Strange days have found us. It started at the end of December, when Mom had pneumonia and CHF again, and out of nowhere asked me if I was in my second year of college. Of course it threw me for a loop, so I just nodded. She then said “you must be 14.” Again, threw me for a loop, and I nodded. She asked me what I was studying and I finally got an honest answer out with “English.”

That seemed to satisfy her, but then an hour or so later, she said “I’m sorry you didn’t come live with me.” I am no good at this, so I said “me too.” Then she asked if my sons took me in. And I said “no.” She went to bed, and I realized a couple of hours later that last conversation was with her favorite aunt, who died almost 30 years ago. A little weird, but I shook it off.

She talked all night in her sleep and picked at everything around her, including me (not picking on, but picking at). Neither of us slept well. She finally crashed around 5 am, but then woke up around 8 am calling me into the living room and telling me, without fear, that something had just run across the computer and I needed to find it. I looked around, ran my hands over everything to show her nothing was there. Satisfied, she went back to sleep for an hour. When she woke up, she sat straight up, looked at the bookcase on the opposite wall, and mumbled something. She didn’t have her hearing aids on, so I spoke in her better ear and asked what she’d said. Clear as day, she asked “do you know those three angels over there?,” pointing at the bookcase. I said “I don’t think so.”

She had an on/off day, without any more hallucinations, but sleeping a lot (and I temporarily upped the melatonin, so that I could get some sleep too) that day, but then seemed to be back in present reality.

And, although physically visibly getting weaker with each passing day, with roller-coaster blood pressure – although the highs have come down some with better med spacing, but the lows, at night, have dipped very low – and continued stability and dizziness issues, Mom has stayed on a pretty even keel mentally until the middle of last week. She had part one of a crown down last Wednesday afternoon (I’ve been through a whole series of self-beatings as to whether it was my fault this past week has been full of strange days, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this is disease, and it would have happened regardless because all the signs were already there) and came home exhausted. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, so I know that and this are just coincidental. But it shook me for a couple of days.

She was tired and very weak all day Thursday, but she was lucid. She was asking questions, though, about Elaine and Rachael, and was getting them mixed up. So I sat down with her and went through some family photo albums. She had a hard time recognizing any of us, including herself and Daddy, which made me realize that lucidity has become relative.

Friday, she was still tired and still weak, but seemed to be doing a little better. Saturday, she was up all day and pretty much with the present until dinner time. We were sitting at the kitchen table eating dinner when she looked at me and asked “did you go to college over there?,” pointing into space. I knew she meant East TN State University, so I answered “no.” She then asked where I did go to school. I answered “North Carolina.”

The next question hit me out of the blue again.

Mom: “Is that where your real mother lived?”

Me: “No.”

Mom: “Is she dead?”

Me: “My biological mother is dead.”

Mom: “Did you have a daddy?”

Me: “Yes.”

Mom: “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”

Me (after counting on my fingers to make sure I got everyone): “Six…that I know of.”

Mom: “Do you have pictures?”

Me: “Yes.”

Mom: “I want to see them sometime.”

Me: “Okay.”

And then she seemed to poop out. We’ve made a habit, after we eat dinner Saturday evening, of watching basketball and she’s always hung with me pretty well. Saturday night by 7 p.m., she was done and wanted to go to bed. I put her to bed and she was out like a light all night.

She woke up between 8:30 and 9 Sunday morning and ate breakfast and was back asleep by 10:30 a.m. And slept, except for dinner, all day Sunday and all Sunday night. Monday, except to get up and go to the bathroom and eat a little, she did not get out of bed all day. I called Home Health and asked for a nurse to come out. In the meantime, Mom mostly slept and I kept a close watch, lying beside her at times, holding her hand, reminding her that I love her.

Something in my gut said I needed to let Deb and Elaine know what was going on, so I called them both. Elaine said she wouldn’t be able to get back for the funeral, but asked me if I would come to Washington so we could have a memorial service for Mom there. I said “okay,” and she broke down in tears, explaining that she didn’t expect me to agree so readily to that. I was surprised and thought “Why not? I know the cost of getting five people from the Left Coast to the East Coast on little notice is prohibitive, and they need to have the chance to say good-bye too.” Deb was calm – surprisingly – she got the Norovirus making the rounds at the retirement community where she works (the Health Department quarantined all the residents on Monday) during the first phone call, but then started stalker-calling me later in the day when it sunk in.

The home health nurse came late in the afternoon and as I was saying I thought it was time to switch to hospice, he was saying the same thing (just got a call about an hour ago for the hospice consult today). Other than a low-grade fever, her vitals were okay. He suggested giving her Tylenol for the fever (and it broke Monday night and hasn’t returned, so that eliminates the possibility of infection) and said he’d work on getting the doctor to approve the hospice consult. I was insistent that if her PA wouldn’t approve it, then to go to the doctor in the group who has also treated her, been in on hospital stays, and knows her history to get the approval this time.

Mom slept most of the night Monday night (after eating dinner, she wanted to go right back to bed), but woke up around 3 am, bolted out of bed, took off on a tear with the walker (I was right behind, but was surprised at her speed and agility), and slammed the bathroom door in my face (we’ve been leaving the downstairs bathroom door open and the light on at night so she doesn’t get scared). I opened the door and saw the fear on her face. “Is that man upstairs?,” she asked me. I said “yes, no need to worry.”

