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Now It’s My Turn: Vulnerable And Scared

Posted on January 14th, 2015 by karen

by Myra Marcus

My son leaned across the table and looked me straight in the eye. We were having Sunday brunch at a trendy Williamsburg (Brooklyn) eatery. “Mom,” he asked, “do you have long-term care insurance?”

“No,” I replied, taken aback. “That’s only for old people.”

“Well,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “it might come in handy someday. A really faraway day, of course, but isn’t it better to start early?”

“I will take it under advisement,” I said, cringing inside. So it has come to this, I thought.

How did this happen? When did I cross the old-person threshold? Do my kids think the mother they used to kiddingly call “Old Yeller” is so old that decrepitude is imminent and she will shortly need long-term care?

When I got home, I scrutinized my face in the mirror, checking for liver spots that may have sprung up while I was eating brunch. OK, my mother died a few months ago, so I’m a little shaky. But she did live until she was 93 years old. That bodes well for me, right?

It doesn’t matter — I am now next in line. I have noticed that I am becoming increasingly aware of the fact that I’m getting older. That I will eventually die.

I have always had a solid case of death anxiety. I was, however, able to self-soothe. I told myself that I was young and that, barring the unforeseen, I still had at least 50 years left to live. Then 40, then 30 . . . it worked until June 20, 2014 when my mother died. In my eyes I became an older person on that day — a veritable senior citizen, a frail elder — all of that and more.

My inner dialogue goes something like this: Will I wake up in the morning, will I see another day? Will my osteoarthritis impair my mobility, or will it simply deliver unrelenting pain? Will I have to drag myself to the ER one night because I think I’m having a heart attack and there’s no one else in the house except a cat?

Then, if I really want to cap it off, I can always picture my mother, in her casket, dead and never coming back.

My world is a very different place now, almost unrecognizable. Reminiscent of a line from an A.E. Houseman poem, “I, alone, and afraid in a world I never made.”

I feel a profound sense of loss and totally off-balance. I am plagued by intrusive thoughts of being hurled through the windshield of my car, of tripping on an uneven sidewalk and breaking a hip. Every hideous crime depicted on the news brings new possibilities into my death repertoire. I feel as if I have no control over my life. I am vulnerable and scared.

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In Care of Dad: A Look Back At 2014

Posted on December 24th, 2014 by kim

by Kim Keller

I remember when I was a kid, rolling my eyes at my parents when they’d talk in wonder about how fast time goes by. Of course, that was a long, long time ago, and here I am now thinking, where did 2014 go? I don’t roll my eyes any longer. Now I just smile knowingly.

And at the end of December, my parents would sit around and reflect on all that had happened that year. I thought it was kind of silly then, living in the past and all, but I see the wisdom in that now, too. You should always bring along the lessons and whatever good life has to offer.

In that spirit, here’s a look back at In Care of Dad in 2014:

“I will never leave you — no matter what happens I will always be with you.”

Unbeknownst to both of us at the time, those would be the last words my father would ever say to me. That one sentence would carry me into my fatherless future, like a road map to guide me on the sometimes perilous, sometimes heartbreaking, always blessed journey of my life.

— Ann Meyers Piccirillo, Always Your Daughter, January 22, 2014.

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Building A New Life After Loss

Posted on November 19th, 2014 by karen

by Linda Weatherseed, LMSW

It was a year after her husband’s death when my dear friend Mary confessed that she felt totally worn out, lackluster and disinterested in everything. “I don’t know who I am anymore,” she said to me. “I feel so empty.”

Mary’s husband, John, had been her college sweetheart. After graduation, they both got jobs in New York in the advertising field. Aside from their work, they had many interests in common, including hiking, travel and the theater. Four years after meeting, they married, and in five years time their son Brian was born.

Mary initially cut down on her work hours to stay home with Brian, and eventually she gave up work altogether to be a full-time mom. John was a devoted husband and father who couldn’t wait to get home at the end of the day to see his family. Mary was the kind of wife and mother who worked tirelessly to give her family a secure and happy environment. John and Brian were the absolute center of her world.

Then, at the age of 47, after 21 years of marriage, John started to feel unusually fatigued. At first he thought he’d just been working too hard, but a series of blood tests revealed the awful truth: John had cancer. Brian was 16 at this time, a high-school junior. After the initial shock of the diagnosis, Mary and John, always optimistic, decided they simply had to do everything possible to combat the cancer and pray for the best. Unfortunately, after a two-year battle with the illness, John died at home with his beloved Mary and son Brian by his side.

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Saying Goodbye To The Blame Game

Posted on November 12th, 2014 by karen

by Ed Moran, LCSW

I saw them again last evening. I’ve never met them but I see them every night, walking hand in hand, taking their after-supper stroll. While I tend to be lousy at guessing ages, I suspect they’re both in their mid-seventies, and I like to imagine they’ve been married forever.

