A pensive moment at 18 years old during a college field trip
Perhaps it’s been native anxiety that vexed me in life. I’m a nail-biting kid who grew into a nail-biting adult. The roots of anxiety are chemical but also familial and cultural. Raised in a family with three other brothers, a pushy father, and an enabling mother rife with her own fears (projected upon us) it’s no wonder my life bears marks of self-confidence failures.
That said, there was no more competitive kid than me. I compensated for anxiety by trying to win everything in sight. Sports was also a release for the high-energy needs of a kid with ADHD. But I never rationally understood that condition as a child. I knew that any boring subject turned me into a lost soul staring out the window during class. Or else I drew. Art was something I could turn that attention-deficit focus into something real. Later on, I found writing too. Those three pursuits are my life’s salvation. They fueled whatever self-confidence I could muster through those elementary school years through college.
I once had a 3rd-grade teacher who gave me a choice. “Chris, you can stay inside and work on the classroom play or go out for recess. Which do you want to do?”
Well, I was leading the kickball home-run contest during recess. It made me the hero of the whole school. But she didn’t ask me about that. I told her, “I want to go out to recess.”
“Fine,” she blurted. “You don’t get to do either. You can sit here with your head down the whole period.” That’s what she made me do. She punished me for a choice I had sound reasons to make.
But in 4th grade, I had a teacher whose Robert’s English Series curriculum combined writing, art, and plays. I thrived in that class and wrote about it once on this blog or another. One day I received a phone call from National Public Radio. A reporter conducted a Lexis-Nexus search about that curriculum and my writing was the only article that turned up. They interviewed me about it. It made me feel good to be recognized for appreciating the value of integrated education. It bolstered my self-confidence to hear that someone else understood the value of helping kids, especially neurodivergent kids like me, find self-confidence through innovative teaching.
These days, I substitute teach and notice many kids struggling with classroom attention. Perhaps I should have chosen teaching as a profession, but I’m not sure I had the self-confidence or self-assurance earlier in life to do so. It takes enormous focus for effective classroom management. I might have been too forgiving or unwilling to discipline kids acting badly.
Part of me also resists those tactics because our elementary schools in Pennsylvania used corporal punishment to control kids. In first grade, I shoved a kid for knocking over a Stratego game we were playing during indoor recess due to a rainy day. The kid tattled on me and instantly a vicious old lady teacher named Mrs. Paloney entered the room, grabbed me by the neck and hauled me out into the hallway where she told me to drop my pants and underwear to the floor and proceeded to spank my bare ass in front of other children in the hall.
Trauma transfer
Now, by that age, I’d witnessed my father thumping my brothers to the point where I was traumatized as a child seeing his fury. It frightened me beyond words. So being spanked further traumatized me. Later that afternoon, I saw my best friend spanked out on the playground for committing some small slight. I broke down in tears.
My first-grade teacher, Mrs. Cutler, saw me crying and somehow sensed a deeper fear in me. She escorted me inside and asked, “Is there something else going on, Chris?”
I longed to be honest with her at that moment but didn’t fully grasp why I reacted that way. What I do know is that many years later, during my late 20s, I awoke at night pounding my pillow in a fever dream of anger and rage. That’s the moment I realized that childhood trauma follows you and undermines the ability to have trust in yourself and self-confidence too. Soon after that I sought counseling. That didn’t work because the therapist wasn’t that good at discerning my need to reconcile the longstanding impacts of unfortunate life events.
With my late wife Linda (left) best friends Greg and Francie, and my mother Emily following my win in the Geneva Community Classic 10K circa 1984
The long way around
During my late wife’s eight-year cancer survivorship, I sought counseling to help me manage caregiving for my late father as well. After a couple sessions, the therapist asked, “You seem good at forgiving others. How are you at forgiving yourself?”
That question answered numerous questions for me. It also allowed me to search past relationships and examine social (especially dating!) failures caused by that combination of early trauma, native anxiety and neurodivergent sensitivities. From then on, in my early fifties, I began building a different kind of self-confidence.
Racing in college cross country. Our team placed second in the nation.
Despite my lifelong struggles with a lack of self-respect and confidence, I achieved great things on many fronts. I led teams to national championships in running. I published art prints and won awards for design. I built a literacy project that grew to serve 375,000 families. And I’ve now published four books with several more on the way.
I also stood strong through ten-plus years of caregiving for my wife and father. Through that I learned patience which has an incredible effect, believe it or not, in building one’s self-confidence. I also grasped through experience that I have strong character under all sorts of duress. That strengthened my resolve and confidence in other ways. I walked out my father’s door one afternoon after my mother passed away in 2005 and realized, “This is all up to you, taking care of him now.” And I knew I could, and would, do my best at that.
My father was in fact a loving man whose adoration for his grandkids proved it.
Which meant engaging with my father daily through all his medical and social needs. Over time, I came to realize that despite his fatherhood struggles raising four headstrong boys, he’d done much for me in support of my art and writing and sports. “Pay attention to your craft,” he once advised. That’s the best advice any father can give.
I believe I also helped my brothers dissolve some of their misgivings about our dad. Once the two eldest had trouble engaging with him, that ability improved in later years.
So, while the call of self-confidence waivers at times, and costs me opportunities due to fear, that’s my big “resolution” this year, to shove fear aside and continue on the paths I love. I hope you can too.
Are you overcoming fears this year? Share at cudworthfix@gmail.com
I’ve learned the value of humility the hard way, just like everyone else. As a proud young athlete growing up, my main concern was winning every contest I could find. My older brothers challenged me daily in sports ranging from table tennis to basketball and all points between.
Having older brothers toughens you up. I transferred that sibling rivalry to competing with friends and then participating in competitive sports. At the age of ten, I pitched our Local 285 baseball team to victory in the second game of the Lancaster, Pennsylvania city championship.
Throughout high school and college, I led the teams I played on, eventually turning to running full-time, where I ran as the first man on teams that won conference and district championships. In college, that success continued as I competed as a Varsity runner in a cross country program that won our conference all four years and as a senior captain ran in the Top Five all season, leading our team to 2nd in the NCAA Division III championship. In track I won conference three years and made Nationals three years in the steeplechase.
Even after college, I kept competing and set all-new personal records at distances from the mile (sub-4:20) 5K (14:45) 10K (31:10) 10-mile (53:30) and 25K (1:24:25). In my best year I raced 24 times and won 12 of those road and track races.
The reason I share this journey is to explain that all this training and perseverance was cited by my coach as having extreme value when my late wife was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2005. “Your whole life has been a preparation for this,” he told me.
But what I wasn’t prepared for was the degree of patience required to be a good caregiver. As a person with ADHD, I always struggled sitting still, waiting for things to happen, and not being able to “do anything” in the moment. Learning patience when you have to wait for hours to get results, sit in quiet (or noisy) hospital rooms at a bedside with your partner, and keeping track of important details day-to-day, these are all key requirements in a caregiver. I had to learn them. The hard way.
On top of my wife’s care I was caregiver to my father who suffered a stroke back in 2003. Through eight years of my late wife’s survivorship I tended to my father too. She lived through 2013. He lived through 2015.
I learned humility from all that caregiving. Never did I think that I was doing things perfectly. Mistakes are made no matter how hard you try. Sometimes, it’s emotional mistakes. Becoming impatient. Letting anger take over. Getting frustrated when the patient doesn’t seem to appreciate you. Feeling ‘put upon’ when relatives won’t or can’t step up to help.
And there’s money mistakes. Medical too. But you muddle through. But one thing that you learn from all that is practical humility. You don’t think of yourself as better than others. In fact, its possible to be too hard on yourself. One therapist called me on that one. “You seem to be good at forgiving others,” she reminded me. “How are you at forgiving yourself?”
Both of those traits require honesty. You have to “get real” in order to “truly feel” your purpose in the moment. Get to know where your weak points are, and understanding your strengths. Learning to lean on others when (and if) you can, and embrace vulnerability. It’s a superpower.
That brings us to the trouble with hubris. Once you’ve been a caregiver it’s easy to spot false pride in others. It’s painful sometimes to realize how insensitive and willfully ignorant people can be. In the United States, our healthcare system doesn’t favor the weak. It rewards the rich and employed and too often casually disregards those most in need. I read about how Black women can’t get a fair shake in medical offices because practitioner don’t take their word seriously. I’ve heard about other women than my wife feeling something’s wrong in their body and doctors just write off the bloating to water weight when in reality it’s tumors growing on their ovaries and spitting out fluids. By the time they’re discovered, cancer has advanced.
And when I see the callous way that certain political parties treat the healthcare system in America, it makes me angry. Now, I’ve been the beneficiary of non-profit forgiveness of medical debt, so I’m not personally complaining. One time AT&T even wrote off a $500 cellphone bill during one of my wife’s most tenuous cancer recurrences.
But the idea that rich people are now running around passing judgment on programs like Medicare without considering the life stories of those insured through it, or maligning folks counting on Social Security they’ve saved for decades to support them in elder years, it makes no sense why people vote for the hubris of these greedy freaks whose money obsession says more about their own fears in life than it does about their supposed success
Hubris is the opposite of humility, the quality that makes us all better people whether we’re caregivers or not. When you look to leaders, take stock of where their humility meter reads. If they’re arrogant and dishonest, don’t throw your trust their way. They’ll only use you and discard you as fodder for their selfish ways.
My late wife Linda during the first year we’d met in the early 1980s
Tomorrow, March 26 of 2024 will mark eleven years since my late wife Linda Cudworth passed away. She survived through eight years of ovarian cancer, a Stage IIc diagnosis that proved persistent and aggressive through multiple surgeries, chemotherapy treatments (literally dozens in cycles of 5-8 at a time) and the pursuant side effects ranging from destroyed taste buds to feet and hands numbed by neuropathy so bad she could hardly manage to do the thing she loved most, which was gardening.
