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Grieving is a process that happens when you lose something or someone.  I leant about the stages of this when I trained as a change facilitator as people do grieve for the things they left behind in a the course of Change.  Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross described it as a five stage process:-

1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance

Well regular readers know that I know have personal experience of loss and I have to tell you that after 5 months and a little reflection that the real experience is much messier than this (or any other) models suggest. 

After my holiday I feel further back along this road in terms of emotions although the model might suggest I’m making progress.    It feels these stages are more like a piano keyboard that you wander up and down, sometimes going through several steps in a day.

I learnt today that bereavement comes from old English and means literally to be robbed.  I felt that this original meaning gives much insight into the reality of the experience.  You feel robbed of your dreams, your expectations, your future… 

I feel we have all coped ever so well with our loss but I have a friend who reminds me that the stone on top of a wall is referred to as the coping stone and its job is to cover the wall and protect the base.  Some times coping gets in the way of healing.

Whether you are dealing with loss of a job, or a role or a loved one, it is a complex and lonely path one walks, no matter what help is offered.  Accepting help is not easy or simple and it has to be offered at the right time, in the right way by the right person to be acceptable.

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We have just had a wonderful week in Tuscany.  We hired a villa located half way up a mountain and there was all the peace and quiet you could wish for.  It seemed to make reflection unavoidable.  One of the things that I found tough was not having someone there to share and explore these ideas with.  That kind of conversation was always at the heart of our relationship and I don’t think anything has so brought home the reality of her passing as this sense of not having that person you totally trust to explore new ideas and feelings with.

I occurred to me once I got home that this is also something which is common amongst people who are running businesses and I know that many of my clients particularly value having someone independent who they can frankly explore ideas and issues with and it is this role as a sounding board that I particularly enjoy.

We all need someone to listen to us and it is a huge and valuable gift between people… have you made time to listen to someone today?

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Today was a strange day.  It is the first time on a Monday morning that all my children have been out to work at the same time and today I was here, home alone.  The house is silent.  I have cores to get on with of course, things to clean, calls to make and a set of good intentions about diet and exercise to live up to!  It’s not that I dislike the silence, but I am very aware of the house about me and its stillness. 

My middle daughter even phoned to see how I was coping with it.  It is all very odd and I suppose that when my son is off at Uni then this will happen more and more.  It was never a norm that I sought nor one I frankly wish to get used to. 

It is very different when work if frantic as you have lots to occupy your mind and time, but during this enforced sabbatical and whilst I’m under effective ‘house arrest’ it feels very strange.  It is a little like the Ghost of Xmas Future is showing me a glimpse of something that , like Scrooge, I’d sooner not have to live into…

I wonder what the next turn of the wheel will bring?

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There was some tension in the air at home and I always hate this but couldn’t put my finger on what was causing it.  Then my daughter cracked and said that she didn’t feel all that she was doing was being seen or appreciated.  She didn’t mind doing it but needed to feel that it was valued.  Now, I, like most of us I guess, like to think I do a pretty fair job of saying “Thank you” and looking after those around me but clearly I had been failing here, where it was most important.

This got me reflecting on the power contained in a simple, and sincere “Thank you”.  It says “I see you.  I value you and you efforts.  Your gift has not been taken for granted.  It has been appreciated and valued”  However, it seems to me that its secret power is the underlying message that you have been seen, you have been valued, you have been appreciated.  This is the a vital for most of us a oxygen.

Whether at work or a home, whether you want to improve your bottom line or just live in harmony, I recommend that you spend a little less time reading How to Succeed books or listening to consultants and experiment with the power of genuine gratitude and appreciation

“Grace isn’t a little prayer you chant before receiving a meal.  It’s a way to live”.  Attributed to Jacqueline Winspear

“There is no such thing as gratitude unexpressed.  If it is unexpressed, it is plain, old-fashioned ingratitude.”  Robert Brault,

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When you lose someone close to you you are pitched into a place where you have to learn and think about all manner of things that most of us choose to avoid most of the time.  You have to find out how to dispose of a body and think through what should be done with one.  Then there is the forest of legislative red tape you have to swim through …and the forms!!  Once you have been through the process of dealing with their will (or worse still the absence of a will) then inevitably you think about your own.  Many of us wrote our wills many years ago and things change.  Mine was written to protect 3 babies, I now have 3 adults with different needs and issues, so I have begun the process of revising and updating mine.

You have to be made sterner stuff than I not to shed the odd tear when writing this kind of thing.  However, it is a real expression of love and one’s final opportunity to look after those that you care for.  This process makes you think about who and what is important to you and actually the time to do something about both of these is right now.  Why wait till we die to say “I love you!”?  Why wait till it is too late to make time for the people and things that we care about?  I know this is neither a new or an original thought but that does not diminish its truth one whit. In both business and personal lives we waste way too much time on the trivia.  Shifting our time and attention to those things that will bring us either emotional or material ‘wealth’ is one of the keys to success

“Nearly everything you do is of no importance, but it is important that you do it.”  Mohandas Gandhi

“A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.”   Jackie Robinson

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I have previously written about our choice to try to make something positive from Carys’s untimely death.  It seemed to the only choice we could make.  When I entered that Intensive Care ward, and saw all those beds, each representing a tragedy for another family, when I passed those families in the corridors, how could I not wish that some of them got their prayers answered?

