A Yuletide Wish

Posted by Dia in Christmas and tagged with Beliefs, Miracles, Respect, wonder December 24, 2010

THOUGHTS FROM THE YULETIDE 2010

Dearest family and friends, old and new;

Greetings from the slushy, drizzling, overcast, and fog-riddled, slightly-far north town of Eagle, Idaho! We fervently hope the holiday season is bringing you a lot more sunlight than we’ve seen here over the last month, and that your vitamin D and serotonin levels are correspondingly higher. I really shouldn’t complain of course. We need the moisture, and the snow in the mountains is a godsend. But still. We’ve been buried under low, heavy clouds and dense fog for so long now that it’s starting to feel a lot like Venus.

The family is doing well. Cal’s had a great year at work and, yes, he’s still traveling back and forth to the Northeast every month and loving the job. Go figure. A double life really seems to suit him. And thanks to both good luck and their stellar work ethics, Lorin and Kit survived the transition and still have jobs after Hewlett Packard bought Palm last year, laying off a lot of the old work force in the merger. McKenna graduates from Boise State University in a few days with a B.A. in English/writing emphasis and a minor in History and has developed into both a talented academic and a sensible, hard working woman. We really couldn’t be prouder. As for me, I was eventually buried under the organizational demands of trying to write a book about dying, so I shelved the project and started a blog about dying instead. Turns out it’s a lot easier to continue to sound coherent in a few paragraphs than it is throughout hundreds of pages. Who knew? I have a deepened respect for anyone who writes an entire book about anything.

* * *

Well, right after I wrote the above paragraphs two weeks ago the tsunami hit and I was swept out to sea by the combined demands of holiday preparations, graduation celebrations, blogging schedule, joining a gym (not the best timing on that one…), and cramming a block of dental/medical appointments into the end of the year to try and catch the insurance benefits before they expire. That’s how I find myself sitting here a day and a half before Christmas, stuffed and tired, pressured by deadlines, sweating and sore, screened and cleaned, just a wee bit stressed out, and still trying to think of something warm, fuzzy, and holiday themed to say in the yuletide letter this year.

Merry Christmas?

Actually, I say that carefully. A few years ago Cal and I took a walk along the river on Christmas day and ran into an older couple who wished us a Merry Christmas as they passed by. When we smiled and wished them the same, to our surprise they became agitated and stopped to talk. Evidently, they’d wished someone else a Merry Christmas earlier in the day and whoever it was had bristled and taken offense at the greeting. Our older couple had retaliated by taking offense at the fact that offense had been taken and, lo and behold, in direct opposition to the spirit of the season, the cycle of bad feelings was up and running, passing on its merry little way downriver to us.

I’ve thought about that one ever since. I realize there’s often tension these days around what Christmas…and other traditions for that matter…are supposed to mean, how they’re supposed to be celebrated, and whether or not they should even hold the prominent place they do in a secular society. It’s understandable. I think we all tend to get a little territorial about the traditions that are most important to us, and it’s only natural to resist the intrusion of other traditions onto our own.

The urge to protect the unique rituals, values, and celebrations that nourish, strengthen, and guide us in our lives is universal. I know I certainly don’t want anyone else messing with the way I celebrate my season. But having said that, please believe me when I say that neither do I have any desire to dictate how you should celebrate yours.

We weren’t a particularly religious family when I was growing up, so my parents took the Santa Claus track and really poured themselves into celebrating the magic of Christmas. They went to great lengths to create as much joy, wonder, and sense of miracle for us kids as possible and, funny though it might sound, some of the most important, foundational lessons of my life were learned from the way they taught us to celebrate the season.

First of all, they taught me that Santa Claus was real. That there actually existed a jolly, caring, magical being who was so generous–so loving and happy–that he devoted his whole life to flying through the world to try and touch, enrich, or bring love to every last, living person in it. Naturally, this understanding evolved quite a bit as I grew up. (You’ll be relieved to know I no longer believe in Santa.) However, it also instilled a couple of lasting and important beliefs in me:

1) There are powerful and benign forces at work in creation that sincerely desire my happiness, and

2) Gifts aren’t always given because they’re earned or deserved. Sometimes generosity is just for its own sake.

Secondly, my parents taught me that sometimes miracles come in the night, and I can’t begin to tell you how much courage and hope I’ve drawn from that lesson over the years. Throughout my childhood and on into adulthood, it’s helped me to be less afraid of the shadows, to trust that along with the monsters, darkness also harbors miraculous, luminous gifts. And I honestly think the odd faith I developed from that early lesson helped me more during the lean, dark years of my battle with depression than anything else.