She got up yesterday morning and was fairly alert and stayed up until after lunch, when she asked me if the man was still upstairs (I told her he wasn’t), and then asked me where the twins and the little girl were. Again, even though this shouldn’t take me aback, it did, and I had no way of answering her. The afternoon degenerated into full-blown hallucinations and R.E.M. Disorder. She wanted to go to bed right after we ate dinner, but she spent the next three hours doing something with the walker (I lock it and put it beside the bed…all I heard for three hours was clicking and every time I went in, there was a crazy conversation about things like wrapping and sending a fork to someone, sending medicine somewhere, sending blood somewhere, etc.). I finally laid down beside her, thinking that would calm her down.

She talked, mostly incoherently, to people all night long, picking at everything around her, including pulling her oxygen off every time I turned around. I doubt she slept. I know I didn’t. She was up and down several times in restlessness, but then kept telling me she was going to sleep. When she got up at 8 this morning, I made the bed (I’d been up since 5 because I was hot and tired of the picking and the poking and the restlessness and knew that sleep was just not going to happen) and when I brought her back from the bathroom, she wanted to go back to bed. She dozed – maybe – for an hour or so and sat up and asked me where everyone was and what we were supposed to do. I told her everyone was at work and she and I were going to stay home and look after the house. Seemed to satisfy her, but then she asked me how many people were living here and when would everyone be home. I shrugged. I’m tired of trying to answer things I don’t know the answer to. And she was okay with that.

Strange days. Strange nights. Strange life. Nothing prepares you for being in the middle of it, no matter how much you read or hear about it happening in the course of this disease. It is never the same as actually experiencing it. Lessons abound. I hope that I learn them well.

I have been thinking a lot about how we reveal our real selves, mainly through our words, in spite of all the sometimes elaborate attempts we can make to project ourselves as something different and, in most cases, better than what we, in stark reality, are. We are quite the contradictions, I’ve observed, and the messages we send between our projected selves and our real selves are quite contradictory as well.

This deals, again, with the interrelated subjects of authenticity and truthfulness, because it seems that the people we are least truthful and authentic with, first and foremost, are ourselves. And once we’ve bought our own prettied-up press about ourselves, we are eager to feed that story to the world as the actual representation of who we are. And we’re lying. To ourselves. To everyone else. And, most of the time, we don’t even see how pervasively dishonest we’re being.

I’ve observed a phenomenon that has emerged with the advent of social media. People really will say and do anything. Until social media came along, most of what ordinary people went unobserved and unnoticed. It was easy to project whatever image of yourself you wanted to and almost no one would be the wiser. But social media has had the ironic effect of removing restraint in many cases and people, in general, seem blissfully unaware that everything they tweet or post or comment or “like” is adding up to a composite, and more truthful – even more ironic – picture of who and what they are.

It appears, to me anyway, that most people don’t give any thought to “what does this say about me?” – and what it really reveals is a total lack of concern or care for how they represent themselves and everything else (employer, family, friends, God and Christ) they claim to represent – when they are using social media. It truly makes me shake my head a lot.

I consistently see people routinely post links to religious organization site articles and then post statuses like “Sarcasm: because it’s illegal to beat the crap out of people.” or “Calm down. Take a deep breath. Hold it for 20 minutes.” And I think of Luke 6:45.

I see people who claim to be following Christ (those who don’t make any such claims are, in fact, the most authentic) like and share things that are clearly in opposition to what Christ believes and does. And I think of Matthew 12:33-37.

The biggest irony – and perhaps most troubling aspect to me – of this phenomenon is that these same people often are the most vocal and the most strident, and not in a good way, in group discussions. They are the first to attack, criticize, and condemn others. They show very little mercy, very little kindness, very little gentleness, and very little compassion. They will chew you up and spit you out for breakfast. And then gloat about it (you can almost see the peacock strut of pride in their words), all in the name of defending, they say, “truth.”

It turns out that truth for them is relative to how they see things. As Jack Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, and I paraphrase for grammar’s sake,  ”They can’t handle THE truth.” No wonder. If they’ve lied to themselves about who they are, then it follows that the rest of their lives will be a lie.

Relative truth always includes healthy doses of self-interest, prejudice and bias, and ignorance. It is the result of thinking very small and not having much of a clue about the big picture. It will ignore absolute truth. No matter how factually, logically, or objectively it is proven to be wrong, it remains entrenched, and each attempt to correct it brings out more ignorance and even more commitment to it. It is a paradox that I don’t understand, but I’ve seen it over and over.

Relative truth depends first on self-interest. To cling to an idea as true when it is not, the crux of that idea must show a threat to well-being by an antagonist. This goes hand in hand with bias and prejudice. Two obvious examples of this are the Ku Klux Klan rhetoric, much of which still exists today, more cloaked and more subtle than in the 19th and 20th centuries, but still alive and well, which targets – and demonizes – African-Americans as a threat to the self-interests of white America and the immigration debate going on today.

The immigration debate is interesting, because it really shows ignorance and prejudice against a single group of people – Hispanics. Almost every time I see a comment on immigration or illegal immigration, I see two words in the comment: (1) Mexican (some people are a tad more savvy and say “Hispanics”) and (2) Spanish. And then there is the usual ignorant bashing about laziness, stealing our jobs, higher crime rates, lower property values, and less for all of us who are “entitled” to it and more for those who aren’t “entitled” to it (some of the same arguments made about African-Americans since the end of the Civil War).

