Goddesses Never Age: The Secret Prescription for Radiance, Vitality, and Well-Being (32 page)

CARETAKING AND TAKING CARE OF OURSELVES

Though sickness and infirmity are not inevitable as you get older, you may find yourself in the role of caretaker of a sick or ill parent—or needing care yourself. The flow of offering and receiving is a part of life, but it’s easy to become cranky and difficult instead of submitting to it gracefully.

Caretaking for others can be so stressful that it zaps your energy, makes you depressed and anxious, and even causes you to develop stress-related illnesses. It’s no accident that women often develop autoimmune diseases after the stress of caretaking for their parents. An autoimmune disease is characterized by the immune system not recognizing the body’s tissues as its own. In caretaking for those you love, you can lose yourself and start to
wonder,
Who am I? What’s my role? Am I daughter or nurse?
If at all possible, even if you
are
a nurse
,
get professional caretakers to help you with your parents should their health start to fail. Becoming all things to Mom and Dad is a surefire way to age yourself. As daughters, we have to learn to express our love to our parents without losing or exhausting ourselves.

Years ago, the dying process was very different. We didn’t have the medical interventions we have now that can prolong a fairly poor quality of life at great cost for an average of five years, causing enormous stress on the person dying and on the family caring for her. In her book
Passages in Caregiving
(William Morrow, 2010), Gail Sheehy writes, “Today’s average family caregiver in the United States is a forty-eight-year-old woman who holds down a paid job (more than half work full-time) and spends twenty hours a week providing unpaid care for an adult who used to be independent. One-third of family caretakers are actually on duty forty or more hours a week. One-third also still have children or grandchildren under the age of eighteen living with them and take care of two or more people, usually parents. Not surprisingly, one-half report a high level of burden and nearly one-half say their own health is fair or poor.”
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When perfectionism enters the picture, the burden on the caretaker becomes even greater.

Sheehy has written that caretaking should be approached as a marathon, not a sprint. We all want to believe that once Mom gets the surgery and the post-surgery physical therapy, she’ll get right back to her active life again. We all want to believe that Dad’s mild confusion and forgetfulness will be checked by some medication. Unfortunately, often, one small loss of health or independence leads to another and another and we’re unprepared for how quickly the situation snowballs.

The typical scenario is that the daughter—and if there’s more than one daughter, it’s usually the oldest daughter or the unmarried one—steps in to do the caretaking while the other siblings check in here and there, and maybe offer some money to the caretaking daughter (or son). The other siblings don’t understand how much of a burden Mom and Dad are on the caretaker. If you see this beginning to happen in your family, call a family meeting
and set a plan. Expect some denial all around. No one wants to admit that Mom and Dad aren’t able to be totally independent anymore. Push for everyone to come to an agreement on what to do so that you don’t end up doing all the caretaking.

If your parents are still independent and in good health, talk to them and your siblings now and set up a plan for what to do should Mom or Dad become frail or ill. Urge your parents to do estate planning and end-of-life planning. Have them set up and sign a health care POA (power of attorney) so someone can deal with their finances if they become incapacitated. Also, have them set up a living will so you have a legal document spelling out their wishes when it comes to end-of-life medical interventions, and a MOST (medical orders for scope of treatment) form. The MOST form, which must be reviewed yearly, is far more explicit and detailed than the living will. For example, a MOST form includes an option to choose a do-not-resuscitate (DNR) order, which means that if your parent goes into cardiac arrest, she does not want cardiopulmonary resuscitation administered. The harsh truth is that CPR often breaks the person’s ribs and rarely even works, or if it does work, it often leads to diminished quality of life. It’s important to know whether your parent wants to spend his last minutes of life on a floor or hospital bed having someone pound on his chest—or to risk surviving and becoming an invalid. You can get the forms I’ve mentioned on the Internet; they can vary from state to state and country to country, so you want to read them carefully to make sure they cover what you need covered. The MOST form should be printed out on bright-colored paper and posted visibly on your loved one’s bed so that every person can see it and follow the instructions clearly.

