094 - Numbers and faces both matter.

Starting 2025 with resolve

Welcome back (or welcome)!

In case you or I have forgotten, this is a newsletter with stories and tools to help you be more comfortable as you help others in hard times.

Grieving and resolution sometimes interact.

It’s a new calendar year, but grieving isn’t fixed with new numbers. Because, after all, it isn’t fixed. Don’t expect your friend (or yourself) to suddenly be all better just because it’s 2025.

And I’m not sure about the value of a resolution to grieve less or to be happier now that we’re one or five or thirty-five years after the death.

That said, if someone says, “This is the year that I want to clean out that room,” be helpful. And helpful doesn’t say, “It’s about time.” And helpful may choose to not say, “I’m proud of you.”

Helpful could make eye contact and eventually say, “Okay.”

It could say, “How can I help with part of it?”

It could say, “My friend is really good at sorting through things and making decisions about value.”

It may say, “I’ll bring some tissues. And some tissue paper.”

Cleaning out the room is a task, not a sign of something. But the task may be helpful.

The cumulative effect of death.

I was talking the other day to a person whose mom died a couple weeks back, whose sister was heart-deep in cancer treatments, and whose brother, in front of us, was having a hard time. I offered support. And it reminded me to share this post with you again: 030 - When things pile up. (substack.com). It’s got 8 ways to be helpful when deaths are adding up.

I’m looking at death data and you can, too.

The CDC has searchable databases of health information. These days, I’m looking at one called Underlying Cause of Death 2018-2022.

Right now, it’s helping me know how many people have died at home, in a hospice facility, in a medical facility, or other places in our county. Which tells me how many people don’t have the possibility of being supported by the staff in a hospital at the time of death (which is one thing we chaplains do in our hospitals). (This is part of some research I’m doing.)

And numbers are personal

In a month, I’m talking to a group about being helpful in grief.

This isn’t a grief group, by the way. There is value in grief groups. Formal ones like GriefShare, informal ones like a friend created. But there is also deep value in groups willing to talk about grief as part of their conversation. We have to learn to talk together about grief, without sending grieving people off to their own group until they get better (and stop making us uncomfortable).

Anyway, the data searching let me know that 1,218 people died in nursing facilities in DuPage County (IL) in 2019. Which is a number. But one of those people was my mom. Who was not a number. Magnitude and faces. Both are significant.

And when I talk to that group in a month, in DuPage County, I’ll talk about how to be helpful to people like me. Families. Who are all around.

Thanks for reading.

And thanks for supporting this work and for being helpful to others.

I’ll see you next week.

Jon (and Nancy, who came to visit my office for lunch on Christmas Day)