Yet persist she did. Long enough to see her son Evan graduate from college and begin work. And nearly long enough to see her daughter Emily graduate as well. It wasn’t an easy period for either of them, working in New York as Evan did at the time, and Emily looking to finish up college at Augustana while her mother’s health declined. Those events and the aftermath affect us all to this day.
Corporate wealth versus public health
But I also want to talk about something I’ve never fully addressed. That is, how the world and its work and healthcare systems treated us from the minute we received that initial diagnosis back in 2005.
At the time, my mother was also already fighting lymphoma with oral chemotherapy because she wanted to stay healthy enough to care for my father Stewart, who had a stroke in 2003 and never really recovered. His apraxia and aphasia stole his speech, and paralysis on his right side took away many of his other activities.
That made me the primary caregiver for both of my parents. So when the cancer diagnosis came along for my wife we were already dealing with considerable issues related to insurance and caregiving. That November, my mother was additionally diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She died after one chemo treatment that produced in her a life-ending stroke.
At the time, our family healthcare plan was administered through my employer the Daily Herald, a newspaper media company. We chose an HMO to save costs, but what that really meant was that our doctor options were limited by our plan. We were balancing our healthcare needs against all the other expenses we faced in life at the time with kids in high school and college.
We were just trying to get along. In the early 2000s we lived on my salary of $75,000-$80,000 a year. I also made an additional $15-20K per year freelancing, often working early mornings and late evenings as a remote freelance creative director and copywriter for an agency I’d later join as an employee. We used my wife’s preschool teaching income of $18K to save up and pay for my son’s college costs at the University of Chicago because our FAFSA was about $16K per year.
The Gold Standard
Linda had surgery in 2005 to remove the remainder of the ovarian tumor that the naive gynecologist had broken during exploratory surgery to check the cyst. That accident revealed the cancer, and it also unleashed millions of cancer cells throughout her abdomen. These implanted on the abdominal wall. We were grateful to find in our HMO a premiere gynecological oncologist named Dr. James Dolan who did investigative surgery to remove cancer. In a post-surgery meeting with me in a closed room, he quietly told me that her abdominal wall “felt like sandpaper” thanks to the cancer cells growing there. “I extracted as much as I could,” he told me.
After that, we proceeded with intravenous chemotherapy to kill as much cancer as we could without killing Linda. Then they recommended a “Gold Standard” tactic of dumping chemo directly into her abdominal cavity through a port in her belly. The nurses actually nudged the port loose with one treatment and the chemo spilled out making a white stain on her skin.
We probably could have sued over that, but our biggest concern was getting through the chemo so that she could return to something resembling a normal life after months and months of her being sick and tired and fed up with the entire debacle.
HMO ills
Our annual family vacations to Seven Mile Lake in Wisconsin were a tradition
All the while we wrestled with HMO bills and tried to keep up with our payments. Upon signing up for the HMO, we had to switch family doctors, leaving behind the physician that Linda trusted most. That practice, one that I’d been attending since I was twelve years old, no longer accepted the Blue Cross HMO we’d chosen. It’s a tragic thing when an insurance system takes medical decisions out of people’s hands.
To make matters weirder for me, during same time period my boss at the newspaper decided to conduct a 360-degree review on my performance at the company. Needless to say, I was a bit distracted that year. Thus the review held plenty of criticism. I’d been Administrative Associate of the Year in 2003, so I wasn’t a slouch of any kind. But thanks to the burdens of caregiving for my wife and parents, juggling bills and kids in college, and commuting all over five Chicago suburban counties to run the marketing efforts of six bureau offices, the year 2005 was not easy for me under the circumstances.
Yet despite these pressures, I still managed to grow a literacy project that represented $27M in market value to 375,000 families. My role also involved conducting 200 annual events as well as several dozen awards banquets, symposiums and sales programs for a newspaper with a circulation of 140,000 or so. Amid this flurry of activities, I had some problems, yes. But it also would have helped not to have been put under a 360 degree microscope while dealing with everything going on at the time.
Bigger money
I ultimately left the company in 2007, joining the agency where I’d been freelancing. Linda’s health was by then stabilizing. We felt like it was a good time to make the change given the failing nature of the newspaper industry. The Internet was stealing revenue and kicking the ass of nearly every newspaper in the country. Dozens were going out of business. I’d just won a $1M account for the agency by leading a pitch to a giant men’s clothier chain based out in Richmond, Virginia. My new salary would be $110,000 a year, almost $30,000 more than I’d been making at the newspaper.
But then tragedy struck again. Within a month of starting that new job in the summer of 2007, Linda’s CA-125 numbers began rising. The surgery and chemos she’d endured the previous years were not keeping the cancer at bay. It came back hard and fast that summer. The disappointment of having done the “Gold Standard” and having the cancer come back so fast was too much for Linda. She had a complete emotional breakdown, screaming in anger when we got the call that cancer was back. Her personal affect collapsed. Her parents spent time at our home during the day yet I spent every other hour at work checking on her as needed. My own performance suffered, and before long, the agency elected to fire me.
I get it. Company leadership wants positive, high-performing employees. The boss of that firm once looked at me and complained, “I like you better when you’re smiling.” I was just trying to survive at the time. I’d spent so much time on the phone during those months that I received a $500 cellular phone bill from our cellular provider. I took the bill to a local store and explained our situation. They told me that they’d credit back the entire bill. No charge. Obviously I thanked them profusely.
Back on the job hunt
My photo of a juvenile bald eagle.
But I was still out of work. At that point, cancer families have a choice to make, and it’s not pretty. Within a month or so, payments must be made to continue COBRA insurance coverage. That means the patient assumes the total costs of insurance. In our case those costs totaled $2000 a month. That’s a ton of money to pay before even considering monthly bills. So there I was, out of work with just a nest egg of cash available, suddenly thrown to the insurance wolves.
It took months for Linda to emerge from the depressive episode brought on by the emotional collapse. She could only bear to leave the house for short periods, usually with me, or sometimes, with her parents. Even that was tough. Meanwhile, she’d developed a condition called ascites, a swelling of the abdomen due to fluids caused by cancer. One night I walked in to find her lying on her side with the light in her eyes flat and nearly lifeless. I helped her into the car and we rushed to the hospital. The medical techs proceeded to drain several liters of fluid out of her gut. That can only be done a few times as the procedure has risks of causing infection and other problems. We needed to get her back into chemo to kill off the cancer that returned. The rest of 2007 was spent getting those treatments as occasionally her most trusted friends sat with her at the cancer treatment center if I had job interviews or freelance gigs to handle.
Making do
I got to work again by 2008, accepting a lower-paying job nearer to home at an audio-visual company. The salary was just $60,000, about half of what I’d been making at the agency. I took the position because there were some energetic young associates that just started at the company, which planned to launch a student response system for the education market. There was growth potential if that succeeded. Mostly I took the job so that I could be near enough to home to take care of Linda. She was going better again, having survived even more chemo and another surgery, but this time her hair fell out even faster and her hands went numb. She bought wigs and wore gloves to do her gardening.
The bills continued to escalate during that period. The costs of chemo and surgery shot up so high that we could not afford to pay for it all, a total of nearly $100,000 built up. I learned that the hospital where we having treatments done was a non-profit offering financial assistance. To my amazement, they reviewed our financial situation and agreed to pay 90% of all our bills. I sat at home that night crying in thanks. On that subject, I greatly admire wealthy people moved to support healthcare and hospitals. They rightly deserve to have their names on the facilities. Thank you. That’s indeed a beautiful thing that wealthy people do.
Ugly questions and healthcare roulette
That still leaves some ugly questions. Why does our insurance system work like this? It’s clear that no one really knows what’s going on with actual patients and their medical bills. I’ve long been a proponent of a national healthcare system for these reasons. The US should be like so many other countries around the world, investing in the health of its people rather than forcing them to play healthcare roulette.
In this country, real, everyday people feel the ugly brunt and abuses of the for-profit healthcare It’s an ugly process in which insurance companies, healthcare providers, the government, and employers small and large all battle over who should pay for what. All we know is that the costs of health insurance rises year after year. During the eight year reign of President Bush, the costs of health insurance rose by *96% and millions of people remained uninsured.
*Source: Crain’s Chicago Business
Money drains
That leaves people heading for the emergency room if they’re uninsured, driving costs higher and reducing effectiveness of care for everyone. It’s unexcusable that a developed nation such as the United States of America carries on like it does claiming that it offers the ‘best healthcare system in the world.’ Yes, we have many advanced and amazing healthcare opportunities in this country. But what does it mean that our doctors hate it because they’re in debt up to their ears from paying for their medical education, and the cost of insurance for their practices is skyrocketing too. Meanwhile, nurses suffer long hours and hospital systems try to nick every dime out of patients just to stay afloat. Money consistently drains down the sinkhole of the American healthcare system. It’s a national debacle. A shitshow.
To make it all worse, many companies fear having their insurance rates go up every year. This is true for companies small and large. Once the recession hit in 2008, there were many small companies struggling to survive month-to-month while banks refused to offer loans to cover payrolls or operating expenses, much less insurance costs.
By 2010 my job at that little audio-visual company came to an end when the rescue dollars offered by the Obama administration to fund educational technology ran out. “Sorry,” I was told. “We don’t see the same business coming through this year. We have to let you go.”
Well, that was also a lie. I’d researched and landed a former business line with a huge educational supplies company eager to sell our firm’s AV equipment through their national channels. But because that firm competed with the localized dealer network and the Good Old Boy system it relied upon, the company’s President and top salesperson fought the supposed incursion upon their territories.
