Reflections on Living and Dying

Michael and I have spent the past five days sitting with his mom as she slowly makes the final journey of her life.  We have had the support of her family, friends, and hospice along the way.  So many people who love her, who have shown up to sit and care.

When Judie was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December, we all agreed to see how we could help her stay with us, in our home.  Thankfully we have been able to have her at home for the past ten months and she is dying in her own room with all the important people in her family surrounding and supporting her.  And I didn’t know what a gift the experience would be for me.

This road is filled with lessons.  I’m learning that important lessons about living come from the experience of sitting with dying.  Learning about critical values like love, human frailty, compassion, courage, forgiveness, and about the value of time.  These are all things I know about, but I am experiencing them in new ways as I sit here in the presence of the completing circle.  I sit in awe and I feel how blessed I am to be allowed to help care for the end of another person’s life.  At the end, I am working to be focused on being fully present, in this moment, and this moment, and then in the next.

There is something that can happen, if you allow it, when you care for another person as they die.  You can fall in love with them in new ways, and you can fall in love with life.

I have a unique opportunity to foreshadow my own life, see my own end and look at the places I am wasting time or energy on things that don’t serve me or those around me. Places where I might be focused on the small stuff, the unimportant, the meaningless, holding onto resentments, or judgments, or bitterness toward myself or others.  I cannot keep love and judgment in the same space in my mind or heart and continue to stay present.

Knowing that you cannot give what you do not have.  You cannot be what you are not willing to become.  You have to become love to give love.

Sitting quietly in the presence of an ending life offers us a look at places that are scary, but these are places we will all be looking at eventually.   Developing peace through this experience requires us to look at ourselves and reflect, looking at the thoughts or beliefs that are helping or challenging the ones that are hurting. Death asks us to explore where our attachments to stories, beliefs, and ideas might be leading us onto a fearful lonely path.  Dying allows us to become courageous in the face our fears.

Life goals are wonderful, they give us direction.  But, life is far more mysterious and deeply meaningful than solely completing a series of goals.  Life is about experiencing both the ups and the downs.  Finding joy in the moments.  We have the opportunity to recognizing the connection between us all, as we spin along on this shared spaceship, being born, having a life and then passing on into the next experience.  We share this reality with every other living thing on this planet, to include the planet.  Learning to rejoice in life’s mystery.  We can miss our purpose if we are focused only on things like making money, or  all the stuff we want, or sitting in judgment of others.  In the end, the only things that bring joy are the meaningful relationships you create, the people you love and the people who love you back.  The ones who will help to feed you, feed your soul, rub your back, wash you, and help you comfortably move through the rough places that come into each of our lives.

Sometimes we sit waiting for our lives to begin.  But life is not a dress rehearsal. Life is happening even if you’re waiting, life is happening all around you.

My biggest challenge is in recognizing the illusion of “control” that I still want to have in my life.  Challenging this illusion and allowing myself to be  fully present, in the moment.  Trusting that I will get what I need to be a better human being.  Being in touch with my own soul, and working on the lightness. My biggest insight is that life is an adventure towards surrendering.  In every moment letting go of expectations, of anger, and remembering that each of us are all on the learning journey together.  And, that insight has been huge for me.  Surrendering.  Breathing.  Surrendering again.  I see how difficult the surrendering has been in Judie’s ending life.  For her, for us, letting go and letting love.  In these last moments, none of us can take care of ourselves alone.  At the end, we need others, we require care, and we all must let go.

I am sitting with my own internal struggle as the train continues forward and there are no more stops or choices along the way.  No more doors to open, save one.  And our family has talked about how surreal it is when you come to the end of life.  For me this blessing has been important: reminding me to be aware of love, making choices that matter and mean something in my life, because I too will come to the end of my own journey and I want to be able to embrace it as my next adventure instead of my last.

Dream as if you will live forever

Dream as if you’ll live forever live as if you’ll die tomorrow.