And yet every time I see this, I think of Leviticus 19:33-34, and if I have the opportunity, I say something like the following (this is an actual comment I made in response to this recently): “In reality, the only natives to this country, our ancestors – the original wave of illegal aliens – mostly destroyed through disease and murder (breaking God’s law, which supercedes all man-made laws, which are selfish and often reflect humanity’s tendency toward double standards and situational ethics). So unless we have a native American heritage, we’re all descendants of illegal aliens.”

The people slamming this particular subset of immigrants (legal or illegal) never missed a beat and continued to show how profoundly ignorant they truly are. Notice I said “subset.” There are a lot of immigrants and aliens, legal and illegal, from all parts of the world living in this country. I have never heard complaints about illegal European immigrants and aliens, or illegal Canadian immigrants and aliens, or illegal Caribbean or African or Asian immigrants and aliens.

Realistically, these groups together probably make up the largest share of people “illegally” in this country, and yet the focus on one group shows the bias and prejudice behind it and shows the relative truth. The person or people screaming about these things are not, in fact, opposed to immigration (illegal or otherwise) per se, but they are vehemently opposed to this particular group of people. The hate comes out through their words, even though most of them will tell you they love everybody.

There is one more tell-tale sign of this duplicitous behavior – and I spend a lot of time self-checking myself in an effort to make sure this is not my behavior, because Jeremiah 17:9 says we’re all prone to this and prone to ignorance about it, so by pointing these things out, I’m reminding myself that I have to be constantly making sure that who I say I am is who I am – is attacking people instead of problems. When I have an issue with something, I’m very careful with my words to make sure my communication is not directed at the person, but at the issue or problem. When I’m talking within a group about a problem, I don’t bring names and personalities into the discussion, because that’s irrelevant. There’s a problem that needs to be addressed and resolved. Period.

Duplicitous people name names and make people the focus of their discussion. Inherent in this is pointing fingers and blaming someone else and then holding themselves up as being right and righteous and unmovable. They use words like “ever” and “never” to describe themselves. Like the big banks of the bailout that we all paid for, they see themselves as being too big (or right) to fail.

Proverbs 17:9 comes to mind when I see this. It doesn’t mean tolerating or compromising with wrong-doing or sin. What it does mean is not shouting it out from the rooftops, naming names, and then going on to trash the person and/or people personally. That fixes and solves nothing. In fact, it, without fail, makes things worse and usually ends up with a separation of some sort, most of the time permanent.

Why? Because picking on a person or people in a personal way automatically generates “sides.” And once sides have formed, they grow. And whatever the actual problems or issues that needed to be addressed get lost or forgotten by most and the issue becomes about personality (for or against). And the worst part about this is the dishonesty embedded in the outcome: the problems or issues still exist and were never resolved and both “sides” bear the responsibility for that omission (even the side of the maligned person or people should make sure the issues and problems are the focus and not the person or people, but it rarely happens).  And because the heart of the matter got lost, it will crop up again and again on both sides because it never gets dealt with and resolved.

I’ve always heard that you are what you eat. I believe this is a physical truism. A spiritual truism is, then, you are what you speak.

Try Not to Breathe – R.E.M.

“I will try not to worry you” is what Mom says on her good days, when there’s a little space of light in the growing dimness as large areas of her brain die because of vascular dementia, now in its final stage, and Alzheimer’s Disease. I know she means it, and when just a short time later, she does exactly that, I know it’s not her, but a brain that has irrevocably malfunctioned.

The last couple of months have been a period of significantly rapid decline. In mid-September, she fell in her bathroom at the assisted living community where she was residing, in the middle of the night. She had three different versions of where she fell and how she fell. I have no idea which one, if any, are what actually happened. But she fell hard enough that she severely sprained her right ankle, effectively immobilizing her for about two and half weeks.

I had issues with how the staff handled the fall. Despite the fact that I had gone on record with them, after a fall several months ago that neither got an incident report nor that I was notified of (Mom told me several days after the fact in a random conversation), that I wanted to be called, day or night, any time something happened with Mom. I was not called this time either. Again, Mom called me early in the morning to tell me she fell and that someone had helped her get up and back in bed, but that her leg was really hurting.

Internally, I was extremely upset for several reasons. The first was that she was moved without knowledge of whether anything was broken (the staff member said “Mom said she was okay,” and my immediate internal question was “Really?!? You’re relying on the accuracy of condition from someone with dementia and Alzheimer’s?!?”). The second was that she was not immediately transported to the hospital for x-rays and the third was that I was not called then and told to meet her at the hospital. Bad judgment all the way around. I had enough time to calm down before going over and was able to voice my concerns calmly and rationally with the Director of Nursing, who agreed completely with me.

I spent the next seven days and nights there with her, to help her get to the bathroom during the night, to help with showers and dressing, to help her move around as she was able. When she was sort of back on her feet, I came back home, but was closely monitoring her.

About three weeks after the fall, I noticed she was having a lot of difficulty breathing, with little to no exertion, and took her to her physician’s assistant that day. He took a chest x-ray and he and the radiologist saw fluid in her lower right lung. The conclusion was that it could either be the onset of pneumonia or fluid from her heart collecting in her lung. The decision was made to treat it as pneumonia and she was given a high-powered antibiotic shot in the office and a Z-Pack.

The breathing issues were not resolved. I had brought her home with me a few days after she finished the Z-Pack for our annual observance of the Feast of Tabernacles, which we did last year and were planning to do this year via webcast. After two days of watching her increasingly struggle for every breath, I made the decision in the wee hours of October 15 (the 13th anniversary of Daddy’s death from congestive heart failure) to take her to the emergency room.