I’d studied the previous sales reports showing that the education company had once done $600K in business with our firm. With another salesperson I visited the education company, re-opened those sales channels, helped train their people and provide them with marketing materials, and brought in a quick $1M in restored business that year for a firm doing $20M annually.
But our internal audience was not in favor of the change. “Our dealers don’t like their salespeople calling on their schools!” they protested.
“When was the last time any of those dealers actually called on those schools?” we responded.
“Well, they plan to…” was the weak response. We’d learned that the new sales channels threatened their anachronistic methods of doing business.
We might say the same thing about our healthcare insurance industry and its anachronistic corporatized structure. The “old ways” of doing business are clearly not efficient or effective for anyone. The possibility of competition from a national healthcare system to regulate and negotiate prices is too much of a threat to Big Pharma and the likes of United Healthcare and other monopolistic healthcare insurances hogs feeding at the trough of unrestricted data, access and profits from the American population.
No agency at another agency
I searched far and wide for a new job and got a position at an agency forty miles away. During the onboarding process, which was conducted by the wife of the company’s owner, I hesitated filling out the information on the health insurance forms because it would mean revealing my wife’s cancer. I considered not telling the truth, but reasoned that could lead to a lawsuit. So I filled out the paperwork honestly and turned it in, knowing that it might raise red flags in the minds of the couple running the company. From the get-go, I worried about that.
Sure enough, after month I was suddenly shifted to an inane sales position requiring me to drive all over the Chicago area handing out bottles of promotional pepper sauce as a device to land marketing work for the agency. It never worked, and of course, I didn’t land much business. I quietly asked, “Shouldn’t we be using the marketing techniques we teach our clients to market our own firm?” For some reason, that was ignored. Ultimately, they pulled me into a meeting one day and said, “You’re just not cutting it. We have to let you go.”
I resisted and specifically pointed to the fact that I was shifted away from the original responsibilities to engage in a crazy proposition that no one could fulfill. Later that day, I wrote them via email because I’d done my research before leaving and talked to the broker that sold them healthcare. “I can stay on their plan, right?” I asked. He assured me that the law required that I be offered that opportunity. But the company tried offering me a $1500 stipend toward whatever insurance I could find. At that point, I contacted a lawyer friend. I accepted their $1500 offer and also stayed on their insurance until I found a new job.
Bad scaffolding
As I understand it, the entire American healthcare system is built on a scaffolding of bad policy originally constructed as a sort of “incentive” or “benefit” to attract employees. The healthcare system we developed relies on this quasi-capitalistic notion that we should all get health insurance through our employers.
But if supporting and defending capitalism were truly the mission of the American healthcare system, businesses would have nothing to do with health insurance at all. That would eliminate the massive costs and time spent by HR resources negotiating and managing company-sponsored healthcare plans. Our corporately sponsored healthcare system is a fraud. To make matters worse, the politicians responsible for legislating healthcare are in many cases funded by the profit-based companies benefitting from the waste and corruption integral to our system.
The laws governing small companies are vague and frankly, rife with loose language and utter bullshit about what they can and cannot do to hire and fire employees, much less provide access to healthcare insurance. If a company has less than twenty employees, they get a ton of leeway in how they can screw people over. I know that it’s hard to run a company of any size. I’ve seen it firsthand. But I also know that there’s a right way and a wrong way to treat people. I’ve seen that firsthand too.
After I left, one of the employees at the first who knew my situation called to offer condolences. She told me, “Don’t fuck around with these small companies,” she warned. “You need to get a job with a big firm with good insurance.”
A CMO still hiding the Big C
I tried to abide that advice, but the job market was still tough in 2011. I applied and was hired for a position as Chief Marketing Officer at a PR firm. Things went well for a year. I earned a number of national public relations awards for clients large and small, even bringing 2000 people the grand opening of a ReStore.
The company’s owner knew and liked me, yet in the back of my mind I remained cautious because during the interview process she’d openly stated, “The only reason we can offer insurance here is because no one’s had cancer.”
I have a labor law attorney friend whose firm once faced rising insurance costs. His partners were angered by the fact that his wife had a couple surgeries to fix scar tissue related to horseriding injuries. “Your wife is driving up our insurance costs,” they complained. But when the broker from whom they purchased their insurance explained the rising costs, he told them. “It’s not her surgeries making the costs go up. Both of your wive’s are in their child-bearing years. That costs more money to insure.”
The fact of the matter is that virtually no one understands our insurance system in America.
Fortunately, in the case of that little PR agency, I was able to fill out and submit our health insurance forms without sharing them with the office manager or anyone else at the firm. I mailed them directly to the insurance provider. I believe that’s how it’s supposed to work. And don’t HIPPA laws require it in some fashion? Yet many small firms ignore such requirements.
Even with that precaution, I’d soon run afoul of that firm’s insurance fears and other policies related to employment.
A grudge and payback
After traveling to Colorado Springs on a client recruitment trip at an event where large firms met with PR firms like ours, I was accosted by a fellow employee who was angry that the owner had spent $35K to attend. “We won’t get a bonus this year, I bet,” he complained. In turn, I explained that we were trying to up our game and bring in new and larger clients so that we’d all make more money. Instead, he bitterly blamed me for supporting her venture. In fact, he made a practice of complaining about her every time we went to lunch. I didn’t know that his disenchantment would soon cost me directly.
In the spring of 2012, Linda’s cancer came back. This time it would require yet another surgery involving a complicated extraction of cancer from her liver and colon, where it had spread. With the surgery approaching and the need for some time off possible, I considered telling the company about her condition. Yet I feared getting fired if they found out my wife had cancer. I’d been enough nuttiness to know that anything could happen.
As an insurance against my own risks, I worked hard the last two weeks before the scheduled surgery trying to land a big client. I figured that might stand up against any potential costs we might incur if our company’s insurance coverage shot up.
On a Sunday night, a bit anxious to make something happen I’ll admit, I opened up my personal website and posted one of the successful creative campaigns I’d just produced with an in-house designer. I was trying to reach a network of people through my own website that might be able to provide a referral for new clients.
The pressures were getting to me, so I decided that Monday morning to tell the owner and the HR director about my wife’s condition. They expressed complete support for our family. After all, I’d attended every company event and brought some recognition to the firm, including a complete re-write and design of the company’s website. I thought I’d built some loyalty and value. They assured me that I had.
But that afternoon the post of content to my website generated a Google Alert about the client’s name. At that point the disenfranchised employee came to my office with a stern look on his face and said, “You need to take that down right away.” So I did. It had stayed on my website no longer than ten hours. It was highly unlikely anyone even saw that post. But the copy mentioned the client’s name. Technically, I’d committed an error in judgment.
Getting fired is no fun
I walked into work the next morning to be greeted by the owner, whose stern look told me something bad was happening. The entire office was silent as they led me to the company conference room and informed me that I was being fired for breaching the company’s policies on client confidentiality. “That’s weird,” I responded. “They’ve already published that work in a magazine.” They didn’t care, they told me. I’d put the company at risk.
The lawyer they hired sat in the room and read me some legalese. Then I was told to gather my personal effects and leave. If you’ve never been fired from a job, it really is no fun.
That afternoon I contacted my best friend who is a labor law attorney. He gave me some advice to follow for an upcoming hearing on unemployment insurance but he was busy with his full-time job the day I was to have the hearing. It was conducted by a Chicago employment judge. In advance, we were told to exchange relevant materials so I submitted proof that my post had done neither the company or the client any harm. However, I never received the information they were supposed to provide me.
Upon mentioning that to the judge at the start of the hearing, he told me not to speak until spoken to. From there the case was railroaded and I was also blocked from collecting unemployment insurance. In sum, that disgruntled employee had fucked me over in spiteful revenge over my support for the boss’s investment in client recruitment.
Lessons learned
I’ll end this story there, because not long after that debacle my wife’s condition got worse. Her own father died of heart complications in late 2012. Then on December 26 of that year we learned that her cancer had migrated to the brain.
The doctors told us, “That’s not supposed to happen.” But it did. We engaged in brain surgery using radiation. Then they put her on steroids for the swelling. That made her kind of energetically crazy in early 2013. We even had to counsel her to stop teaching preschoolers because her judgment just wasn’t right. That broke her heart. And mine.
When the steroid treatments ended her body mercifully gave out but her mind never did. We’d done our praying and told each other of our mutual love. She died peacefully the evening of March 26 after the hospice team visited her that afternoon.
I’ll admit I was grateful and relieved that she was freed from the misery of the cancer that caused her distress all those eight years. Despite it all she lived as fully as anyone could, planting amazing gardens, raising monarch butterflies from eggs on milkweed leaves, and loving her own children and those she taught with all her heart. She was 55 years old.
But my point in this essay is that I still cannot believe this is the way that human enterprise is supposed to treat those facing illnesses such as cancer. In its broadest sense, society is still primitive, tribal and brutal in its methods of care as far as I can see. Corporations can toss people around at will, it seems. Our healthcare system favors the rich and spits on minorities, women and anyone that fails to fall under “covered categories.” Is there any more inhumane system on earth? Probably so, but we’re supposed to be better than that. Instead, we’ve got greedy fake Christians and their hypocritical political partners claiming to be Pro-Life while constructing death panels based on who can afford to pay for insurance, and who cannot.
Fortunately, there are still many kind and wonderful people who break through the ugly facade of America’s healthcare system to offer great care and financial support. But they fight against a system more concerned with corporate wealth than public health. And that’s the real cancer in America.
Taking pride in vulnerability does not mean always being scared or sad. It’s quite the opposite. It’s about being authentic in whatever situation you find yourself in life.
One of my new work cohorts encouraged me to take an Enneagram test to see where my personality fits on the spectrum of such things. I signed up on Truity and paid $19.99 to get the full results. The outcomes were interesting, with all my best qualities and flaws laid out in black and white.
