Hey, do you know a caregiver in your life who's struggling with something and you don't really know what to say?
Well, guess what? I do. So get them this book. It's called A Minute for Caregivers. When every day feels like Monday.
They're one minute chapters. And I'd love for you to put that in the hands of somebody who is struggling as they care for a chronically impaired loved one. And it could be somebody dealing with an aging parent, especially each child. Somebody that has an alcoholic or an addict in their family. Somebody who has a loved one who has had a traumatic experience, mental illness.
There's so many different kinds of impairments. There's always a caregiver. How do you help a caregiver?
How do you help somebody who helps somebody? That's where I come in. That's where this book comes in. And that's what I think you're going to find will be incredibly meaningful to them. And if you're going through that right now, they get a copy for you.
Friends don't let friends care give alone. I speak fluent caregiver for decades of this. This will help. I promise you it'll pull you back away from the cliff a little bit, point you to safety, give you something solid to stand on so that you or that caregiver you know can be a little healthier as they take care of somebody who is not healthy. Caregivers make better caregivers.
It's called a minute for caregivers when every day feels like Monday wherever books are sold. And for more information, go to PeterRosenberger.com. She's the author, speaker, business coach, and podcaster. She's got a lengthy resume, but right there smack dab in the middle of her resume is the word caregiver. Her name is Sue Ryan, and I'm very glad to have her with us today. She's got quite a story, quite a journey, and I'm looking forward to hearing her insights. So, Sue, welcome to the program. Peter, thank you so very much for inviting me.
I'm really glad to have the opportunity to share with you and with your audience. We took a while to get here. You and I started talking some time ago, but life just has a way. Life in the life of caregivers has a way, doesn't it, Peter?
Blessed are the flexible, for they shall not be bent out of shape. Sue, tell us a little bit about your story. First off, your background before caregiving and before all that came about, and then what happened in this journey and where you are today.
So let's just kind of go back to the beginning here. In the early part of my professional career, which started my early 20s, I was in the enterprise application software industry, and that's where I stayed for over 30 years in a variety of different roles. Beginning in about my mid-20s was my first caregiving journey, and I was in a variety of family caregiving journeys in parallel to my professional career all the way through my professional career, and I also never self-identified because, especially when I began, it was certainly not seen as something that you could share and still have a professional career. And I have had, as I mentioned, a number of journeys, including my husband, my dad, and my grandmother, to name a few.
My dad was a frontotemporal lobe dementia, and his journey was about eight and a half years, and overlapping that by a couple years was my husband's, and his was just under 12 years. And my grandmother preceded both of them. What was that like, you know, did you just get picked out of the family with your grandmother and get involved in this, or did you just step up? What, how did that, how did that evolve with you?
It was a blend of it. It was that I complemented the care. I wasn't the primary and full-time caregiver. I was a part of the care team with my grandmother.
Her son was her primary caregiver. And because I had already been on so many family caregiving journeys before that, it made sense that my experience would help that journey. From the very first journey back in my 20s, I've always felt like when the journey was given to me, there was a purpose in it, there was a reason for it, so I never fought it. And I always felt that there was something for me in this, that part of the purpose in my life was the experiences of the journey, both for me, for where I was going, and then also for my ability to support my loved one having their best life journey. And so from that space, I just always embraced them. And that didn't mean that they weren't challenging. It didn't mean they weren't incredibly frustrating. It just meant that I never fought them and I never said, oh, why me?
And I never felt like a martyr or anything like that. I felt that I had been blessed to be able to have the ability to support someone in a time when they needed support and learned a lot. And that's why the number one reason why I began sharing because I wanted other people to learn faster and more easily than I did.
And I wanted them to gain experience through the professional side of my career in information technology. I used to say, there's data, information, knowledge, and wisdom, and the world's got basically an infinite amount of data. And we get some curiosity, some interest in it, and we start asking questions and gathering information. And that's what we do when we begin our caregiving journey. And then we use it and we work with it. And all of these journeys helped me develop knowledge, and yet it's not wisdom until we share it. And I'm in the season and have been for probably the last 10 years of sharing what I've learned to help others because I know what it was like not to have that in my early journeys and how much I benefited from it and others have benefited from it. What brought you into the IT world? I mean, did that start in high school because you were pretty young when you got into the caregiving world, but you were already into the IT world at that point.
