Webinar Provides Guidance for Mortuary Affairs Workers

Military life offers many rewards, including the pride of serving one’s country. But it also presents numerous challenges across a variety of roles, with the one taken on by military mortuary affairs teams being among the most emotionally taxing.

Designed specifically for those serving in mortuary affairs, the Mortuary Affairs and Grief webinar discusses the challenges of the job and how to recognize symptoms of grief and compassion fatigue. A trained professional with degrees in psychology and counseling conducts the webinar, and it is available through Military OneSource.

If you are among those facing the day-to-day challenges of working in mortuary affairs, this webinar will also teach you ways to cope with the emotional demands of the job. And it will help you know when to seek help to maintain your own mental health, so you can continue to serve the deceased and their families to the best of your ability.

Mortuary Affairs and Grief webinar highlights

As a mortuary affairs team member, you can take pride in your service to your country and your mission to honor those who have died and provide respect and comfort to their families.

But the job can be emotionally draining.

To help you deal with the stress of the job and the toll it can take on your ability to serve those in need, as well as on your personal life, this webinar details ways to:

• Meet the challenges of the job
• Deal with personal stress
• Recognize symptoms of grief, including:
  • Emotional
  • Physical
  • Behavioral
• Manage compassion fatigue and ambiguous grief
• Cope with any issues you may be experiencing
• Find outside help

This webinar explains the realities of lesser-known aspects of grief, such as compassion fatigue, which most affects fields such as health care and those who work in mortuary and funeral affairs.

In these cases, an individual’s preoccupation with the suffering of others can lead to a secondary-traumatic-stress-like experience. And this can result, over time, in the lessening of compassion for those you are helping.

By watching and listening to this webinar, you will learn how to recognize these and other conditions and how to form a strategy for dealing with them.

The webinar also suggests when it might be time to seek outside help if those usual coping methods don’t work.

Other specific issues addressed include coping strategies for mortuary affairs team members in:

• Recovering and handling decedent remains and the emotions these actions can elicit.
• Dealing with ambiguous grief without closure or a clear understanding often results in unresolved feelings. These feelings can be brought on for many reasons, including not being able to attend a funeral or memorial service for lost family, friends or service members.
• Operating within a remote work environment either on a military base or within the civilian community away from friends and family members.
• Managing affairs for 20 or more deceased service members in a day and knowing them only in death as opposed to who they were in life.
• Facing personal losses but not being able to grieve because your own family members are looking to you to be a pillar of strength since that’s what you do for a living.

If you have additional questions, you can also call and speak with a Military OneSource consultant at 800-342-9647 or start a live chat.