Friendship is a sheltering tree

On this afternoon's Voices in the Family, the always wonderful Dr. Dan Gottlieb noted that perhaps THE key factor on whether or not someone experiences a "good death" is their social circle.

What a blessing, with my only sister in a hospital a state over & many miles away, to have the comfort of knowing she has dear friends close by.
  
Yesterday afternoon, it distressed me to hear Mim say her physician steam-rolled her into allowing him to give IV nutrients, when that's totally against what she wants.

 

Today, I called two of her closest friends - a pair of sharp professionals - to ask if they'd do a Whitney & pin the staff/doctors down, let them know MIM calls the shots, not them.  

Joy & rapture - they already have!  They were there last night, she'd been given the IV nutrients & was unable to keep them down.  From what I hear, they did their own version of pinning the staff to the wall & letting them know that MIM calls the shots.  

Yes, Dr. Gottlieb - the quality of our friendships does largely define the quality of our life, and of our dying.  

Of all the things I've envied my sister - her intelligence, her ability to connect & deepen connections with people, her creativity & her inner light - the greatest is her remarkable circle of friends & caring acquaintances.  From the time I was in high school - when dorm friends visited as much to talk to Mim as to hang out with me - to this moment, watching her josh & banter with the hospital staff, her ability to click with people, has left me in awe.  

It's the circle that - regardless of where they live, regardless of whether they are in this world or some other plane - is gathered around her right now.  

What gratitude I have for the sheltering love that circle provides, knowing that I may not be with her, but it always is.

I see with my sister the power & importance of friendship, brand new & age old.  I saw it with my mother, whose circle GREW as she inched into her nineties, thanks to the internet.  I see with older friends who consider their friendships as essential as air.  I cherish the older friend who - in her mid-90s - continues to make devoted new fans wherever she goes.  I applaud the family who is committed to getting their father to & from to his regular Friday lunch with colleagues from work - a 45 mile drive, one way.  



Like my own, Mim's circle of friends arcs from itty bitty children to ancient elders.  That is probably being a godsend for her right now.  Friends can bring their little ones in & perk her up, while the matriarch of our family - Peggy - can write her a note infused with her longer view & warm smile that beamed upon Mom & Dad.  It means the world to her when Daniel & Lindsay visit, along with their parents.

Whatever our age, we can develop a fresh appreciation of the friendships we have ~and~ reach out to make new ones.  For millennia, humans were tribal, then we organized into clans, then families, then nuclear families - today, too often we are silos.  Friendship isn't as natural, as organic as it once was, yet it is perhaps more important than ever.  As families get smaller, our circle of friends needs to grow larger.  True when we're in our teens, twenties, eighties or older. 

This afternoon, Dan Gottlieb shared a story about Redwood trees.  Talking about how, in the face of adversity, we need the tender, connecting care of friends, he reminisced about a trip with colleague to Muir Woods, with its majestic Redwoods.  A nature buff, she marveled at the magnificent trees' shallow root system.  Dan was dumbfounded that the largest, tallest, oldest trees on the planet could have live thousands of years without deep roots.

"Redwoods grow in clusters," she explained, "and their roots interlock. That's how they get their strength." 

We draw strength from friends.  Mega blessings on the circle that gathers around my sister.  Joy & love to anyone & everyone who recognize that friendship IS a sheltering tree, who do all they can to grow deep roots & extend leafy branches. 

courage calisthentics - THROW AWAY THE MIRROR

 

Confession - I thought Mom was loopy, thinking that throwing away a mirror would be a way to strengthen our courage muscle.  She meant metaphorically, but it still seemed a tad whacko.  But the older I get, the more it make sense.

Even the sharpest snappiest sveltest 60+ year old is going to look at least a teensy bit frayed compared to his or her younger self.  Mom knew people who grieved their youth, whose focus seemed to be on halting, as best they could, the impact of the passing years.  They didn't just have mirrors in the house of their soul, they were like fun house mirrors that distorted & twisted out of shape.  She knew people who looked in the mirror & saw everything they weren't any more & mourned.