So when did that kick in for you? When I was in college, I actually was going to, I went to a college that had a degree in equestrian studies. I was fascinated with the science of numbers, and I was going to have horses as an expensive hobby. I showed horses around the world and loved that. August 1st of my senior year in college, I got kicked in the knee by a horse and that rearranged my professional path. And with my fascination with the science of numbers, it was logical for me to get into information technology.
And that has just been something I've always been curious about. So I've been a geek since I was in my mid teens. Well, you were doing all this while taking care of your grandmother, then it changed into your dad and then your husband, but you've maintained all of these paths that you're doing. How did that work for you mentally to make that shift? Because one of the things I've learned in my years as a caregiver is that you've got to pivot at any given moment.
And being geek, I share your geekiness and I share your nerdiness, but things just don't always look very tidy like they do when you're dealing with systems and numbers when you're dealing with a caregiver. Right. They were not. My grandmother's journey was not until I was in my 40s. I had other people whose journeys were preceding that. And yeah, it was really tough because a big part of what I did on the technology side is I traveled. And it was very challenging to be a caregiver and also to have the responsibility for traveling and not to tell anybody else that you are a caregiver.
So those parts of it weren't the easiest part of it. However, I began practicing something in the journey with my dad that I coined as massive acceptance and radical presence. And it simplified my journey. I was caring for my dad one evening and my dad, my hero, we went to all the horse shows together. He was always there for me. He was always saying, I'm going to teach you how to think. So when I'm not there for you and I want to teach you how to stay safe. So you can do it when I can't help you.
And then here he is and he's needing the help. And I felt like one evening I had really underserved him because while I knew he had dementia, I was trying to get him to do something he'd been teaching me all my life. And from that came massive acceptance and radical presence. And what massive acceptance is, is that I recognized that I wasn't accepting exactly what was in the moment, exactly the way it was. I didn't have to like it. I didn't have to agree with it. I didn't have to understand it in the moment. I just had to accept this is what is and accept it without judgment of myself, of anyone else or the situation. Because when I could accept, OK, this is what it is, then I could stay radically present in the moment, which meant I can meet my care receiver exactly where they are in the moment, not where some guy that says they should be in this place on the diagnosis. Where is my care receiver in this moment?
What do they need in this moment? So that I could celebrate when there was even the teeny tiniest beautiful moment. And there were tons of those as well as when it was time to make a really, really challenging life altering decision to be able to be present in that moment.
And that's kind of what came out of all of it. And I feel like it has really supported me in my life, in all areas of my life now. Was there something that triggered that moment for you to that massive acceptance? Because I've seen a lot of disconnect with fellow caregivers when they are really in the moment, but they're not accepting this. They just they're begrudging.
They're showing up, almost gritting their teeth. I'm in the moment. I'm dealing with it, but I'm not. There was not the acceptance part. What pushed you into saying it's important for me to accept this? That's such a great question, Peter. Thank you for asking it, because part of it is that not being present in the moment. And another part of it is the judgment.
And it is that we judge ourselves or we judge our loved one or we judge what's going on. And what it really was is excuse me, my dad and I were sitting out on the back porch and it was dusk and it was a beautiful dusk evening. We were looking out over. They were kind of up on a sloping hill and there was the grass and all these nice things. All of a sudden he jumps up and says, walk the dog. He had frontal temporal lobe dementia with aphasia.
So it was hard for him to communicate. He grabs the dog's leash and starts walking toward the door to the of the porch. And on one end of the door to the porch, it goes out onto this sloping, grassy hill.
And we're in Florida. The grass is like razor blades. It's rough.
It's it's all these other things. So I'm thinking, you know, my dad, who's teaching me how to be safe. That's not the safest way, because the door at the other side of the porch walks out onto a paved concrete path that meanders down the hill. So I'm like, Daddy, Daddy, let's go this way.
It's safer. He's walking that dog toward the door. And I said, no, Daddy, Daddy, let's go this way.
This is the right way to do it. My father, who absolutely adored me, he would spank me if I did something wrong, but he would never lay a hand on me if just in normal circumstances. My father pushed past me to walk out that door. And I was shocked for a moment. I was like, what? And then it's dusk.