She awoke early. She was gasping for air and said her chest hurt. I told her what we were doing, got her dressed, and drove her to the hospital, all the time thinking about the irony of the date.

At the ER, I got her in a wheelchair, wheeled her in, told the front desk people what was going on, reminded them she had a DNR and living will on file, and they took her, told me to park, and that I could get her checked in after I parked. They wheeled her on back to the ER and I parked. After getting her checked in, I went back to the room and was shocked by the number of people in there scurrying around. I first thought it was because it was before 8 a.m. on a Saturday morning and they were just having a slow morning.

After seeing the BNP test (brain natriuretic peptide test – measures the amount of the BNP hormone in the blood. BNP is made by the heart and shows how well the heart is working. Normally, only a low amount of BNP is found in the blood. But if the heart has to work harder than usual over a long period of time, the heart releases more BNP, increasing the blood level of BNP) number (BNP levels below 100 pg/mL indicate no heart failure; BNP levels of 100-300 suggest heart failure is present; BNP levels above 300 pg/mL indicate mild heart failure; BNP levels above 600 pg/mL indicate moderate heart failure; and, BNP levels above 900 pg/mL indicate severe heart failure), which was 1709, I realized that they were all in there because she was in serious trouble.

She was in full congestive heart failure and was admitted so the fluid could be pulled off and a battery of heart tests run. The ER put her on oxygen and she was on it until she was released five. Her saturation when she got there 73%. Her best saturation on oxygen was 92%.

For the next five days, doctors and cardiologists kept telling me everything was “fine” with her heart. When I pressed strongly for an explanation of why she was a death’s door just a few days before and so much fluid was on her heart and in her lungs, I got defensiveness (one nurse practitioner and I would have been nose-to-nose had Mom not been lying on a bed between us – definitely the most unprofessional behavior I have ever seen from a medical person, all because she didn’t like the fact that I kept saying “that answer is not acceptable because it doesn’t explain her condition when I brought her in her five days ago,” and she snapped on me, and I called her on the behavior), non-answers, and a general lack of concern about my concerns.

The doctor who discharged her – with a BNP of 795 – discharged her without oxygen. I questioned that and he looked at the monitor and said “it’s 92%, so she’s fine.” The reason she was 92% was because she was still on oxygen. I was incredulous, but realized that pointing out the obvious, which I’d been doing for five days, was a waste of time as far as they were concerned.

I brought her back home with me – by now Deb had come in – and she slept pretty much through a couple of days and then announced she didn’t want to go back to the assisted living facility, but wanted to live with me. I questioned her quite extensively to try to determine her reasoning. She talked all around it for a while, then finally said “I know I’m dying.” That combined with how much monitoring for falls, dizziness, etc. Deb and I were doing after her discharge from the hospital convinced me that her moving in with me was the right decision.

So, three weeks after another ER visit followed by another vascular dementia step two days later that saw her admitted to the hospital again – by the same doctor who discharged her the first time (way different attitude and demeanor, which was helpful) – then discharged five days later to home health and then the purge/move of all her stuff to my house, I have a new roommate.

Interestingly, she is now on oxygen 24/7 since she’s failed two oxygen saturation tests in the past three weeks and tomorrow she will be fitted with a 24-hour BP monitor to record the extremely low and high blood pressure readings (and fainting, dizziness, fatigue that has accompanied it). Her PA says it’s a result of all the damage to her brain from the small vessel ischemia, which is still occurring. The “step” a couple of weeks ago was a strong TIA, which takes out a lot of the brain cells at once, and this pervasive oxygen deficiency have perhaps hastened what might have been a slightly slower rate of declination, but who knows really?

This is where we are. And I’m okay with it. I pray a lot, knowing I don’t have the ability or strength or wisdom to do this alone. There have been many answered prayers already and I have a lot of peace knowing I don’t walk this part of Mom’s and my life journey alone.

So instead of all the years she and Daddy spent worrying about us, now it’s my turn to worry about her, even if she’s trying not to worry me. As I’ve told her often over the past few years, no matter how crazy things got with her, even if I didn’t love her, I owe her that. Because once upon a time she and Daddy chose to do that for me. But the reality is that I do it because I love her.

So, Mama, I will do my best to try not to worry you as well.

One of the true voids in every strata of life now, from personal to corporate to national to global, is that of authenticity from the inside out. We live in a society that has been jaded and marred by the realizations and revelations that the people they’ve admired, looked up to, followed, and thought they knew were frauds.

That has destroyed trust and undermined respect for any kind of authority – not abusive, misused and self-seeking tyranny, which is often the only manifestation we currently see in almost every governing structure, from personal to corporate to national to global – necessary to ensure order and progress. And that has led to the deepening chaos and retrograde that we see unfolding today.

I read an excerpt from “Sweetness,” Jeff Pearlman’s new book about Walter Payton, the Chicago Bears’ legendary running back from the mid-1970′s to the late 1980′s, in Sports Illustrated yesterday. And although the excerpt is being criticized for its portrayal of an inner man who was quite different from the outer man, it underscored this point about how important that our inside (who we are) matches our outside (what we do and say), because if those are not in sync, eventually the cracks will appear and we will be unmasked as frauds, pretenders, and wannebes. And no matter how much good we may have effected as a result of our superficial external coating, it will all be scrutinized, dismantled, dismissed, and abandoned, with nothing but the ugly truth of who we really were left as our legacies. 

