Don’t Shoot the Messenger? Gimme a break!

April 30, 2012 By toughconversations Leave a Comment

I was recently asked to pass a message from one party to another. Party A didn’t want to confront Party B. Reluctantly I agreed to be the go-between. And as usual, I turned out to be as much the enemy in the eyes of the recipient as the person who asked me to relay her message.

Talk about a tough conversation? It was impossible. So, I decided to check in with an expert on messaging: the daughter of a divorced couple.

Even though most divorce agreements state that the parties will not ask their child to pass messages between them, it is honored more in the breach than in practice.

She generously shared her five rules for message transmission. With her permission I am passing them on to you.

1. Prepare to be shot. No matter how hard you try not to be in the line of fire you will likely be a target.

2. Try to impress on the recipient that you are in no way responsible for coming up with the message. Try even though you’ll probably fail.

3. Empathize with the recipient. Let him or her know that you understand how they feel; how difficult it must be to hear what you have to say.

4. Get ready to listen to the recipient’s vent. Sadly, your messaging job isn’t complete until you have duly heard the recipient blast away at whomever you represent as well as yourself.

5. Finally, proclaim your neutrality. It is critical that you tell the recipient that you don’t have a dog in this fight.

The best advice that I can proffer, however, is this:  unless you’re a trained mediator, refuse to be the messenger. Just say no.

Sig Cohen

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Asking The Right Questions

December 19, 2011 By toughconversations Leave a Comment

My partner Sig and wife Susan recently celebrated a significant wedding anniversary with their faith community. Sig spoke on a reading from Chapter 40 of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. Joseph, who has been unjustly imprisoned, notices that two fellow prisoners seem troubled. He asks, “Why are your faces downcast today?” This question opens a conversation that results in Joseph’s being freed, becoming the most powerful man in Egypt under Pharaoh, and changing the course of history.

Sig’s point:  It can be more helpful to ask the right questions than to have the right answers. To notice another’s body language and respond empathetically to another’s mood is a way to build trust. These skills help couples build enduring marriages like Sig’s and Susan’s. They are tools that smooth workplace relationships, cross generational divides, and help to heal old wounds.

What kinds of questions do this? Questions that are open – we don’t know the answer – and that show interest without prying. They respect the other’s dignity and boundaries. They invite a real exchange, in as much depth as the other senses is comfortable and safe. Opportunities abound daily to practice this healing act, if you’re willing to engage.

Young friends do it without thinking. “¿Qué pasa?”  “What’s up?”
Elder friends do it with each other. “How’s your spirit?”
Co-workers do it. “What are you working on these days?”
Couples do it. “Honey, you seem happy. Did something good happen today?”
Families do it. “Mom, how was it for you when Dad was transferred to New York?”
Strangers do it. “What brings you to this meeting?”
To almost anyone: “What do you think about …..?”

An open question can’t be answered yes or no. You’ll know you’ve asked a good one when you get a response to which your next words can be, “Tell me more.”

This holiday give yourself and someone else the priceless gift of a good conversation!

Carolyn

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Tube Tales

September 25, 2011 By toughconversations Leave a Comment

(The following stories are true; only the names have been changed.)
1. My friend Linda’s grandmother was in a coma. The doctors had put her on life support. After several months in this condition Linda’s mother, Gail, was unsure how to proceed even though she was named grandmother’s health care proxy. So Gail invited the 12 closest family members to grandmother’s bedside. Once assembled, she asked them to vote on whether to remove life support. Nine voted yea; three nay. Life support was withdrawn, and grandmother died within hours. The three nays realized that removing life support made sense and were relieved to know that grandmother expired painlessly.
2. Twenty years ago Stuart moved to Washington having renounced his family ties. We knew nothing about Stuart other than he had previously lived in upstate New York. Stuart developed a virulent form of abdominal cancer, which went untreated. While visiting a friend his condition deteriorated such that he was taken by emergency vehicle to a nearby hospital, placed on life support, and administered morphine. Stuart had no living will nor a DNR order. (Do Not Resuscitate.) His friends were at a loss how to proceed as was the medical staff. After three days the doctors decided to reduce the morphine drip to the point that Stuart regained consciousness. When he did, a doctor asked him what he wanted to do. Stuart mumbled that he wanted to ‘go home.’ His answer gave the doctors sufficient justification to remove life support and transfer him to a hospice where he died a few days later.
3. When my cousin Joan’s mother was admitted to the ICU of a local hospital, it was clear that she might never regain consciousness. Joan’s older brother, Sam, was her mother’s health care proxy. Both Joan and her younger sister Carol did not want their mother to remain indefinitely on life support. Sam did, and because he was named health care proxy, he prevailed. Their mother remained in a coma for the next two years before she passed away. Given the sisters’ anguish over their mother’s prolonged coma and the huge cost the family incurred, they haven’t spoken with Sam since.
Moral of the stories? Plan ahead. Make sure that everyone in the family whether they suffer from a chronic disease or not has a living will or a health care power of attorney, or proxy. Try to reach consensus on whether to use life support or allow nature to take its course. One of the best tools we’ve found is “Five Questions” which has become America’s most popular living will because it is written in everyday language and helps start and structure important conversations about care in times of serious illness. See www.agingwithdignity.org.
Sig Cohen