It's all these things. So I'm going next to him. I am like, OK, is he going to fall? Is the dog? The dog's agitated. He's agitated. I'm agitated. You know, are we going to make it down the hill?
All of these things. So I am not fully present in the moment. We get down to the bottom of the hill. And again, everybody's agitated. Everybody's frustrated.
We are safe. But but then, you know, once you got a diagnosis and you get disrupted, it's so hard to get you back to a place of peace. So my dad is just completely discombobulated. He was frustrated and upset. And the rest of the evening was not pretty. And I reflected on it afterward and I was like, what happened? What did what could I have done better in that moment? And what it really was is I'd accepted he had dementia, but I'm trying to get him to do what he had done. My whole life was teaching me about what's the safest thing to do.
He didn't have access to that. And so me, instead of being so fully present and accepting that and opening the door for him and then helping, you know, like be able to grab the dog if it needed it or keep everything calm, I'm like trying on my agenda. And that changed it. And the minute that switch flipped, it has never gone back. And it has served me so well. And I mean, I had to make a life changing choice for my husband.
And I was able to stay fully present and calm in that moment. I would imagine that switch being flipped also permeated into every part of your life, including all the business part of it, everything else, recognizing that that massive acceptance, because I think this is one of the challenges I have faced, personally, just going through this, OK, if we could just get through this, then we can get on with our life. And there's a point where you say, no, no, this is our life and it's OK. I'm going to accept this and I'm going to be present in this life now.
We're not looking for something to get us out. But how many people are in business? How many people do you see in their jobs or in their corporate structures who are just trying to get out of where they are, as opposed to being where they are and growing in it? Did you connect those dots with it as well?
Oh, absolutely, because many, many of the years of my career was what something called sales. So I'm out there trying to get clients and having them invest tremendous sums of money in what we're doing. And instead of being fully present in the moment, I'm always looking, you know, what's the next thing that has to get done? What's the next thing?
What's the next thing? Well, the awards come and you've done a phenomenal job. And yet you're looking at, well, I didn't get this done. And if I'd only done that, I could have done a better job. Next year, I'm going to do this, blah, blah, blah. You don't stay in the moment.
You don't celebrate what's really great. And yet you also don't learn as much as you have access to from where the outcome was not what you anticipated. And then when you're doing it with judgment, you have a very skewed vision to what it is.
And so you can't be at peace. And by staying fully present in the moment, accepting that this is the moment and not judging it, whatever the moment is has lessons in it and prepares us. It makes it so much easier for me to reach out for help. I'm not trying to prove I can do it.
I'm not I'm not trying to feel like I shouldn't ask for somebody else's help or that I should do something like somebody else did. I'm being me and I'm being me in the moment. You know, for me, that there was a defining moment in my life as well where that light bulb went on and I was in the past when I would go through a surgery with Gracie. And I was constantly trying to back and forth on the phone, trying to do stuff, get everything done, run around like an idiot. And this particular time in the season of my life, things had settled down for me mentally and emotionally and spiritually. I was just in a much different place and I was trying to distance myself from the freneticness that I'd had before. And I was sitting beside her after it was post-op and we were back in the room.
They got her back into the room. And I was just looking at the menu, getting ready to order dinner that night from the hospital cafeteria for her. And it was very quiet in the room. I was not on my phone.
I was not doing anything. I was just sitting there beside her. And I look over and she is as blue as they get. And she had stopped breathing and she coded. And I, there was no telemetry on her though.
This is many years ago. I immediately got the nurse. They called the code. And I mean, people parachuted into this room, you know, and I've been at that hospital a lot and I knew a lot of people. These were people, these were like ninja nurses and everybody showed up and I sat there right in the corner. They all, in fact, people, and I said, look, they were starting to intubate her. And I said, look, she's a singer, used a small tube. And this one guy who I swear I'd never seen before. He said, no, no, we know Gracie.
It's okay. You know, we got her. And I was like, how did you even know? But they took care of her. They got her off into ICU and everything was fine. And then her surgeon and the other nurses on the floor knew me. They looked at me and they said, you did good. And the thing is, and here's what I learned, I did nothing. I just sat there in the moment.
I was radically present. And because of that, I saved her life. And the lesson learned from me was stop trying to get out of this and deal with what it is and be in it. And in the process, I literally saved her life for doing, because I was doing nothing and just accepting that this is where I was supposed to be.