Authenticity starts early in life. Its foundation is a moral integrity that is absolute – right or wrong, no matter what – instead of relative – right or wrong depends on the situation – and that we do not allow to be compromised nor compromise with. This is the foundation our parents have an important part in laying and we have an important part in building. We choose early on whether to build it or try to get around it by compromising it.

I don’t claim to know all the factors that go into which way we choose. I know that personality and temperament play a part. I know that experience plays a part. I know that what’s most important to us plays a part. But early on, we choose to try to stand on our principles – and suffer the consequences each time we don’t, and the negativity of that makes it less and less appealing – or compromise them.

Compromise is where the inner and outer person begin to part ways and become two separate entities instead of a single whole. The road to living a compromised life starts with seemingly little – although, in fact, they are never little – things. Cheating at a game or on a test. Lying to parents or teachers or ourselves. Stealing something from someone else.

Although getting caught or not getting caught by someone else can certainly encourage us or deter us from pursuing the road to a compromised life – it seemed to me as a kid that I seldom got away with anything without getting caught, and for that I’m now thankful – it seems to me that the strongest determinant is one of conscience. Conscience is what tells us that even if we didn’t get caught it was in conflict with our moral integrity and that dissonance was intolerable so we told on ourselves, made the situation right, and determined not to do that again, and if we did, we repeated the steps of getting rid of the internal conflict by admission, correction, and determination.

If our inner person (conscience) is not authentic, then these wrong acts, because no one else caught them, will not bother us and demand that we admit them and correct them. Instead, exactly because no one else caught them and there were seemingly no consequences – except to our character, which often goes undetected for many years because we become extremely adept at hiding the defects  - they embolden us to make these compromises habitual until they become who we are on the inside. We become liars.

And because we live in a society that mirrors this same behavior, giving lip service to a watered-down and surface version of law and order, but being utterly corrupt and okay with that corruption underneath, we become liars among liars, until there is virtually no truth, no authenticity, no honesty in any of our systems and the people who lead those systems.

I could write a book alone on the number of people I’ve worked with who were in leadership positions who lacked authenticity. I can hold up one finger on one hand for one man who was authentic inside and outside. He stands all by himself as someone I can say I truly respected and truly trusted and who was the best leader I ever worked with.

My dad was another authentic person in my life. He lived what he believed and who he was matched what he said and did. He set the example for me of what being authentic, real, and genuine looked like in every day life. For that, I am both blessed and grateful, because I grew up with the real deal and that made an indelible impression on and, I believe, helped me to determine which path I would embark on and stay on.

I am not perfect at being authentic 100% of the time, but that is my goal, and every time I see something, inside or out, that doesn’t match up, I undertake changing it until they do. It will be a life-long process for me, but I trust, with the help of God, that, when it’s all said and done, this will be one that goes into the win column.

I talk very little about 9/11/01, even though I was there, mainly because that is an event I processed after the fact mostly internally while dealing with the day and then moving on and helping others in my sphere of influence try to move on starting the next day.

(Inset statement: Having been there and been a part of it, I must admit that I’m always bemused and bit taken aback when I hear people I know who were not there and did not experience it first-hand talk about it as if they did. Whatever the rest of the nation outside of the areas of 9/11/01 experienced was nothing compared to being there in person.

I think the thing that bothers me most is projection: somehow equating a personal response as a citizen of this country to the response of those directly impacted. THEY ARE NOT THE SAME. Not in this lifetime nor in any lifetime. How or if we move forward is the bottom line, which is what this post is about, but to equate a peripheral experience with a direct one always strikes me the wrong way.)

But I have been reminded of it this week in an in-your-face kind of way as I’ve read and seen all the promos for marking the 10th anniversary on Sunday. And that has gotten me to thinking in a big-picture way about the last 10 years for this country and for its citizens and for us individually.

9/11/01 was the day America truly lost her way for good. We left the main road to find an elusive tree in territory we knew nothing about and became so micro-focused on finding that one tree that we were oblivious to the fact that an entire forest was growing up around us, with stronger and bigger trees than the one we were seeking, and each step was taking us deeper into this strange forest and we were getting more lost by the minute. Unlike Hansel and Gretel, we weren’t even smart enough to try to leave a trail of crumbs to find our way out.

The greatest chance for recovering from being lost is early on. The longer we are lost, the greater the odds are that we will get more lost and there will be no recovery: we will either disappear off the radar or we will die. Either way, we become irrelevant to the world around us.

We’ve spent the last 10 years, trillions of dollars, and thousands of lives running around in circles chasing ghosts. Our focus has been on the past, not the present or the future. While we as a nation got lost to a moment in time, the rest of the world moved on. And we’re paying the price for that – and will continue to well into the future – now.

People who get lost and stay lost eventually just accept their circumstances when all hope of finding their way back or being found disappears. They end up impotent and lethargic. Their worlds become smaller and the little things in those small worlds become larger until they become their world.

As I look at this country today, that’s exactly what being lost for so long has done to us. No matter where you look – education, politics, religion, media, military, culture to name a few – there is no force, no power, no strength, no conviction, no determination. Focus has been narrowed to little fringe things and those things have taken center stage, while the big and important things right in front of us have become invisible. 

We’ve spent 10 years at war and for what? Invading Afghanistan was ridiculous and we knew that once upon a time, especially after the Russians had spent about the same amount of time we have there and had to withdraw in defeat. Bin Laden probably wasn’t and hasn’t been there since we invaded, but if we’d really wanted peace and needed a statement to get it, we should have used the killer weaponry that every taxpayer has spent in their lifetimes a ton of money building and blown a hole in the planet where Afghanistan is. And then gotten on with our lives with the assurance that any other country would think long and hard before attacking us.

