public health is everywhere
EXPANDING ON THE “OFFICIAL” DEFINITION
My own definition of public health holds central its focus on collective well-being. Alongside the science of public health, I seek to bring forth the spirit of public health through my death and grief work. Both science and spirit relate to how we work with death and grief. Research and evaluative outcomes are relevant in understanding what conditions people die of, the prevalence of disease, actions (and policy) that prevent death, how the body is preserved after death, and the physical impacts of grief, for example. Often missing in our dominant public health system is the spirit of public health–how we name and acknowledge the loss represented throughout the research, how we tend to one another through periods of loss and death, how we listen to the earth, or how we truly prioritize our mutual well-being over the capitalistic practices our society prioritizes.
Public health, in my opinion, is an ancient discipline, each of us having ancestors at some point in our lineage who sought ways to protect and care for their communities. Therefore, I surmise that each of us has ways of bringing back the deeply rooted spirit of public health and subsequently inviting this spirit into how we walk with loss, grief, and death. Certainly, these ancient practices included tending to the dying and the dead, to the bereaved and can slowly (continue to) be unearthed after centuries of being buried underneath internalized dominant-systems thinking. Our ancestors were better able to prevent the end result of unprocessed grief and meaningless endings because they knew that honoring loss and death were critical to the health of the community as a whole–to the health of its living members.
I am a public health practitioner by training and this orientation influences my approach to both death and grief work. As such, I view my death and grief work as public health work and our society’s death and grief illiteracy as a public health crisis.
The impact of this illiteracy is compounded loss which shows up as violence, isolation, poor health outcomes, etc. We can prevent these outcomes!
WHAT IS PUBLIC HEALTH?
By “official” definition, public health is “the science of protecting and improving the health of people and their communities by promoting healthy lifestyles, researching disease and injury prevention, and detecting, preventing and responding to infectious diseases” (CDC Foundation). Public health is distinct, although related, from medicine in that its central focus is on prevention rather than treatment. It centers the health of the collective over any one individual.
IS PUBLIC HEALTH DEAD?
Public health is being decimated. Certainly by current federal policy, but also by decades of underfunding, denial of what is needed, and low prioritization. Meanwhile, our collective’s inability to meet such loss becomes more apparent. As someone currently in the field of public health, I often ask myself: is public health dead?
Perhaps this iteration of it is and most certainly we are walking the edge of something new–both collapse and possibility live there.
What would it be like for us to reimagine a society where our grief and death illiteracy were treated as the public health crisis of our time (alongside such current public health crises of gun violence, climate change, pandemics or racism)?
death + grief work help us (re)imagine public health
A society where we (re)imagine public health implementation and community care is a grief and death literate society. Here are some components I believe inherent to this literacy:
We name the reality of impermanence, grief, and death.
We re-familiarize ourselves with practices that help us move through loss, becoming more willing to uncover the places we have buried our grief and accepted denial.
We show up vulnerably first with ourselves and then with others to navigate and hold loss and death.
We offer support across the life/death cycle–birth and death experiences inhabit two sides of the same coin and hold an enormity of grief, loss, and joy between them.
We have the collective agency and power to tangibly and sustainably affect the crises of our time.
We prioritize people, their dignity, and our care of one another over any one individual.
We prevent the outcomes of grief and death illiteracy–violence, inability to hold discomfort, denial, isolation, relational poverty, etc.