I wasn't striving to get out of it. So when you say that, I'm going to, by the way, I'm going to use that again. I'll give you credit, but I'm going to use it. I'm going to just steal it right now.
You can use it anytime. And what you said, Peter, that was so powerful. So many of us, especially when we get in the role of caregiving, there are certain things we begin to do. One of them is we begin the doing part and we forget about the being part. We need to be in the being as much as we need to be in the doing.
And part of the being is just being with our loved one, being present to the moment, and also being present to ourselves. Don't just do something. Stand there. Just don't do something.
Stand there. So it's not the striving. It's not that, OK, I have to do this, I have to do that. And it's so easy because there's always more to do than we could get done. Our lives were full and now we've got caregiving. And the caregiving diagnosis came and we wanted to have a PhD in the diagnosis and a PhD in being a caregiver.
Plus, we had full time jobs and we had family and we had all these other things. And so it's easy for it to become overwhelming and for us to step away from the being part. And sometimes the greatest gift as a caregiver is being around your loved one in the being space of it so that you can be fully present with them. And then when you are that, you're not in a space of judgment. We put my husband in a care community and I saw so many people who would say, oh, you know, well, Jane brings in cookies to her mom every day and she's here every day and she's here all day. And I just feel so terrible because I can't do that and I'm not there and I'm not a good caregiver.
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have a different journey. You do different things.
And when we're in that doing and judging and all those other things, we can't be in the being and we need a lot of being in order to do. We need to be able to say, I need self-care. I need other care. When you, I want to circle back to something. I have actually three follow up questions.
I'm going to kind of lightning around you with a little bit. But first off, when did you become comfortable saying I'm a caregiver? That's a fabulous question.
Nobody's ever asked me that. And the reason I have on my Substack page today went out, I do a thing every Monday from my book. It's called A Minute for Caregivers When Every Day Feels Like Monday. And this is one I put, you might be a caregiver if, because I was asked this question by AARP years ago. They did an interview with me and they said, what about these people who don't identify as a caregiver?
And I always thought the question was just outrageously funny. For some reason, I just lapsed into Jeff Foxworthy and said, if you have a carpet cleaner on retainer, you're probably a caregiver. And they said, well, you ought to do a bunch of these with Jeff. And I did.
I called him up and we did a whole series on you might be a caregiver if. And because I thought people are not, they're doing it, but they're not necessarily identifying themselves as this. This is what they are. I didn't think of myself as this for decades. And so I think this is so powerful.
There's so much. That's for you, though. You didn't want you didn't say it. You mentioned that twice.
And I thought, well, that's interesting. When did you start saying it? I respect you're asking the question and I'm going to give you two different kinds of answers. I hope that's OK. There's no rules here.
OK. Early in my early in my caregiving journey, and this is something that happens a lot right now. Many business professionals do not self identify in the workplace as a caregiver because from an organizational perspective, where they work does not recognize or have a support mechanism for family caregivers.
It creates a phenomenal amount of pressure in it. It impacts team productivity. It impacts personal productivity. It impacts a lot of different areas. For my career, of all the years I was a business professional, I was not in an environment that supported the self identification as a caregiver in that professional environment.
And so from that lens, I did not ever self identify the. Fortunately, the guidelines around that are now shifting more organizations. And this is one of the voices I have is I'm doing everything I can to get my voice out there to help shift the narrative, because it's so easy to support and embrace family caregivers. So the other answer then of when did I start self identifying as a caregiver was when I left my traditional corporate professional career. Because then I was very comfortable being recognized as a caregiver because I knew the better way for me to be a better caregiver is if other people knew about it, because I didn't have all the answers. I didn't even know all the questions to ask. And the more I got myself out there and said, I'm a caregiver, I'd I'd benefit from your guidance in this area.
The more other people had the opportunity to support me, to ask questions and to be there for me. Absolutely. I think that you're right. It's all changed. And people haven't quite known how to deal with this in years past. I mean, I started doing this back when Reagan was president.
So that's, that's, you know, life has changed a lot since then. And, and I, but I've maintained this. And I want to ask you this, because this is your world. This is your wheelhouse in the business world on this. I have maintained that caregivers in many respects are an employer's dreams. Because we are high functioning multitaskers who are use creative and adaptive solutions to very complex problems. And I've maintained that caregivers possess skill sets that they had even scratched the surface of understanding what they actually bring to the table. How does that resonate with you? Absolutely.
