knowledge” but somehow that is
hard for some to accept. It seems to me the need for
discussion before the fact, as it were, is great.
|
|
|
| Copyright John
F. Tomczak. All rights reserved |
|
|
| |
|
|
| |
|
|
 |
| |
|
For more information on bereavement support, or to
purchase Shared Knowledge, click on the
book cover. |
|
| |
| |
|
It's
easy to stay up to date on the things that interest you.
Just 
