Exercises in Perspective

I talk a lot about perspective, but I think about it even more often.  It's one of the few things that keeps me from coming apart at the seams during the Mad Tea Party of life.  

I like to read about things that give me perspective and about the impact that different people and experiences have had on others.  One thing I have realized in thinking about the legacy that my dad left behind is that little things can make a big difference - little things we say, little things we do, and even little things we think.  Each of these can serve to shape each of us into a person with a bigger heart, a better outlook, and a broader perspective.  As Mother Teresa once said, "None of us, including me, ever do great things.  But we can all do small things, with great love, and together we can do something wonderful."

In keeping with that theme, I have decided to compile of list of things that can bring perspective and post those ideas periodically as challenges to myself and to others.  Some will be fun, some will be thought-provoking, some will be service oriented or otherwise actionable.  All will be targeted at contributing to the perspective of anyone who participates.

Here's the first one:

Let someone know the impact he or she has had on your life.

This idea came to me from a message that I got from a person who knew my dad many years ago.  The person had heard that my dad was sick but didn't know that he had died. In reading some of the entries in this blog, he recognized himself as one of the guys in the story that I told here:

The Spirit - Not The Spirit of Competition

When he read that story, he said, "I tell the story of that race in Mississippi all the time to people. I learned a life lesson that day. A great story was told through his life. I can recall all those runs and races and his smile that seemed too broad for his little body."

When I told him that Dad had gone on ahead, he expressed sadness and regret that he had not been able to tell my dad how he had been impacted by him.  He said, "I wanted to tell him how his life story connected to mine. He was largely responsible for my love of running and in many ways responsible for my future."

Thinking about his words and the words he said he wished he had told my dad made he think about the fact that there are many people in my life to whom I haven't reached out in some way over the years to let them know how they influenced me. 

What he said made me realize that end-of-life regrets are not only for people who are nearing the end but also for those left behind who haven't delivered a message that we wish we had.  

In doing this first Exercise in Perspective, you may choose to communicate with a person from your past or from your present, someone younger or older, someone who served as a mentor or a teacher to you or just a person who caused you to think or act differently than you might have otherwise.  Your message can be delivered in writing or verbally, and it can even be as basic as something like, "Thank you; knowing you has helped make me the person I am today."  The only criterion to this challenge is that you reach out to a person who has left a mark on you in some way, and the point is this: don't wait.  Do it now; the person to whom you deliver your message will be glad, and so will you.

Measuring the Course

As far back as I can remember, one of my dad's routines after he got home from a long run was to immediately jump into the car to drive the route he had run to measure the exact distance of the course.  (This was WAY before GPS systems existed.) Most people would probably choose to sit down to rest as soon as they could after a strenuous workout, but Dad was the kind of person who couldn't stand to let grass grow under his feet.  He taught us to have honor and priorities, to set goals, to set our mind to doing things and then to follow through. WAY before Nike said it, he used to say “Just Do It” whenever he heard someone make an excuse for not doing something they should have been doing; I remember so many tough runs when he would tell me to tuck in behind him so that he could block the wind for me after he'd said “Put your head down and let's just do it.”

If Dad could have “driven the course” at the end of his life, if he could have had the opportunity to examine what he had done and the choices that he had made along the way – I wonder to what he would’ve made adjustments.  Not much, I would venture to guess, and I think that’s pretty damn remarkable.  I'm not sure there are many people in this world who would be able to say the same.

Here's a question with some Food for Thought: What would your biggest regret be if today was your last day of life, and how can you attempt to right that regret?

Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last few weeks or months of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, and later she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.  Ware writes of the clarity of vision that people often acquire towards the end of their lives and of how others can learn from their wisdom. "When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently," she says, "common themes surfaced again and again."

Here are the top five end-of-life regrets, according to Ware:

"I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me."  Looking back over the course of their lives (measuring the course), people often recognize that certain dreams they've had that have not been fulfilled, making this the most common regret of the dying.  And, as we learned when my dad got sick, by the time a person realizes that he needs to hurry to try to realize those remaining dreams, his health (and sometimes other obstacles) often restricts those goals from being attainable.

"I wish I didn't work so hard." Ware says that this was a regret shared by every male patient she cared for (and some of the women too).  What they wished they had done instead of staying late at the office so many times was to have gone to their children's ball games or school programs or to have spent more time with their spouse or other loved ones.  

"I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings."  Ware says that many people reported that they had suppressed their emotions in order to keep peace with others.  They regretted not having told someone that they were angry with them - or that they loved them.  Sometimes this is a regret that can be addressed in the final stages of life, but many times the years that have passed since the issue began make it impossible to right on down the road.

"I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends."  In the midst of our hectic daily lives, it's easy to lose track of people who have meant so much to you and whose impact you may not realize until it's too late.  Again, sometimes when the person who is dying expresses this regret, loved ones from the past can be contacted, but many times it isn't possible.  

"I wish that I had let myself be happier."   The realization that death is near can give a person new perspective on things, and one of the things that is commonly realized is that happiness is a choice.  The clarity that often comes at this stage of life helps people to see the good in their lives much more clearly than they did before.  Other things like material goods no longer seem important.  People do want to get their financial affairs in order if possible, but it is not money or status that hold true value for them as they near the finish line - it's love, both given and received.  