But we were already very lost and didn’t realize that being lost made us and would continue to make us make really ignorant decisions.

Like invading Iraq. Any thinking person knew that this war was to settle a personal grudge match and had no legitimate basis for us. But when you’re lost, you quit thinking logically and start thinking emotionally. And emotional thinking and decision-making is fatal – to a nation, to its citizens, to us as individuals.

So, bogged down in two wars, with limited, at best, or no clear-cut goals, ends, results, we found ourselves needing money to finance them. So, we went to China and borrowed it cheaply. And borrowed and borrowed and borrowed. Our thinking was so myopic – a result of being lost – that it never occurred to us that we were moving from the position of being the world’s lender to being the world’s borrower. We became credit-happy as a nation.

And the nation’s credit-happiness became personal credit-happiness. Banks sent out applications to everybody for credit cards. Students borrowed huge sums of money to pay for undergraduate and post-graduate degrees. Technology offered new, bigger, better gadgets and gizmos continually and the push to stay current meant unrestrained spending on anything and everything. People who could not afford to buy homes suddenly found they could buy homes.

When you’re lost, only today matters. The future isn’t even on your horizon. When you live in a world that tells you that boogeymen are around every corner and you never know when this day will be your last day, this day becomes the only one that matters and your mentality becomes one of instant gratification. 

And that became – and is still largely – the American mentality. Which is why the global financial collapse hit us hard and took anyone who was looking for the elusive tree and hadn’t noticed the forest growing up around them by surprise.

And here’s the irony. It should have been at that point that this nation, collectively and individually, woke up and realized we were lost. But that moment came and went and here three years later, we’re still following the same lost path, deeper in the woods now, and powerless to do anything or know how to get back to the main road. The politicians don’t know. The economists don’t know. The educators don’t know. The media doesn’t know. And the preachers, by and large, don’t know. We are thoroughly and utterly lost.

Fortunately, we have the promise that we have a Dad and Older Brother who know exactly where we are and will intervene to get us on the right road and help us to learn what we don’t know now so that we won’t get lost again. May that day come quickly!

In my post, A Chain is Only as Strong as Its Weakest Link, I referred to two essential tools every leader should use to “grow” every team member, including him or herself: the performance development plan and the annual performance review.

This post will discuss what these tools are, what their purposes and outcomes should be, the requirements of fully and successfully utilizing them, and their effectiveness with have-to’s and want-to’s.

A performance development plan is an essential part of the team-building/project-management process. What this tool does is provide a framework for building on established strengths and implementing tangible and obtainable steps for improving areas of weakness. The scope is all-encompassing: interpersonal skills, communication skills, work-related skills, and personal skills.

Its title, though, must be the focus: 

• Performance - The action or process of carrying out or accomplishing an action, task, or function, with special attention to the word “process,” because this is an on-going process
• Development – This implies a set starting point with the goal of moving forward in one or multiple areas
• Plan – A concrete and well-laid-out set of steps to achieve these goals

A performance development plan assumes that changes need to be made for the benefit of the individual, the team, the project(s), the department, the business unit, the corporation, and ultimately the planet. How often do any of us think in terms of our individual impacts on the the big picture (e.g., the planet)? And, yet, to really grow that’s exactly how we need to think, because the reality is that every choice, every decision that you and I as individuals make affects others on a much larger scale than most of us ever think about.

If we understood our individual accountability and responsibility in the spheres of influence in our immediate lives and how those intersect with other spheres of influence and so on, I think we would be more careful, more thoughtful, more deliberate about what we do and say and are. A well-done performance development plan is a step toward that conscious care, thought, and deliberation because it focuses the individual’s attention on the big picture and how that individual fits into it and how he or she can improve to add value at every level from personal to global.

Performance development plans should be formulated interactively with full participation and input from both the assessor (the leader) and the person being assessed (the team member). This gets buy-in from both parties. What I always do is hand a blank form to each of my team members and ask them to assess themselves as to what their strengths and weaknesses are, what they do well and what they need to improve or change, and what development goals they want to accomplish. I explain to them that I will be completing the same form for each of them, and then when we have our first meeting to get the plan in motion, we’ll review both assessments as part of the planning session.

The reactions to this always surprise me, even though it’s the way that makes sense since I can’t possibly know enough about anyone to do a performance development plan by myself nor can I understand where anyone sees him or herself in the context of a formalized process. I have to have the other person’s input so that we – not just I – but we can develop the plan together. This invests the team member in the process and gives them accountability and responsibility for ensuring that the goals, which he or she have jointly formulated with me, are met. 

But the reactions and the subsequent input from each team member reveals stark differences between the have-to’s and the want-to’s.

In every project there are two major components that really matter all the way through. One is, obviously, project design, development, management, and completion. But the second, which is actually more important – after all, this team or some variation of it will be working on future project development, management, and completion – is that of people development, oversight, and enhancement. At the end of any project, the people that worked on the team in that project should emerge with more maturity, more skills, and more value. The ultimate goal of a good leader should be to develop good leaders and there are a set of processes that parallel the completion of a project from inception to finished product that make this possible. 

So what about the team? It is the rare case when a leader gets to hand-pick (read: hire) and form his or her entire team from scratch. That would be ideal, but it just doesn’t happen. Instead, leaders form teams from what they have to work with, which is a mixture of legacy employees (read: they already work there and the leader just inherited them) and the occasional new hire here and there. New hires are generally not going to be complicating factors for the team or the project because they have been selected based on very specific criteria that indicates they will add value to the team and the project.

