Living While You’re Dying Advocacy
My dad had a living while he was dying experience. He was fortunate to have a cancer that had a degree of predictability in prognosis, but dad didn’t ask the timeframe. He simply asked the specialist to support him live well while he could consciously decide what was important to him. Dad also liked checking off lists, so intuitively he did what he felt called to do. This included doing his last timely road-trip, selling his car before his disease could potentially rob him of this pleasure and privilege and making amends as best possible with people and what was still a little incomplete. From my reckonings, he did this as best possible. His final phone call to me was short. He knew. I knew. He simply said, “Today this phone call will be short. Farewell.” And as I lit a candle for him the following night speaking in the airwaves to him “choose your time dad”, I noticed a long streak of pink light emanate from the candle into the air. I knew in that moment he got his wings. And indeed, it was in that exact moment.
Yesterday in my Bold Women Speak role I spoke with a young woman, who has just supported two important women in her life die as best possible. Her favourite nana and her husband’s mum.
This woman is wise beyond her years, and her soul sings Death Doula. Not yet qualified but soon to be, she certainly has an innate sense of offering dignity in the dying process and she is “uber-qualified through lived experience” in my opinion. She demonstrated this in the way she spoke up, sang, touched, advocated, questioned, accompanied….so many beautiful verbs done with dignity for her loved one as they were living while they were dying.
Nevertheless, it was far from straight-forward. Advocacy often isn’t. Questioning the “norms, protocol and system” can indeed be challenging. She challenged over controlling power of attorneys who usurped the dignity of the dying and took away rights of others. Yowsa. She questioned timeframes that came from a system being abided to. But more than that, she midwifed her nana into the ever-life.
She recognised many things in that living while you’re dying experience that were damn difficult, and sometimes soul-destroying. It’s here she will be, and in fact already is, the change-maker. I’m so looking forward to helping her hone that wisdom, impactfully tell her story and bring well-needed, refreshing views on Alzheimers, Dementia and the Dying process in tangible form that she can use in interviews, as content in blogs, speaking gigs, online resources, and the courses and retreats she will offer. How important to use her honed wisdom into far-reaching impact. That’s what Bold Women Speak is all about.
YOUR ADVOCACY ACTION:
What are you passionate about having a voice on and making change with?
Key thing for many is feeling confident enough and getting the foundations and structure in place. In other words to create key content (key teaching points, honed wisdom, precise desired change or outcomes) that can be used in many different formats to educate, build awareness and get buy-in.
Get the foundations done once, and it’s so much easier, time efficient and gets your message across far more accurately and succinctly.
Email me today if you want to know the process that can do just that. Don’t go alone. Have someone like me, who has your back.