 

It was sad, knowing people who refused to go out in public anymore because they didn't look the way they did years before.  There are people in my own life who only order take-out because they don't turn heads anymore when they walk into restaurants.  They define self-loathing.  What a sorry waste.  No courage.

Mom knew people like that, but not many.  Most of her friends had long ago banished such mirrors from their soul.  And she even came to banish the one that reduced her good qualities while it magnified her bad ones.  

Throw away her actual mirror?  Nevah!  She could ignore the wrinkles, the "saggy baggy" body (as she laughingly described it), the grey hair.  But go out without her lipstick? Nevah!  That, for her, would be close to being naked in public!  

Core courage calisthentics:  locate all the mirrors that distort, lift them off or pick them up, and THROW THEM OUT.  Accept that you are who you are!  

Think about those friends of Mom's, the ones who wouldn't go to Friday Supper or church, to play cards with friends & especially not out in the bright light of day to watch a grandson pitch.  What a waste.  Don't be one of them.  Ditch the mirrors, just be who you are.  My mother & her friends didn't just accept themselves as older women - they made it something worth celebrating!

more on SELF-ACCEPTANCE

Warning - very philosophical posting ahead!

 

My older friends aren't shy about letting me know when they think I'm out in left field.  One had definite views on my posting about self-acceptance.  She agreed it's essential for strengthening our courage muscle.  She just thought I'd done an iffy job making the point.

In her experience, coming to genuine self-acceptance is TOUGH.  Which self are we accepting?  Try to figure out your genuine self, only to discover that not only do you have a number of "selves," some of them want the opposite thing.  The Self that wants to lose five pounds battles with the Self that wants an everything bagel with a generous smear of full-fat veggie cream cheese.  The Self that wants to get up at 5:15 a.m. battles the one that wants to watch Casablanca - that ends at 11:55 p.m.  The Self that wants to...  

I got the message.

One of the reasons we resist looking inward is because its so gosh darn confusing.  We have all these Selfs running around - which is the real one, the genuine I?

According to my friend, none of them.  She considers her "I" to be the still small voice that is silently taking in all that's happening, so low register even she can't hear it, only tune into its vibes.

Yikes!  That sounds like a lot of effort.  Here's where it got interesting.  It seems that she had neither the inclination nor the time when she was younger to pause & consider, "What is self?"  But the older she got, the more her day-to-day life slowed down, the more she thought about it.  

A woman of the '60s, she'd long heard about "monkey chatter," the noise in our heads that distracts us from what we really think.  But after she exited her own 60s, she found herself questioning what she'd come to think she really thought.  

Come again?

She realized that most of what she thought was only what she thought she thought.  (My head was whirling.)  She started looking at her thoughts as labels she'd put on events & experiences, rather than just letting the events & experiences be.  (She almost lost me there.)

The point she wanted to make is that coming to self-acceptance is a long, challenging, indescribably rewarding journey.  It is not as easy as she felt I made it out to be.  And it involves multiple steps & many levels, most of which we won't see coming.  And just when we finally think we've got it, we'll have reached a place where we can actually see that everything is something other than what we expected.  

I hope that is close to what she described.  At least my core point remains ~ self-acceptance is essential to developing a strong courage muscle.  Just remember that we have many Selfs inside, more often battling rather than forming alliances.  Do our best to come to figure out which will help us meet our heart goals & give the rest the old heave ho.  And just as we finally have a productive team of Selfs with our highest best interests at heart - realize that none of them really exist.  But that we can't push this, that we need to get our lives at a slower pace, a calmer place.  

As convoluted as it all sounds, I think I get it.  If it didn't sound convoluted, I'd be describing it wrong.  I think what bugged my friend was me sounding like life is a straight line, or at least makes a logical progression from Point A to Point B, and so on.  She wanted to say life isn't a straight like or a spiral - it's a hot mess. 
 

