A Funeral for My Father's Mind: A Therapist's Attempt at Grieving

This paper addresses grieving from a therapist's perspective. As occupational therapists, we focus naturally on clients'concerns when illness or death strike in their lives but little is known on how we react when faced with personal losses. Through the experience of gradually losing her father to a degenerative disease, the author attempts to distinguish what, in her professional training, can be helpful or detrimental to her grieving process. Five areas, common to all occupational therapists, are examined in terms of their impact on grieving. They consist of our theoretical understanding of grief and bereavement; our knowledge of pathologies and prognoses; our use of client-centred guidelines, our access to a professional network, and the values inherent to the practice of occupational therapy. While acknowledging that grieving is fundamentally the same with therapists and people in general, the author emphasizes some differences linked to our professional status and suggests coping mechanisms better suited to our specific situation.