A Hospice Chaplain's Fieldguide to Caregiving: Finding Resilience on the Frontlines of Love

By EM Hager

Might your caregiving be easier?  It's a lot just to keep your balance. Shift to healthier more resilient and less stressful ways of caregiving with these bite-sized, wise and funny gifts. They are friendly, concise and even a bit humorous, (because you have

• Language: English
• Publisher: same as contact
• Release date: Nov 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781882807024

EM Hager

E.M. Hager has been shaped by both the Oklahoma prairie landscapes she has lived in, and by the leaping (or falling) off their edges: boom then bust, drought then flood, and the general human ups and downs of love and loss. When she finally reached home on the West Coast, she added San Francisco's (and Silicon Valley's) technological bubble-to-bust cycles to her resume. That learned resilience has taught her balance...and bounce in her three professions. The first as a Landscape Architect with a West Coast degree, she was licensed and practiced in five Southwestern and prairie states. The second grew from opportunities found after she moved to San Francisco and became the bootstrapped CEO of several, serial, digital mapping concerns on the edge between CD-Roms and the Internet. That ended with the bursting of many bubbles both personal and economic and an eleven-year caregiving journey of an elder began. She fell in love with her third profession, on the edge of a place where she never wanted to be-a place where no one wants to be. She became an Interfaith hospice chaplain and a support for caregivers everywhere. Her education taught her to design with living systems and now it frames her understanding at bedside about the nature of birth, life and death-as a dynamic process within the seasons of renewal. From this place and nature, she offers thirty-one practical gifts to support caregivers in the tough and tender places of love-the front lines of illness and health.

Book preview

I

THE FRONTLINES

The Frontlines is a beginning place in caregiving where shock is only a phone call away. The stress of concern over our loved ones is intense, coupled with the common-place unreality of another life and death ER throw-down. This drama alongside the tedium of caregiving inspires (and sometimes even requires) an exhausting level of hyper-vigilance from us, which tends to eclipse and drain our normal life balance. With these eight rules, we can do better. You can do better.

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Gift No.1 Wait Here

Stop struggling. Wait Here for the goodness to catch up.

Gift No. 2 Stay Full

Running on empty? Stay full to do what is yours to do today…that’s enough.

Gift No. 3 Etak Compass

Our longings and discontents are inner guidance.

Gift No. 4 Diva Breathe

Generous people breathe deep but real divas let it go. Think Pavarotti.

Gift No. 5. The Gratitude of Redwoods

Allow gratitude to turn what you have into enough.

Gift No. 6 Play Daily

Playing right where I am is the long game—especially in the leftover moments.

Gift No. 7 Be Willing

If I am willing, I am not broken.

Gift No. 8 Stop. Rest

Take off your cape. Decisions will be made—but not right now.

1

Wait Here

Stop struggling. Wait Here for the goodness to catch up.

The cold ceramic floor was sucking out her warmth as we waited for the San Francisco EMTs. I touched Betty to reassure her—or me; she was icy. Her head gash would need stitches and the doctors would later find a cracked vertebra. None of it stopped her from joking about how cute the paramedics were when they did arrive.

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Five Years

into Caregiving with Six to Go…

I think he’s the cutest. Doesn’t he look like Glen? Or it could be H.R. or Keith or anyone on the list of my exes. It was a familiar dance. Betty was entertaining again; she was holding court. I was her captive entourage and the firefighter-paramedics were the attentive audience. She was doing a pretty good job of holding on to some dignity as well as holding off the next phase. She and I were on the same ship sailing in denial: she was not yet my child and I was not yet her parent.

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Humor was even more

unexpected in the emergency room. Her healthcare workers were perplexed, then charmed by it (especially, if they saw me modeling laughter). Or they might miss the joke entirely and report me to the authorities. My daughter beats me. Betty had said this in response to the ER staff’s private questions about the source of her many bruises from nocturnal falls. When I asked her the same thing about the new bruise du jour, she’d say, How would I know? It was as if I had asked about a dent in the bumper of some rental car parked on the street. Maybe she was in shock or perhaps it was her natural wit, but she thought this account was very funny.

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The subsequent elder