Tag Archives: death

Grannie’s Bystander Problem

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I played a central role in managing my grandmother’s care over the last two years. Here are some thoughts that might help you and your siblings.

It’s better for everyone to have ‘the conversation’ before it is required. Most families lack plans, or skills, to deal with their elders’ passing.

A – each elderly person needs a champion. By champion, I mean a leader, not an owner, of a situation.

B – the champion’s role is to co-ordinate care by the family, and outsiders. In our family, reflecting different skills, we split the financial/admin support from the emotional/medical support. This split works very well.

C – be careful not to ‘own’ an elder. Use caution with commitments that might impair your ability to meet the needs of your spouse and kids. Don’t become a casualty, emotionally or financially.

The highest achieving, or most emotionally giving, can be tempted to move the elder into their house. This can be great, or a disaster, we’ve seen both outcomes in our family. Often from the same situation, but different perspectives (grand kids vs spouse).

D – be open with what needs to be done and ask everyone to contribute a little bit.

E – geographical spread costs time and money. My family lives all over the world, there is a large, mostly hidden, potential liability due to our spread.

Because the problems of the elderly (health, loneliness, death) are difficult to resolve, many people don’t bother to try. That’s a shame because you’ll never regret a small kindness but you might regret not making any effort at all.

A friend shared with me that, in death, she didn’t have anything to offer her parent. The earlier relationship had been unhealthy and she’d decided to end the cycle of pain in her family. She was getting push back from her family to engage but couldn’t bring herself to do something that lacked authenticity.

It reminded me that sometimes our role might be to take the blame as others deal with their grief. Being a father gives me many opportunities to chose what I think is best, rather than expedient.

As a parent, I hope to teach my kids to improve a little bit on the legacy I pass to them.

With powerful emotions, write down how you’re feeling. Time will reshape your memory and you may want a record of why you made your decisions, especially if you have a habit of regret.

The following were central lessons:

As the end nears, small kindnesses have large impacts.

Everyone contributes based on their own capacity.

Don’t keep score.

Your community likely has resources to help you manage. Ask for help.

Our actions train our families to manage our own decline.

Preserve dignity as long as possible.

Difficult Conversations

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Over the last year, I have been travelling to learn about my friends’ lives. The trips are short, and we have the opportunity to talk a lot. By keeping the trip short, and going to my pals, the quality of the conversation is high and the inconvenience to my family is small. The trips have a large payoff for me:

  • Gratitude for the life I have
  • Learn what’s good about their lives – try to figure out the payoff from living like them
  • Make sure I see friends that I want to keep in my life
  • Learn about an aspect of their lives where they have different knowledge than me (teenagers, aging, the transition to adulthood, healthcare, performance psychology, grief & loss).
  • Do something random to generate new opportunities.

One of my favorite discussion topics is managing difficult conversations. For example, a challenging situation for doctors is telling the mirror image of themselves about the arrival of their greatest medical fear – cancer or terminal illness.

I ask questions about.. How to cope? How to be effective? What is best practice?

These skills are useful at work and are essential to create an exceptional family web. I’ll share what I’ve learned so far.

Before a difficult conversation, pause and remember:

  • This situation is not about me
  • I am part of the solution
  • Be cautious
  • Understand that I will make incorrect assumptions about everything around me

The points above get me in a relaxed frame of mind, especially when combined with my Big Meeting Protocol. The mental preparation works best when combined with an on-going process of self-reflection (that I like to do while cycling). You’ll be surprised that you can mute your emotional triggers by awareness that they exist.

Understand your hot bottons – examples might be: not caring, not doing enough, letting someone down, past mistakes where I’ve yet to ask for forgiveness, or not addressing areas in my own life where I need to make change.

Know your desired outcome – examples might be: clear communication, exit a relationship, create consensus, make better decisions.

Follow up in writing – if the conversation triggers fear, or anger, in the other person they are unlikely to remember the conversation. Even if you’re hearing each other, everyone hears a different conversation. Certainly, everyone remembers a different conversation.

Focus on helping the other person – I’m more likely to get my desired outcome if I help the other person achieve their own goals. A doctor might ask a terminally ill patient, “is there an up-coming event that we can focus on getting you to attend?” Alternatively, a family member might have concerns about public perception, confidentiality or independence.

Remembering my tendency to make incorrect assumptions – I like to gather information from the other party so I can better serve their needs. Often, a person’s needs are as straightforward as being listened to, respected and valued.

Finally, I remember that my mission isn’t to change others…

  • …because I don’t know best
  • …because I have my hands full with myself
  • …because my life is my source

Mortality and Mental Clutter

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Found out that Posterous are shutting down so I’m going to blow out my drafts folder and transition to coachgordo.wordpress.com. Everything on this site should migrate and I’ll let you know when I make the shift.