Somewhere late in the PDF, which is replete with graphs and charts about personality and life traits, I noticed a quote highlighted in the headline of this article. “True strength comes from the courage to be vulnerable.” I sat there a minute and thought: “That’s exactly what I meant by calling my book “The Right Kind of Pride.”
The Right Kind of Pride is precisely that: the consistent action of taking pride in the willingness and courage to be vulnerable.
As for that book, I’m pretty sure that some people are scared or uncomfortable about reading a book about cancer survivorship. But it’s not JUST about that. The eighty-plus blogs I compiled speak to the the value of authenticity in all situations.
Here’s the basic fact: All of us must be survivors of one kind or another. Plus, none of us gets out of this world alive. All I can say is that when it comes to getting through the tough things in life, vulnerability is truly powerful.
Caregiving
Before our marriage in 1984.
Over eight years of caregiving that was the principal way that I found hope and support.
Originally, I oversaw my mother’s journey through lymphoma and pancreatic cancer, followed by a stroke and finally hospice. Her passage left me in charge of caregiving for my father Stewart Cudworth, a stroke victim from 2002. I would remain his caregiver through his passing in 2015 at 89 years of age.
That all began in 2005, the same year that my wife was diagnosed with Stage IIC ovarian cancer. Immediately I was graced by an offer of support from the preschool director and her team of teachers at the school where my late wife Linda taught. For the next eight years, those people and many others (thank God) were willing to help us through the ups and downs of cancer treatments, including surgeries and recovery, chemotherapy, prodigious drugs and side effects, and emotional challenges deeper than we’d ever imagined possible. We’d make it through one segment of treatment to remission only to have the cancer return. That progressed with rapidity like the sound of a ping-pong ball as it taps out from its original dropped height.
During all that time I blogged to our caregiving support group about the blessings and challenges we experienced, and things we learned along the way. Those blogs formed the bulk of the book I wrote titled The Right Kind of Pride. Then I wrote a prologue and epilogue, including A Goofball’s Guide to Grief. Because I am. A goofball.
Making the most of my hair before it all went away in my late 20s.
Personal journal
But I also kept a personal journal for thoughts that were not ready for public consumption at the time. I’d actually forgotten about those words until recently when I opened up a thick journal given to me by my mother-in-law for my July birthday in 2012.
I’d been thrown out of work earlier that year by an employer who fired me the day after they learned my wife had cancer. So I was freelancing and trying to cover everything from COBRA insurance costs to the daily costs of living. Fortunately, I was able to find bits and pieces of work to tide us through, all while dealing with the difficult fact that Linda’s health was decreasing in quality. She started having seizures in the fall of 2012, and then we discovered a brain tumor that required surgery, radiation and steroids to treat, and after that, things got really tough.
Calm realizations
At that point in February of 2013, I landed a new job and was trying to do my best at it. But the daily challenges of helping her through were significant. By February 11, it was even tough for her to get around. “Linda sleeping on the couch upstairs,” I wrote in the journal. “Chuck is on the Ottoman, leaning on my leg until a few minutes ago. Following me around all day. Linda improved a bit, for a while anyway. Big day tomorrow. Meeting Dr. Ferris and Dr. Dolan.”
We made it to the appointment with the medical oncologist Dr. Ferris. But things didn’t go all that well. She could barely stand to lie on the table, and the doctor pulled me aside and made a calm recommendation of palliative care going forward. I knew what that meant. And besides, Linda was too exhausted from gut swelling and fatigue to make the trip from Warrenville to Advocate Lutheran General to see the physician that treated her so well from the outset. I could barely get her home.
Constructive thoughts
I wrote in the journal on February 14, Valentine’s Day 2013, “Well, my objective with this journal is to focus on constructive thoughts rather than destructive, which so many other journals in this house seem to have been. In a constructive fashion, therefore, it is still important, most important, to acknowledge that Linda Mues Cudworth––or Linda Ann––is in the process of dying. She has been a most wonderful wife all these 28 years, and wants to continue if only she could. But her cancer is catching up with our dreams of going places together and doing things. We had both promised to get to Glacier this year––together, if her health would allow it. Now it seems more likely she will be gone, the earthly part of her that I so love anyway. Our relationship has gotten richer these past 8 years. Richer than money and wealth combined. Our mutual failings and weaknesses have fallen away. She has told me that she loves me and I believe her now. I have told her that I love her and she knows it now. Our wedding vows have been fulfilled; for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part.”
We made many trips to Decorah, Iowa over the years. One of the prettiest spots in the Midwest.
Reading those words again nine years after she passed away on March 26, 2013, gives me both sadness and satisfaction. We did the best we could all through those years. “Sunrises and sunsets still await,” I continued writing in the journal that February. “And spring as well. Hurts so much to know that she may not be with me. So soon. So sudden. Yet we have lived well together, the best we know how. I love you Linda. I always will. God Bless your kind and spirited heart. Forever.”
The promise of vulnerability
It would still be weeks before the end of her life came. But we opened our lives at that point, trying to bring our children and family, friends, and associates into the sphere of vulnerability. If you absorb nothing else from these words, please embrace the truth that “true strength comes from the courage to be vulnerable.” We lived that reality and I can promise you that while things don’t always happen or end how you’d like or expect, the courage to be vulnerable is one of the most valuable human traits of all. It expands all the good things that life has to give.
It’s fascinating to study yourself objectively through a test like Enneagram. It’s a valuable thing to learn what emotions and character traits drive you from within, and how that translates to life and relationships. And it’s the core of who we are that matters. Letting others see that in you can be a wonderfully empowering force in life.
Linda Cudworth passed away on March 26, 2013. While appreciating her life, I am grateful for the things life and love continues to bring.
The day after Christmas in 2012, my wife Linda and I were scheduled to meet with a neurologist at the Central Dupage Cancer Treatment Center. We managed to have Christmas together with her family that year even though her father passed away that winter. He’d had a heart attack while sawing up a giant oak in his own backyard, Following that incident, he developed dangerous swelling in his legs that ultimately led to kidney failure.
All that fall, we teetered back and forth between hope and reality for my father-n-law. He did kidney dialysis, and it seemed to work, but swelling kept coming back.
Meanwhile, Linda was experiencing an series of seizures. We thought they were a side effect from yet another set of chemotherapy treatments. In any case, it was scary stuff. We’d be out for a gentle walk and her body would start to tremor and shake, but she refused to give up her love of movement and being out in the sunshine.
A combined team of oncologists from Central-Dupage hospital and our longtime gynecological oncologist Dr. James Dolan conferred on her condition. Finally a test was ordered to check the condition of her brain. On December 26, we found out the disturbing news. The ovarian cancer that had afflicted her since 2005 had reached her brain.
“It’s not supposed to be able to breach the blood-brain border,” an oncologist told us. “But here we are.”
We sat together facing yet another shock on December 26, 2012.
It had been a long and difficult year. Back in March, I’d been fired from my job the day after the company learned that she had cancer. We’d kept her cancer a private matter when I started the job, but I finally had to tell them when it came roaring back late that winter. I knew that she’d require more attention with driving her to appointments, staying with her through chemotherapy and taking care of her in between treatments.
Granted, we had a wonderful caregiving team built up around us, but there are always some things that only the immediate family can handle, especially in a life-threatening situation. So I explained our situation in simple terms to the company where I worked, and they promised us support. That was on a Monday, but by Tuesday morning they came forward with an accusation that I’d breached company policy by posting an image of the work I’d done for a client on my personal website. When I walked into work that day, I came face to face the owner, an HR director and a lawyer equipped with all kinds of documents telling me that I’d somehow put the company’s reputation at risk.
No consideration was offered for the stress I might have been under, or how that situation might have affected my judgment. I was out the door and soon forced to pay $2000 a month in COBRA premiums to hang onto medical insurance. All because the owner was frightened that my wife’s condition might increase the company’s insurance premiums.
I appealed the case to the Unemployment system and was blown out of the water by the judge holding the teleconference. He introduced all the evidence the company presented and disallowed everything that I’d provided in relation to the case. I was railroaded, in other words, by a labor-sympathetic judge. Even my best friend, a labor law attorney, was disgusted by the outcome.
But rather than dwell in that space forever, I chose to reach out to that owner in subsequent years and we talked about all that had happened. Forgiveness took place.
But that didn’t help us in the near term.
Little miracles
That summer we struggled to make bills, and sat together praying one night that I’d find a freelance job to cover the $3500 we needed to make ends meet. That next morning an envelope arrived through our front door. It was stuffed with $3700. We hadn’t spoken to anyone about our situation. Other money from our church came our way as well. We hung on, kept her treatments going, but the cancer was relentless. By fall, a tumor was discovered next to her colon. If it could not be removed, the whole colon would need to come out. Then she’d need a colostomy operation. I admit that I was not looking forward to that outcome.
The gynecological oncologist did miracles in the surgery room and my selfish prayers were answered. And then, the day my wife got out of the hospital after surgery, we drove straight to the hospital where her father lay dying.
Crash course
My cycling jersey after the bike crash in September of 2012
As if that had not been enough challenges to face in 2012, I was still recovering from a bike accident that happened earlier that fall. In September I was cycling in a rare weekend getaway with friends while my wife staye back home to spendtime with her family. During the ride, I was cruising down a long hill at 40 mph when a case of bike wobble set in. I crashed in dramatic fashion, flying off the bike and tumbling down and embankment where I lay in shock with a broken collar bone. My friends didn’t know where I’d gone. One of them was ahead of me by fifty yards and the other had not yet crested the hill when I crashed. So I got help from a band of other cyclists who called for an ambulance. I wound up in a tiny Wisconsin hospital in Dodgeville. They pumped me full of Vicodin until someone finally reached the wife of one of my friends. She’s a nurse, and she came to gather me up for the trip back to our campsite.
