At that point, Allison turned to finding ways to stay connected to her lost loved ones as a way to ameliorate her anxiety about further loss. When we find ways to feel connected to the people we lose, then the catastrophe of death is softened so that we do not fear it as much in the rest of our lives, thus creating a balm for the anxious thoughts.
“It took me a while to appreciate that if I was going to keep my parents’ memory alive, the work was up to me,” Allison said. “I needed to be proactive. The urgency to keep my parents present in my children’s lives has only increased as they’ve gotten older. I want them to benefit from their maternal grandparents’ values, priorities, and experiences. I want my children to learn from their wisdom. But this was never going to happen by accident. I’ve had to make the decision to teach these lessons—not all at once, but a slow and steady drip of stories whenever the occasion cleanly presents itself.”
Rather than turning to religion or spirituality, Allison created threads of connection that made sense to her. “What I needed were concrete opportunities to keep my parents’ memory alive. I didn’t find joy in abstract concepts. True happiness for me stemmed from digitizing old photographs, making a quilt out of my father’s neckties, and baking my mother’s ‘famous’ fruit platter pie. Taking purposeful steps to celebrate loved ones—to ensure their ongoing presence in our lives—is one of the most essential aspects of healing and thriving after loss.”
ALLISON GILBERT’S SUGGESTIONS FOR KEEPING MEMORIES ALIVE
Plant Flowers
One of the most uplifting ways to celebrate a loved one’s memory is to plant daffodils, a fun and meaningful opportunity. The idea is to plant, if possible, one bulb for every year your loved one lived.
This is a great activity to involve friends, family, and neighbors. Not only will you benefit from the extra hands, but you’ll be able to use the time to invite conversation and share stories about your loved one. Daffodils are the perfect flower for such a happiness-inducing project: as perennials, they’ll come back spring after spring—and they’re virtually indestructible. You don’t have to remember alone. Remembering can be social and meaningful. It can be uplifting and fun.
Say Their Names Aloud
I make a point to say their names out loud. I also orient what I saw around my children’s relationships, not mine. When I refer to my parents, I try never to say “my mom” or “my dad.” I refer to my parents as “your grandma” and “your grandpa.” Word choice is critical. Children absorb more and appreciate more when relationships involve, and revolve around, them.
Be Proactive
For many individuals, anxiety after loss stems from feeling unmoored. Death, even if we anticipate it, is ultimately out of our control. Being proactive about remembering loved ones is an essential antidote. Keeping a loved one’s memory alive—enjoying reminiscent foods, listening to their favorite songs, sharing stories on social media—restores a critical sense of agency. We become empowered because we take back some of that control we’ve been missing.
A SENSE OF CONNECTION
I really believe that opening yourself up to the possibility of reestablishing or strengthening your relationship with your lost loved one will help you find greater peace and long-lasting healing. It doesn’t matter if you just recently lost someone or if it was decades ago. It’s never too late to give some thought to your spiritual side, ask yourself big questions, seek support, and deepen your connection. Doing this work will have an enormous impact on decreasing your level of anxiety.
Please reread this chapter as many times as you need to. Let the questions and thoughts here linger in your mind and in your heart. The love we have for the people in our lives does not disappear when they die, and neither does our connection with them.
A NXIETY C HECK-I N
Let’s check in with your level of anxiety. After reading the last chapter, I hope you’ve been able to give some thought to the framework that you use to understand your loss and your life. Finding ways to make meaning out of the death of a loved one, and the life you are subsequently living, is an important way of reducing anxiety.
Rate your current anxiety level on a scale of 1–10 (with 10 being the highest).
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Check the symptom boxes that currently apply:
Panic attacks
Insomnia
Nausea
Dizziness
Heart racing/palpitating
Obsessive worry
Hypochondria
Hopefully, by now you are noticing a difference in your panic and anxiety levels. If you feel that you are continuing to struggle, then read back over particular chapters that resonated with you, or seek out the additional support of a therapist who can help you implement the tools you’re learning here. In this next chapter, we’re going to talk about facing your fears about death and in essence help you prepare for your own death. I know some of this can be scary, but tackling this important subject is a huge part of breaking down anxiety.
11 | Death Planning
For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.
—P LATO
T HE ROOT OF ALL ANXIETY LIES IN UNCERTAINTY. A ND WHAT presents more uncertainty than death itself? We fear death because we do not know when it will come or how it will happen. However, one of the best ways to overcome our anxiety about death is to face it.
Most people push off the idea of preparing for death, feeling that there is no reason to prepare for it when they are healthy or young. But for those of us experiencing anxiety around death, taking precautions and making preparations can be the very thing to set us at ease. It should come as no surprise that you are thinking of death more than ever following a loss. Losing someone we love is always a stark reminder of our own mortality. Realizing you are not prepared to die yourself, and feeling resistant to making those preparations, or pushing away the idea of doing so altogether, can be the direct cause of underlying anxiety.