Third, my mom and dad required us, from the time we were small, to think about, select, wrap, and give gifts to each other. And when we finally got to open them all on Christmas morning, we always did it one at a time, each of us taking turns opening a present while everyone else watched and shared in our excitement. We circled around and around this way, as many times as it took, until everyone was done and it was this ritual, more than any other in my life, that taught me how the giving and receiving of gifts is really a banquet for everyone to sit down and enjoy. I learned that whether I’m giving or receiving, ripples of happiness can be created either way, and the truer the spirit with which I do both, the wider the ripples become.

There were a thousand other lessons of course, opportunities to develop qualities like patience and self-control, as well as learning how to manage things like disappointment, envy, and greed. I’ve continued to build on these early lessons all my life, and I feel like the Christmas traditions practiced by my family were actually fundamental and essential to the development of my deepest sense of humanity. I’ve always known that my family’s way of celebrating Christmas was neither the “right” way nor the only one, but it was our way and that made it beautiful, nourishing, and perfect for us. It created magical ties of love, faith, strength, and generosity that bound us closer together, and gave us a way to reaffirm each year the things that my family cherished most. And I’ve done my level best to pass the same gifts and lessons down to my own children.

I guess this is all just a long way of trying to explain that, if Cal and I wish you a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays or Peace of the Season or any other kind of holiday wish, it’s not because we’re trying to impose our childhoods, or beliefs, or values, or culture on you. We’re not. We don’t believe in that. We love the fact that everyone gets to find and draw meaning for their life in the way that feels right and true and most nourishing to them. And we love even more that we all have the freedom to do just that. No. All we’re really trying to do with the greeting is make a deep, sincere, and heartfelt wish for you from the language of our childhood joy:

For us Merry Christmas means that, no matter what holiday you do or don’t observe, and no matter how you do or don’t observe it, from the depths of our hearts and with the greatest good will, we wish for you all that is best in your world, from all that is best in ours.

With great love and even greater hope,

Cal and Dia

Wikipedia again

copyright Dia Osborn 2010

Life Is Like A Trust Fund

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with Beliefs, Life, medical paradigm, Miracles, Talking about dying, wonder December 22, 2010

In “Dying” Is Still Alive I talked about the cost of focusing so much on trying to cure a life threatening illness that we risk going straight from being sick to being dead, with no time left for the opportunities that dying offers in between those things. In the comment section afterwards, Linda of What Comes Next? posed an important question: When fighting a life threatening illness, is it possible to embrace dying too soon…to forfeit the opportunity to rise above it and live longer? This is a great question and one that a lot of people ask.

What I’d like to do is break it down into two parts.

Part # 1) Is it possible to embrace dying too soon?

My answer, which probably won’t surprise anyone, is absolutely not.

Personally, I think we should all start embracing dying (i.e. looking at it, accepting it, and using the daily awareness to live as wisely and fully as possible) early on, ideally in childhood. The opportunities for exposure are rife. Like the first time we see our father crush a bug, or our mother put a cooked leg of something on our dinner plate, or have a family pet die, or hear about our little friend Emily losing her grandpa. As I’ve mentioned before, it’s never hard to find dead bodies scattered along the side of pretty much any road in America and, if all else fails, there are the innumerable references to, and reports of, dying and dead on the news twenty-four hours a day.

However, since children learn how to embrace dying from their parents, and since most parents don’t know how to teach it, most of us wind up as adults lacking the skill. In fact, most parents not only fail to teach how to embrace it, they treat it as something unspeakable and do their best to hide it. The most common metaphor for dying used in our culture is The Enemy, a horrible, looming foe to fight against tooth and nail, both bitterly and indefinitely.

As a result, most of us don’t learn to embrace dying as the last, natural, grueling-but-luminous stage where, if we’re lucky and blessed, we have the time necessary to successfully wrap up our life. Instead, we deny it as long as possible which can drastically shorten or, sometimes, even eliminate the opportunity to fulfill our end-of-life tasks. Most people don’t seem to realize that it takes time, sometimes a lot of it, to wind up our affairs, make our bequests, and absolve and be absolved by those we care about. To link trembling hands one last, aching, transcendent time and say I love you. I’ve always loved you. I will always love you.

As a death averse society, we haven’t fully grasped yet that dying at peace, with no regrets, and with our loved ones prepared for a life without us afterwards, is a necessary and worthy goal.

Instead, most us learn to look at dying as the gruesome, terrifying end of everything. To run. Run! Hard and fast, for as long as possible toward escalating medical intervention; drugs, surgeries, and treatment regimes that can not only consume most of the time we have left and create more layers of suffering, but actually shorten our lives as well.

