Do living wakes work for people who are having assisted dying?

Do living wakes work for people who are having assisted dying?

Yes, they do. In fact, most people who are having an assisted death do have a party before they go.

They have a chance for everyone to come and say goodbye and they really are quite successful.

But a little bit like my story before, we have found that families who have had assisted dying and had a living wake beforehand still have the same grief afterwards and often come through our loss and grief centre saying, I wish we’d still had a funeral. So yes, the living wake was important, but they actually need to say goodbye, not just a cremation where the person is taken away from them, but actually somewhere they can go, maybe just a private farewell with close family and friends, but they need to honour their grief again by saying goodbye, by being in the moment after the death, because it begins a healthy grief journey, good grief rather than cut-off grief. And many of them have actually said that death has felt like a sudden death because they haven’t felt like they should have a funeral, so they haven’t had that goodbye.

So living wake, yes, with assisted dying, fantastic, but also think about the grief process afterwards for those who are close and need to grieve well.