In this final piece of the puzzle, we are going to learn about various ways you can begin to get your affairs in order as a way of alleviating your anxious feelings.
First things first. You are going to die. Pretending that you’re not, or trying not to think about it, will not prevent it. Taking measures to be prepared will give you a greater sense of peace than you think.
Much of our anxiety in life stems from a fear of death in some form or another. We lose many things throughout our lives, from jobs and partnerships to pets and lifestyles. Choosing to face the fear of loss head-on, to bring it out into the light and really grapple with it, diminishes the fear. Diminishing the fear diminishes the anxiety.
I know it’s scary. Believe me. All day long, I talk to people who have lost someone they love. I hear countless stories of death, tales of horrific illnesses or tragic deaths, lives taken too soon. It’s sometimes difficult for me to listen to these stories and not imagine them happening to me. But I’ve found that facing the fear is far healthier than suppressing it.
When I used to work in hospice, we had a weekly team meeting that lasted several hours. All the members of our hospice would gather—the doctor, the chaplain, the nurses, the social worker, and myself. For several hours, we would go over the case of every patient we were currently treating. I often left these meetings depleted and anxious, with phrases like “metastasis to the brain and internal bleeding” ringing in my ears. I’d find myself obsessing about weird aches and pains, worrying I had cancer.
In order to overcome these thoughts, I did a lot of the work I talk about in Chapters 8 and 9—retraining my brain and using techniques of mindfulness. But in addition to these tools, I also knew that part of the work to overcome my anxiety around this had to involve facing my fear and becoming comfortable with the idea of dying.
I forced myself to imagine my own death,
and in doing so it helped me recognize some of the things I needed to change and also some things that I needed to get in place. Doing this work truly alleviated a portion of my anxiety. While I do not want to die early, I now know that if I do, there will be nothing left unfinished or taken care of.
I began with a few simple things and expanded from there. Each step I took reduced my anxiety in a discernible way.
1. Creating a living will
2. Creating advance directives
3. Getting life insurance
4. Making my funeral wishes known
5. Tasking friends with things I would like done after my death
6. Compiling a list of things I want my daughters to have
7. Creating a document that lists all my passwords and accounts
8. Writing letters to loved ones to read in my absence
9. Making a list of places I’d like my daughters to visit
10. Making a list of things I want my daughters to know about me and our family
In this chapter, we’re going to explore all of this and more. Doing this work will not only help you feel more secure about what will happen when you die but also directly benefit your loved ones and the process they will go through upon your death.
Let me give you an example. Even before my father knew he was actively dying, he began to put things in place for after he was gone. I was in my early twenties during this time and living in New York City while he lived in Southern California. Each time I visited him, he would sit down with me and go over various things, telling me where his key for the safe-deposit box was and explaining that he wanted to be cremated. He also took me to the bank on several occasions and made me a cosigner on all of his accounts.
On one such trip, he sat me down at the kitchen table and handed me a piece of paper. “Sweetie,” he said, “I want you to make a list of everything you have to do after I die.”
I balked at him, shook my head, and told him he was being morbid. He pushed on, explaining that he was doing this for me. He went on to explain that when he was gone, there would be a great many things I would be responsible for, and he wanted to help me while he still could. I understand now that he was also doing this for himself. He was plagued with worry—his own anxiety—about what would happen to me after he was gone, and going over these things helped ease that.
The morning after he died, I dug out the list he’d had me make that day and stared at it. I was numb with grief, but I was also the only one to take care of the inevitable tasks one must deal with after someone dies. “Write an obituary,” the list read. “Choose a crematorium. Call social security. Order death certificates. Alert the bank.” I smiled through my tears at the memory of the day he had me write these things down. Even in death, he was still with me, guiding me through life, and in that moment I was so grateful that he had pushed me to face these things with him.
I know it feels scary to think about it all, but the truth is that somewhere deep down, you’re already thinking about it. Not facing these things is manifesting in anxiety. The trick is to start small. You don’t need to tackle this all at once. Begin with something easy. Even just make a list of all the things you know will need to be taken care in the event of your death.
I turned to my friend Amy Pickard while I was working on this chapter. After the loss of her mother, Amy created a company called Good to Go! that helps individuals and families get their affairs in order.
When Amy’s mother died when Amy was forty-three, she left a mess for Amy to clean up. Amy was stunned to realize that her mother had put nothing in place in the event of her death, and Amy was completely overwhelmed with the tasks at hand. She was grieving her mother, a woman who had been her best friend in life, yet also forced to sort through a litany of tough questions and decisions in the midst of her grief.
