Death Competence: Why I Look at My Own Mortality Before I Sit With Yours

There's a line I keep coming back to in my work;

You can't hold someone else's losses well if you haven't acknowledged your own.

It sounds simple, but it isn't, and it sits at the centre of something called death competence.

Photo of a flower in a memorial

What death competence is

Death competence isn't a technique. You can't learn it from a worksheet or pick it up in a weekend workshop.

It's made up of three things:

🪷 Knowledge. 

Understanding how grief works, how death affects bodies, families and cultures, and what the research tells us about loss.

🪷 Emotional resilience. 

The capacity to stay present with pain, including someone else's, without rushing to fix it or looking for the exit.

🪷 A willingness to look at your own mortality. 

Honestly. Before you sit with someone else's.

Gamino and Ritter (2012) described death competence as an ethical imperative for people who work with the dying and the bereaved, and I agree with them. It isn't a bonus skill, it's part of doing this work responsibly.

What happens when we avoid it

When we haven't made peace with the fact that we will die, and that everyone we love will too, it leaks out.

We change the subject. We reach for reassurance too fast. We say "passed away" instead of "died". We look for the silver lining before the person has finished telling us what happened.

Clients notice. Most of the time they don't say anything; they just learn that this topic is too much for the person in front of them, and they quietly take it somewhere else, or nowhere at all.

Why this matters for the people who sit with grief

If you work with grieving people, this is for you. Counsellors, nurses, GPs, funeral staff, teachers, community workers, every member of our community.

It's also for you if you're simply the person others turn to when someone dies. Plenty of us are, without any formal role.

Some questions worth sitting with:

🪷 What have I lost, and what have I not yet let myself grieve?

🪷 How do I feel when I think about my own death, or the death of someone I love?

🪷 What do I do when a client's story touches mine?

🪷 Which words do I avoid, and why?

There are no right answers. The point is to ask, and to keep asking.

We can't ask others to go where we won't

Here's the part I feel most strongly about.

We have no right to ask our clients to do something we're not willing to do ourselves.

The work of grief asks people to look at what hurts. To say the word died. To stay with the absence. If we're asking that of them, we need to have done our own looking first, and to keep doing it.

Death competence isn't something you finish. I don't think I'm "done" with it, and I'm not sure anyone is. It's a practice. It's why I run Death Cafés, and why I think conversations about dying belong in everyday life, not only in the hardest moments.

Over to you

Have you heard of death competence before? I'd love to know whether it's a concept you've come across in your work or in your own life.

If you're a practitioner who'd like support in this area, you're welcome to get in touch about supervision.

Reference

Gamino, L. A., & Ritter, R. H. (2012). Death competence: An ethical imperative. Death Studies, 36(1), 23-40.