If your parent is open to it, you can plan even further ahead. I recently took a walk with my mother and asked her what she wanted for her funeral. Given her relationship with organized religion, she was most clear on the fact that she didn’t want a minister anywhere near when it came time for the funeral. She’s fine with a Vedanta monk, however, who is a friend of the family. And she wants to be cremated and have her ashes strewn from a small airplane over the back hill on the farm where we all grew up. I asked her if she wanted to have one of us make a video of
some “parting comments” in the next year or two that we could play at a memorial service after her death; Mom said she’d think about it. She also wants her service within a couple of days after her death—that matters to her, and I want to honor that.

While we’re on the subject of making end-of-life wishes clear, start thinking about your own plan for leaving this world for the next. I don’t care if you’re 30—there’s no time like the present to create a vision for your transition. Remember, healthy centenarians usually die in their sleep, not in a hospital bed. Don’t set up your loved ones to try to guess at your wishes and wrestle with the doctors and the state and your other relatives to try get everyone on the same page. Develop a loving relationship with yourself, with the people in your life, and with the Divine. I don’t think it’s death we fear so much as the possibility that we won’t get to truly complete the unfinished emotional business that is part of our soul school in the first place. Consider what we can all learn from the many who have had near-death experiences and now teach us that when we pass over, we will find that we are loved and cherished beyond anything we can imagine. Anita Moorjani says that having died and come back, she no longer works so hard at being “spiritual.” Instead, her near-death experience taught her that truly loving and taking care of herself in daily life were most important. Live fully now, trust the process of life, and plan for how you want to make your exit. No one wants to be a burden on the people they love. Avoiding the conversation about planning for the end pretty much ensures that will happen!

Ira Byock, M.D., former director of palliative medicine at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, has said, “When people die well, their families grieve lighter.” He explains that what matters most as your relationship with your loved ones in this life draws to an end is saying four things: “please forgive me,” “I forgive you,” “thank you,” and “I love you.”
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Truly, the deathbed can be a place of amazing healing. My sister and brother-in-law lived with his mother, Thelma, for the last six months of her life until she finally passed at age 94. Thelma had been a successful research chemist and a natural leader in her community. She wanted to die in her own home, and was a fighter until almost
the very end of her life. One day, toward the end, she could no longer stand up, and she laid her head on her son’s shoulder. Then she told him, “You’ve done a good job.” These were words he’d never heard her say before—and they healed not only him, but his children as well.

After that, his mother slipped into a coma and didn’t eat or drink for five days. Meanwhile, her entire extended family gathered around her. On what would be the final day of her life, her great-grandson, who was just a toddler, said, “When is she going to die?” The child’s mother was embarrassed because Thelma had always been a most proper individual, with a strong personality. But immediately after the boy asked his question, Thelma suddenly had a moment of lucidity and said with great compassion, “He can’t help it, dear.” And with that, she took her final breath. She had a good death.

If all this talk of death is making you want to get on with life, good! To quote Rebecca Authement, “Thoughts of death are best used to get on with life. Death will come in its own time. Get your affairs in order should be a daily mantra, not something said to a person with a terminal diagnosis.”

THE ERA OF COMMUNITY

It’s hard not to be scared in times of uncertainty, whether it’s a transitional time in your life or a transitional period that everyone is facing. As I write this, there are astrologic events happening that we haven’t experienced since 1966—perhaps before you were born. The last time the celestial bodies were in a similar position was a very chaotic time when the women’s movement, civil rights, gay rights, and the very unpopular Vietnam War were all in the news. It was also the beginning of waves of women and nonwhite individuals entering professional schools in significant numbers for the first time in history. Today, we’re entering a new era and experiencing what shamanic astrologer Daniel Giamario calls “the turning of the ages.” You won’t find security in money, power, or doing things the way you’ve always done them. Give up the fear habit and replace it with faith, love, and community connections. You
will
find support and sustenance in your
relationships with those around you. We need to be thinking about community support as a primary way to help us release fear, anger, and grief and develop a greater sense of safety, happiness, and optimism—and to keep us healthy and ageless. Social isolation and loneliness are a major health risk, right up there with smoking cigarettes, high blood pressure, obesity, and a sedentary lifestyle.
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The happiest people are those who have a tribe. In the documentary
Happy,
the elderly women of Okinawa, Japan, one of the famous Blue Zones where people enjoy an unusually long healthspan and lifespan, talk about being sisters to each other and interacting and playing with the children on the island; a single mother in Denmark explains why communal living with a dozen or so families was key to overcoming her loneliness and fear. We aren’t meant to live alone and disconnected. In his study of healthy centenarians, Dr. Mario Martinez finds that they all live in “subcultures” of like-minded individuals who support their joyful and healthy outlook.