Sliding Doors

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine about both of our parents' battles with cancer, his mom and my dad.  Both were diagnosed at an age when they appeared to be in the prime of their lives, on the cusp of retirement, in seemingly good health.  My friend's mom was a long-time smoker but at his insistence had quit smoking a few months before she was diagnosed with the lung cancer that took her life a short time later.  As he was talking about her illness, he told me that he will always wonder if by encouraging his mom to quit smoking he had somehow caused her to get cancer.  He said he knew it wasn't really rational to think that but that he couldn't shake the thought that somehow the thing that had changed in her life before the diagnosis was made was not fortuitous, that there was a link.  I think in the greater scheme of things, human beings tend to want to believe that cancer (or anything else) happens for a reason, that where there's an effect, there must be a cause.  That's what our logical minds often tell us, and it's our way of allowing ourselves to feel like we have some sort of control over, well, anything, when in many cases we just don't.  No matter what the case is, no matter what the cause - if any - cancer is always unfair, and that's really the bottom line. 

Hearing my friend say that he felt on some level responsible for his mother's death made me think about the way that in any death, in any circumstance, there is always room to wonder: what could I have done differently, how could the outcome have been avoided, WHERE DID I LOSE CONTROL?

That conversation also started me thinking about the difference between guilt and regret, two emotions that are different from each other yet are often confused, especially when people are grieving.  In my opinion, the term "guilt" is frequently misused; the term actually refers to something that one feels he shouldn't have done because it was wrong.  In many ways, guilt can be a disabling affliction, just like Cancer.  And, also like Cancer, guilt is something that can happen to anyone at any time, no matter the circumstances.

Regret, on the other hand, is what is felt when when something has happened that has resulted in a loss or a missed opportunity, despite the fact that the person had no control over the result.  Regret occurs when there were circumstances beyond one's control; in short, regret can arise when one makes a mistake. The difference is that what was done in the case of regret wasn't wrong, even though what happened as a result was undesired.  

Many times I've heard people say they feel guilty when a loved one gets cancer, even when that loved one becomes a "Survivor."  I've heard people say they feel guilty for not doing more or for not being there for a friend or family member who has Cancer.   What they more likely mean in both cases is that they regret what happened, even though it wasn't an outcome of their actions.  

I know personally how cumbersome it is to harbor feelings of guilt and/or regret; it is, in a word, awful.  But the most awful thing of all is when the person who is sick feels guilty: They may feel guilty that those who are caring for them are missing work and other things, they may worry about the money involved in the treatment of Cancer, they may feel that they are a burden on others.  They may wonder if they did something to have caused the Cancer or if they didn't do what they should have done to prevent it.  One of my friends who battled Cancer years ago once told me that while she was sick she felt guilty for feeling jealous of people she knew who were healthy, and she said that after she was done with treatment she felt guilty for getting better when so many with Cancer don't.   And although "regret" is the better word to use here, we tend to say "guilt" much more often.

Why does that distinction matter?  Maybe because feeling guilty is, in a sense, blaming ourselves for something that was in no way under our control and/or for something that occurred as a result of an innocent action.  If someone is justifiably guilty for something, they should take responsibility for what they did and then make an effort to make amends whenever possible.  Inaccurately labeling regret as guilt can serve as a huge barrier in the grief process; when one feels responsible for a loss when in fact that person had only the best intentions and had no control over what ended up going wrong, it's easy for him or her to get "stuck" because their perception of what happened isn't based in reality.

All of this reminds me of the concept of the movie “Sliding Doors” (If you haven’t seen it I recommend that you do **Caution: not for kids!**), which is that it is possible for even a small decision to forever change the course of a life.  Surely the vast majority of adults have done some things in their past that they wished they’d done differently.  And when someone you love dies of a terminal illness (or maybe when they die from ANYTHING), it doesn't seem like it would be that unusual to feel at least a little bit of regret, and in some cases some guilt may play a role as well.

Looking back to the time when my dad was sick, part of me wonders – and will always wonder – if I did enough.  If I could’ve done more.  If I should’ve played something differently.  And if I had, would it have made a difference?  

Sometimes I think about the Sliding Doors concept, about different ways that things might or might not have been done as we tried to cope with his illness.  I guess technically mixed in with that wondering are some blame and some anger, both of which I feel are completely justifiably directed towards the health care professionals who in my opinion didn't do what they should have done.  (More on that later ... )  But I also find myself thinking about what-ifs from other time periods in my dad's life - both from before he got sick and whenever I imagine how things would be if he were still here, either having been miraculously cured or still fighting.

As I've mentioned, my dad was involved in lots of accidents during his life, most of which occurred out on the road during his physical pursuits.  Although I can't for the life of me figure out why I do this, I sometimes think about how things would have been had he sustained an injury with long-term effects in one of these accidents.  I always thought Dad had somehow ended up with nine lives (Maybe that's why he considered himself a cat person more than a dog person.)  Now I am left to wonder if he did but I somehow lost count along the way.  To some people, I guess it might seem like my family should have discouraged him from doing things like the running and the biking and the adventure races that sometimes resulted in serious injuries for him, but we always protected and defended his right to continue despite the risks because he loved it and, to be really honest, maybe because we caught a little bit of his "I'm too lucky for anything really bad to ever happen" fever along the way.  

When Dad talked about people he knew whom he thought had "gone downhill" over the years, he always said he hoped that didn't happen to him.  In fact, I distinctly remember several times hearing him say that he hoped when his time came that he went out running.  In a way, I guess he got his wish.

Why is it that "If games" are so common with grief: If only _____, things would be different. If I'd encouraged him to go to the doctor.  If we'd found out sooner.  If we'd chosen a different hospital or different doctors.  I guess it's because whenever our minds create these alternative scenarios, we can imagine an alternate reality to the one that we just don’t want to accept. These counterfactuals allow us to hide the truth, to conceal the reality of pain, if only for a little while.