Good morning Reader,
Welcome to the 37th issue of The FAM.
The alarms are still there on my iPhone:
11:55 AM: Dad’s Morphine
1:55 PM: Dad’s Morphine
3:55 PM: Dad’s Morphine
5:55 PM: Dad’s Morphine
7:55 PM: Dad’s Morphine
The day before, I pulled out my father’s living will and reviewed it sentence by sentence with my mother. He clearly asked for no artificial or life-sustaining support at the end.
With that clarity, I made the decision to remove the oxygen that was keeping Dad’s body here.
Hospice helped us determine that morphine would comfort Dad’s transition, and I wanted to be the one who administered it. I wanted to shield my mother. And it seemed wrong to ask our hospice provider, a complete stranger, to do it.
At 10:23 PM that evening, my mother and I – one on each side of the bed – held my father in our arms, told him we loved him, gave him permission to go…
And then Dad’s eyes opened as if waking from a long slumber. He shook his head three times and took his last breath.
I remember thinking, now he knows all the answers.
The Resentment That Followed
And then it began. Not immediately, but over the months that followed.
I became filled with resentment.
There was a part of me that came to dislike a part of my father.
Not for the very last days. Not for the tenderness of that final moment. But for the last eight to ten years of his life.
Dad lived a bold life. One of the last things he said to me on his deathbed was, “It’s been quite a ride.” And it was.
Unprecedented business success. Travel to every corner of the world. Local cultures. And he gifted his children and grandchildren “trip of a lifetime” after “trip of a lifetime.” He was good to us in so many ways.
But in the last decade… something shifted.
They say Parkinson’s played a role. Maybe it did. But from where I stood, Dad gave up.
And worse – in my mind – he became selfish. He expected to be waited on hand and foot by my mother and his caregiver.
And it robbed my mother of a decade of her life.
I thought my mother would thrive after Dad’s death. But that decade took its toll. She is still with us, but she is in rapid decline.
And I’ll just say it the way it came out of me back then: God got so much right… but this end-of-life stuff can feel cruel.
And yea, over the years I became mad at Dad.
Because the ripple effect of those years wasn’t good for him, for my mother, or – to varying degrees – for my siblings and me.
My Ill-Conceived Noble Mission
So I made a decision.
I decided I would never put my two children through what my father put us through. That thought consumed me.
Holding my father as he took his last breath… and then watching the cost those final years had on my mother… it literally ate away at me.
And yes, damn it, I was going to be the one to reverse the trend. I was going to show my children how to die the “right” way. (Aren’t I the noble and righteous one?!)
Fast forward a few years.
I’m staged near the ocean in the We Supply America RV outside the Bay Area. My son, Dirk Jr., drives down with his dog Philo to have dinner and a few drinks.
That night was golden for me. Any time with my kids, I cherish.
The steaks and vegetables get cooked. A few IPAs get opened. The conversation wanders the way good father-son conversations do.
And as the night wore on, the chat turns to my father’s – Dirk’s grandfathers death.
I feel the indignation rise up – that familiar righteousness I carried – and I say it. I mean, it was my duty to say it – right!
I tell Dirk that I will never put him and Allison through what my dad put Mom and us through.
With chest puffed out, I tell him that I am committed to “dying in a way that would make you proud.”
And then the hammer drops.
In that moment, Dirk rose to the level of not just my son… but a needed truth-teller.
He looked me in the eye and scolded me.
“I don’t ever want to hear that again,” he said. “Don’t do it for us. Do it for yourself.”
The Power of Doing It for Yourself
Holy shit. Talk about sobering up in an instant.
Because with those four words – “Do it for yourself” – my son wasn’t correcting my plan on how to die. He was reorienting my approach to living.
In that moment, I saw the truth: my “noble mission” wasn’t noble at all. It was resentment dressed up as virtue.
I was using my adult children as a reason to stay bound to a bitterness and anger that oddly, I didn’t want to let go.
By holding on, it gave me a strange kind of permission to be smaller.
Let it go.
Not to excuse what happened. Not to pretend it didn’t cost you something.
But because carrying it doesn’t punish the past.
It punishes you.
I’m not saying people don’t hurt us. They do. I’m saying resentment becomes a backpack we choose to wear long after the hurt is over.
And that backpack is damn heavy!
Ordering Consciousness
In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi tells us:
“A person can make himself happy, or miserable, regardless of what is actually happening ‘outside,’ just by changing the contents of consciousness…one must find ways to order consciousness so as to be in control of feelings and thoughts.”
This is gold.
In other words, our situation doesn’t determine our state of being. It’s what we choose to carry. It’s how we organize the contents of our mind.
And for a while, I had organized my mind around resentment and a strange obsession with dying well. Think about that! I mean, what a way to go through life. But, that what I was doing!
Until, with Dirk’s words – “Do it for yourself” – something shifted. A spark. A wake-up call. A realization that I am better than this.
This symbolic slap upside the head woke me up in a way that I had to take ownership of what I was carrying and thus sharing with the world.
I had to stop letting resentment run the show.
I had to reorganize the content of my thinking. This was on me!
The Choice Is Ours
The choice is ours.
That night reminded me that my life, how I feel about my life, and how I show up in my life is not only in my control, but – and here is the important part – I have a duty to myself to take this control.
As Viktor Frankl said,
”Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
When Dirk said to me, “Do it for yourself,” I began to assume control, and the choosing of my own way.
And you know what? It’s a hell of a lot better way to live!
A Different Kind of Living
When I scroll my phone I still sometimes see those morphine alarms. And I still feel that moment of last breath in my heart.
But the deeper shift wasn’t about my father’s death.
It was about Life. My life.
It was the realization that I was allowing negative emotion to guide my entire outlook on life. Which in turn determined how I showed up in my life.
I found resentment to be a strange thing. For me it disguised itself as righteousness. But it can and does take many forms. Maybe for you it is silent scorekeeping, emotional withdrawal, sarcasm, resignation, or your favorite way to numb yourself.
It’s the story you keep rehearsing until it becomes the lens you see life through.
But in whatever form this resentment takes, what it really does is keep you bound to a smaller life.
And none of us want to live a smaller life.
That wasn’t my son giving me a slogan. That was him challenging me to get out of my own head, let go of what no longer matters (if it ever did), and to embrace the beauty of life before me.
So if you’re carrying something right now – and in reading this today, you realize a form of resentment is holding you back, I won’t pretend it’s easy.
But I will ask you this:
What are you still carrying that you’re ready to put down?
Your alarm is ringing.
Resentment doesn’t just weigh you down. It steals your tomorrow.
Go on, put the backpack down.
Do it for yourself.
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