Dr. Gloria Horsley talks with Amy Florian during an Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC) conference about how to heal after losing a loved one. Florian is the founder and CEO of Corgenius, which was named after “cor” (Latin for “heart”) and “genius” for brain. Connecting hearts to the brains and businesses is her calling. She speaks with businesses, healthcare organizations, and faith-based organizations. We need people to come into our organizations because although we all have hearts, they get hidden. We live in denial, and remove death from our daily lives.
We use hospitals as an excuse to sanitize death and let someone else take care of it. There are instances where this is positive, but we also use it to separate ourselves. We don’t like to say the words “death,” “dead,” or “die” easily—when it doesn’t mean the literal description. We’ll say a dessert is to die for, our kids will be the death of us, or that a friend will “just die” when we give them a special gift. However, when it comes to actual death, we’ll use any word but “death.” Why is that?
Redefining Death
In American society, we’ve done an incredible job of separating ourselves from death. However, it’s time to bring reality and heart back into these discussions. It’s too easy to “put” someone in hospice care or a hospital, which can be a great thing in many regards, but we can also use these places to forget about the death process.
When someone is bereaved and going back to work, understand that people are very well meaning but they don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to act. You’ll probably make people uncomfortable, which is why it’s critical to get support outside of work.