All that time, my wife was at her parent’s house having yet another seizure. My daughter begged her to go to the hospital, but in typical fashion, wife refused. When the call came that I’d been in a bad bike crash my daughter was in the center of all sorts of trauma. A dying grandfather, a mother shaking to death from cancer, and a father now injured badly after a bike accident.
The effects of trauma
We tend to take these traumas too much for granted in our lives, but they do have long-term effects. We grieve, but perhaps we do not fully process what’s gone on. We move out of that emotional space, but probably not all the way. We deal with what we can in the moment, but life has its demands. So we trundle on. Not fully healed, yet not terminally damaged. If we’re lucky.
During the late stages of my wife’s life, my son was working in New York City. He had to deal with all this strange news from afar. “Do I need to come home?” he asked. It was hard to tell him everything that was going on. It was even harder to figure out what expect of him. My wife said, “Tell Evan I’m fine. I don’t want him to worry.”
My daughter was finally off at college after two+ years of coursework at a community college. She was doing amazing things in her communications studies, even doing live spots on public radio that summer. Her mother was so proud and amazed. We’d sit close to my Mac listening to the live stream and she’d turn to me and go, “That’s Emily!?” Hearing our daughter work professionally on the radio was a welcome joy.
Dealing with the options
But the events of that year kept overwhelming us. And that brings us back to that moment in the cancer treatment center when we found out that my wife’s cancer had moved into her brain. “Here’s what we can do,” the neurologist told us. “We can go in through the top of the head and excise it. Then we’ll apply radiation.”
We sat there thinking about those options. My wife did not have to think long. “Yes,” she said with resolve. And she smiled, “I mean, why not?”
Why not, indeed. We’d been through multiple surgeries, countless rounds of chemotherapy and many times, we got back to some form of ‘new normal.’ But this felt different to me. I looked over at her and smiled. She gave a thumbs up sign when she was ready to go.
Before the brain surgery and radiation. I’ve kept this photo for ten years.
So we came back for the treatment. They didn’t even have to shave her head. She’d lost her hair several times over through treatments, and this time her hair had not come back at all. She stripped off her wig and they began the process of affixing a stabilizing unit to her skull. It consisted of a circular metal band with screws that would be used to hold her head completely still. She posed for a couple quick selfies using the Photo Booth application in my little black Mac Laptop, and off she went.
The treatment worked. They captured and killed the cancer in her brain. The seizures stopped. They gave her a steroid prescription to deal with the swelling caused by the surgery and radiation. From there it was off to the races. Those steroids turned her into a Survival Machine. Her personality became magnified. She cleaned and cooked and sat up writing lesson plans for the preschool classes she taught. But as the steroids added up in her system, her sense of judgment disappeared. She spent money we didn’t have. One night she researched a new car, and that next day, we drove to the Subaru dealership and bought it. I wasn’t sure if she was getting money from her parents or what, but I sensed that something final was happening, and decided to go with the flow.
The steroid effect
Toward the end of February, she could no longer handle teaching at the preschool she loved. Her spaciness increased, and it frankly put the children at risk. I collaborated with her director to ease her out of the position. That was absolutely necessary. Yet despite our efforts to be kind, something in her broke the day that she learned she could no longer teach.
Once the steroid prescription was eased, her body and mind fell slowly back to a normal state. That was when I knew that she would not live much longer. The stress and fatigue of eight years of cancer survivorhood wore her out. During one of our last visits with the oncologist before bringing her home for palliative care, she was too damned tired to even get off the treatment room table. I spoke quietly with the oncologist that day. She was kind. And honest. And earnest. “Take care of her,” she told me.
Linda Mues Cudworth passed away peacefully in our home in March of 2013. My son and daughter were together with me that night. It is both a blessing and a strange truth to be present when someone you love that much passes into eternity.
Aftermath
We’ve all gone through gyrations in the wake of her passing. My son suffered through depression and a period of addiction. He’s emerged with a will not just to survive, but to help others process their mental health in constructive ways.
My daughter was just coming into her own as a young woman when my wife passed way. In many ways, that left a void in her that is hard, if not impossible, to completely heal. Every year, she recognizes more of her mother in herself, and the pain of losing her mom keeps turning over. Those are legitimate feelings. I know other women that have lost their mothers. I wish at times they could all talk with my daughter.
As for me, I’m not sure that I fully processed all that happened that year, or perhaps the many years before. During my wife’s eight years of cancer survivorship, I was also the primary caregiver for my father after my mother passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2005. That was the same year that my wife Linda was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
My father lived another four years after Linda died, and I did my best to take care of him. After my wife’s passing, I admit that what I wanted most was to be free of the constant pain and fear involved in caregiving. But there was still a job to do.
Coping
During the eight years of caring for her, I’d been on and off supportive medications such as Lorazepam to help me deal with the anxiety of caregiving. It did its trick as needed, but some of that stress sinks deep into your soul.
I recall trying to ride my bike with friends during that period. I’d be out on a fifty or sixty mile ride with them, but when it came time to ride hard or compete, as cyclists love to do, I often did not have the will to keep up. I’m pretty sure that what I experienced was an active sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. Not the kind that comes from being in a war, or witnessing a murder, but the kind that comes from not being able to deal with personal shocks over and over.
As a form of therapy, I started blogging to our caregiving group to communicate some of the feelings I had about the things we were going through. Much of that was quite positive, and I’m proud that we found ways to find blessings and hope in all that trauma. That’s the right kind of pride. This blog is an echo of all that.
Anniversary
But this year, when December 26 rolled around, I realized it’s been ten years since that strange day when we found out that the cancer had moved into her brain. Once we knew the cause of her seizures, it explained quite a bit about what was going on with her body
But it also brought on conflicted feelings in my mind. Should I hope for her to continue going through the stress and pain of cancer survivorship? At that point, I began to grieve in real time. I understood that I no longer wanted to see her go through the awful stuff. The sickness. The numb feet and hands. The fear. The trauma of surgeries. The loss of life quality. Giving up the things she loved to do. None of that is ever what I wanted for her. It certainly wasn’t what she wanted. Some part of me was relieved when the pain was over. Through faith and reason and love of life, I began to move on.
For these reasons, I got ahead of most of the people in my life by recognizing that she was not going to make it through the year in 2013. I didn’t know how long it would be before she died, but I knew for certain that it would happen. Even her doctors were astounded at the job she’d done for so long in staying alive.
That’s not the kind of news that people want to hear from the primary caregiver, so I kept it to myself. Perhaps that was a mistake of some sort. But my wife had plowed through so many obstacles during her years as a cancer survivor that none of us could imagine it coming to an end. She was so tough about staying alive it did not make sense to question her. She surely showed us all what it means to love life. She loved her children fiercely, almost to a fault at times.
Endings
So we didn’t make end-of-life elaborate plans. We were so occupied with keeping her alive that we never discussed what to do when she died. But earlier in life, we’d talked about cremation, so that’s what we did. Her ashes rest under a grave marker next to her father in the Lutheran cemetery in Addison where she grew up. That town was the place where she attended the church gradeschool, then moved on to Addision High School. She graduated Magna cum laude from Northern Illinois University.
We met in October of 1981 and she lived until March of 2013. In all, we had a great life together; full of family, friends and most of all, our children.
The lilies being watered in our garden, circa 2011.
She also loved her garden so much that it’s hard to describe the satisfaction she got from her green craft. She’d sit in our LL Bean Adirondack chairs staring at her garden with a glass of wine, or a margarita, or one of her strong gin and tonics in her hand, and just enjoy.
Perhaps that’s why I moved on quickly from the trauma of her last year of life. That’s not how I wanted to remember her.
I chose to remember her cherishing the work she loved. She also told a close friend, the preschool director who served as our close caregiver for all those eight years, that she knew I’d date if she ever passed on. But that friend waited a full year to share that quiet bit of insight with me. I thanked her for waiting. We all need to make decisions on our own terms. I’m grateful to have had a wonderful life with my late wife.
I’m also enormously grateful to have found love again.
Gaining traction
Life is often complicated, and even the people closest to you have a hard time understanding the reasoning or motives behind some of the decisions we make or the changes and impacts that come with them.
Ten years on from December 26, I hope that people gain from reading this and find ways to embrace life even in the face of trauma, and even if life turns out different from what they expected.
It’s indeed a strange thing to go from the traditional joys of a December 25th to facing moments when the world itself seems to shift underneath your feet. Sometimes the best thing to do is to keep those feet moving, to find traction in the things we do and love every day. And please, let’s forgive ourselves for wishing the world would just stand still now and then. Take some time. Look at your garden, whatever that means in your life. It is the work of your life.
The farm in Upstate New York that I loved to visit as a child.
At six years old, most of us don’t have a great grasp of the world around us. Life revolves around parents and family. The rest of life is a mystery until we experience it.
During the summer after my second grade year in school, my favorite aunt and uncle traveled from their farm in Upstate New York to visit our family in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. When the time came for them to leave, I begged my parents to allow me to go with them back to the farm. To my surprise, my parents agreed.
A half hour later a bag was packed and I was plopped in the back seat of their car for the trip north to Bainbridge and the farm that I loved.
But the next morning, I woke up with a horrid feeling in my gut. I was homesick. If you’ve never experienced that feeling for yourself, it can be best described as a deep combination of longing and loss that penetrates your whole being. All you want to do is go home.
Confession: I was always an anxious kid. Already at that age, I chewed my nails. Looking back through a life of dealing with aspects of anxiety and depression, I realize that homesickness was a product of who I am. Learning to cope with anxiety is a lifelong job. I don’t blame myself for it, and these days I know myself well enough to function healthily. It wasn’t always that way.