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Today’s article comes from a conversation with a friend that found a lot of noise in their head after the death of a parent.

When I turned 40, I asked myself, “Am I ready to die?” There were some areas where the answer was “no” and I addressed those over the last few years. Today’s article is about coping with mortality-related noise, rather than the changes I made in my own life. 

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With the noise in my life, I split it between optional and essential.

Optional is stuff lIke chat forums, tv, media, Facebook, Twitter, traffic, stressed out people… I ditched as much of that as possible over the last ten years. I have to constantly trim noise sources. My life with kids has narrowed, but deepened.

Essential noise, for me, is kids. They’re going to be loud regardless and my capacity to cope requires me to have far less noise in every other aspect of my life. Avoid kids with a spouse that has weak mental health. The children will overwhelm your marriage. When it comes to mental health, I’m the weaker link in our marriage.

As an athlete, I found that exercise-induced fatigue is a form of noise that can turn enjoyable aspects of parenting into misery. This realization required an uncommon level of honesty with myself. Athletic parents rarely admit the link between training fatigue and parental misery.  

To cope with my ‘essential’ noise, I started to sit. With my meditation, I sit and breathe. No agenda, no desire to progress, no desire to do more… Very different from how I approach other things. The game is to let my thoughts settle. See my thoughts on Learning To Sit.

A parent’s death makes our own mortality real. To cope with my mortality, I’ve spent time (before my parents have died) considering death – as a natural process, it’s inevitable nature, how it relates to life, the nature of dependant arising, and it’s ability to provide a test of courage. I’ve been building a resolve to “die well” and have found that frees me to “live well.”

In life, I’ve taken steps so that I could die, tomorrow, knowing that I acted to the best of my ability and left everyone close to me better off. I still have a decent sized “to do” list but I’ve done enough, and acted in such a way, that I could pass without regret.

Simple ways to trim noise from a modern life:

  • Push notifications – remove them all, especially email
  • Up-tempo music – I use music sparingly
  • Peers with cluttered minds – noisy people don’t need to be talking to me – often it’s easier to avoid people than address the true trigger that is inside me
  • Traffic – for some reason, my concept of personal space extends around my vehicle – every time I drive “on peak” I regret it
  • Areas of high population density – city people act like city people because they live in cities
  • Telephone – turn it off, use airplane mode or leave it at home – even carrying my phone creates constant distractions/noise as my mind creates things I “must” do

If you care enough then change. If you don’t care enough to change then let it go.

 

Learning To Sit

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When Lex turned three, we got to the point where we started asking ourselves when would be an appropriate time to start beating her. Of course we didn’t say it that way… but the nature of the conversation was clear to me.

I didn’t want to teach my daughter to accept physical intimidation from men – so I needed to find another way.

I’m glad I looked around.

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Today’s conversation was with a physician that deals with life and death, daily.

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The best book I’ve read on meditation is The Miracle of Mindfulness:

High performers will tend to overthink it – what works for me is sit comfortably and breathe – when I need to get centered then I count breaths… here’s the mantra…

1 breathing in, 1 breathing out

2 breathing in, 2 breathing out

3 breathing in, 3 breathing out

…

…

10 breathing in, 10 breathing out

I don’t go past 10 in one set. Then I chill a bit. Then I repeat another set of 10 breaths. It can be surprisingly difficult to get to 10 breaths without being distracted! That’s OK – start again.

The first step is learning to settle. That one aspect of mediation is enough. They tell me that there is more. I might get there, I might not.

Resist the urge to progress or go longer (this is very difficult).

After a few months of daily practice, you might find that you have the ability to focus on a topic and see more clearly. I’m only at this stage occasionally. What I’m mostly doing is learning not to hold onto situations, or seek to impose my desired outcome on a situation, or person.

If you are dealing with death, pain, anger, trauma… the first phase will help you release that, rather than retaining it inside to be released into your family. 

In addition to your service as a physician, you do a great service to your community by releasing the suffering around you without transmitting it to others. I think that’s what eastern philosophy means when they refer to “burning karma.” Strong emotions have to be released, or we will transmit them as part of our legacy.

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This book explains meditation through the eyes of an athlete

I read the first part when I started meditating and read the second part when I felt that I had a basic understanding of Phase One. I haven’t finished the book as I don’t think I know enough about meditation, yet, to understand part three and beyond.

Ten minutes a day, as many days as you can. Commit to 30 days. You’ll notice a difference. After the 30 days, you’ll notice a clear difference in mood if you skip a few days. I’ve started AM/PM sessions and it’s helping. Of course, dropping most sources of news (other than The Onion) might also be helping to clear my mind.

Mediation gave me an awareness that I was filling myself with noise that had nothing to do with the key decisions of my life.