Living and dying are issues that are coming up in my home very distinctly.  I haven’t shared with many people my personal life situation.  But, when my husband and I moved from New Mexico to Washington State in 2013, we brought my mom with us.  She was no longer able to manage her affairs, she had lost most of her vision due to a Pituitary Tumor and the related surgeries, and she just basically needed more help.  So, the option was to find her a place to live, or move her in with us.  I have a complex, complicated, and in the past it has been an often painful relationship, and she and I both saw this as an opportunity to work towards healing our relationship and ourselves. It’s a work in progress in my life, learning to let go of resentments, hurts, and StoryJack my experience day to day.

We had been living in Washington State for about a year when my mother in law was suddenly homeless.  It was a no brainer, we had just purchased a home that had a daylight basement with a living room, two bedrooms, and a bathroom, so we moved my mother-in-law into our home.  And, soon after moving in with us in October 2014, my mother-in-law was diagnosed with end stage Pancreatic Cancer.  Since that time, we have begun the process of living and dying in our home.  Death is a hard thing to watch and participate with, but death comes with many gifts.  It creates the space to look at how you want to live your life and how you want to die.  My mother and my mother-in-law could probably not be more different.  My mom is a developing Buddhist and my mother-in-law is conservative Baptist.  I fall somewhere in between.  Sometime about 15 years ago my mother-in-law was telling me about how terrible Pagans were when I asked what a Pagan was, she said, “Someone who loves nature and sees God in nature.” I apparently, in a fit of being contrary, told my mother-in-law that I was a Pagan.  That stuck poorly with my mother-in-law.  I was not being compassionate at that dinner years ago.  And while I don’t consider myself a Pagan, I do still love nature and I do see God in every leaf, flower, and living thing.  My past contrariness has forced me to look at the fact that we are, all four of us, very different.  And, there are many gifts that come from learning to let go of judgment, learning to be accepting, and the willingness to work through differences with those we love, it has been deeply powerful.

Dying is, at its heart, the act of letting go.  Letting go of the stories we have told ourselves that in the end don’t matter.  Letting go of the illusion of control.  Letting go of the ideas of what life should be like.  Breathing through pain.  And, ultimately letting people in, letting them help, letting go of how you think you’re supposed to get love, get help, and learning to accept the love that is around you.  God shows up in the people who are there for you in these difficult times.  Learning to let go is much harder to do than to say.

As I sit and comfort and watch my mother-in-law struggle with the letting go process of dying it is also a letting go process for me.  Not one of us can walk another person’s journey.  I can’t make her better, I can’t make the emotional pain go away, and I can’t make her better.  She is allowing me to show her love, help her where I can, dispensing morphine, rubbing her back or hair, and just being a loving presence in the space that lets her know she is not alone.

 

image from bigstockphoto.com

 

Truth Bombs

I often talk to people about being honest and truthful. I meet people who tell me what honest people they are and how they ‘tell it like it is.’ But, I don’t often meet honest people who also have good outcomes with their honesty. More often they explode a Truth Bomb.

There is often one of two things going on here. First, if we are ‘honest’ when we are upset about someone else’s actions, thoughts, or words,, we tend to tell them the “truth” from our perspective, even if it hurts them. We support ourselves with “Sometimes the truth hurts.” But, what we miss in this statement is that telling the truth doesn’t have to be done in a hurtful way. The second thing that may be going on is that we think we need to educate someone with what we think. So we drop our “Truth bomb” on them.

I think that both of these practices are a little self-serving. I know I have had moments when I felt the need to share my perspective and told a hard truth to someone. Here is what I have learned from my own Truth Bombs.

The problem with telling a “Truth Bomb” to someone else is not the truth part, but the bomb part of the delivery.  I can’t speak for you, but when people drop a truth bomb on me, I don’t hear them.

I taught Anger Management for the Air Force for 7 years and several of the responses I have gotten to this honesty issue have sounded like this:

“I am not going to sugar coat the truth!” or,

“I am a blunt person, just deal with it!” or

“Sorry if the truth hurts, but it’s the truth and that’s not my fault!” or

“I am not responsible if you don’t like the truth!”