The morning of my homesickness, I recall my aunt making a phone call to my parents, who drove up from Lancaster that day to fetch their anxious, homesick son. Apparently all involved had pity on me. Perhaps they knew those feelings well enough to realize there was no cure except to send me back home. Sometimes good caregiving is a matter of listening to the people involved.
Keeping me on the farm a couple days might have cured the homesickness, but I must have been a sorry sight with all those aching tears. I guess I can be grateful that adults had compassion for my condition.
The giant elm that once stood in front of the Nichols family farm where my mother grew up.
I looked up homesickness on the Psychology Today website. It had interesting things to say about homesick feelings. “A number of studies have suggested that homesickness can be associated with psychological difficulties such as loneliness, depression, anxiety, difficulty adjusting to new situations, and psychosomatic health problems. Given that being away from home can be accompanied by the sadness of missing it, one wonders why we form such powerful emotional bonds to our home. Surely, attachment is at least partly the product of all the wonderful experiences we enjoyed during our childhood.”
It goes on to say, “As poet Robert Frost famously explained, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Our bond extends beyond enjoyable experiences. It encompasses unconditional love, commitment, loyalty and enduring connectedness.”
Still, no specific mention of fear as a cause of homesickness. Perhaps there’s no reason. That emotion is woven into the DNA of anxiety and depression. It is both the cause and a symptom of those conditions.
The PT article continues,” Efforts to prevent homesickness must contend with a paradox. Although research findings have been inconsistent, homesickness seems to be more likely when children have had prior experiences with separation from home as well as when they had had little or no prior periods away. If homesickness is the price we pay for attachment to a strong loving home, would anyone want to diminish the quality of a child’s home to prevent the possibility of future homesickness?”
Like many children in that day and age, I lived in a home that was both loving and at times, a conflicted place. My father lost his mother to complications of cancer treatment when he was just seven years old. He went to live with an uncle and two aunts because his own father experienced profound depression at the loss of his wife and also brought on in some ways by The Depression.
So my father’s upbringing was at times gruff. His pain at losing his mother at such a young age was probably never adequately addressed. No doubt there were feelings of homesickness after being shuttled from his family home to a life with a tough old uncle and two unmarried aunts. The sense of loss must have been profound. Thus despite his largely caring character, he bore an anger within him that spilled out at times. His four sons tried to meet his approval but there was an exasperating and sometimes frightening tone to certain aspects of our upbringing.
So that feeling of separation from home as a place of safety and comfort is both a physical and emotional reality for all of us. Yet to this day, I still view our Lancaster house and yard as “home” in many ways. We moved away when I was twelve years old. A type of homesickness has traveled with me all these years. We’d have never left that place if I’d had my way.
A Google Maps photo of the family home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Yet that would have denied me all the experiences that were to come and those were good. So while homesickness is real, it is also not permanent and is no way to define or limit one’s time in this world. We have to rip off the bandage at certain times in life, and move on.
All of us have some sense of home that lives within our souls. Sometimes it’s just the smell of a room when the windows are open… or the curl of a pillow as you roll over to face that person whom you love. It can be heard in the song of a bird calling in the trees, or the sound of a car pulling into a driveway.
Take in those sensations and indeed, you’re home again. That’s the right kind of pride.
Note: I’ve shared impressions about homesickness before on this blog because they symbolize so many other aspects of life. May you find that sense of home wherever you are.
People nearing my age often retire. Some run their career course and it makes absolute sense to cash in and cease working in the conventional sense. Others plan wisely and have the financial resources to allow them to quit working and do what they want with the rest of their lives. I’m glad for all those who achieve those milestones. They’ve typically earned them.
Yet I’m also glad for people that choose not to retire at a given age. While the age of 55-65 is often the traditional age for retirement, there is nothing that says you have to quit working at that stage. Our current President of the United States, Joe Biden, is 78 years old. The masterful Bob Dylan just turned 80. Many great artists work even into their 90s. What’s the damn rush to quit working?
Still, the pressures to do so can be daunting. I know a sales executive, now retired, who could not find employment after his company consolidated departments and he wound up on the outside. He’s living now in Arizona, and enjoying it. But at first he was hurt by the sense that he was no longer valued in a working way.
Those are challenging emotions for people at any age, and losing your job or needing to step back from employment is often a solid blow to the ego. So much of our identity is tied to our working life.
There is also the sense of “earning a living.” During my peak earning years I found myself out of work several times during caregiving for my late wife. At several times during eight years of caregiving she needed me home to take care of her through surgeries, chemotherapy treatments and recovery periods of both physical and mental consequence. The timing was seldom convenient to long-term success or building the perception of a steady-growth career. Each time I peaked in income, rising from $80K to $100K, cancer whacked us with a recurrence, and it was hard for her to work as well.
It felt like starting at Square One during each of those comebacks. Sometimes the return to work involved taking lower-paying jobs that were closer to home during periods of cancer caregiving. I won’t claim that I was a perfect employee during those periods of change, either. During those eight years, I was also principal caregiver to a father who was a stroke victim. The dual demands were daunting.
Yet I still managed considerable successes that included winning large accounts, earning national awards in public relations and marketing, and building a literacy project that served more than 375,000 families. But my failures included forgetting meetings, allowing the occasional typo to slip through, and trying too hard to protect my job by posting a sample of client work to my personal website. I was under enormous stress in the moment and didn’t think that decision through. It led to my dismissal just a day after I’d revealed to the company that my wife was a cancer patient. They brought in a lawyer to protect their interests in that circumstance after they’d promised to support us no matter what. It was hard not to consider that a cheap shot.
Plus, that situation left me with no job and COBRA insurance premium payments of $2000 a month. To say that some of our premium earning years were compromised by cancer struggles is a massive understatement.
So I’ve forgiven myself for not retiring at age 55 when some of my peers managed to do so. But here’s the odd truth about my actual attitude. I’m not eager to retire. In many respects as a writer and content developer, I’ve never been more capable and productive. Quitting now would be a shame, from my perspective. I still enjoy the challenges work provides.
I’ve also been an athlete all my life, and I’ m swimming, riding and running every week. I enjoy the sensations of being fit and active. That aligns with my daily writing, painting or producing creative content across a spectrum of platforms. Perhaps it would be nice to retire, but I feel like I’d still be doing the same things I do now even if I weren’t traditionally “working.”
As for a retirement plan, there is still time to make up the difference and that’s what I plan to do. The other main goal I have in life is to MAKE A DIFFERENCE. That is why a series of books I plan to publish are so important to me.
The first is a book titled Honest-To-Goodness: Helping Christianity Find It’s True Place in the World. It is a treatise on the roots of Christian tradition and how legalism leads so many people astray. It is a collaborative project with a Professor or Religion named Dr. Richard Simon Hanson.
The second is a book titled Nature Is Our Country Club. It is a book about the way golf courses thirty years ago realized there was a better way to manage their properties than pouring chemicals all over the ground and mowing everything in sight. The narrative traces how natural landscaping relates to the world at large, and what the human race needs to do in order to protect the earth on which we all depend.
The third book is Competition’s Son, a biography about life that deals with the effects of competition in all aspects of life; learning, sports, family, relationships, business, religion, success and failure, and emotional conditions ranging from anxiety to joy, from depression to salvation.
The first two books are finished and being prepped for release. My goal is to begin speaking and producing content around those topics going forward. All the while I’ll continue working because I love what I do. I’m glad for those who retire, but I’m also glad for those who don’t.
To me, that’s the Right Kind of Pride. How about you?
One afternoon while heading out of the college cafeteria during the last semester of college, a classmate clearing plates and cups from the tables in the Union lost control with her hands and it all came crashing to the floor. That moment inspired a poem that I wrote based on how she responded.
WAITRESS SINCE THIRTEEN
Although the saucer fit the dish, she turned too quickly, threw the cup,
and watched in vain as coffee stained her shoes and left her morning drained,
“You’d never know,” she said to me, “I’ve been a waitress since thirteen.”
Last night I was writing at a local eatery and overheard the head waitress talking about her previous places of employment. Both are well-known restaurants. They’re not cheap places to dine. She talked about the fact that some of the clientele was snooty, and that the establishments charged way too much for what they provided. Now she’s happier working in the open bar and restaurant atmosphere where customers are more down to earth. She works the room with candor and kindness. An expert waitress in her element is a sight to behold.
Hands-on, hands off
Two weeks ago in Florida, we celebrated a landmark birthday with a relative at their golf club. Our round was delayed by rain and there was a wedding going on upstairs where the main bar and grill are located. So we moved to the downstairs bar and ordered food and drinks. Things were getting merry among the members that had already played that morning. Several were showing the effects of drinking.
The waitress working the room is a veteran of such situations. I watched her deftly fend off the handsy attentions of a member well into his liquor. She kept a smile on her face the whole time while using her arms like fencing swords to redirect his advances. In those situations a waitress is something far more than a person who serves food and drinks. She was at once counselor and therapist well-aware that there would be a tomorrow even if her customer refused to recognize it in the moment.
Frontline dedication
During this pandemic mess, we’ve all learned who the real frontline workers are. They are people at the point of contact for all sorts of human interactions. This morning the Chicago Tribune reported that here in Illinois, customers will be required to keep their masks on while ordering food. That’s a small move to protect the health of those who wait tables. Surely some people will take offense to that requirement as they have toward the concept of wearing masks at all. But they would be selfish and wrong to do so. Sadly, some will refuse to comply.
That further places our wait staff in positions where they are forced to govern all sorts of human behavior. Here in America, waiting tables is typically viewed as some sort of servitude. Not so in other parts of the world, where being a waiter or waitress, or however you care to describe it, is considered noble work. It takes real character to be a good wait staffer, whatever the circumstance. It is a form of caregiving in real time. Our sense of community in this world comes from such dedication. Wait staff are the frontlines of civility.
