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OLLIs Living and Growing with Loss

OLLIs Living and Growing with Loss. Bette Felton, RN, DrPH OLLI at California State University, East Bay.

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OLLIs Living and Growing with Loss

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  1. OLLIs Living and Growing with Loss Bette Felton, RN, DrPH OLLI at California State University, East Bay

  2. OLLIs are more likely than other learning communities to experience the loss of active members. Our members can become unable to participate due to family responsibilities, sickness or death.

  3. What can OLLI’s do? We can take on an OLLI responsibility to plan for this inevitability through personal connection and conversation. As with other forms of loss, we can’t change the loss, but we can work with it.

  4. Strategies for OLLIs Designate and commit time to talking about the losses. • Allowing and listening to individual expressions in friends and groups • Offering programming to talk about loss, e.g. write your own obituary or memoir writing coursework.

  5. Strategies for OLLIs Acknowledge our losses to our membership and survivors. Many OLLIs have found ways to honor those who have gone, and support those who have survived. • Honor our friends and colleagues with physical or digital ‘walls of memory’. Univ of Delaware did “Portraits from Life”-OLLI artists painting or photographing ‘sages’ for gallery display • UCB suggests creating a ‘Learner Hall of Fame’, inducting the ‘sages’ among us who have been important to OLLI growth and excellence. • The epitaph written by a friend of Chico’s OLLI is an example of a precious acknowledgement, made to us from Ann Nikolai.

  6. Strategies for OLLIs Create ongoing memorials • Lectures, learning opportunities, annual events/receptions and scholarships in memory or honor of OLLI members. • UCB suggests the commission of an ‘artist in residence’ to create memorial work in honor of OLLI members • Annual publication of members and friends who are no longer present

  7. Resources for the future • Thomas G. Long. (2013). The Good Funeral: Death, Grief, and the Community of Care. • Search for Obituaries in Google. Check out the proliferation of help….’writing your own’,‘writing while dying’,or ‘star obituaries’ • Look at Legacy.com…… • Byock, I. (1998). Dying Well • Rubin, G. (2012). A Good Goodbye

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