Lani Leary's Blog, page 4

Participate with your presence

Most people’s lives are a chain of small acts like eating, walking, working, laughing. What might happen, and how might our lives be different, if we carried out those small acts as if it was the only and last thing we might do in our life? What if every move we made and act we carried out was to find the sacred in all the mundane parts of life? What if we lived our life as though the sacred in all life mattered?

Being present to another person’s decline, illness, pain, and dying means that we persevere and hold still, rather than look away, deny, or dismiss another person’s suffering. Many will not try because they think that they can not make a difference. In their fear, they believe that the only difference worth making is to reverse disease or bring about a miracle that stops death. Love does not ask that we be God, but only that we be present.

To be present means that we need to pay attention, maintain patience, and let go of the security that we believe we know what is right for another person; we use the gifts of our intuition and heart-mind, quieting the chatter and fears of the brain.

Your presence does not have to be extraordinary…it just needs to come back when it has wandered and to stay the course. Your presence needs to continually feed the journey and respond to whatever arises, all the mundane and the beautiful.

I can find meaning in loss

To say that we must confront our grief may be too harsh. Perhaps what is more helpful is to engage or “enter into” a deeper appreciation of what is; to be so courageous as to mingle with our grief so as to find the texture and nuance of it. The closer we examine it, the more intimate it becomes; the more of our own it is, and the less ambiguous and vague. We can hold our grief; rather than our grief taking hold of us.  We can know it so that it can inform us of what is most precious to us.

During the exploration and within this intimacy we learn that we can not only tolerate our pain, but we can transcend it, and see it for what it is and what it is not. It is “only” pain, it is not bigger than our love. It is a reaction to the illusion that love is lost. When we realize that we are holding the memory of our loved so close that we have memorized the texture of their skin, we can draw the contour of their face, recite their favorite stories, and know how they would respond to a question we pose, we know without hesitation that they are present. We know that joy and sorrow, love and grief can coexist at the same time.

When I pay attention without judgment, without pushing away what comes up, I am present to what emerges and that seems to me to be the gift of the struggle. When I sat with my father without looking away from his anxiety of not being able to breathe deeply; without reacting to his displeasure of being stuck in an ailing body…when I sat with him without an agenda but just with my full presence…I experienced and reflected to him that he was more than a failing body or an exhausted spirit.

We sat together, as his life was ending, with both joy and sorrow, love and grief.  We held it all, together.

The possibility of another way

Our anxiety is the barrier to compassionate care.  Our anxiety comes from our lack of experience, skills, or knowledge.  We are not taught how to respond in the ways that are needed.  In the same way we do not teach people how to parent (the most important job in our lifetime), we assume that we will all know how to approach dying and grieving.  It is not part of our DNA; these are skills that must be taught, practiced, sanctioned, and reinforced.  We must be given vocabulary with which to put the experiences into context, make meaning, and express ourselves.  We must have role models that demonstrate what it means to be compassionate, caring, and empathetic.  All of this will serve as a foundation that dramatically and directly affects our underlying beliefs about the end of life.

Our attitudes, myths, and asssumptions about death, dying and grief stifle our capacity to be of service.  In our culture, we do not have the structure from which to question or investigate those myths; we carry the burden of fear as though that which we resist and fear is an incontrovertible truth.  We are stricken, paralyzed to move toward what most needs our attention and presence.

Sterotypes that we hold lull us into not recognizing our diversity.  All old people are not frail; many are active and engaged and thriving while others are sedentary and isolating.  All older patients do not have pain, nor are they all riddled with illness.  The young die too, and we must not dismiss each person’s unique needs, values, and different ways of living out their life.

I believe that it is not illness, or the progressive decline of an infirm body that causes us the greatest distress.  It is our myths, fears and assumptions that are the living cancers, cutting off our life force and individual capacity to live the life we came to express.  I challenge each of us to ask ourselves what it is we believe about death, dying, illness…and then ask “how do I know that is true?”  Would you be willing to open to the possibility that there is another way to experience the end of life?… and then set out to build a life now that supports that?