In-flight service
The same goes for the people working these days as flight attendants. That profession has changed drastically over the years. Where full meals used to be served on many flights, these days it is more common to receive a bag of salty snacks and a glass of ice water.
The old standards about appearance that once applied to flight attendants are now gone. Travelers also don’t fly in formal wear they way they once did. Airplanes are now packed wall-to-wall with people to maximize profits for every flight. That strategy has backfired in the age of the pandemic, and the middle seats now sit empty.
The entire industry is a bit more low-brow and some regret that loss of glamour. Flying moved from an experience to be enjoyed to a gut-level mode of transportation. Airplanes are no longer a version of a flying restaurant for shorter flights. The in-flight movies can be nice, and Wi-Fi is appreciated. But these are more about sharing isolation than engaging in the communal experience of air travel with flight attendants as hosts.
Noble work
It is still noble work taking care of others, despite what the prideful and selfish among us care to think about it. In a world where so many people behave grotesquely in public while looking down on others for their manner of earning a living, it is the right kind of pride to look for the humanity in all those doing their jobs. Because unless we all do that, the world is doomed to its caste-like appetite for tribalism, wrought with greed, dismissiveness and abuse.
So to make the point about treating others right in public, we’ll leave with this video from the Monty Python movie The Meaning of Life. The first time we watched this in the theater my brothers and I almost heaved up our popcorn while nearly dying from laughter. Absurdity is often the best illustrator of graphic abuse. There’s a little too much Mr. Creosote in the world right now. That’s not the right kind of pride.
The first time I worked remotely was back in 1994 during the original advent of email communications and the Internet. I’d started a small company called Environs whose clients included a fitness company, a real estate management company, a pair of newspaper companies, and a few other clients.
Communicating via the web was not too slick back then. My nifty new Powerbook 540c laptop had dialup capabilities, but the connection process as you might recall was slow, noisy (that dialup tone was classic) and bandwidth was limited.
But to me, it all still felt like magic. I could communicate with clients far away, send and receive proofs of creative work and writing, and seldom feel alone.
Technology helps
Because while I’ve never been a tech device geek or software coder, I’ve always loved what new technology can do. Clearly, I was not alone in that realm, as Apple products appealed to people like me who found the IBM/Microsoft world offensive in its lack of intuitive traits and its often cloying yet clunky interface. If I could have obliterated that paper clip character when using Word on client computers, I surely would have.
The arc from the early days of Apple through the Macintosh years to the melding of compatible software with Microsoft pushed the world toward increased efficiency, and it has all been remarkable. Now many of us are working from home thanks to the enhanced speed of computer performance and Internet accessibility.
While I’ve worked as a full-time employee in marketing, communications, and public relations for thirty years, I’ve also always worked from home in some capacity. So the Coronavirus demand for social distancing and WFH mandates is nothing new. It’s just a matter of plugging into another new reality. Some people find it easy while others struggle with a sense of isolation.
The multi-tasking debate
The first question everyone has to ask themselves when working from home is how much multi-tasking they can or should try to handle. Some efficiency experts insist that multi-tasking is the absolute bane of productivity. “Don’t do it!” they’ll insist. “You can only do one thing well at a time.”
Well, the parents of children working from home can’t afford that luxury. So people adapt to circumstance as need be. As a person that was once a caregiver to three people simultaneously while holding down a full-time job, I learned how important it is to build a solid foundation of self-affirmations.
I was looking after a mother with cancer, a father with a stroke, and a wife with cancer, so I learned quickly to give myself credit for things accomplished. I also learned that multitasking isn’t a luxury at all. It is oftentimes a necessity. People working from home have to juggle multiple worlds. That means learning how to compartmentalize the daily task list, putting things into groups, and doing things in segments. It can be a great feeling to see a chunk of work through.
There is no real reason you can’t shift gears, do some other things in groups and segments, all while keeping a line open for unexpected calls and unanticipated emergencies. It might seem more stressful than working in a contained office space, but learning how to cope in different environments is, over the long term, a quite valuable skill.
The drama in your head
Here’s a ‘dirty’ little secret about working from home. The world outside often can really wait. It’s the drama in your head that is the real traumatizer when you’re working from home. Granted, some companies are measuring every moment spent and every keystroke logged. So let’s not be naive. If that’s their measure of true productivity, it may well be the case that any day-to-day functions need to rest outside working hours.
But for many of us, it’s a question of how well we get the job done, not how many keystrokes we’re plinking away during the day. If the kids need attention or the dogs need a walk, go do it. You may well solve a problem in your head during those activities. Almost all the solutions to problems that I conceive are the result of going out for a run or a walk. It works miracles.
Through success and failure while working remotely, learn to take a breather and step away if you need to. Working out at noon can be a great way to break up a day. Sitting at the same desk in the same office you’re occupying 8-to-5 or longer can be physically and mentally exhausting. Go outside and walk around for even five minutes if the pressure builds up or you grow frustrated. It’s a great way to find perspective.
Practical measures
There are some practical measures you can take to quell any productivity drama that builds up in your head. Take a moment to document what you’re doing and develop the instinct to be tactically sparse and ‘remotely confident’ when communicating your progress. If something isn’t getting done, or you need answers and can’t make progress until you get them, be honest and even-keeled about it. Many times the people with whom you are communicating are also juggling tasks and just want to know when to pick up the next task. Amusing fact: they may even be relieved that you’re not outworking them. But where there are genuine deadlines to be met, don’t hedge bets. Prioritize those first and don’t let distractions get in the way.
Doing things right
At one of the agencies where I worked as a creative director, our graphics department had a saying that went like this: “We always have time to get things done in a hurry, but never time to do them right the first time.”
That’s a hard thing to remember when communicating remotely. We all make mistakes of passing things along just to get them out of our inbox and “done.” So remote work requires us to take one extra look at the things that we and our associates do. It never hurts to enlist a partner in that process. Having a champion alongside you in project management helps to confirm the importance of what you’re doing and can provide important reminders of when things need to be done. And how to do them right.
Look for consensus
Working remotely is increasingly reliant on group conferencing calls through Zoom, Teamworks, Google Meetups, and the like. All these apps are scrambling now to improve their capabilities and win the market for remote conferencing. Yet it all comes down to one thing: providing a platform where people can build consensus around ideas, projects, and plans.
To be a successful conferencing user, look for opportunities to be a leader in building consensus. We don’t know how long this WFH world may last, so you’re a valuable team member if you help people come to an agreement and even inspire and motivate others. It’s entirely possible for you to be that person.
Ask questions
Want to know the easiest way to lead in this world? Be prepared to ask questions. Make up a list of smart and necessary questions before any conferencing call, or issue one good question per session to contribute in the best way you can.
And when communicating via email, chat or any other channel, ask questions quickly if you’re going to ask them at all. We can all make the mistake of waiting too long to get clarity. That leaves the impression that 1) you’re not on the ball 2) don’t care 3) don’t understand the project as a whole 4) are unsure of yourself.
Prioritizing
Being quick or attentive to potential problems may be the most important “rule” of all, but it’s not always easy to do when working remotely. Just like the “real” office, people aren’t always available.
In that case, make a point of considering genuine solutions. That value is even greater when you’re directing projects for multiple clients, as freelancers often do.
At all points, people need to learn to prioritize, and we all know pleasing everyone can be tough. No client or partner likes to think they’re playing second fiddle to what you’re doing while working remotely.
Surely that holds true in working for bosses and collaborating with teams or other partners. It all comes down to focusing attention where it is needed most. That’s the base principle behind all successful remote workers. Give full attention to whatever is in front of you, ask questions early and to fully understand the goal, and multi-task by prioritizing at all times.
Most of all, take pride in your work no matter where you’re doing it. That’s the right kind of pride.
Christopher Cudworth is author of the book The Right Kind of Pride: Character, Caregving, and Community. Available on Amazon.com.
During eight years of caregiving for a wife with ovarian cancer, there were many times when nurses served to help us get through the challenges of treatment, surgeries, chemotherapy and in the end, palliative care. I wrote the following essay about the value of nurses for the caregiving group that formed around us. Later it was published in The Right Kind of Pride, the book I wrote about our journey and for which this blog is named.
With nurses doing so much work on the front lines and as first responders during the Coronavirus and Covid-19 epidemic, this bit of testimony is meant to encourage nurses everywhere, and to urge people to appreciate their training and work
Nurses, literally and figuratively
Tuesday, December 20, 2011, 5:30 PM
Two days after my wife’s surgery I woke early to head west and pick up our dog to go home and check on the house. Stepping onto the elevator I encountered two tired-looking nurses leaning on the back wall.
“Shift over?” I asked. “Yes,” one of them breathed, trying not to look too relieved.
“Well, I admire your work,” I told them. “Patients can be a pain in the butt, I’m sure.”
“You said it, not me!” one of them replied as they headed out the elevator and down the hallway, exchanging knowing glances.
No easy gig
Nursing is no easy gig, of course. Nothing in the medical profession really is.
They see so much, both literally and figuratively. Nursing is the most intimate of all professions. Even more so than being a doctor, in some ways. From inserting catheters to administering shots to washing patients who can’t wash, nurses see humanity up close and personal.
There are also broader dimensions. Families in crisis. Human frailty laid bare. The human condition. On those dynamics rest hopes of healing. That is why medicine exists, and nurses carry it out to the best of their abilities.
Of course, nurses deal with varied results and varied perceptions of their profession. Not having worked in the medical field, I do not entirely know what the environment is like. But some nurses I’ve met speak of doctors that do not treat them well, or show respect. Maybe the pecking order at some hospitals is harsh. Yet the good hospitals seem to celebrate every role from orderly to surgeons. And there really are some great hospitals in the area where we live. We can be grateful for that. And this is no paid testimonial.