In La Crosse, Wisconsin, where end-of-life discussions are the established, accepted norm, life expectancy is actually one year longer than for the average American population. And a 2006 study by the NHPCO found that the mean survival rate for patients on hospice was 29 days longer than it was for patients who were not on hospice.

For a person who’s spent their entire life regarding dying as something horrific, it’s a real challenge to switch gears, turn around, and embrace it when it finally comes. Not impossible mind you, but definitely harder.

Helping people make this switch was one of the major goals we always worked toward in our hospice. We fought hard to help people make the difficult transition from fighting for life to accepting dying because we saw, consistently, what a profound and healing difference it makes. There’s more trauma involved when the state of dying is embraced late, or never embraced at all. There just is. Sometimes this is unavoidable, as in the case of a swift or sudden death. But more often in today’s medical system, it happens as a result of focusing entirely on finding a cure without also preparing for dying.

Which brings me to the second part of Linda’s question.

2) Is it possible to forfeit the opportunity to rise above it and live longer?

While this question initially seems to reduce the situation to its simplest elements, I think it’s actually creating a trap. To explain, I’d like to use a teaching story.

Imagine you were born with a trust fund, and in this trust fund was a billion dollars. All your life you’ve been able to draw from this fund whenever you wanted, using the money for any old thing your heart desired. While you learned early on that the trust would eventually wind down and close, everyone was kind of fuzzy about the dates on that part. So in the end you just kind of forgot about it and started spending.

Then one day your lawyer calls to tell you that the termination clause has been activated. He’s learned that you’re going to lose access to the funds in about six months. He knows there’s no way to break the clause entirely, but he thinks that if you fight it, you might be able to win a temporary stay. Buy some extra time. The tricky thing is, you have to draw down the money in the trust fund to mount the court battle.

You now have three forces at work:

First, there’s the hope: You might win extra time and still have some money left in the fund afterward.

Second, there’s the real and measurable cost: You’ll be diverting money to the fight and depleting the funds you need for everything else in your life.

And third, there’s the risk: Court costs these days can easily eat up most of the trust. Even if you eventually win more time, the funds might already be exhausted.

Considering these three things, you really, REALLY need to ask yourself some important questions before you decide on a strategy. The trick is what are the best questions to ask? Naturally, you want the ones that will give you the most insight and wisdom, the ones that will be most helpful in guiding you in your choices during the time you have left. So what are those questions?

Linda’s question, adapted to our metaphor, is one possibility. If I just accept the clause and forgo taking it to court, will I miss the opportunity to use the trust fund longer? The answer? Well…yeah. Of course you would. The answer to that one, just from the standpoint of pure logic, is obvious. Which initially makes the right choice seem like a no-brainer. Of course you should fight. Anything else would be giving up.

However, this way of looking at it is actually misleading. It makes it sound like, universally, there’s only one possible option that everyone should always make. But that’s not true. Why? Because every person is different; with different needs, different dreams, different circumstances, different ages, different strengths, different fears, and different prospects. All these things need to figure into the choices that each person makes, so the questions we ask need to include them. Ideally, they’d run more along these lines:

Okay. Exactly how much extra time are we talking about fighting for here? Rough guess, what are the odds of my winning this fight? Am I really interested in betting the farm on longer, riskier odds? Just how much money is left in the fund to fight for at this point anyway? Is there something other than legal fees I really want or need to spend that money on? What will I lose by mounting a fight? What’s more important to me; having the funds available to spend in the future, or spending them today on what I love?

And what is perhaps the most important question of all: How much of the fund should I reserve for what I love, value, and cherish the most, to ensure I have no regrets–that my loved ones will still be okay–when the trust eventually closes?

The metaphor of a trust fund is apt because, in reality, life isn’t something that belongs to us. It’s not like our mothers gave birth and then picked up a receipt at the front desk. Life has never been ours, something we’re entitled to own and control. On the contrary, it’s only ever been a miraculous, incomprehensible, immeasurable resource controlled by something else too big to understand. Life is something that we didn’t earn and don’t even necessarily deserve, but that we nevertheless get to use however we want, for free.

To me, life is exactly like a trust fund…only times a gazillion. It’s our fortune. Our treasure. A limitless, jaw-dropping, sphincter-releasing wealth beyond our wildest, freaking dreams. I’m talking real-life fairy tale here, a winning-the-biggest-lottery-of-all-time kind of luck. A staggering, incalculable store of riches that’s set up in trust for us when we’re born and that we get to draw on and use for as long as we’re here.

But of course, as with all fairy tales, there is that one small catch: We only have access for a limited time. And while the question how much time? is certainly a compelling one, it’s unanswerable. For me it’s more valuable to ask instead, What is the best and brightest use of whatever time I do have?