A hundred percent. We're, we're creative. We learn how to, there's no such thing as really multitasking, but we learn how to navigate a variety of different tasks. We learn how to maximize what we have. We're good at budgeting because we've got our budgets spread thin and we have a lot of responsibility going on. Translucent.
Yes, translucent. The other thing, Peter, that's really valuable is when a business is loyal to us and keeps us when they're in this temporary season called caregiving, we're phenomenally loyal to them as well. And we'll do everything we possibly can. We're so blessed with technology today that for many people, when they have a temporary season in their life in one way, shape or form, you can also work and our ability now to communicate with teams, the more and more we're able to do that, the better it is. So, yes, I agree. I feel very strongly that caregivers are great team members and that they want to stay. You've got somebody who definitely does not want to leave the workforce.
No, they don't. And I think the knee-jerk reaction that a lot of caregivers have had is, okay, I've got to take X amount of time off and throw myself recklessly at taking care of dad or mom or whatever. And then everything kind of falls apart. And I always tell people, just take a beat for a moment. Just breathe. When you hurl yourself at the beginning of this thing, so you run the risk. For example, there's a lady I knew that she stopped everything to take care of her dad with Alzheimer's. She thought, okay, this is going to be just a short season.
Well, seven years later, she's bankrupt. And that's the thing that I'm screaming and raising my hands on. You've got to pace yourself. This is the long haul. Don't quit your job.
Don't freak out. You didn't get here overnight. You're not going to get through it overnight.
It's a matter of just pacing yourself. I want to go back to one other question, the setup for another one. When this thing happened with your husband, please feel free to not answer because I don't ever want to pry or expose anything. But that had to have been a gut punch. How did you deal with that? It was a gut punch.
However, my husband, this is going to get a little bit controversial for some people, and that's okay. It was a gut punch because it was certainly not what we anticipated. I didn't meet my husband until I was 46. Never been in love, never been married. He was 12 years older than I am.
It was just wonderful. And we had a great time for about 10 years, and he was diagnosed. And so it was pretty shocking news because it was certainly something that neither one of us had been giving any consideration to. However, my husband was a mass everyday Catholic while he was still in the womb. He didn't fear death. He didn't see death as the end of life. He said, I fully accept this journey. He had questions he wanted to ask God and Jesus.
He wanted to have an intellectual conversation with the Apostle Paul. And we journeyed together, and I embraced that. And it was that we maximized.
We didn't bemoan what we didn't have. What we said is, what do we have access to? How do we maximize our experience? And how do we make it the most positive experience for both of us? So the lens that I looked at through my journey with my husband is, how do I make him? How am I the best steward of his remaining time to help him be in the best place? So when we celebrate his birthday back into heaven, he's ready to go. He's at peace.
He has done what God wanted him to. And I have supported him and done everything I can for him to have the best possible journey. And also not lost sight of the fact that it's my journey as well, because I'm learning things. I'm going through things. I'm being challenged. I am having all kinds of experiences.
And I would not be having those if there wasn't some purpose for those in my life. And so I completely accepted this. This is where massive acceptance and radical presence comes from.
It's that, OK, this is this is what it is. Do you feel that when you go out and speak on these things now, I mean, you're certainly very open now about your caregiving thing as opposed to 20 years ago or whatever. And do you feel like the audience is able to see their life now in the context of these stories that you're telling, that they're able to say, oh, I see the the life principle here? It's not I've maintained this for years that there's nothing I deal with as a caregiver that's not part of the human condition. I just deal with it kind of on a nuclear level. I deal with it every day, all day long.
But it's still there's nothing. Gracie and I deal with this husband and wife. That's not just common to everybody that's in a marriage. We just have as far as the emotional stuff.
I mean, sure, most people don't have 80 some surgeries, but at the same time, somebody is going to get sick during the marriage. Somebody is going to have a bad day. Somebody is going to get into an argument.
Somebody is going to deal with this. And the principles that we've learned through this that sustain us in this are pretty much universal. Is your audience recognizing that now with you?