But I’ll reiterate: When we think about who provides a great amount of care and recovery in medicine, we should never forget to thank the nurses, both men, and women. There was Allan, and Silvia, Rafaela, and Kathy. the list goes on. All with attributes that add up to good care.
Professional caregiving
Because nursing is basically professional caregiving, it is something to observe when you’ve been placed in the role of caregiver yourself.
The challenging part is that the tools have advanced but the needs have not changed. The records have gone digital. The ability to monitor patients is so sophisticated. Yet it is still the human responsibility of nurses to read those signs and pass them back along the chain for the doctors and surgeons to study. Front line. First responders. In tune. In touch. That’s the role of nurses.
It is a cosmopolitan profession. The nursing professionals in the four or five hospitals with which we have had experience are quite racially diverse. Hospitals seem to hire nurses to match the culture and backgrounds of their constituent populations. But not always.
Language is another important aspect of nursing. For example, at the network hospital where Linda had her surgery, the primary phone greeting is given in several Eastern European languages. Diversity is not some casual thing at a hospital. It really can mean life or death.
Communication
Style of communication is also important in nursing. Some nurses excel in this category, with a gift for compassion that is comforting and encouraging. Others are more business-like, and their attributes can be of tremendous value in many circumstances. Linda’s chemo nurse this time around was a focused woman whose competency and the organization was of great assurance. Success in chemotherapy treatment can depend on the nurse’s ability not only to administer the medicine but also to track and monitor patient response in real-time (daily response to treatment, blood counts and side effects and over the course of treatments (chemo tolerance and patient affect) these attenuations add up. Literally and figuratively.
Racing for life
Getting chemo really is like running a marathon; checking your vitals along the way, taking aid at the proper points and pacing your effort so you don’t falter. Chemo is a marathon.
But surgery is a sprint of sorts. Our surgeons fixed a hernia, did a colon resection and removed a 31mm cancer tumor in about 2.5 hours. That’s fast and brilliant work. You can worship athletes all you want. Medical doctors like these deserve real accolades.
It is the nurses however who are the trainers that get you back into shape after the taxing sprint of surgery or the exhausting marathon of chemo. With cancer sometimes you need both to be successful. Fast-twitch and slow twitch.
The range of human foible
That and a sense of perspective and humor helps. I was really glad the people at the nursing station had a sense of humor when after the first night at the hospital I trundled out of Lin- da’s room at 5:00 a.m. to visit the bathroom down the hall. No one looks dignified at that hour, and I felt a little like a college freshman in a “walk of shame” down the dormitory hall after an all-nighter. But no one said a word. They see weirder things every day. Lucky for me, a bald man seldom has bad hair days.
Nurses see it all, of course, the whole range of human foible. Being able to encourage patients with an occasional jest about the difficulties of recovery can break the ice and open channels in working through pain or other humbling issues such as finding ways to go to the bathroom when it is far from easy and convenient for the patient. All this basic stuff,. They have to know when and how to be light about it, and when not.
Startups and bending over backward
Nurses are the professionals who get it all going for people again, over and over. Week after week. Year after year. Think of all the focus and dedication it takes to be a nurse for 5, 10 or 25 years. And people do it.
The nurse who checked Linda out of the hospital has been working in the same phase of nursing for 25 years. She was immensely practical and detail-oriented, dispensing instructions so that we would know how to care for the surgical wounds and tend to bathroom matters the right way. That nurse fit her job.
A young nurse named Rafaela checked on Linda regularly during her week in the hospital. She seemed to appear like magic from around the curtain whenever there was a need in the room. That nurse excelled in care.
The first night after surgery, Linda’s nurse was a soft-spoken woman who struck up a conversation starting with a compliment about the fact that I was staying overnight with my wife. Perhaps it is not so common for people to stay over. The new Planetree model for health care offers a more humanistic approach to medicine and facilities, especially hospitals. Hospitals now provide comfortable couches that convert into beds so that family or supportive friends can stay overnight with a patient.
I can tell you that’s a huge improvement from the night spent next to her bed back in 2007 when the only available place to sleep next to her was something like a Medieval torture device. The vinyl recliner on which I slept formed a pronounced hump approximately the curve of a mature dolphin in mid-jump. It was not the most comfortable night of sleep in my life, punctuated as well by beeps and whistles and the bustle of nurses hustling in and out for blood pressure checks and temperature readings. They were just doing their job, yet I felt like it was a torturous night of sleep deprivation in a black site somewhere in Eastern Europe. I exaggerate, but when you’re tired the mind works overtime.
To her everlasting credit, my mother-in-law, who had done overnight duty on the dolphin chair the previous evening tried giving me fair warning without scaring me off completely. But let us say that it was one of the 3 worst nights of sleep in my life. The top 2 were surviving a bad bout of the flu and one very long night in the late 1980s with a prostate infection that made my lower abdomen feel like I’d swallowed an angry serpent. I don’t really want to list a Top 10. The memories are too painful.
But the dolphin chair simply had to do in that instance. Such are the duties of caregivers at times. It’s like God wants to humble you into sympathy for the patient. So I thank God for Planetree now.
Patience and patients
Still, as a caregiver, I lose patience in too many situations, grow irrationally embittered by circumstance or fall too quickly into self-pity or worse, anger or depression. What is the cure for those selfish emotions? Mostly, it’s gratitude. Step back and take a breath. Be a nurse to your own soul. Forgive your- self. Then get back to service.
Because it’s a miraculous little dynamic that when we fix our focus on serving others we wind up serving our own true best interests. That’s where we learn we are not alone in our challenges and our minds off our own problems.
People who through simple self-control and a modest demeanor exhibit such patience always amaze me. Admittedly I envy people like that, especially when failing to manage that level of self-control myself. Where do some people get such strength of character? Can it be learned? Are some people just natural caregivers?
Probably those questions cheapen the issue. It is, of course, a complex combination of things that makes people good caregivers, or nurses, or doctors. Or perhaps it is simplicity that makes it possible. Be content. Learn to give. Don’t make life harder than it needs to be.
When it comes to institutional compassion, that is a goal much harder to achieve in some respects. The hospital where Linda had her surgery communicates its compassionate values in many ways. If I recall correctly, one of the messages posted on the wall reads, “We welcome all to this place of healing.” There’s definitely room for a religious message in there, but not an exclusive one. As it turns out, our nation is actually formed on a similar, inclusive ambiguity. So uniquely Ameri- can. Yet people seem to miss the subtlety in that. Want to turn it into an ideology not in keeping with the Constitution which guarantees freedom of religion and freedom from religion.
We are all equal souls. Nurses probably know that better than most. There’s nothing special about any of our functions. We all poop and pee. We all have a heartbeat. Breathe. Think. Cry out in pain. Laugh. Worry. Hope. Heal if possible. All part of the process. Such is humanity.
You know that cynical phrase, “some people are more equal than others…” Well, a nurse cannot afford to think like that. People notice if that sort of thinking creeps in.
When it’s your wife or your husband, your son or daughter, a close friend or even co-worker, you want the hospital and doctors and nurses taking care of them to do their very best to help them get well. It simply cannot matter whether someone is one race or the other, speaks Russian instead of English, or has no money to pay for the care they need.
Grace and blessings
I can tell you we have been the beneficiaries of such care, in ways that absolutely flabbergasted our ability to comprehend the many forces working behind the scenes to ensure our welfare. The least we can do in response to this grace and these blessings is what? Give back in any way we can. Pay attention to those taking care of us. Express our appreciation.
And guess what? Opportunities to reach outcome up more often than you might think. It is true that when you are in a position of most vulnerability, you are best able to share in the pain and challenges in other people’s lives.
Our nurse during Linda’s first night in recovery from surgery was so caring and attentive that conversation naturally flowed to the discussion of family and friends. It turns out our nurse was a single mom whose husband left her for another woman, leaving her to raise her two children alone. She was frustrated by how hard it was as a working mother–also attending graduate school–to meet someone, a man she could grow to love. She had nearly given up hope, she told us. Even the men on the Christian dating services turned out to be less than honorable.
It’s a story quite familiar to my wife who over the years has worked with dozens of families and single moms in her job as a preschool teacher. At one point after checking up on Linda, conversing while she worked, our nurse stopped and stood in the middle of the room, seeming to want to gather herself before moving on to other duties. We’d been talking about how she gave so much time to raise her kids, got them to rehearsals and practices and games. But how it was all worth it in the end because it keeps them busy even if it wears her out.
We talked of God and faith, too. She shared several of her favorite Bible passages with us. We told her we’d recently been in a bible course where we read the entire book in 90 days. “Oh, I don’t think I could do that,” she sighed.
“12 pages a day,” Linda assured her.
I admitted. “I didn’t keep up and had to hustle to finish.”
We encouraged her that all her work as a mom was worth it. That her children would turn out to be a blessing to her for her dedication. “Yes, I know,” she murmured. “But I have had to sacrifice a lot.”
Then she stood quietly in the middle of the room, seeming to contemplate her place in the universe. Standing in front of the privacy curtain and silhouetted by the light from the hallway behind her, our nurse stood and stared across the room, soaking up the relative stillness until she said quietly, “Well, God Bless you guys.”
It’s impossible to know the exact circumstances people face, or how they truly feel. Linda turned to me after our nurse had left and said, “She reminds me of so many single moms I’ve met, just “poured out” from having to do everything themselves. Wanting to be filled up spiritually.”
We met a veritable parade of nurses the following 5-6 days. All types of people and styles of care. Some were talkative. Others were focused and efficient. All played a brief yet important role in our lives. We can only hope that in some small way we give back to these people who daily give so much of themselves. Nurses literally and figuratively rule as far as we’re concerned.
The Right Kind of Pride 