death

Grief and a Holiday Letter

December 14, 2017 By Carolyn Parr 9 Comments

In October of 2015 the man who had been my husband for fifty-six years died. December found me still numb with grief. As my children and I struggled to navigate the season without a compass, we were feeling a lot of things. Joy wasn’t one of them. If it was there, it was buried under a thick layer of pain.

It was time to write the annual holiday letter Jerry and I had always written together, but I felt lost.

Should I just skip it and leave friends wondering whether they’d been abandoned? Should I spill tears all over the page? Should I put on a happy face to hide the pain?

None of those choices seemed right.

Then I reflected on what had followed Jerry’s death. I realized that this was a season when grief, like the Wise Men, came bearing gifts. [Read more…]

Death Terms and Euphemisms

February 29, 2016 By Carolyn Parr 6 Comments

From time to time, Tough Conversations will present articles by guest bloggers on topics of interest to our readers. M. Jane Markley, an expert on advance care planning, wonders why it’s so hard to talk about death:

Have you ever noticed just how difficult it is for people to say the word “death” or “died”? You mostly hear the terms when something horrific has happened like an earthquake or a bombing but in day to day life it is rare. This is part of our culture of death avoidance. Just take a look at the obituaries. If we don’t say it, perhaps it won’t or didn’t happen. If you listen carefully you will hear many other phrases or words used but rarely “death”. [Read more…]

Redeeming the Pain (A Book Review)

February 15, 2016 By Carolyn Parr 4 Comments

Some books are better the second time around. Even better the third, after life has delivered its lessons. Living Through Personal Crisis by Ann Kaiser Stearns is such a book.

Its subject is grief over life’s losses, big and small. A painful divorce propelled the author, a clinical psychologist, chaplain, and professor, to write it. She had two purposes: to help others and to heal herself.

In a video on her website, and in the Preface to her revised version, Dr. Stearns says resilience comes when we learn from our pain. When we find meaning in it. We redeem our own suffering by using it to help someone else. And that makes us stronger. [Read more…]

Talking to Grief – Part 2

November 10, 2015 By Carolyn Parr 5 Comments

“What can we do to help?” friends asked me as my husband lay dying and soon after he passed. At first I didn’t know how to answer.

I was still feeling my way through early-stage grief, from the inside out. At first I didn’t know what I needed, but others sometimes recognized a need and offered specific help. Or just showed up with it. Sometimes my head was clear enough to ask. Sometimes not.

I previously wrote about helpful things to say to a person going through a loss (Talking to Grief). But it’s not all about words. Support comes in words and actions.

[Read more…]

Talking to Grief

October 7, 2015 By Carolyn Parr 2 Comments

by Carolyn Miller Parr

What can you say to the parent of a 17-year-old son who dove into a wave this summer and came up paraplegic? Or your 53-year-old family member who suddenly discovers he is riddled with cancer? Or “Sarah,” a church friend, who will soon celebrate her 56th wedding anniversary, holding her husband’s hand and watching his slow but unstoppable surrender to dementia and death?

Recently I have felt surrounded by grief. It knocks at my own door and I see it everywhere. I can smell it, touch it. Anyone who watched the Pope’s visit on TV saw plenty of it. He waded into it: immigrants, homeless people, prisoners, babies attached to oxygen. Francis knows how to speak to pain.
[Read more…]

Entering “Elder-dom” – Part 2: The Legacy Question

October 10, 2014 By Sig Cohen 3 Comments

In a previous article, we explored some challenges that often surface when engaging in a tough conversation with an older adult. Those challenges include: autonomy, independence, and even dignity. Here we examine yet another challenge: an older adult’s legacy. Not financially, but how others remember them after they have passed. [Read more…]

Is There Such a Thing as a ‘Good Death?’

September 12, 2014 By Sig Cohen 8 Comments

After several years of relentless chemo and radiation to check her cancer, Rebecca decided to die with dignity.

She consulted with family members and some close friends and then contacted a nearby hospice. Whatever ‘tough conversations’ there might have been were brief, open and honest. How could anyone object to Rebecca’s decision after all the various treatments that she had undergone? Everyone was in the loop: family members, close friends, some neighbors and a few former colleagues. [Read more…]

Tell Me About the Skeletons in the Closet

April 24, 2014 By Carolyn Parr 4 Comments

That’s a question Bryan Bishop eventually gets around to asking every prospective client who comes in for a will or estate plan. As the client is recovering from the shock, Bryan reassures them, “Every family has them.”

Think about your skeletons. What are they? The loving son who can’t manage money. The brilliant, strong aging parent you suspect has undiagnosed dementia. The kind daughter who can’t say no. The addicted grandson. A second wife you love, but whose son you consider immoral. An in-law you dislike or distrust. Mental illness, secret HIV, a hidden mistress for whom you’d like to provide. Maybe even an unacknowledged child of your own. The IRS lien on the family farm. The list goes on and on.

And heaven forbid you die without a will.

Why does your lawyer need to know all this stuff? The short answer is to prevent war from breaking out before your body is cold. [Read more…]

You went to…a “Death Cafe”?

January 21, 2014 By Sig Cohen

Yep. Talking about death and dying can be a tough conversation. I recently visited a “Death Cafe” where a discussion about death and dying was frank and open.

But “fascinating” best describes the candor and compassion of the two-hour conversation.

The idea of a death café has intrigued me since learning about it a year ago. As an elder mediator helping families resolve disputes concerning an older parent or relative, I wanted to see how willing people are to talk about this often closeted topic. I was pleasantly surprised. The nine of us talked about dying and death, both personally and objectively.

Begun in England several years ago, death cafes are informal gatherings of individuals who talk about death and dying from all vantages. A hospice worker organized the first U.S. death café. Surprised by how willing people were to discuss death when they heard about her profession, she decided to organize one. “People,” she explained, “have a need to talk about death.”

The facilitators stressed that people’s remarks should remain confidential, and that the café is a safe space to talk openly and candidly.

We first explained why we were attending and then asked to complete the sentence: “Death is ___________.” The one-word replies included “transition,” “ painful,” “ peaceful,” “ necessary,” and so on. Next, we focused on “contradictions in our thoughts about death.” While I couldn’t think of any, someone suggested that suicide has its contradictions. While a person committing suicide may think he or she is ending their physical or emotional pain, they rarely consider the pain their suicide will inflict on others.

Another topic explored what we want to do before our death. Answers broke into two categories: one on travel; the other on accomplishing something, whether it is gaining inner peace, fulfilling a life mission, or seeing one’s children succeed.

Throughout I observed a sense of “permission giving.” Once one person shared her feelings about, say, the death of a loved one, others felt free to jump in. Conversations ranged from the intimate to the humorous, from the loss of a child to contending with different ways of planning a funeral.

The café ended with a feeling of commonality: we saw that we could share with strangers some of our deepest concerns about death and dying; and we garnered new perspectives on a topic that most of us had seldom or even refused to discuss.

Sig