Life Purpose

6 Important Skills for the Living When Caring for the Dying

caring for the dying

“I am the midwife of my mother’s death”

That’s the title of a poem I wrote a few months before my 81-year-old mother had a stroke and passed away. I wrote it because I felt responsible, yet helpless, to ease her pain as her body became less reliable, her thoughts less coherent, and her resolve to continue living began to fade. Since being diagnosed with congestive heart failure, my mother had become increasingly dependent on me to help her manage the routines of life that sustained her and brought her joy – grocery shopping, swimming weekly at the gym, visiting my house once a week, or going to the doctor.

This is the story of what I learned about dying from the final months, weeks and days of my mother’s life.

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Three Funerals and an Album

Heather Stewart

My father passed away a couple years ago. My uncle one month before him. Another uncle a month after. I went to three funerals in the span of three months all at the same funeral home. I’m fairly certain the funeral home was getting suspicious of the ladies in our family. Had any of the men who passed away been rich, there would have been some arrests. If it weren’t my actual life, I would have thought I was playing a part in a film. Except Hugh Grant was nowhere to be found.

During that time, I felt so numb yet the most alert I had been in years. I was angry yet overwhelmed by love. Things were funnier and more painful. I felt more and less.

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Find and Live Your Kefi

Kefi

Kefi is a Greek word that can be described as a feeling of pure exhilaration where you have bliss, excitement, and euphoria. During moments of Kefi your entire being experiences a rush that you want to share with others. You smile, laugh, dance, or sing. You do whatever it takes to release this joy. Hard to translate since words cannot completely explain the feeling when one does experience it. While Greek dancing at the full moon party in Folegandros’ port, I had it, and this is when my friend explained the word to me. It was beautiful. My journey is about finding Kefi and I know that all of us can find it if we just let it in.

My life prior to May was not about living Kefi.  It was about achieving, climbing corporate ladders, making more money, getting more degrees, working long hours, thriving on stress, buying homes, saving for retirement, etc.  You get the picture.  I was doing everything right; the way society accepts and defines ‘how to live a successful life’.  I am very gracious for the abundance that 18 years of working brought me and the experience gained while working in top consulting firms, travelling the world, and engaging with some of the world’s largest corporations.  To some, this might sound like living the American Dream.  For me, it became a living nightmare as I dragged myself out of bed each morning to go into the office and sit in my dark cubicle.

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Stop Chasing Money and Start Chasing Richness

richness

It took me a long time to realize money would never make me happy.

A trip around the world finally drilled this truth into my brain, and it has dramatically changed my life. I spent my early years on a high-achievement track. I’d always been a go-getter: earning good grades in school, graduating at the top of my class, and moving rapidly up the career ladder. After my wife and I graduated from Harvard, I thought we had it made.

I found a high-powered job. I worked for a major consulting firm, flying around the world to solve tough problems with top executives. Still, something was missing.

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Rummaging Through the Vintage: How Lessons from Yesterday Can Transform Today

lessons from yesterday

I’m not always as diligent in the spring cleaning department, but I do make it a point every once in a while of cleaning out my closet of stuff that have accumulated over the years. It’s always interesting what I find. I’m always reminded of different points in my life, when I was into this or that fashion. Or household trinkets of one or other design style. It speaks to who I am and where I was. It also reminds me to be grateful for all that I have because I have so much.

So it was quite a surprise when I found myself not rummaging through my vintage fashion but through the vintage stages of my life when my childhood babysitter Mary called me out of the blue to let me know that she was visiting the area. I hadn’t seen her since I was thirteen or fourteen, but little did I know that spending time with her would be equivalent to my rummaging through the hallmarks of my closet. Only instead of pulling out long-forgotten personal treasures, I was nudged into re-evaluating where I was in life and where I wanted to be.

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The Hardest Truth: I Don’t Have a Passion

spark

In the study of philosophy, it is imperative to define terms at the outset. I always think of a passion or calling as being that thing that we must do in life, that thing without which we will be miserable most of the time.

That is a very big expectation, indeed.

I cannot count the number of days, weeks, and even years I have spent researching what my true passion may be. Name the assessment and I’m sure I’ve taken it. Meyers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator? Yup, many times. ISTJ anyone?

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Looking For Answers? I’m As Clueless As You Are

looking for answers

I didn’t know what I was doing when, as a child, I begged my parents for a dog. Yet I found myself, 12 years old, with a puppy. I had to get up every morning at a time I’d never before heard of to clean up its mess. I had to go out in the wind and rain and winter-chill to take it for a walk, day after day after day.

Today, I own another dog, and I still don’t exactly know what I’m doing. Sometimes she sits when I ask her to. Sometimes she gives me a look, “so you think you can tell me what to do, huh?” and wanders off to sniff the flowers.

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How to Escape Despair and Bring Meaning to Your Life

bring meaning to life

I have lost a lot of friends in my life. Each time I came face to face with the pain of loss, I was presented with a choice. In looking back at my life, I have come to realize that the choice was always the same.

At the age of 16, for one and a half years I squandered away my existence, lost in a world of drugs. Two friends who shared this life with me are no longer alive today due to the degree to which we immersed ourselves in despair and self-destruction. As cliche as this may sound, the truth is, almost overnight, my life changed forever.

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How to Live a Meaningful Life

meaningful life

It was a hard thing to admit – that I’d done everything I was told to do… and felt empty. Western culture tells us “Get a degree, get a job, get a home, make a lot of money, and happiness is yours.” I’ve tested the theory… It doesn’t work.

I used to be a teacher in the inner city. Every morning I would wake up at 530 am to go teach in the poverty stricken neighborhoods of Los Angeles, California. On some level it felt good. On paper, it looked great. Here I was – in my mid 20’s giving my heart and soul to educate america’s underserved youth. But if I’m honest, with you, with myself – I did it for the wrong reasons.

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Why You Can’t Live Without Passion

passion

I was watching a movie the other day called, “Peaceful Warrior.” There’s a character in that movie called, “Socrates.” He’s a very wise and intelligent guy. One of the things he said really caught my attention. He said, “Death isn’t sad. The sad thing is: most people don’t live at all.”

Most people don’t live. It seems almost esoteric or new agey to say something like that. But deep inside, I know it’s really true. Most people’s lives flash before their eyes. They go day in and day out just going through the movements. They’re not really… living.

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