Next month, 18 years will have passed since my father lost his battle with colon cancer. This couple I see every night reminds me of what’s been taken from my mom, from me, and from my three siblings. That should be my parents on that nightly walk, holding hands, enjoying each other’s company. I suppose what I’m saying is, sometimes I still get angry, and sometimes I still want to know why.

But what I’ve discovered over time, through all these years of personal introspection and working with the bereaved, is that people spend an inordinate amount of time conjuring up blame when friends and family pass away. And they aren’t the only ones who struggle with blame. Victims of illness also get in on the exercise — it seems there’s more than enough blame to go around.

When a behavior is so common, there’s probably something of value in it. So what does blaming do for us? For many people, assigning blame creates the pretense of order in an otherwise chaotic situation. For example, a cancer diagnosis normally rocks people to the core. It shatters their sense of security. For some, it seems the only way to restore control is find out who or what is responsible. A smoker will blame their lung cancer on cigarettes. A drinker will blame their liver cancer on alcohol. Same thing goes for the wife of the smoker, and the children of the drinker. They all get in on the blaming. Someone who led a clean and healthy life, with no obvious risk factors, might choose to blame God. The possibilities are endless when the blaming begins.

Blame tends to reflect a sense of guilt for having gotten so sick. I’m being punished with this illness because I wasn’t a good person. I must’ve done something wrong to wind up with this illness. What did I do? It’s a common response because it offers a rationale (regardless of how irrational it might be) to explain an otherwise inexplicable turn of events. But it’s a dangerous path to start down. It can be extremely difficult to extricate oneself from that line of thinking, and it can drain one’s emotional energy that’s better suited to building the internal strength that’s needed to fight for survival.

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Survival Lessons For Life’s Toughest Challenges

Posted on October 22nd, 2014 by karen

by Kim Keller

“Write your troubles on a slip of paper and burn it.”

This is one of the many pieces of advice from bestselling author Alice Hoffman, in her new little gem of a book called Survival Lessons. I keep this book, filled with Hoffman’s words of wisdom, right next to my bed. In fact, after reading Survival Lessons for the first time, I bought extra copies to give to all my friends. If I could afford to buy this book for every person in the In Care of Dad community, I would — it’s that good!

But, since I can’t afford thousands of copies, I’ll just tell you about it instead.

Best known for her two novels, Practical Magic and Here On Earth, Hoffman said she wrote the non-fiction Survival Lessons because it’s a book she wished she’d had when she was faced with a breast cancer diagnosis more than 15 years ago. Devastated by the news and overwhelmed by the prospects of the treatment process, Hoffman explained that she went “looking for a guidebook. I needed to know how people survived trauma.”

“It happens to everyone,” she said, “in one way or another, sooner or later. The loss of a loved one, a divorce, heartbreak, a child set on the wrong path, a bad diagnosis. When it comes to sorrow, no one is immune.”

Hoffman never did find that guidebook she was looking for, but, after surviving many of life’s challenges, she decided that she finally knew what the guidebook should say. And, as the author of some 30 books, who better to create this much-needed volume? She set out to write the book she had needed those many years before, a book that she herself would want to read if she were ever again faced with a devastating life challenge.

Survival Lessons, published last year, was the result.

The book is broken down into bite-sized chapters, each with an empowering preface, starting with “Choose,” as in Choose Whose Advice You Take, Choose How You Spend Your Time, Choose To Love Who You Are. Although there are so many circumstances in our lives that we have no control over, Hoffman helps us remember that we have the power to choose how we approach those challenges.

The book is also chock full of illustrations and tiny bits of poetry, and even offers a few important extras, like a brownie recipe that Hoffman claims will make you “forget your sorrows.” Survival Lessons is compact and easy to finish in one sitting, which is important when you’re feeling truly lost. Not only are the words valuable, but so is the act of completion. Finishing a book makes us all feel that we’ve accomplished something, and that we have the potential to accomplish more.

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When Grief And Guilt Prolong The Pain Of Loss

Posted on October 1st, 2014 by karen

A zinnia means: I mourn your absence.

by Erin Barone

Sarah was 35 years old, with two small boys and a husband who abruptly passed away due to a brain tumor. While her husband Sam had complained of steady headaches, Sarah would blame it on stress from his job as a financial advisor and simply tell him to take some Tylenol.

After a few months of unrelenting headaches, though, her husband finally decided to see a doctor, whereupon he discovered that he had a brain tumor requiring immediate surgery. Sadly, Sam did not survive the procedure, dying on the operating table.

Since his death, Sarah has frequently made comments like “I didn’t choose this life for me, and I especially didn’t choose this life for my two little boys.” She also blames herself for having minimized the severity of her husband’s headaches, often stating, “I should have listened to him more, I should have told him to go to the doctor sooner, and then maybe they would have been able to save him before the tumor grew so big!”

