Who Showed Up? What Went Right?

It’s a cruel irony.?

A loved one's death wreaks ultimate chaos on daily life when your coping skills feel nonexistent.

Even if your loved one took care in planning for their death, there’s nothing easy about settling their affairs. If you’re in charge, you find yourself dealing with every bureaucracy that touched your loved one’s life. Health care. Finance. Insurance. Probate court.

If your loved one didn’t leave a will, it pushes the chaos to a whole new level.

And then, there’s planning for memorial services. They can add an extensive to-do list to life at a time when getting out of bed demands your full effort.

Plus, at a time when you really need family members to step up, some may suddenly become high maintenance. They expect your emotional support when you’re barely holding it together yourself. Or maybe death has surfaced family dynamics you thought were resolved decades ago.

Then, there are those wild cards of life that keep coming. Lost jobs. Weather disasters. Pandemics.

Suddenly, you feel like the world has turned into a hostile place.

Here’s the thing: It hasn’t.

Even when we’re going through the darkest of times, life is always a mix of good luck and bad. Of difficult people and angels in disguise.

But when the bad part gets so awful, we forget the good stuff is out there, too.

There’s a reason for that. It’s part of our survival instinct. We learn through challenges. We store bad experiences, along with lessons learned, in memory. It’s how we stay prepared to face future adversity.

That’s why it takes intentional practice to see the network of support that’s still surrounds us.

The key is practicing gratitude-for-who-you-have and gratitude-for-how-things-happen.?~Emily and Amelia Nagoski, Burnout.

I’m talking about the people who show up. The luck that occurs when we least expect it. And, most importantly, the times we, ourselves, solve a problem creatively or move a difficult situation forward through special skills or pure grit.

Now I’m not at all saying to ignore, deny, and stop wrestling with the stress that’s inevitable after a loved one’s death. I believe we need to lean into frustration and pain to work through it.

But we also must supplement our hearts and minds daily with the positives. It’s a way of giving our natural defense system some R&R.

As you may have guessed, I’m talking about a daily gratitude practice.

But it’s a specific type of gratitude practice, one that I think is particularly suitable for those faced with the immense responsibilities around a loved one’s end of life. This practice is based on one described in the book Burnout, by Emily and Amelia Nagoski.

A real friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks out.?~ Walter Winchell, journalist

The exercise is to consciously recall the people and resources that helped you get through trying times:

1. Who showed up for me, for this current difficult situation or past ones? List three people who’ve helped you through your current struggles or in the past. Strangers count!

2. What’s worked out better than expected, either recently or in the past? Think of three times when something went right in the midst of a current or past life challenge.

3. How did I, personally,rise to the occasion and make this challenging situation work out? List three times you personally helped resolve a difficult situation through your own special skills, abilities, or talents.

Challenge yourself to do this practice once a day for a week. Record your thoughts in a journal and reread them a few times. For extra credit, share your memories with a friend. Better yet, write a thank you note to someone who showed up with you needed them.?

Before you know it, you’ll start thinking of these things spontaneously throughout the day. And the world will feel like a friendlier place.

Once that starts to happen, you can drop the practice if you want. Just remember to resume it if life starts to look bleak again.

For those enmeshed in settling a loved one’s affairs, this exercise tends to work better than the typical “what-I-have” gratitude practice. Instead of focusing on the things you have now, you re-build your faith that the good stuff, the mission-critical stuff, will materialize when you truly need it.

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