A Time to Feel Grateful, Sometimes After Loss

My husband Jim and I are packing this morning - we've got an early morning flight tomorrow to Dayton, Ohio. Our daughter Natalie's boyfriend grew up there and we're all meeting at his family home to celebrate Thanksgiving. 

Sipping my coffee, I began to think of all things I'm grateful for this year. Mom died on August 16 and in lots of ways, I still can't believe she's gone. But I searched for gratitude in the last year of Mom's life and this is what I found: 

• I feel grateful that just before Mom died, my sister and I went with her to a lovely hotel in a small town where her parents grew up and married. We reminisced about family history, explored pioneer gravestones (and found my great grandparents' markers)! We slept in the same room with views of the lake, a fire burning in the grate. 
• I am grateful that Mom had wonderful carers in the last year of her life - they loved her and she loved them.
• I feel grateful for my sister. Even though we've always been close, sometimes when life gets very busy, we take each other for granted. But we are hyper-aware of each other now, sharing our grief and our family memories. We've been holding hands a lot over the last few months. 
• I feel grateful for my husband Jim and our new puppy Daisy. I love my life and the chance I have to walk outside in the forest - nature heals my heart and soul. 
• I feel grateful for the love in our family, for our precious Nicholas and Natalie. I am grateful that Nick has been healthy and strong over the past year and that his carers love him. I feel grateful that our Natalie is thriving in her work and in her life with someone she loves very much. 
• I feel grateful that I have the opportunity to reflect on my life and share with so many others who, like me, have a life with caregiving at its heart.

Most of all, I am grateful that over the years, I have learned some lessons of resilience. I have learned to feel deeply grateful, especially for the love in our family. I hope you feel the love of family, too. Happy Thanksgiving to all my American friends and family! 

For Caregivers, It's All About Gratitude

My husband Jim and I are in Milwaukee visiting our daughter.  Natalie works here at an arts research foundation and we really wanted to see where she lives (it's so important for us parents to visualise our kids in their surroundings!). It's a wonderful city and we're excited to leave for Dayton, OH tomorrow where we're joining Natalie's boyfriend and his family for Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is always a time to reflect on gratitude. We wonder what we'll say this year at the dinner table - what exactly ARE we grateful for? Caregivers know that every day, there must be at least one thing to be thankful for. And that mindful practice of purposefully feeling gratitude is one of the keys to surviving long term caregiving.  Science proves it.

So, what am grateful for this year?

• I am grateful for my health - that I can still dance and exercise.
• I am grateful for my home and for cooking and eating good food.
• I am grateful that we are all alive and relative pain-free, especially Nick and my Mum.
• I am grateful for the wonderful people who help our family care for those we love.

And most of all, I am grateful for the love in my family and in my circle of dear friends.

This Thanksgiving, I wish you all grateful hearts and peaceful minds - good food and kind conversation. All the best and Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

PS: If you would like to test your own Gratitude Score, have a look at THIS! And if you'd like to tell a story about your own gratitude practice (or read about others'), look at THIS!

FOR YOU, ON NATIONAL CAREGIVER DAY

You won't receive any cards or cakes for National Caregiver Day.  You won't be handed a box of chocolates or a new diamond ring either.  If you did, you would have made it or bought it and wrapped it yourself. 

That's the thing about caregiving, it's for someone else, usually someone we love.  And that's because caregivers learn, over time, how to derive deep satisfaction from a smile, a meal eaten by our loved one, washed hair, calmed anxieties and memories shared.  We don't need gifts of chocolates or diamond jewellery to understand how our loving acts are needed and appreciated (although we'd never turn down those earthly gifts, of course!). 

National Caregiving Day is an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of our caring lives and to thank ourselves, not for being perfect, but for being the best caregivers we know how to be.  National Caregiving Day is a chance to celebrate the nobility in our daily lives.  Because we are noble - more noble than bankers, clerks, lawyers, sales reps, even teachers and police officers.  Ours is the most noble work and all those working professionals know that theirmost noble work happens at home, with family.  Caregiving is the core of what is most meaningful in life - our most intimate relations with those we love who are vulnerable and need our care.  Caregiving teaches us all life's most important lessons.  Eventually, after years of giving care, we become wise elders - that is our reward, and it's a rich one.

Thanksgiving 2013

This is Thanksgiving weekend in Canada.  It's early Saturday morning now and I'm packing groceries from the fridge into shopping bags to bring to our cottage in the mountains.  Everyone in our extended family is there already.  Except Nicholas and my Mum, of course.

Yesterday I visited Nick in the afternoon and together, we skyped my mother.  It was about 4 in the afternoon and we caught Mom still in her dressing gown.  Lately, there are very few days when she gets dressed.  My sister Karen will go to visit her with turkey on Monday, but Ma probably won't eat it.  She has ceased to be interested in food or clothing.  On our call yesterday, Mom was so funny and feisty.  She bemoaned the fact that she couldn't drive anymore and suggested to Nick and me that perhaps she should take up hitchhiking.  That topic brought back a memory of once, when she was young, she did hitchhike.  A good looking fellow on a motorcycle picked her up and she was only too happy to hop on (nevermind she would never have allowed me or my sister to ride on one!).  When Mom got off at her destination, she remembers that young man said, "Young lady, you are the first and only girl I have had on my bike that naturally leans in to the turns!"  I didn't bother mentioning Sheryl Sandberg's bestseller "Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead" because I didn't need to.  My mother could have written it.


Today, I am grateful that my Mom is still alive - that I can still hear her stories, some for the first time, like the one about hitchhiking or another one about her little friend Pinky Cohen who walked his ducks on a leash across Sherbrooke Street in Montreal in 1926.

Today, I am grateful that Nicholas is healthy.  His seizures are under control and now his night charts only indicate one or two very brief ones.  Quite a change from a few months ago when he regularly suffered over ten!  I am grateful that on Thanksgiving Monday, Nick will come to our house for a turkey dinner.  He is mostly tube-fed, but he'll love tasting a few bites of turkey and he'll chow down as much stuffing as he can.

Most of all, I am grateful for the love in our family.  I am grateful for the privilege of caring for the people in the world I love most. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!