Yet I have to ask, “Were you effective and did you get the outcome that you wanted with your method of truth telling?” Because where I have seen this go very badly is we told the real truth like it is man! with no fluff!, and we blew the other person out of the water, we sunk their battleship, and now they won’t or can’t hear us. We may have severed the relationship, or created ammo for them to use at us a later time in a future conversation. Basically, we did harm and our truth was not only useless, but may have been abusive. And, my guess is that probably wasn’t the intent behind the truth, but it might certainly be the impact.

When I was young someone told me, “If what you do with the truth is blow someone up, your point, your insight, your message, the value of the very truth your are attempting to share would be lost.”

The best way to help my truth be heard was to develop it around the ideas of True, Kind, and Necessary. These three values were the legs that stabilized the truth. These were the values that helped people hear the truth from me. This concept fits very neatly with “Socrates’ Triple Filter Test,” True, Good, Useful. It also is something you heard at least in part, in childhood, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I don’t subscribe to the last statement, because sometimes I have to say something difficult. But, my goal is to be heard by the other person. And, if I have something difficult to say and say it in a mean and hurtful way, I know I won’t be heard.

I see True, Kind, and Necessary as aspects or legs of a stool; without all three, you lose stability. I have heard people say to just use a 2/3 model, if it is two of the three, you can say it, but I believe you will get maximum impact with the power of all 3. This does mean we sometimes have to slow down our statements, think about our responses, gain insights into what we are really trying to say, so we can say it clearly and concisely. At the end of the day, if the conversation is so important you to have it, the statement and truth are so compelling your have to share it, then you actually owe it to your conversation to do it well. Like most bombs, this one is best left unexploded.

 

em⋅pa⋅thy [em-puh-thee]

Empathy is a interesting word, the dictionary definition is:

1.	the intellectual identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

2.	the imaginative ascribing to an object, as a natural object or work of art, feelings or attitudes present in oneself: By means of empathy, a great painting becomes a mirror of the self.

Do we need empathy in our lives? Empathy is often a word we use in respect to other people and our expectations of them with comments like “they don’t have empathy” or “they need empathy”. Sometimes it seems we don’t have a deep understanding of what empathy even means to ourselves, let alone what it means to others. For me, short verse, empathy means: being able to put myself into someone else’s shoes. It’s the ability to feel or imagine another person’s experience.  It often requires that we learn to suspend judgment and work to understand the other person’s perspective. This becomes most especially important, if you don’t agree with or like the other perspective.  Empathy isn’t about feeling sorry for another, but rather it’s the ability to feel compassion for what their experience is.  It’s finding a way to recognize “the me, in you”.

Empathy comes off sounding ‘soft’ or unnecessary in business, but in reality, empathy is a big part of Emotional Intelligence and it is the process by which we improve relationships.  In relationships, we often start off with positivity.  Then, due to the daily hazards of interacting with others, those positive feelings can erode. We develop habits of interactions, conversations, expectations, and arguments.  We build walls against the annoyances, the hurts and disappointments.  As we build walls, see ourselves as different than others; we can tend to lose the ability to care.  It’s this ability to care that allows us access to the other person’s emotional landscape.  This loss can cause no end of problems. We might see others’ motives maybe more harshly or negatively than we would have if we had kept our openness toward them.  In an University of Michigan,  August 2010 study lead by Sarah Konrath, she found that empathy is on the decline and that while we are hardwired to care, social and cultural impact can negatively affect our ability to empathize.  This hurts relationships, it hurts work atmospheres, and it impacts the bottom line, as wreckage takes time and resources to fix.  One positive take away, is that what can be unlearned, can also be relearned.  It just takes awareness, intention, and practice.

At this point in my life, I have come to believe everyone is a sale person.  I don’t care what you do for a living you’re selling something.  Some people sell cars, others sell widgets, or apps, some sell stories, others sell how to think, or learn, and some sell ideas.  I personally sell ideas and how to think through situations in order to be more effective.  So how do you sell your product?  What are the internal and external guides that direct you to buy this car, or that widget, or another idea?  Often it comes down to relationships, with a person, a business, a feeling, a need, and/or an idea.  We are motivated along these lines.  So, let’s say I am a nice person, but I don’t read cues well, and you end up feeling like I don’t get you at all.  Are you going to want to give me your business?  Maybe once, but to build a brand or to build a business, hopefully we are thinking a little farther than one sale.  Relationships are key to success and empathy is key to relationships.