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Mid-term for Boomers…and Everyone Else

August 14, 2011 By toughconversations Leave a Comment

In our last blog we discussed the lack of knowledge among most boomers of what it means to grow old. Pretty alarming stuff.
This week let’s find out how much you know about what to expect in your “golden years” and provide you with a few answers so you can start planning.

1. Who qualifies as a “Boomer”?
Answer: Anyone born between 1946 and 1964. According to The Boomer Project, the first wave of Boomers are turning 65 this year (2011) at a rate of more than 8,000 a day!

2. What are the eight levels of professional care that some of you may need as you grow older?
Answer: Senior Centers
Adult Care Centers
In-home non-medical care
In-home medical care
Retirement and independent living communities
Assisted-living communities
Skilled nursing homes
Hospice care

3. Have much could some of these care levels cost you in today’s dollars?

Senior Centers: Nominal (Typically a per-day fee for congregate means and other activities)

Adult Day Care: $15,250

In-Home Non-Medical Care: $18,000

Independent Living: Less than $30,000

Assisted Living: $36,000

Skilled Nursing Home: $78,000

4. How much longer can you expect to live? According to the US Census Bureau, the number of people in the U.S. over the age of 100 in 2050 could be anywhere from 834,000 to more than one million.

While more than half of all Americans will spend part of their senior years in long-term care situations, the study points out that few have the resources to cover such a major expense. Don’t expect Medicare and Medicaid to provide full coverage for these costs. At best they will offer only limited coverage under certain circumstances.

Besides the information gap, the study found that the U.S. has a “shortage of trained professionals to handle the growing number of geriatric cases.” For example, the number of geriatric psychiatrists will diminish from one for every 11,372 Americans to one for every 20,192 Americans by 2030.

The study concludes that a massive public information campaign is needed to bridge this knowledge gap, but that it “would pay for itself many times over in lowered costs for senior care and less suffering for millions of Americans.”

The above information is taken from: “Seniors and the Information Gap.” A White Paper from Home Instead Senior Care, a US-based international franchise network providing high quality, non-medical senior home care.

Sig Cohen

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Stuck in the Information Gap?

August 7, 2011 By toughconversations Leave a Comment

Dear Reader,

Please take a minute to answer these four questions:

1. Have you thought about the possibility that you may need senior care as you grow older?

2. If yes, are you aware of the various senior care options that you may need and that are available to you?

3. If yes again, have you begun planning for your and your family members’ senior care?

4. Do you know what these options may cost you (and your older adult parents) as you both get older and, hopefully not, become infirm?

If you answered YES to just one of these questions, consider yourself in a minority.
According to a 2009 study carried out by the Boomer Project* for Home Instead** a majority of the respondentsqueried queried (a whopping 73 per cent of the adult children, i.e., Baby Boomers)  said they have neither thought about nor planned for the kinds of the care they may need as they grow older.

More disturbing: 50% of the seniors surveyed indicated that they have neither thought about nor planned for their own future care needs.

The survey revealed that most respondents:
• Knew little about the care options available to them,
• Were ‘misguided’ about the cost of these options, and
• Were ‘poorly informed’ about how they will pay foror how much these options will cost them.

Most believe that their social security and Medicare benefits will be sufficient to cover these expenses. Only 18 per cent of the adult children cited long-term care insurance as a possible source for financing their future care needs. And only 21 per cent of the seniors surveyed could name long-term care as a potential financial resource.

These findings were so alarming (to us, at least) that we plan to devote the next two blog posts to information that emerged from this survey. Stay tuned.

