One Foot in Front of the Other
Ed looks at me and asks, “How do you do it, Silver?” He is referring, of course, to how I am navigating the grief around the loss of my life partner Bill. This is more than a passing interest on Ed’s part. His wife Laura was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer the same time as Bill and he is afraid, as anyone would be, that one day he’ll be facing what I am going through now.
I look him in the eyes and answer, “I honestly don’t know, Ed. I just put one foot in front of the other.”
Since that conversation I’ve had a lot of time to reconsider Ed’s question. How does one survive what he and I have had to go through? How does his wife Laura, who is not only surviving, but also thriving despite the cancer, do it?
It has everything to do with emotional resilience.
During those long hours caring for Bill and the torturous days waiting for test results and wondering, always wondering what the future held, what gave me strength was the emotional resilience I had spent years building. Even on the days I felt like I had lost it, it was there.
So what is emotional resilience and why is it important?
According to the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy website, “Emotional resilience simply refers to one’s ability to adapt to stressful situations or crises. More resilient people are able to “roll with the punches” and adapt to adversity without lasting difficulties, while less resilient people have a harder time with stress and life changes.”
People with road rage (any rage, really) are sorely lacking in emotional resilience.
I am living proof that emotional resilience can be developed and/or deepened. It has everything to do with where you place your focus. If I could attribute only one factor to my own resilience (and there are many), it would be learning about the Law of Attraction, a principle that says, “You get more of what you focus on.”
My early childhood was unhappy and my teens and twenties even more so. I had the mindset of a victim and I constantly attracted people and circumstances that reinforced my view of the world. Fortunately, my Dad always told us, “You can learn anything from a book.” (Although I personally prefer my surgeons and dental hygienists to have actual experience.) Because I was so miserable, I began to look for answers.
My first mentor was Dale Carnegie who wrote, How to Win Friends and Influence People. This book taught me how to get along with others, a major problem at that time of my life. It worked and in the 9th grade I was elected to Student Council! Since that early success, I have been on the path to creating a life that I want instead of a life that just happens to me. The more I learn, the more emotionally resilient I become and the reserves are there when I need them most.
Think back. Who were your mentors? Who helped you to become more emotionally resilient?
I’d love to hear.
Easy is Overrated!
In my last blog, I invited everyone to join me, every morning, in putting pen to paper to answer the following questions:
- What will make your life easier today?
- At the end of the day, if you feel it’s been a good day, what will have happened?
I was raised Catholic so, time for the confessional. I did a poor job of this assignment.
Question 1 was the sticking point. Why is it that I can so easily figure out what will make someone else’s life easier but, when it comes to my own, it’s a mystery? As I ponder this, I think the answer may not be as simple as deciding that I don’t know how to take care of myself. That’s an easy answer and most of us who were born to nurture have, at one time or another believed this to be true.
The answer as to why I found Question 1 difficult is twofold:
(1) Truthfully, my life is already easy. I have used the Law of Attraction over many years to attract a life that’s pretty darned good. I have everything I need, much of what I want, and no major life problems at the moment. Yes, I am grieving over the loss of Bill but that is part of the Circle of Life. We lose loved ones. We grieve. And it doesn’t mean that life is terrible.
(2) If I am totally honest, I don’t really want my life to be easier. I want it to be more meaningful, more exciting and richer in all that makes life worth living. “Easy” is overrated. I’ve had easy and all it does is make things well, easy, but it doesn’t make things fun, or interesting or compelling. For me at least, “easy” leaves me unmotivated. Give me something difficult to do and I am more alive than ever. That’s probably why I love caregiving so much. I am not a trained nurse and yet, every day I take care of someone who is ill, I am forced to tap into a well of creativity I wasn’t aware I had.
Here’s an example from many years ago. Two years after my mother-in-law moved in and survived a series of surgeries and related complications, she had a stroke that left her paralyzed on one side. We had a monitor in her room so we could hear if she needed anything. One afternoon, she was sitting in the chair in her room watching TV. I was in the kitchen and heard, over the monitor, a voice, totally without panic, say, “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.” Mama had a great sense of humor.
Sure enough, when I went in to check, she was sitting on the floor. She told me she’d kicked off her slipper by mistake, stretched out her good leg in an attempt to retrieve it and slid right off the chair and onto the carpet.
Here was the dilemma. Mama’s room was very narrow. Where she had landed was a four-foot space between her bed and a giant window overlooking our back yard. I called my husband in to try and figure out how to get her back into bed without hurling her through the window. Because of her stroke, she was dead weight, making it all the more challenging. Just about the time we were contemplating calling the fire department, it hit me! I remembered how patients in hospitals were transferred from one bed to another by putting a doubled up sheet beneath them. We laid down a doubled up sheet, positioned Mama so she was lying on it and hoisted her onto the bed. It was so easy!
Call me crazy but I LOVE that kind of problem solving. Whether it’s caring for another or just tackling a particularly hairy problem at work, it’s exhilarating! I think that’s why we humans make up problems in the first place—so we can solve them. My guess is, if I could wave a magic wand and take away all your problems, some of you wouldn’t be finished reading this blog before you’d be inventing new ones!
So…time for a different Question 1: What will make my life more __________ today? (Fill it in for yourself—exciting, interesting, fun—you get to choose what you want more of.)