The medical mindset at work today tends to glorify the fight to live, and skim over the deep human costs involved in such a fight. This often leads people to continue fighting in the face of increasingly long odds, instead of devoting their remaining energy to fully living whatever time they have left. It’s surprisingly easy for the fight itself to take over and become the goal. That’ why it’s so important to remember that the fight is only worthwhile in so far as the life it seeks to preserve is worth living. When it begins to consume and destroy that life instead, then it’s time to stop.

We’re living in a transitional age where developing technologies have granted us miraculous gifts. We’ve gone from having little to no choice at all about how we die to an overwhelming explosion of options and, even though we don’t have any more power to prevent death today than we ever did, we’ve developed an extraordinary, mind-blowing capacity to manage its timing.

However, there’s still a gaping hole that exists between these developing powers and our understanding of how best to apply them. Subconsciously, we’re wrestling with a lot of confusion. All the old instincts about dying are alive and well and active, lurking just below the surface. We’re still firmly in the grip of old memes, superstitions, beliefs, and attitudes about it, only now we’ve added layers of wild (and often unrealistic) expectations born of a new, more sophisticated world. Our collective understanding and response to dying, developed through tens of thousands of years of helplessness, hasn’t evolved as quickly as our intellectual, technological knowledge, creating turmoil and chaos. But it’s also opened the door for some amazing exploration and new possibilities in how we want to ultimately embrace and manage the way we die.

We’re living in an exciting, intoxicating age where we’re all medical pioneers, where we all get to explore and experiment in our own lives with how best to apply this new wave of knowledge. I suspect, as we evolve and mature in our understanding of what dying and death mean in today’s world, we’ll become more skilled in balancing our profound desire to live with a deepened, more authentic acceptance of dying. We’ll discover new and wonderful ways to navigate, treat, live…and still dance…with chronic and terminal illness. Ways that, today, we can’t even begin to imagine.

I think the current, explosive growth in medical possibilities offers us a parallel opportunity, both as individuals and societies, to grow and develop at a pace that simply wasn’t possible before. We now have the chance for our deepest humanity–our collective courage, generosity, insight, humility, and wisdom–to grow at the same exponential pace as our technology.

Personally, I love it.

There’s A Yorkshire Saying

Posted by Dia in Uncategorized December 17, 2010

I’m at the Commencement ceremonies for my daughter’s college graduation this morning and will be busy celebrating this great, great, GREAT event for most of the day. It’s been a wild week with very limited writing time. Therefore, the post I had scheduled for today will have to wait. In the meantime, I give you this fantastic saying from Yorkshire:

“YOU ARE A LONG TIME DEAD.”

John of Going Gently told me about this one. He said people in Yorkshire use it to remind themselves of how important it is to live life fully while we still have the chance, because once the chance is gone, it’s gone for a long, long time.

Needless to say, I love it. I figured, in the holiday spirit of giving, I’d pass it along.

copyright Dia Osborn 2010

(Image is from Wikpedia and is of Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire)

The Linda Series

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with Christmas, Control, Fear and courage, finding meaning, Surrender December 10, 2010

Image from Wikpedia

As I roll on into the Christmas season my time to blog is shrinking. The extra demands are growing exponentially and the juggling is getting hairy.

But that’s okay. I don’t really mind. The stress is worth it to me because I adore the holidays. (Well, mostly. There have been tough years.) My love of Christmas is a legacy from my childhood, the gift of parents who bent over backwards to create as much magic, wonder, and joy for my four siblings and I as they possibly could. They loved Christmas, and therefore I learned to love it from them.

It’s funny how, every once in a while, life really is that simple.

Anyway, this is all just preamble for what I really wanted to tell you: For the rest of December I’ll (probably) only be posting on Fridays. At least about dying. (During the rest of the week I reserve the right to succumb to moments of yuletide exuberance and post snippets about holiday moments.)

There. Notice served. Now, on to the real topic.

In a recent post, “Dying” Is Still Alive”, I talked about the mistake a lot of people make in assuming that dying and death are parallel or even, in some people’s minds, the same. In the following comments, Linda said something that, in my opinion, really helps shed light on the reason why this mistake gets made. Here’s most of it (the emphasis is mine):

Death & dying…yes, I think I’ve probably considered these two words/ideas as synonyms. Given the choice between the two this very moment I would strongly resist BOTH. To be honest, I think I’d prefer to be dead than to be dying. Like most people, I think I fear the process far more than the fact. I subscribe to the notion that the best way to dye would be blindingly fast like a stroke or heart attack during the night from which I never woke. (My ex-husband went this way, and while the abruptness makes the loss very difficult for those left behind, we all agreed that he was the lucky one because he never saw it coming.)