Sig Cohen

* The Boomer Project provides market research and strategic consulting to corporations, industry associations, civic and non-profit organizations.

** Home Instead Senior Care is a U.S. based international franchise network that provides high quality non-medical senior home care. It consists of more than 875 locally owned and operated offices that help seniors and their families through the home care stage of aging.

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When No One’s To Blame

August 1, 2011 By toughconversations 8 Comments

I’m looking out from the deck of my beach house in Delaware at the wild wetlands behind, struggling to digest an enormous dumpling of grief.

A week ago today (on Saturday, July 23) my vibrant, fit, generous friend Kate fell off her bike in Rock Creek Park and woke up in the ICU of Washington Hospital Center, paralyzed from the neck down. Unable to speak but fully conscious, she could only blink yes or no.

On Thursday she died.

Kate was a leader in my faith community, and we’re all stunned. Any death is disorienting, but one so random and unexpected is especially hard to absorb.

One of my personal mottoes is “Plan ahead. Work your plan. But always have a Plan B. And C.” It’s a way to try to exert some control over the future.

Kate planned ahead. She wore a helmet. She was an experienced biker. Last Saturday she chose to ride early in the morning before the sun was too hot or the traffic too thick. She was riding on a bike path, not the street. But an obstruction in the path forced her (and other bikers) to go on the grass. She hit some kind of bump in the ground and it killed her.

At Tough Conversations we advocate planning ahead. We still think that’s important. But we all need the humility to recognize life is fragile. Sometimes we simply have to acknowledge that we’re not ultimately in charge. Our best plans can be swept away by a tsunami or a nuclear meltdown or a bike accident. Tragedy strikes and it’s nobody’s fault.

Sometimes simple acceptance is the only path to a measure of peace.

Carolyn Parr

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Right and Righteous? Give It Up!

July 25, 2011 By toughconversations 2 Comments

Picture this: An extended family is gathered for a Thanksgiving feast. A granddaughter announces she’s moving in with her boyfriend. A son has brought his same-sex partner to meet the family. You learn your favorite cousin had an abortion. The family vegetarian ostentatiously declines the turkey and anything it touched. Your Mom’s friend who helped make dinner is a guy 10 years younger than she and you suspect he’s more than a “friend.” A Marine in uniform and a peace activist complete the scene.

(I’m only partially making this up. I’ve seen each of these situations – but, I confess, never all at once!)

The need to be right and righteous can derail family relationships — sometimes forever– quicker than anything else. When someone says, “It’s a matter of principle” or starts quoting Scripture to buttress a position, or refers to those who disagree as “evil,” it’s time to pass the Pepto Bismol.

What’s wrong with wanting to be right? And good? Nothing, if we have the humility to understand we may be wrong. Or, more realistically, we may be partly right and partly wrong. Of course it’s a good thing to seek truth and to act from a moral basis. But we can only see through our own limited experience. To insist that another is not only wrong but even immoral leads to broken families, broken politics, and in extreme cases, war.

And yet, common ground, common values can be found in the midst of so much diversity. We just have to be willing to focus on the big picture.

So what can this family talk about? Anything they want to, if they keep their vision large enough. They may still have many common values: a yearning to give and receive love, kindness to animals, a safe world in which to bring up children, respect for human life. There are many ways to express these values. Some are represented at the table; others haven’t yet been dreamed.

Rumi, a 12th century Persian poet, said it this way:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field.
I will meet you there.

Happy family gatherings,

Carolyn Parr

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Clean As You Go

July 11, 2011 By toughconversations 2 Comments

Jerry and I recently visited a young couple in their beautiful home. They both have careers, 10-year-old twins, and two dogs – yet their house was sparkling. Thinking of my own less-than-twinkling space, I asked, “How do you keep your house so clean?”

The husband, wife, and one twin said in unison: “Clean as you go!”

Well, Jerry and I adopted that slogan, and our home has become much more orderly with very little extra effort. I started to think about how this might apply in other areas – like relationships.

Say, you drive over to take your mom to lunch, and find her happily eating a tuna sandwich all alone. How might you respond?

You could gunnysack your disappointment and pretend nothing’s wrong. You could call your sisters and complain. You could chew Mom out for being inconsiderate and never writing anything down or checking her calendar. You could “catastrophize,” decide she has Alzheimer’s, and start looking for a nursing home. The list goes on.

Or you could clean as you go.