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Unresolved Grief: It’s Complicated

Posted on September 10th, 2014 by karen

by Erin Doeberl

Kate was a 38-year-old mother of three and sister of two. She had lost her eldest sister, Jane, unexpectedly to suicide. It was a terrible shock for Kate — this was her big sister, the one who understood Kate the best and was always there for her. “How could I not know?” Kate would sometimes exclaim to herself. “What am I going to do now?”

Kate began suffering regret, remorse and guilt almost immediately following the news of Jane’s death. Kate’s reaction was not unusual. The first few months after the sudden death of a loved one bring about a variety of different feelings, sometimes a sense of pervasive numbness, other times a rapid shift of emotions, like a roller coaster ride.

Kate expected to be emotionally inconsistent for a while. But a year and a half later, she was still feeling the same way, except possibly worse. She found herself avoiding anyone associated with Jane. She stopped calling Jane’s husband and didn’t reach out to anyone else in Jane’s family, not even around the holidays, which only exacerbated her feelings of loss and loneliness.

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When Does Grief End?

Posted on August 27th, 2014 by karen

We are thrilled to re-post this article from Gemini Adams. She is an award-winning British writer, grief expert, and author of Your Legacy of Love: Realize the Gift in Goodbye. This piece originally appeared on Gemini’s website, www.realizethegift.com.

by Gemini Adams

It took me a very long time to integrate the loss of my mother. Perhaps this was because she died so prematurely, at just 48 years old, she was still a young person in the eyes of many. As for me, at 21, I was even younger.

We had only just learnt how to become friends — having battled through the highs and lows of my teenage years, just as we had come to see each other as allies, as women sharing similar challenges and interests — then she was snatched away. It wasn’t unexpected. Mom died from cancer and her death was a slow, long, drawn-out affair that took two and a half years, despite the fact that when she was diagnosed, she was given only three months to live.

The journey through grief was not an easy one. There were plenty of surprises, misty days, thunderstorms, and moments when the car slid down the road revealing a sheer cliff-face which had me frozen in a state of fear. But after a couple of years the bad weather cleared, blue skies burst through the monotonous grey, and there were occasional interludes of sunbeams, small but nonetheless brilliant.

Here are a few of the poignant ones:

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GOOD GRIEF!

Posted on July 23rd, 2014 by karen

by Amanda Geffner

Jeannie couldn’t understand why, two years after the sudden death of her husband Bob, she still felt a hole in her life. Why can’t I move on? she wondered. Why can’t I control these periodic waves of sadness?

It was especially trying when the Fourth of July rolled around. She and Bob had always organized and hosted an annual party, a genuinely gala affair. She knew how much these gatherings meant to her son and daughter, both teenagers, and she wanted to make it the same for them this year, but she couldn’t. She felt exhausted, overburdened, sad and abandoned. She wasn’t up to making the extra effort or pushing herself. She wanted someone to reach out to her, not the other way around.

But most of all, Jeannie felt guilty for feeling all of these negative emotions.

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Doula Training For The End Of Life

Posted on July 16th, 2014 by karen

by Lisa M. Wolfson

As a cancer survivor and someone who is drawn to helping others in need, I have always explored ways to help people improve their health with a holistic approach. In recent years I have also been drawn to explore the full-life process, including the process of dying, and have felt a desire to help people and their families when faced with the realization that they were entering the final stage of life. So I researched and did training as an end-of-life doula and I’m immensely grateful that I did. I expected to learn about the dying process but what I really learned in this training was how to live.

An end-of-life doula is someone who provides informational, physical and spiritual support to a person who is dying and to their family as well. The doula honors the sacred part of the dying process while addressing it as a normal part of the human life cycle, with the goal being to achieve a “good death,” meaning a death with acceptance, without struggle, with grace and peace. The role of the doula can include planning for the final phase of an illness, maintaining a continuous presence when the person is actively dying and working through, or reprocessing, the experience with caregivers and family.

A doula will explain the dying process to the person and the family members, and help develop a plan for the final days that honors the wishes of the person who is dying. These wishes may include the setting for the vigil and who they want present during their final hours. The vigil itself may be just a day or two, or run longer. The doula will work with the near-departed in advance of the vigil stage to develop a relationship and have time to honor their wishes. For instance, some people may want to be at home with only their immediate family members present, with candles and some specific music playing or perhaps something being read to them. Another person may request to be alone with their spouse and children when the end nears. The doula will orchestrate these wishes as much as humanly possible. The doula may do legacy writing with the person as well, helping to put certain sentiments into words to be shared with the family and friends after they’re gone, or use guided visualization during the vigil stage to relax and comfort the person. Or the doula can simply act as companion when needed, talking or reading to the person as desired. They may also use aromatherapy or therapeutic touch to comfort the person and help them let go when the time comes.

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