087 - What would you do with two months? And other questions.

Welcome back. Or welcome.

I want to be helpful to you. Which means spending time reflecting on what was or was not helpful to people in grief and difficult times.

And at the moment, I think I’m leaning more toward helping and less toward reflecting. I’ve had extra shifts. I’ve been cluttering my mind.

I’ll tell you some stories and that will help me reflect.

What do you want to do with the time?

The guy wasn’t very old, compared to me. The diagnosis was recent and rough. “I’m not religious,” he said when we started talking. “Sometimes,” I said, “I’m not either.”

We started to talk. He described what he had heard. After listening for a bit, I said, “If the options are two months or two years, think about what you want to do with the time.”

What conversations do you want to have? What habits do you want to help people form? What plans and paperwork and arrangements need to be put into place? What bridges do you need to build or to burn?

I told him about a room I’d been in. The spouse said, “All I want is two more days.” I prayed. The spouse begged. The patient wasn’t responsive at all.

The spouse got almost two more days. But I’ve always wondered why they wanted two more days. What arrangements? What conversations that only one participated in? What milestone? What was there about two more days? I will never know. And I am grateful for them for those days.

I’m not a great goals person. But I like the question. Two days, two months, two years. What do we want to do with the time? And better, perhaps, how do we want to help someone else with their two days or two months or two years?

Practicality is not a wrong response in grief.

I was asked the same question twice this week: “Do I wait for the funeral home to call me, or do I call them?” The question came from two daughters, though the families and rooms and situations were completely different.

They asked me because in our health system, the chaplain is the person who says, “What funeral home are you using?” And then we complete some paperwork.

The first conversation was over the phone.

“The funeral home will have your phone number,” I answered. “So you can wait or you can call.”

Then I said, for the first time in nearly nine years of doing this, “It depends on whether you want to wait on their call or you want to take care of things.”

She paused and said, “I’ll call.”

The next day, I was in another room with another daughter. She asked which way the call should go. I laughed a little. We’d been talking for several minutes I knew it was fine to laugh.

I said, “Yesterday, here’s what I told someone else.”

She laughed, too.

“I’ll call,” she said. “I like to take care of things.”

I tell you that story for two reasons. First, even in the room with your mother’s body, sometimes laughter is an appropriate response. Second, our personalities and ways of working don’t disappear in the first moments of grief.

That said, I told the second daughter not to be surprised if she suddenly couldn’t take care of things. She understood.

Sometimes you can walk away.

On a platform where you post things, like Facebook, you can delete comments on your posts. There is no contract that says, “If you express an opinion because your heart is breaking, people can make comments on that opinion, and you have to leave them.” You can, I think, delete or hide them.

I mention this because I didn’t hide a comment. I wrote a post, inviting people to be kind. Someone commented, mostly missing the point, though partially proving the point. I left it up and fretted. I should have hidden it.

I talk about this idea in This is Hard, my book for grieving people.

Here’s the chapter:

People say stupid things. But they usually mean well.

The mom and dad were sitting by the bed. Their toddler was close to death. Within an hour or two, the child would be gone.

I was talking them through what was going to happen next. I said, “People are going to say things without thinking.”

There are so many things people say. In one of our oldest stories of comfort that failed, Job lost his kids, his belongings, and his health. And then Job’s three friends rubbed pain into his wounded heart with words of blame.

The mom nodded. She understood. And she said, “But they mean well.”

She’s right, of course, but she was more gracious than I would be.

What can you do?

You can smile and nod. You can avoid those people (at least for now). You can enlist a friend to be with you and protect you. You can excuse yourself to go to the restroom. You can respond with, “I know you mean well, but that’s not how I feel at the moment.”

You can find the people who give you life.

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Thanks for reading.

I’m thinking a little more clearly, thanks to you being on the other end of this writing. Next week, I think I’ll have some suggestions for Thanksgiving in the context of grief of various kinds.

Between now and then, have some good in your days.

Jon