Daniel Goldman talks about how in a growing global market, misunderstanding can arise and people need to be able to either not do damage or know how to read problematic situations, so they can fix it.  Also, how do leaders retain talent if they stomp all over them?  That only works if you’re so wildly successful that people will put up with you, are you that kind of successful?  If not, pay attention.

It’s not only about listening to your employee’s or your customers, but it’s about the ability to weigh needs.  Good employers take others feelings into account as they are making broader decisions.

 

So, what’s a person to do to increase empathy? Increasing empathy requires several key elements.  

Awareness.  In a nutshell, it’s time to wake up.  This means seeing ourselves with clarity.  We all feel things, and awareness means that I need to understand my own emotions.  If I understand that I’m happy, annoyed, distracted, angry or hurt, I can take steps to take care of myself.  Shifting from an egocentric perspective about my feelings into one of insights that allow me to access the idea that other people are feeling something too.  Our understanding of our emotions helps us to read and understand other peoples’ emotions.   Think about it; businesses often treat customers in ways that no individual would enjoy being treated.  It isn’t rocket science, it’s actually common sense.  If I were treated the way that I am treating others… how would I react?

Be Interested.  Have you ever had a boss or a co-worker, or heck even a friend, who was terminally set on “output”? It can shut people down if all we do is talk at them.  We show empathy by actually showing interest in what someone else is saying, not just about what we are saying.  Take time to ask questions, work on developing an understanding or who they are, remember peoples’ names, remember their families’ names.  Showing interest in people matters.  I recently read a book called The Charisma Myth, by Olivia Fox Cabane, and she talked about this very thing.  Charismatic people show interest in others.  You feel like maybe you’re the only one in the room, because they are looking at you, listening to you, and responding to you.  We don’t remember what people do, we remember how we feel.

Willingness to Listen.  Steven Covey called it the dialog of the deaf, when everyone is talking but no one is listening.  If you walk through the world and don’t care about the experience of others, then reread the above paragraph.  Empathy is grounded in listening.  We need to be willing to suspend our own voice, perspective, or opinion long enough to really listen to the other person.  Hearing someone is not even close to the same thing as agreement.  So, I am not necessarily agreeing with everything they say, when I listen to understand.  I am just working on really understanding what they mean and where they are coming from.  Listening is as important a tool as being able to read or write.  Many of the biggest issues I have seen in organizations and systems, stem from misunderstanding and a dearth of listening.

Presence. aka. Nonverbal Body Language.  This really fits with listening, in that we project our feelings by all sorts of nonverbal cues.  We can say, have a nice day, and mean very different things based on tone alone.  Our posture can communicate annoyance or interest.  Especially on the phone, we can hear distraction a mile away.  Yeah, yeah, what, what did you just say???  When we are paying attention and have a goal of curiosity or interest, we communicate that clearly with how we hold ourselves, the types of questions that we ask, the reactions and responses to what is being said.  All this, wrapped up in a bow, is presence.

Openness.  People have different perspectives. We come to life situations from different cultures, experiences, and belief systems.  If I care about xyz, and I want a team or an organization to be successful, I want to hear all the perspectives.  Some call this brainstorming, but successful leaders learn to use these differences to make powerful changes.  It’s important to ask the quiet folks to speak up too.  It’s really easy to get all the extroverts to share, in fact they will at times over share, but getting lots of people to share takes paying attention.  Whether we are talking team members or customers, openness means that I want to hear many perspectives, ideas, insights, and opinions.  This enriches our organizations, our teams, and helps us stretch ourselves past the limits that we can create by not entertaining enough ideas.

Basic psychology 101 says, we like people who like us… Say that a few times, because it’s important.  Empathy is easy to overlook, but we do so at our own peril.  We all want to be liked, we all want to feel like someone gets us.