I do it intentionally that way. I can talk about the lessons I've learned and never talk about caregiving. There are lessons I learned as a business professional in my life that I brought into caregiving that I felt like I had to go through something brutal in my business career that, and it's, I just love this because I, I talk about in the moment of an experience, we can't possibly know if it's ultimately good or ultimately bad. There were several experiences I had in my professional career that nobody should have to go through. And yet the lessons I got from that supported me being a better family caregiver. And so when I share the stories that I share, I share them from a place of what else is possible? What is there here for us to learn from it?
I don't see things as a victim. I see things as someone who has experiences and there's a purpose for absolutely everything. And I appreciate the opportunity to have had so many experiences because now I have such a wide variety of stories and I feel really connected to the fact that I wouldn't be a passionate communicator.
I wouldn't have had the experiences I had in the area that I had in business, which is working with high level executives and communicating with them day in and day out. If these caregiving journeys weren't meant to help them see the value in embracing family caregivers in business and how that will, back to your other question, how that will help them. So yes, they kind of go all full circle, Peter. This is what I found in my life and I'm glad to be able to kind of have this informal, you know, test the wind here.
Is this what other people who've been doing this, who are seasoned at this? It's one thing to start off and do this for a year or two, but when you've put in the kind of time that you and I have, you see a different perspective. I love quotes. I love to find quotes everywhere.
And I try to remember as many as I can and I write down the ones that I can't. So I want to throw out a quote to you. You probably have heard it, but it's one of the more profound quotes that I've ever heard. And it was by Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he said, I bless you prison for the change you made in my life for there upon that rotting prison straw I learned the goal of existence is not prosperity as we're told, but the maturity of the human soul. And he wrote that after being 27 years in the Soviet prison. I'm sure you've heard that quote before, but when you hear that and the context of what you and I have dealt with and continue to deal with as a caregiver, what are your thoughts on that? You've got him and I've got the Viktor Frankl quotes.
Oh, I love Viktor Frankl too. That was a big moment for me when I read his book as well. Yes, Man's Search for Meaning and several of the quotes. What I think, whether it's a Viktor Frankl about when we're not able to change a situation, we're challenged to change ourselves or an Alexander Solzhenitsyn, what they are is that, and again, from my lens, it is that I see myself as someone planned my life before I began it.
And I am here to live the experiences of my life to get the most out of every experience I have in this life and to try to do with it what I was brought here for. And a lot of that means that it's like I don't judge. Like, why did this have to happen to me? I don't ever say that. It's like, why me?
When I was in my 20s, I definitely did. It's like, really? We've become a little bit wiser. And now I see it. OK, here's this experience, and these things are coming through me.
And so it is. It's that I'm in this situation. There's a purpose in this situation for life. There's a lesson in it for me. There are lessons in it for others. Perhaps the way that I'm experiencing it is the lesson for someone else. And then there are other times where there's an experience, and there's somebody else's experience is a lesson for me.
And so I look at it from all of those things. And what it doesn't do, and I don't want to diminish how challenging being a caregiver can be. The range of emotions are there, the amount of responsibilities. There's so much always going on. However, when we recognize that, and I've watched people who fought it. The entire time they were as a caregiver, they kept fighting it and judging it.
And oh, why me? And this isn't fair, and I don't get to do all these things. And that is so their choice. And yet I could feel the challenges in their energy, and that really also went forward to their care receiver. As a caregiver, when I look at the words care and giving, what kind of care, how do I define care in this moment?
And when I'm giving, what am I giving? Am I giving physical care to try to help them have a drink, to change them, to calm them? Or am I giving them peace of mind? Am I bringing my energy to help them where they're at?
So I'm always trying to stay really cognizant of that, and I bring that into the rest of my life now. I do a lot of coaching, and coaching is connecting people to the greatest potential they have. And part of that is helping them eliminate things that don't support them. And as a caregiver, there could be so many things that don't support us.
So how do we get rid of those things so that the best potential we have for being a caregiver? You, for example, with Gracie, all the different things that come up, you could be judging those, and yet you don't. Yes, I won't say that I have it, I just say that I'm moving away from it. You're moving away from it because you've recognized judging it is not going to move me forward.
No, it really isn't. And I have learned to, and again, I go back to what you said, acceptance has been a big word for me for some time, that this is my life. It's not a bad life. It's a hard life with her. Her life is immeasurably harder than mine, but it's not a bad life. And I remember somebody asked me one time, would you do it all over again? Reality's hard enough for me.