But I see your point about the tendency to go from fighting death to dead without having had the opportunity to embrace the process, thereby, leaving with unfinished business: sentiments not shared, history not shared, apologies unsaid, ….

…But where, I wonder, do we draw the line between fighting illness and accepting impending death? Certainly the will to live is what propels many people through God-awful illnesses and injuries. Sometimes they come out at the other end in-tact, or nearly in-tact. I’m curious how you feel about this aspect of dying. Is it possible to embrace dying to soon, too forfeit the opportunity to rise above it and live longer?

Linda’s last question is an important one that, I suspect, is on the minds of a lot of people these days, and therefore bears exploring. She also suggests a couple other areas of consideration that I think are equally important. (I’ve chewed on them a lot, anyway.) I’d like to address them all but, since it’s way too much ground to cover in one post, I thought I’d break it down into four separate questions and handle them in a series.

These are the specific questions I’d like to explore:

1) Will accepting that I’m dying interfere with my will to live? (I may actually have to break this question down into a few sections of its own because…well…its that big. I’d like to cover whether love of life or fear of death is a better motivation during treatment, how most of us will have to consciously choose when to die as a side effect of today’s successful medical interventions, what the real value of positive thinking is when fighting an illness, Hint: it’s not for survival as many currently think, and how it’s never really a question of whether we’re going to live or not anyway. Of course we won’t. The only truly meaningful question is about how best to use the time we have.)

2) Which is scarier, dying or being dead?

3) Is there anything about dying that might be worth living for?

And the last thing I’d like to cover isn’t necessarily something Linda brought up, but it’s a related and vitally important point. It involves a question of context, or how we choose to look at dying:

4) What are some possible metaphors we can use for dying and how does each one help or hurt our ability to navigate the process?

I figured I’d start next Friday with Linda’s main question: Will accepting that I’m dying interfere with my will to live?

Stray Thought

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying, Uncategorized and tagged with Beliefs December 5, 2010

I was just thinking about whether it’s possible for anyone to really know what happens after we die and this is my personal conclusion:

1) I think the people who say they don’t know, really don’t.

2) I think the majority of people who say they do know, actually don’t. They just believe they know. Really, really hard.

And 3) I think there are probably a few people out there who really do know. I don’t know how they know it, but I still think they do.

However, 4) Their knowledge will never be of any use to me since there’s no way I can ever, with rigorous certainty, distinguish them from the majority of people who believe they know, but really don’t.

At first glance that seems like a bummer. But is it?

Hmmmm…

Nope. I don’t think so. It doesn’t feel like it anyway. In fact, I’m a little relieved. I don’t want anyone telling me what will happen when I die because then it wouldn’t be a surprise and, to be honest, I’m kind of looking forward to the adventure aspect of the whole thing.

“Dying” is Still Alive

Posted by Dia in Living and Dying and tagged with Life, Living and Dying, Miracles, Taboos, Talking about dying December 3, 2010

I’m starting to suspect a lot of people use the terms dying and death interchangeably, or link them so closely together in their minds that they can’t easily discriminate between the two. At least subconsciously. I suppose that’s to be expected, considering neither of them are things we talk about much. Let’s face it, anything unfortunate enough to tumble into the closed pit of taboo topics is destined to collect a lot of misunderstanding.

But this particular area of confusion intrigues me more than most because it’s hard to find two things more different than dying and death. Exactly how different are they? Polar opposite different. World’s apart different. Different as in “If you had a choice of which one you wanted to be at this very moment, which would you pick?” different.

Death is dead. Dying is still very, very much alive.

In fact, it may well be one of the most alive periods we get over an entire lifetime of being alive. I think this is a very, very important point to remember because, startling though it may seem, dying can be easy to miss.

(Not dead…dead is unmistakable. Dying can be easy to miss. See what your mind did there?)

With the current medical paradigm focused primarily on cure, we can spend so much time fighting not to die that we wind up going straight from being sick to being dead, thereby missing the peculiar and healing light of the world of dying that lies in between those two. We can miss both the chance to realize Oh wow…this is it. I’m dying now….as well as the gift that comes from spending the rest of our days in that final place where life first collapses, and then supernovas into Life itself.

So if there was only one piece of advice I could pass along it would be this: Don’t close your eyes. Don’t condition yourself to denial and blindness. Because, for all their power to transform and heal, the miracles at the end of life are delicate, twinkling, and brief and, if you’re not alert enough to look for them, they can be very, very easy to miss.