Legacy employees are generally where a leader will have issues not only in terms of teaming-building and project-management, but also in performance development and performance reviews. When new leaders come in, the first project is the trial period for both the leader and the team. Everyone is sizing up everyone and there is generally a series of tests that both the leader and the legacy employees will put each other through to see what they’ve all got. That’s the nature of most human relationships and is to be expected. When leaders fail, they fail because they don’t anticipate this coming at them nor do they do the same by getting to know their team members by individually and collectively engaging, listening, watching, and assigning tasks that show strengths and weaknesses.

The reality is that as a leader you cannot get buy-in nor can you do quality performance development and performance reviews unless you do this first.

Ever had a performance review from someone who speaks to you maybe twice a year and that’s just to grunt “Hi?” And the performance review is negative? It’s happened once to me. I refused to sign it because the person doing it had no clue even what my job was, and the review didn’t even describe any of my job functions (I suspected at the time that he’d put the wrong name on the review because he had no clue who was working for him and really didn’t care, but had the same formulaic method of “grading” that my college biology teacher did – X number of people got “Exceeds,” X number of people got “Meets,” and everyone else got “Fails to Meet”).

He got really angry that I wouldn’t sign it and started on the “you have to sign it” mantra. To which, because I was a bit less tactful than I am now, I replied “the only thing I have to do is pay taxes and die.” And I walked out. Nothing ever happened the rest of the time I was with that company (another month), but I went home that night and started a new job search.

Ironically, the chairman of the Board of Directors of the company, who did know who I was and knew what my job was, came to me when I turned in my resignation letter and said “I’m really sorry you’re leaving. You’re a real asset to this company.” My response was “Really? I guess you didn’t see my performance review.” He said he hadn’t and asked me about it. I explained what had happened and he was genuinely surprised and asked “why didn’t you come to me?” I told him that nothing had been done in the intervening month so I figured that he was on board with the review and this was just the way the executive management at the company operated.

I could tell it really bothered him when I said that, but I hope that he learned the bigger lesson of the experience. And that is you have to be involved, no matter what level you are in the company or business unit, with your team and your projects day-in and day-out and in a tangible, coaching role. You can’t check out and assume everything’s going to go well and you can’t smother everybody and assume everything’s going to go well. There’s a balance and a right way.

One of the first things an involved leader will find out is which of the team members are want-to’s and which are have-to’s. It’s obvious right from the start. It’s up to the leader to initiate the conversations that begin this unveiling process. I always start with one-on-one meetings with each of my direct reports and ask the same big-picture questions. What’s the mission? What are you responsible for in the mission? What do you see as things that are working well in completing the mission? Why? What things aren’t working well in completing the mission? Why? What things are missing that would help better complete the mission? What ideas do you have for making the whole process work better? Are there things that you like to do or would like to do within the mission that you have not had the opportunity to do?

I use this for a two-fold purpose. I always take a job knowing that I won’t be there forever, so part of my purpose is to immediately start looking for potential successors – someone who can take the vision, the changes, the improvements and continue them and improve them when I leave. It is always better to pass the mantle on to someone who has participated in a successful team/mission transition to ensure continuity of what works than to bring someone in from the outside who starts all over again. Time and again, I hear from want-to legacy employees that lack of continuity in leadership style and skills is a key morale buster. 

And the second purpose is to identify my have-to’s and want-to’s, because they handle this initial conversation totally differently. In fact, their approaches from the outset are totally different. Want-to’s are thoughtful and usually surprised that anyone is asking for their input especially on the big-picture level. But they usually have a lot of insight and good ideas about how to improve things that aren’t working and what needs to be added for the things that are missing. They tend to present a balanced and objective picture, but they don’t hesitate to give you the full picture, warts and all, in general terms, never finger-pointing or name-calling. They’re invested. These conversations are give-and-take and quite enlightening. Listening to them is vital to gain a real understanding of what you’ve walked into.

Have-to’s do one of two things. Both are equally annoying, but again, it’s important to really listen, using judicious comments to ensure that they know you’re the one in charge and not them. Have-to’s seldom have any kind of insightful or expansive knowledge of the big picture. They simply don’t care. They are also snitches. Their “analyses” are always full of finger-pointing, blaming, and name-calling.

The first kind of have-to you’ll encounter is the flatterer. They reek of insincerity when they walk in the door. Instead of answering the questions, they’ll regale you with stories of how awful everyone before you was and how they were never recognized for their talent and ability, but they’ve heard “great” things about you, so they know you’ll be able to see how valuable they are and that they deserve more money and responsibility. Seriously. They do this in the very first face-to-face meeting.

The second kind of have-to you’ll encounter is the complainer. Their hostility is the first thing you notice when they walk in the door. They don’t answer the questions either, but they spend the entire meeting time complaining about their lives, their team members, their workload, and the fact that nobody has ever appreciated them and they don’t expect you to either. Seriously. They also do this in the very first face-to-face meeting.

The next step is to see how this group of people work together with you and each other as a team on a project. This is vital because it will reveal where the problems and obstacles are going to be every time this group of people has to work with you and the rest of the team members. It is also instructive, from a leadership standpoint, in identifying and working to eliminate the weakest links in the chain.

