OhioHealth Hospice Bereavement Team Brings Conversations About Grief to the Big Screen

OhioHealth Hospice Bereavement Team Brings Conversations About Grief to the Big Screen

Key Takeaways:

• OhioHealth Hospice Athens is hosting a free November film series at the Athena Cinema to encourage open conversations about hospice, grief and bereavement.
• Free grief support is available to adults and children across the community, even if their loved one was not an OhioHealth hospice patient.
• Hospice care supports the whole family, with a team that can include nurses, chaplains, social workers, home health aides, bereavement counselors and volunteers. Talking about death and grief can be difficult. But avoiding those conversations does not make loss any easier.

That is one reason the OhioHealth Hospice Athens team is taking the conversation somewhere familiar to the community: the movies.

In recognition of National Hospice and Palliative Care Month in November, OhioHealth is partnering with the Athena Cinema in Athens for a free film series designed to create a comfortable space for conversations about death, dying, hospice care and bereavement.

For Kelsey Funk, a member of the bereavement services team with OhioHealth Hospice Athens, opening the door to those conversations is an important part of helping people navigate grief.

"We are a death-denying community. We are a grief-denying community as well, and so we need to talk about it," Funk said. "If we just deny it, it doesn't make it easier. It makes it harder to deal with. And so if we have these open conversations, it can feel a little bit more comfortable."

More Than End-of-Life Care

For many people, the word "hospice" can be intimidating and may bring to mind only the final days or hours of a person's life. But hospice care can begin much earlier and is built around providing comfort and support to both patients and the people who love them.

"It's not necessarily those last days or those last hours," Funk said. "It can be the last weeks, last months, even the last years that we can provide care."

That care is delivered by an interdisciplinary team that can include nurses, chaplains, home health aides, social workers, bereavement counselors and volunteers.

And the focus extends beyond the patient.

"We don't look at just one person. We look at the whole system," Funk said. "Family is however you define that. It's not just your blood relatives. It's whoever is your caregivers, whoever are your cheerleaders, and we get to then be the cheerleaders for everybody involved."

Helping Families Carry Grief

Support also continues through bereavement services.

Grief can look different for every person, and Funk says people sometimes put unrealistic expectations on themselves about how they should grieve, how long grief should last or how they are supposed to feel following a loss.

Bereavement counselors can provide a listening ear while helping people find ways to live with their grief and honor the person they have lost.

Funk describes the work as being "the witness to the pain" as well as "the witness to the love."

The goal isn't necessarily to leave grief behind.

Instead, she said, counselors can help make grief "this manageable thing that you can carry with you in a way that you can honor the people that you love."

And no one has to navigate that process alone.

OhioHealth offers free grief support to the community, including people whose loved ones did not receive hospice care from OhioHealth. Services are available for both adults and children and can include individual support in person, by phone or through Zoom, along with school-based services, groups and workshops.

Creating Conversation Through Film

The November film series at the historic Athena Cinema offers another way to reach people where they are.

The series will feature three films intended to approach grief, death and hospice care from different perspectives:

• November 7: Coco, providing a family-friendly way to explore themes of loss, remembrance and connection.
• November 10: A short documentary focused on themes surrounding death, dying and grief.
• November 17: A fictional film offering a lighter, while still meaningful, perspective on hospice care.

OhioHealth Hospice team members will be available at the screenings to answer questions, share information about bereavement and hospice services, and connect people with support.

Tickets for all three films are free and can be reserved online at theathenacinema.com or obtained at the door.

For Funk, the film series is ultimately about making a difficult subject a little easier to approach and reminding people throughout Athens and the surrounding communities that support is available.

"We think that sometimes we can do it on our own, but we don't have to do it on our own," she said.