Volume 9 • 2022 • Issue 1

abilities to eat, socialize, or talk like they used to. How can the profession best respond to these losses? Furthermore, beyond needing to know about the grief experienced by patients, we need to know about how to care for ourselves. As humans, we will be confronted by loss and death. Wouldn’t it be better if we were more equipped? Q You’ve done scholarship about grief literacy and dental education. What have you found? MEM: I recently published a commentary article 1 in the Journal of Dental Education in which I focused on the experience of dental students who have been living through the pandemic. Dental school is already stressful and can be isolating. Losses compound: one loss builds upon other losses. Some students have lost people to the pandemic, but there are the other losses too—experiences, opportunities, and relationships. As educators, creating a compassionate space is a huge gift to students. One thing we know about dental students is that they often have a drive to be perfect. We hand-pick these amazing students, but they often feel a need to be perfect, which makes it that much harder when you experience hardship, failure or loss. Grief can derail anyone—and especially a student who is already under so much stress and pressure. We need to have an educational space where grieving is accommodated. Because if you can’t be in your grief, you can’t move forward with it. You will end up trying to suppress the feelings and emotions, but they can pop right back up when you least expect them. Q If you have one takeaway about grief, what would it be? MEM: Grief isn’t something that can be cured, fixed, or that goes away. It becomes part of you and your life grows around it. If you picture grief as being a thing, like a stone, you can imagine that that stone stays the same size, even with time. But your life gets bigger, it expands around and integrates that stone. So, while the stone stays the same, over time it takes up less space in your day-to-day experience. But it stays with you. Even years later, when you talk to someone about the funeral of someone they loved, they might cry. That crying does not mean you have done something wrong. Those feelings are still there. Indeed, those feelings are important, meaningful parts of the Further Reading: • Cadell S, Joy K, Cherblanc J, Macdonald ME. As COVID-19 restrictions lift, grief literacy can help us support those around us. The Conversation . 2021, July 19, 2021 • Macdonald ME, Singh HK, Bulgarelli AF. Death, dying, and bereavement in undergraduate dental education: A narrative review. J Dent Educ. 2020;84(5):524-33. • Barratt O, Lee R, Curtin C. First trimester miscarriage: Patient care considerations for the dental team. Br Dent J. , 2020;229(8):527-31. person. It can actually be comforting to be able to talk about the funeral and cry again, because it acknowledges a significant part of your life. Would they want the grief erased from their memory? No. Grief has a productive side to it because it reminds us what matters to us, what is meaningful, who we love and who we miss. In a good, full life, we love and lose people and we grieve them and keep loving them. But then, we also love again, too. Love is multiplied, not divided, through grief. In the culture of health care, we tend to want to fix things. But grief isn’t fixable. It needs to be grown through. I think this may make us professionally uncomfortable, because in health care, we tend to want to fix things. If we were all more grief literate, we might feel more comfortable with the idea that we do not need to fix grief. Reference 1. MacdonaldME. It’s time tomake dental education ‘grief literate.’ J Dent Educ . 2021 Nov;85(11):1718-20. Issues and People