From Readers:
I love when you let me know how it’s going. Here are a few wonderful insights from readers about my last blog:
Renee V: My life will be made easier today if I have let go of others’ burdens, no matter the size or scope. It will have been a good day today if at the end of the day I have shared my true self with others while staying true to myself.
From Deb R about grief: “One cannot step twice into the same river, for the water into which you first stepped has flowed on.”
Fly me to the moon
I am in Kona, Hawaii. I landed late and was greeted by the blood moon in the night sky. What a thrill! When I woke this morning at 6am and went out to the lanai, I was greeted by that very same moon setting over the ocean.
This is the first solo trip since Bill passed wherein I am not meeting up with any friends. I know no one on the island. Given that, it is somehow comforting to be staying in the vacation rental condo of dear friends. They’re not here but this home is a reflection of them. The neighbors are their friends and therefore can be counted on if I need them. Somehow all this helps.
I was thinking this morning about how weird it feels not to have someone to wrap my day around. There is me. People say, “This is your time. Be good to yourself,” and I wonder how to do that. When Bill was ill, I spent a lot of time doing whatever I could to make his days easier. When my girls were growing up, I thought about their needs. Now that it’s my time, I guess the place to look for how to do it is to consider my modus operandi when it came to them. How can I adapt what I so naturally do for others, to the needs of that person who looks back at me in the mirror every morning?
So my week on Kona (and I am here to write, not just to play) will be experimental. Every morning, when I sit down with my cup of tea, I will have pen and paper nearby and answer these two questions:
- “What will make your life easier today?”
- “At the end of the day, if you feel it’s been a good day, what will have happened?
I invite you to join me. Let’s grow together. Let’s find out what it’s like to take care of our own needs as well as we do the needs of others. Some of you are far ahead of me in this process, others are where I am right now and still others are thinking, “What the heck is she talking about?” Wherever you are in the process, I invite you to get up ten minutes early each day to do this exercise.
It will be fun to see what happens.
Moping in Paradise
There are few things sadder in life than someone who is living in the past, whether it’s an ex-football jock who peaked in college or parents who keep their children’s rooms exactly as they were, even though they are now grownups with children of their own.
I am writing this from paradise—the island of Kauai, where Bill and I shared some of our happiest times. Being here is an example of a mixed blessing. I feel closer to Bill here than anywhere else. I see him out on the ocean windsurfing and I look for his red helmet as he surfs the waves in his kayak. I picture him in one of his Aloha shirts (as he called them), smiling and holding court as he tells stories to our friends on the lanai of the house we once shared.
And I cannot help wondering if I am clinging to the past. Yes, I know it’s only been eight months since he died and I am “allowed” this indulgence but if it only takes three weeks to develop a new habit, what might eight months accomplish? I don’t want to live out my life like this; Bill wouldn’t want it either.
I teach and believe that you attract more of what you focus on and this period after Bill’s death is proving to be one of my biggest challenges to date. If this were back pain I am experiencing, what would be required to move forward is not surgery but an adjustment or two, like chiropractors do when they perform their magic. That’s because I know this pain is not chronic—unless, of course, I choose it to be.
If I can find a way to enjoy all my memories, then I know I will attract similarly happy times. But they will be new memories that don’t include Bill and therein lies the years of training for how we are supposed to grieve. I have had many people say to me, “It’s an individual thing. Everyone grieves differently,” and I know they are sincere when they say it. I also know that there exists, within our society, a certain protocol about how one should “be” after a loved one has died and it is attached to a timeline. If one is seen to be “moving on” too quickly, then they are deemed to be in denial, or not facing reality.
After my best friend Adele died in a car accident at age 17, our friends and I were out having pizza, sharing memories and finally laughing after two days of nonstop sobbing. Another, older kid walked over to us and said, “How can you all sit here laughing when your friend is dead?” I felt shame. I have learned since then that what we were doing was healing and I’m sorry that we stopped because of one person’s lack of understanding.
There is a world of difference between, “I wish he were here,” and “Why did he have to go?” I know the former will come. My father died many years ago and there are times when I see a new, cool technological gadget, for example, that I think, “My Dad would have loved that,” with no twinge of pain attached to the thought. Even now, I can share stories of Bill with friends and laugh with joy and no pain so I know it’s possible.
My friend Kathy who also lost her mate puts it this way: the pain comes from “I’m not happy about this” (his death) and the choice is, “I choose to be happy about this” (his life and what we shared.)
But first you must acknowledge that a choice exists.
I’ve been wrestling with this topic for a few days, as I generally do, trying to formulate what I want to write. A mentor of mine once said, “If you can’t get it down on paper, it’s not clear in your head,” and I have repeatedly found that to be true.
This morning, tea in hand, I went to sit on the beach and enjoy the morning with the ocean in my ears. That’s when the answer came. THIS is all that matters. This moment, this reality, this time…the gentle breeze on my face, the steady waves being pushed and pulled by the moon, the sound of birds…this is what life is.
It is true that mourning is a part of life. But living in the past because you are mourning is unnatural. If it were “meant to be,” then we would feel good when we did it. If I am to remember, let me do so with joy. Let me remember with laughter. Let me remember with love.
I have been moping around in paradise. What a waste. Bill would definitely not approve. After all, he really is in Paradise and having a blast. He would want the same for me.
Aloha.