Many people feel close to their family and close friends who serve as their tribe, but we can also receive support from the larger tribe of the human race. Social media has helped us recognize our interconnectedness. I’m a regular over at Tosha Silver’s Facebook page, where a tribe of us follow Tosha’s wonderful writing and example of turning our lives over to the Divine Beloved. On my birthday, I was on a family cruise of the Greek islands and Turkey—a dream-come-true vacation for all of us—and I checked Tosha’s page, where she’d posted about my birthday. A woman named Yesim had posted “Happy Birthday all the way from Istanbul.” I loved her picture—she looked so vibrant! I took a chance and asked if she wanted to meet my family when we arrived in her city. Not only did Yesim meet us, she became our family tour guide for the weekend, getting us into places we would never have been able to visit without her. She also became my friend. The moment I met her, I knew that I had met a true kindred spirit. My entire family felt the same!

This is how we’re designed to interact with each other: remembering that we’re all sisters and brothers, and letting go of our social anxiety, fear, and shame to reach out to say hey, let’s
enjoy this experience together. When we do that, we share cardiac coherence. Our hearts actually synchronize with each other and change the energy field we share. We also begin to attract persons, places, and things that reflect our celebration of life. The universe reaches out and gives us a high five, and the Goddess herself smiles. So move into the new era of community by building a sustainable tribe of support.

And when it comes to your tribe, be judicious about who is in it. The people around you can help you reconnect to the life force and flourish or they can drain you and depress you. When we first started the Women to Women health center years ago, at a time when women doctors and nurse practitioners treating only women was a radical shift, some colleagues I respected responded with resistance and sarcasm, the way most people do when confronted with new ideas. I learned to be careful about choosing the people I shared my ideas with. I didn’t need colleagues who were highly critical and unsupportive of the changes I was making in my practice and my perspective, especially when my ideas were new and tender. Some of these colleagues were people I had known for years; we had shared a long and rich history in the trenches of medical training. I loved and respected them. But just as plants outgrow their pots, I was outgrowing them.

You may have to turn the volume down on some relationships, or even let go of them, and commit to bringing new people into your life who will be more supportive of you. The good news is that the universe will provide you with new members of your “tribe,” sometimes in the most extraordinary ways. Once you make the change inside of you, your energy will shift; those who resonate with you energetically will gravitate your way and those who don’t will start to fall away. Years after transforming the way I practiced and thought about medicine, I find that I’m a magnet for people who believe in inspiring women to experience wellness through feeling connected with their joy and their life force. I regularly meet people I want to add to my tribe.

There are people who truly want to vibrate at a higher frequency and be happier and lighter in mood and attitude. But some people who will be attracted to your lightness of being will bring to the table their old, negative emotional patterns. They
will love what they get from you, but they will drain you because they’re not committed to becoming lighter themselves. They are emotional vampires. You might not realize that they are sucking you dry because they seem to be so nice and supportive at first. They may not realize what they’re doing to you. But in time, you’ll see that whenever you interact with them, you come away feeling as if someone just took a pint of blood out of you. I have felt as though I had to get down on the floor and go to sleep after interacting with certain individuals. In fact, sometimes I feel this way just from reading an e-mail from one of them! Those people are mostly gone from my life at this point, but it sure took a while to figure out this pattern.