I'm not going to deal with hypothetical. But that said, I love the way I play the piano now. I love the way I write. I love the way I'm able to engage with people and interact and see beauty.
Back to Viktor Frankl's, when he saw that flower out there in the midst of the concentration camp, I see things that I would normally miss. And my life is richer because of this. I don't particularly enjoy the journey that got me here. And I'm not a blithering idiot saying, oh, yeah, well, you just love this, this, this.
No, Gracie and I both detest certain parts of our life that we've had to do. But I realize there is such a depth to the beauty of this world and the purpose that God has laid upon both of us in this that I'm just awestruck by it. But it's taken me a lifetime to understand that and to embrace that. When I reflect back on my life, I don't think we had the capacity when we were much younger.
And I'm not saying everybody doesn't, but we don't necessarily have the capacity. We haven't had the experiences to know how to process things. And as we get older and wiser, we're able to explore the depths of our lives and we're able to see things if we choose to with more intentionality. And one of those areas when people talk with me about Jack passing and my dad passing and things like that, my grandmother and all the other people, they go, gosh, you must be grieving. And well, yes, I'm grieving. And yet grieving is an emotion just like all the other ones and all of our journeys have them.
But we would not have an emotion if it didn't have a lesson in it for us. And so when I was much younger, I didn't recognize that. I remember the first time that that someone close to me died and I was old enough to understand the concept.
It was my grandma's grandfather and I just adored him and he adored me. And all of a sudden he was gone and I didn't I didn't have a place for it. I'd never had that.
And it was and I didn't know what to do with it. And I see a lot of people, especially when we're caregiving, we have what I call drip grief. You know, our loved one didn't get hit by a bus and they die. They have a little bit of grief along the way. Every day there's a little something we're grieving, a little something we're grieving, a little something we're grieving.
And it drips along the way. And yet there's some grief and it's processing it. And that the grief is an emotion just like joy or anything else that has lessons in it for us so that we can live our lives and not be stuck in it. And I think that's one of the big challenges I see in a number of people in caregiving is when we go through these things and we haven't been taught about grief or we haven't been taught about some of the other emotions we'll be going through.
We don't know how to process them in a healthy way for us to help us. And I look at grief, for example, just using that one example, is the more I grieve, the more I know how deeply I love. I go back to a scripture I use with people when I explain this concept of grief and mourning. And when Jesus said, blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted. But you cannot mourn if you're raging and despairing. That's not mourning.
Mourning involves acceptance. This is really happening. This is happening.
This has happened. And it's accepting what is reality right in front of your eyes. And sometimes that is detestable to us.
And so we will go to great lengths to deny that. But that's not mourning. And there's no comfort that comes in despair or rage in that sense. It's when we grieve it out and recognize.
And you're right, we do have that drip grief that I've called it incremental grief in that every day I pick up another rock to put in this particular backpack of grief. And I get that. I want to leave you with a quote here. Joni Mitchell, a wonderful artist, said to a bass player, an amazing bass player named Abraham Laboreo, followed a lot of his work.
And she said to him, you have a marvelous use of space. Now, to an accomplished musician, that is an amazing compliment because they're not frenetically trying to show everything they got. They're trying to throw the kitchen sink and say, look what I can do.
They are really immersing themselves into the song and letting it breathe and let it be what it is. This is what I hear from you. I've talked to a lot of people over the years and sometimes they just come on so strong they're throwing the kitchen sink at it. But you've had time to really season this in your life. And this is what has been so engaging and meaningful to me to hear another fellow caregiver who has really taken the time to process this and think it through. You have a marvelous use of space, Sue. And I love that.
It's not that you don't use words and we don't use them well and bring in a lot of words. It's that you understand the process better as a, like a musician would, of not just trying to fill up every little thing with, OK, we can do this, we can do this, we can do this. And I have people come on all the time that want to tell me tips that they've learned about being as a caregiver, the task of caregiving, which I am, I got to tell you, I'm just really not that interested in. I've been doing this for four decades. I think I figured it out by now, the task of caregiving. I'm more interested in what have you learned through this? What have you grown?