“The only time I’ve ever had anxiety was when I was grieving, and I had my first panic attack,” Amy told me.
I knew it was directly correlated to the death. I remember hearing a story about a friend having a panic attack when he was four or five because he freaked out over the concept of infinity. I thought of this because it’s when something is bigger than you can understand or handle, that causes anxiety. And death is so big. It’s like my brain couldn’t process the hugeness of it, and so that directly inspired a panic attack. I think you have anxiety when you feel a complete lack of control, a complete lack of understanding.
When my mom died, I was completely overwhelmed. What I wasn’t anticipating was the amount of administration and organization that it took. She didn’t have anything in place. She had an old will from 1987, but we didn’t even find it until a month later. I didn’t even know she had a life insurance policy until the attorney told me. I was angry, too. Why do I have to figure all this out? Why is it down to me to handle all this? Even though I had been so close with my mom, I wished we had talked about these things.
In the year after her mother’s death, Amy began to think about other people having to go through her dilemma, and she began to ask her friends and family what kinds of things they had in place. She was shocked to discover the majority had answered, “Nothing.”
Soon after, she hosted her very first Good to Go! party at a friend’s house. Combining her background working in music and her love of rock ’n’ roll, she brought in a peppy death-related soundtrack and encouraged participants while they were young and healthy to treat it like a party, providing snacks and libations.
Amy’s take is that doing this work doesn’t have to be heavy and depressing, that if we can find ways to make it fun or even enjoyable, it will ease the enormity of the emotional task at hand. She also created a document called “The Departure File” that she brought with her to the parties she hosted and distributed to attendees.
“When I created ‘The Departure File’ for the parties,” Amy told me, “I thought, what are the conversations I wish I’d had with my mother? What does she want me to do with her stuff? What does she believe happens after we die? How would she have comforted me in my time of grief?”
And these are the very things that Amy asks attendees to think about and answer. Today Amy hosts Good to Go! parties all over the country. In 2015 I hosted my own Good to Go! party, and while the experience was definitely intense, it was also cathartic.
A group of twelve of us sat around my living room and had very frank conversations about our end of life. There were so many more questions to think about, not just those in “The Departure File” but even more that arose from thinking about this big inevitability. However, we all left feeling a lot more peaceful and infinitely more prepared.
Here are some questions for you to begin thinking about on your own. Take your time with them. Create your own “Departure File,” or reach out to a company like Amy’s that can assist you in this task.
IN THE EVENT OF YOUR OWN DEATH
1. Do you have a will or advance directives?
2. Do your loved ones know your funeral and memorial wishes?
3. Do they know your burial or cremation wishes?
4. Do you have a list of all of your accounts and passwords?
5. Do your loved ones know where to find your legal documents (will, advance directives, birth certificate, marriage certificate, and car, home, and life insurance)?
6. Have you assigned someone to manage your assets or be a cosigner on your bank accounts?
7. Have you taken measures to protect your dependents financially?
8. Is there anyone in particular you would like notified about your death?
9. Have you thought about what you would like to happen to your pets?
10. Are there personal belongings you wish to go to specific people?
11. Are there memories or advice you wish to pass to your loved ones?
12. Are there things you would like destroyed (for example, journals and diaries)?
13. Is there anything comforting you can provide to your loved ones (for example, a letter telling them
what you hope for them after you are gone)?
For more on these, please see here in the resources at the back of the book.
There are many components to end-of-life planning, some of them financial, some of them administrative, some involving health care, and some purely emotional. A few of the most basic documents to consider are living trusts and advance directives.
What is the difference between a living will, a living trust, and an advance directive?
A living will is basically the same as an advance directive. It is a document that allows people to state their wishes for end-of-life medical care, in the event that they are unable to communicate their decisions. It has no power after death. A living will or advance directive also allows you to appoint a health care proxy who is a person you deem appropriate to make health care decisions on your behalf.
Obtaining an advance directive or living will is as simple as downloading one from the Internet or asking your physician and filling it out. There is a standard form provided by each state that you can print, fill out, sign (you must have a witness and notarization), and then give to your loved ones or store with your health care documents. If something were to happen to you suddenly—a car accident or heart attack—your loved ones would have this important information available to help them in the process of medical decision making.
Living trusts and wills are documents that manage your assets. A living trust is a written legal document that enables your assets to be placed in a trust for your lifetime and then transferred to designated beneficiaries at your death by your chosen representative, called a “successor trustee.”
A main difference between a will and a trust is that a will goes into effect only after you die, while a trust takes effect as soon as it is created. A will is a legal document that states who will receive your property and assets at the time of your death, and it appoints a legal representative to carry out your wishes.
Anxiety- The Missing Stage of Grief Page 20