“Mom, I’m surprised you’re eating. Did you forget we were going out to lunch?” If she is distressed that she forgot, forgive her. But take the opening to explore what’s going on. Has she been forgetting a lot of other things lately? If she says yes, ask whether that worries her. Offer to take her to a doctor for a checkup. This could be a cause for real concern and an opportunity to act quickly.

If she blows you off, as in “I was hungry and couldn’t wait. I didn’t think you’d mind,” clean as you go another way. Say you do mind. You’re disappointed. And hungry. Maybe she’ll fix you something to eat, and you can talk in a loving way about why you wanted special time with her. And then let it go. But do pay new attention to other behavior changes.

In mediation clients say they wish they had not ignored early clues that something was askew. Unexplained expenditures (like a number of checks written to Cash) can be a warning that a parent is being drawn into a scam. Or an addiction. At 90, my own father started to receive large amounts of mail from a publishing lottery. I wondered, but didn’t ask because I thought it was none of my business. Then, when he was in the hospital I found an unpaid bill of over $4,000.00 for merchandise, hidden under his bed, unopened. He was trying to win a million dollars to leave my sisters and me.

The point is, cleaning as you go in a relationship has two benefits: It resolves small offenses before they become bleeding wounds. And it can present an opportunity to  head off a more serious problem.

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Conversations That Bless

July 4, 2011 By toughconversations Leave a Comment

In a wonderful book, My Grandfather’s Blessings, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen tells of childhood conversations she shared with her grandfather, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi. Every afternoon when she came home from school, they shared tea and he told her stories. His stories guided Naomi’s entire life.

When she was 4 years old, he told her a story of creation. A great ball of darkness broke up into countless sparks of light which were scattered throughout the universe. There is a god-spark in everyone and everything. To listen and to notice the light in others is to heal the world. He told her we are born to bless and serve life. He himself had a blessing for everything, and he taught many of them to Naomi.

When Naomi was 7, she and her grandfather had a very difficult conversation. He was very sick and he told her he was dying. He said he would be going somewhere else, closer to God. He said she wouldn’t be able to visit him there. “But,” he said, I will watch over you and I will bless those who bless you.”

Now in her 70’s, Dr. Remen says her life has been blessed by a great many people, and each of them has been her grandfather’s blessing. She has passed it on. After years as a pediatrician, she began to lead support groups for doctors who were treating cancer patients and carrying enormous grief they couldn’t express. Then she expanded to treat cancer patients themselves and others suffering from incurable diseases. Herself a victim of Crohn’s disease since age 15, she now helps people find meaning in their own suffering. And she teaches them to bless life, to bless others.

These blessings are spread through conversations, some of them tough: stories, listening, sharing compassion.

Dr. Remen says, “The power of our blessing is not diminished by illness or age.” It’s something we can do until we die. Our struggles and memories give hope to others.

Carolyn Parr

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Did You Cut the Toikey?

June 27, 2011 By toughconversations 5 Comments

It’s funny how a single incident or remark can change a relationship forever. The slightest word, look or act can radically and unexpectedly shift the ground beneath us. A graphic expression of this occurred in the 1991 film Avalon, which follows the fortunes of an extended immigrant Jewish family after World War II.

Over the years the family developed several traditions that bound its members together. One was Thanksgiving dinner. It happened that one brother and his wife habitually arrived late for the event. So one year the host decided not to wait for his brother to arrive and began carving the turkey.

When the brother and his wife finally arrived and saw that the meal had begun, he exploded and left the house screaming: “I can’t believe you cut the toikey!”

According to the story, that moment irreparably severed the bond between two brothers and their families.

The incident mirrors what often happens in real life: A will that favors one child over another; a dispute among siblings over whether to place an incapacitated parent in a nursing home; or unilaterally deciding that a family member should no longer drive now that she’s reached a certain age. All of these actions can forever alter a previously stable (and loving) relationship.

How can we know the repercussions of our actions or words? What does it take to anticipate the impact of a single remark, or action? Maybe the best we can do is think through the repercussions of our actions and put ourselves in the place of a potentially aggrieved party. Perhaps, there is nothing we can do to prevent hurting, offending, or angering someone who at the slightest remark will turn a relationship on its head and allow years of friendship to evaporate in an instance.

Who are we? The person who easily takes offense and is willing to sacrifice a relationship in the name of pride or status? Or, someone who mindlessly makes statements that cause irreversible harm? Or, one who weighs the potential outcome and relies on his or her inner resources to guide their actions?

Sig

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