 

AND - if it truly matters to us, if we show great care & loving & self tenderness, we might come to the quiet center of it all & discover our true self.  Acceptance isn't an option then; we just are. 

True grit - MIM

 

My sister is in the hospital. As she tells it, her doctors hold out no hope for a recovery.  John, my brother & I visited her on Friday (she is a distance away - we are outside Philadelphia & she's at the Jersey Shore).  It's been tough describing her to friends who ask, "How is she doing?"  I've described her as showing grace & humor, coming up with running gags with staff & generally being a hoot.  But an article I just spotted from AARP just gave me the perfect answer - "She's showing her usual true grit."

Mim looks like a very ill 30-something, not someone over 71.  Nothing about her says "older person."  She is young.  And for all the 63 years I've known her, she's always has remarkable grit, a quality that serves all of us, but perhaps no one as much as it does the aging aged elderly.  

Tenacity, perseverance, resilience - the underpinnings of GRIT.  Throughout her life, my sister has shown all three.  Once she focuses on a goal she wants to achieve, she sticks with it until its done.  

Mim has a remarkable level of determination & self-control, two qualities I've long admired in her & wished were more mine.  She knows what she wants & pursues it.  Quietly, relentlessly.  Even now, she doesn't have the energy to pin the doctors down & get them to do what she wants, but she lets us know.  Seriously ill, she retains incredible inner stamina.  That's grit.
 
Angela Duckworth, who knows a thing or two about the topic, says, “Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.  It's living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint.”  Christine Whelan, a consumer science professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, describes grit as, "Getting yourself through the hard stuff right now because you perceive there will be a meaningful outcome at the end." 

Mim models that however many or few moments we might have left, we can always look toward a meaningful outcome at the end of our moment-to-moment efforts.  She has a lot of hard stuff right now - and the tenacity, perseverance & resilience to work with & through it.

My sister continues to leave me in awe at what she accomplishes when she sets her mind to it.  

• She received her bachelor's degree from New York University in her late 30s, a pioneer student in what was then an experimental program for non-traditional students - she commuted (from Philadelphia!) three nights a week for the first year, two the second, and the third was as needed.  In her 40s, she received her MSW from Rutgers University.  How she balanced school & related costs & living expenses, I never knew.  But she did.  That took grit.
• Mim was such an exceptional volunteer with autistic children, she was officially recognized for it by the New Jersey legislature - with a very official & grand proclamation to prove it.  That took grit.
• When I was little, she coached a boys' football squad, organized several clubs for us neighborhood kids, single-handed put on fabulous 3-night camps in our backyard.  A hard fast rule was that NO ONE was allowed to go home during camp, even if you lived right next door.  No exceptions, unless you cleared it first with Mim.  That gave us all a sense of really being away.  That took grit.
• To this day, people come up to me to say how much Mim changed their lives, teaching them how to study, how to apply themselves to getting a project planned & completed.  She taught them grit.
• Where I work best in a group setting, Mim works best one-on-one.  One-on-one, she's worked with autistic children & their families.  One-on-one, she helps her friends see their gifts & graces.  One-on-one, she stays connected to her core famiy - by birth & of the heart.  That takes grit.

 

Right now, Mim faces challenges beyond my imagination.  One thing I know for sure - she's bringing her trademark true grit to each moment.  She will, once again, set the bar for tenacity, perseverance & resilience.  The grit that got her through being a unique houseparent to kindergartners & first graders at Girard College (K-12), taking them to a friend's farm in the country for an overnight, introducing them to projects & flat-out silliness they'd never experienced before & I'm sure have never forgotten.  That helped her be a second mother & invaluable friend to so many children in so many places.  That made her an anchor for so many people facing challenging situations & heartbreaking times.  All the qualities that make her MIM.

Even now, with all she's going through, she embodies grit.  

They might not ever make a movie about Mim - but, then again, they might.  Maybe, no one will write a book about her - but, then again, they might.  She might be only known to a relative handful of people - but to us, she is unforgettable, embodying determination & action, tenacity perseverance resilience.  A woman with true grit.