What has settled your heart down when you've just felt like you were going to explode? These are things that I hear in you coming out and just, it's a beautiful song. Well, thank you. That's just my observation, one caregiver to another, one person who has looked at this mountain for a long time and said, Oh, I see some, I see these trails. I see those trails in there.
And anyway, that's my last thought, my observation with you. You have a wonderful use of space. That's beautiful. I really appreciate you saying that and hearing it because it's something that you wouldn't have in the very beginning because you would be filling everything up. And yet when we're on the journey and we've been on the journey multiple times, what we recognize is there's so much beauty in the journey. And the most beautiful times are when we're in the being of the journey, not the doing. There are moments where Gracie and I together have shared in something so extraordinary in the craziest of places. Some of our most tender moments in our life have been in hospital rooms, post-op, ICU, things like that where they're very stressful. And there's a lot going on, and there's nurses and everybody else coming in.
And that's one of the things I did with, what I did with Jeff Foxworthy. If you've ever hung a sock on your wife's hospital room door, you know, you're probably a caregiver. But you know, it's, you know, these things like, and I don't care. I mean, people look at me, Oh, Peter, you haven't been in our life. You haven't had to forge a marriage in a hospital room. And, and, you know, you haven't had to learn how to, to go through these things. And until you do, you can't understand how absolutely exquisite the moment is. And this is what you've reminded me of today.
And yet everybody's, Oh, thank you. And everybody's moments are different. Part of what I respect for people is I want them to have their journey. I don't want them to try to have someone else's journey. However, what I want them to recognize is that it's their journey. And in their journey, don't judge themselves and don't let themselves be judged by others. So that at the end of the day, when they're reflecting on it, you know, it's a perfectly imperfect journey. There are a lot of things that aren't going to go the way we would prefer they went.
And yet that's the way they go. And yet, if we can be at peace that we're doing the things that we can control, and we're doing our very best, at the end of the day, that's pretty much all we can. We can't control anybody else. We can't control a diagnosis. We can't, so many things are out of our control.
Our own thoughts, words, and deeds. And that's a good word to end on. Sue, if people want to find out more about you, tell me where's, where's the easiest place for them to go? They can go to two different places. There's The Caregiver's Journey is where my business partner and I, Nancy Treaster is her name. We focus on helping family caregivers navigate their caregiving journey. And then on the leadership and business side, I have SueRyan.solutions, where I focus on business leadership.
Real quick question on that topic. What is the normal, and that's not the right word, what is the, would you, a broad picture of what your client would look like if somebody said, You know, I need to talk to her. Here's what I'm struggling with in my business. What are, what are those kinds of individuals coming to you with? On the leadership side, I focus on helping people become their greatest leading themselves and others. And I focus on people who are either emerging in an area where they're emerging as leaders. They've got like puppy dogs with long legs and big paws.
They haven't quite figured out exactly what it looks like yet. And I help them from a connected head and heart space to do that. Or if they're trying to really excel in an area of leadership, I help them with that.
And those are the areas I focus on from the business leadership side. Great. One more time on the website, The Caregiver's Journey. Yep. And that's dot com. Yeah, and then it's SueRyan.solutions. SueRyan.solutions.
And is that, but that's, there's no dot com to that. That's just SueRyan.solutions. That's pretty easy. This has been a treat for me. And you have brought a lot of wealth of stuff to this veteran caregiver.
Had given me a lot to think about and probably just to commit grand verbal larceny. And if you've given me, I'm going to do it. But this has been a treat. I'd like to do this again and I hope you'll come back on again and thank you for your flexibility as we had to adjust our schedules a little bit.
But this has been a treat for me. Thank you. Peter, it's been a treat for me and I will come on anytime, anything I can ever do. And by the way, if anybody ever needs anything, they can just reach out anytime. I believe part of my journey is helping other people.
If they've got a question, reach out. I love that. So thank you for that. It's not ours to keep. It's ours to share. You're right.
You're absolutely right. SueRyan, thank you so much for being here. This is Peter Rosenberger, hopeforthecaregiver.com. Hi, this is Jeff Foxworthy. 65 million Americans serve as a caregiver for a sick or disabled loved one. If you're one of them, then listen to my friend Peter Rosenberger's show. He's got redneck tendencies, but he's really good at what he does.
Whisper: medium.en / 2025-01-11 10:16:46 / 2025-01-11 10:36:27 / 20