So, even before they turned off the life support we were asked if we would allow organ donation, and I said, unhesitatingly “Yes”.  We got a first letter some 3 weeks later telling me of a 34 yr old lady who had been waiting for 4 yrs who now has a kidney, as a 54 yrs who had been on dialysis for 6 yrs.  Her liver is helping a 64 yrs old man who is married with a family.  A 50 yr married man has her lungs.  Today I learnt that her cornea is allowing a 77 lady to perhaps see her grandchildren, and her aortic valve beats in the chest of a 27 yr old who may find love and joy now she is healthy.

How can we not do this?  How can we not offer this chance to others when we would have given anything for our prayers to be answered?  If you haven’t signed up for organ donation… do it today!

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This has been a real lesson.  In work we tend to tick things when they are ‘done’, but in real life progress is more subtle and fragile.  It is much more like gardening, and the tender shoots are very vulnerable when they first emerge.  We have done a great job of pulling together, getting organised and making things work but under this thin skin of ‘wins’ is a soft and tender core that is oh so vulnerable; bad dreams and being triggered by the silliest of things.  I was watching a rugby Man of the Year award; you’d think that was pretty safe territory till the winning player said that he had recently lost his father and dedicated his success to him.  I immediately welled up.  Or again, I was listening to the radio yesterday and they were talking about how people are using websites, such as Facebook,  as living memorials to keep alive the memories of their lost ones…  One of my daughters has already announced that she is not looking forward to Xmas for all the things that we will be missing and seems to have written it off already. 

I suspect that this fragility of progress applies not only in situations like ours but in all manner of changes.  You have to protect these tender shoots.  I wish I knew how…

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I was thinking this morning about my blog and some of the responses that I got to it, and I realised that there are some experiences that just change you in ways that alter your DNA.   People who have not shared those experiences can never understand those who have.  My father’s generation went to war; at 18 he was serving in the army, and fighting for his country.  He knew what it was to lose friends, to see homes go up in smoke, to have the very fabric of his world threatened by something alien.  Despite being brought up on countless war movies and comics depicting these themes, I have no idea what it was to live through that.  There are other similarly defining experiences and loss is a key one, whether it is loss of a loved one, loss of a limb or faculty, loss of wealth or health. 

We all take for granted those things that are ever present in our lives.  I can truly say that we knew my wife was a special presence in our lives, but like the oxygen you breath, you do expect it to be there.  I don’t think this is something that you ever get over; it is merely something that you get used to.  My children have said this.  They know that they have somehow been deprived of something that has defined them, and this event too will fundamentally alter their views and lives.  They will never again be able to believe that those you love can not suddenly vanish from your world.

One person shared with me that that they too had lost their mother at 25 and I knew that she knew what my children were feeling; another kind soul said that she had no such experience.  I’m glad of this but it is gap that cannot be spanned by empathy. 

We seem to believe that that talking makes everything better somehow, but I have to tell you that the experience thus far in this home is that it changes nothing and is pretty pointless.  In the end you are left with the same reality and simply have to adapt.

We all believe that we are different, and of course we are, but I am coming to believe that it is our experiences, and how we interpret them that define us…

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I know that some of you are wondering how things are going at Cooke Towers, and I have been rather silent of late.  Life has been taking a firm hand a forcing me to take things rather easy and it has as if Life has pushed a giant pause button on my life.  The latest twist in this tale was that whilst out doing some work on our pond with my son, I managed to put my back out so even more sitting around doing nothing seems to have been prescribed!

Team Cooke is doing remarkably well in many ways but the children are all still deep in morning/missing their mum, and nothing can ever make this right for them.  Oddly, time doesn’t seem to make things easier, it simply builds new habits and expectations.  I was told that my tests are all clear and see the specialist on Monday.

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I had always felt that we, the great British public, were pretty sick of both politics and politicians, and was not at all surprised by the result, which for me was a pronouncement of “We don’t like/ trust any of you!”  And today we stand on a brand new shore, the first peacetime coalition government in 70 yrs. 

The electorate have forced their representatives to change their behaviours and ways of working.  I don’t think any of us have any idea if it will work, but we were sick and tired of ‘business as usual’. 

Sometimes, a whole new model and thinking the unthinkable is called for.  The recent changes in my personal circumstances have taken me to this place and now, as a nation, we are going there too.  It maybe in your life or your business this is a very good time to consider radical change rather than just one more tweak…

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