In a group setting, with all the team members present, you, as the team leader define a small, easily-accomplished project that requires everyone to work together to complete it. You define the scope (parameters), milestones (project steps), and outcome (what the end result should look like). You assign concrete tasks to each team member (based on their strengths and skills) and then remind them that your function is that of a coach, which means that you will not hold their hands every step of the way, but are available if they hit something they can’t handle (lack of experience, lack of authority, lack of needed resources) to help them find a solution so they can continue, and that you expect them to use their minds and their talents to complete the project. I also, in this same discussion, tell my team members not to come to me with problems or issues unless they also have suggestions for a solution.

Body language tells the story at this juncture. Everyone is usually surprised, because in American companies, this approach is novel and unexpected. You can see in the want-to’s the initial surprise turn to thought and anticipation as they realize they are being given an opportunity to prove what they’re made of.

The have-to’s are a different story. The flatterers give lip-service to what a great idea it is, but they immediately start trying to get you to tell them every detail of how you would do it and they try to engage you from the get-go in hand-holding. When their attempts fail, you can see the panic and defeat on their faces (but they will keep coming back and trying to lure you into hand-holding, using different angles, the rest of the way through the project). The complainers start complaining about everything, and generally there is some mention of fairness at this point. But when they leave the room, they’ve already made the decision that they are going to do what they want to, whether it’s related or not, and they don’t care what you need, the rest of the team needs, or, in fact about the project itself.

And there’s an essential truth that lies within this scenario, and it’s one of the things that everyone tends to overlook or minimize (I’ve seen this in both corporate organizations and, more curiously, in religious organizations). If everyone on the team is not on the same page – in complete agreement – with the team leader, then they are never going to be able to work together on the team. There has to be a buy-in from everyone at the outset. If there isn’t, every team and every project will be riddled with interpersonal problems that will lead to the failure to build a team and the failure to complete projects efficiently, accurately, and on time.

Performance development plans are designed as a tool to help rectify some of these problems along the way. Want-to’s thrive and grow with these. On rare occasions, a have-to will actually become a want-to (usually because initially there is some benefit to him or her, but as the changes take place, the focus changes to the benefit of everyone), and as a team leader, that’s an incredible thing to see and experience. But for the most part, have-to’s and performance development plans are an oil-water mixture that never ends up producing much more than a lot of headaches, conflicts, and, in most cases, elimination from the team (termination).

Annual performance reviews should be just that. Most companies use these to explain to employees what the criteria for their jobs are, what the parameters of successful job performance are, and then evaluate them on these things in the next breath. This does no one any good because the employees don’t know what they’re being evaluated on until this meeting nor do they have a chance to work on it before this meeting (you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken).

So, in the next post, I’ll talk about these two valuable tools, how to use them correctly (not as a hammer, but as an avenue for growth and change), and how effective they are with want-to’s and have-to’s.

For those of us who examine ourselves year-round (performance development reviews) and then see how well we’ve executed the action items on those performance development reviews (annual performance review) before Passover, I hope that this discussion, which has a parallel connection to our spiritual jobs, teams, and project, will give some practical application that we can all benefit from.

Eclipse – Pink Floyd

This and “Brain Damage” plays through my mind with regularity these days when I think of the last few years with Mom. I started this a week after she was diagnosed last year and it has taken me a year to be able to finish it. My dear friend and sister in every sense of the word, Denise, better than anyone else I know, completely understands why. But now, I think I’m ready. We’ll see.

This is very long, but it takes a good bit of time to get to the dark side of the moon.

Mom was diagnosed via CT and in-person in June of last year with vascular dementia. The non-medical summary is that through a lifetime of frequent mini-strokes (TIA’s), the blood vessels in her brain have and are dying off because they are blocked and cannot get the blood and oxygen needed to sustain them.

Sudden and dramatic degradation, such as what I witnessed up close and personal from the beginning of May until July 11 (after a sleepless night in which I literally begged God all night to help because I just didn’t know what else to do) last year when I got the call at 7:15 in the morning from a mental health person at the hospital who told me they were doing an involuntary commitment to a geriatric psychiatric hospital in the area, to which I agreed (the answer to my prayer), is one of the hallmark symptoms of a vascular dementia “step.” Generally, the pattern is a step of decline, a period of stability, then another step of decline. 

There was a gradual decline for several years, punctuated by sudden episodes of anger, delusion, suspicion, and outbursts, but Mom was still able to, for the most part, function pretty well on her own. Because I live nearby, I was the easiest and most frequent target. Deb, who visits regularly, shared the wealth when she was here. The worst episodes, until last year, were during her hospitalizations in 2008 and 2009. Her last hospitalization in 2008 and her mid-summer hospitalization in 2009 were my previews of what May, June, and the first 22 days of July 2010 would look like for her and me.

In August of 2008, just a month and or so after Mom was hospitalized for pulmonary embolisms, we had about a week and a half of emergency room visits because, except for one episode in which she was vomiting violently, of her blood pressure. Each time, I’d take her after I got off of work, we’d spend until 2 or 3 am there, they’d stabilize her, I’d go get prescriptions if necessary, take her home and get her in bed, then stay up and just go back into work the next day. The last visit to the ER for blood pressure was the one that almost killed her.

Her blood pressure was dangerously high when we got there around 6:30 pm. The doctor on duty gave her blood-pressure lowering medicine every hour without significant changes for several hours. They had the alarm activated on the monitor, and that sound became etched in my memory as it went off every 15 minutes or so each time a blood pressure reading was performed. By 2 am, I was concerned about how much medicine they had given her with no measurable results and told the doctor I thought they should admit her. She said “we’ll do one more hour’s worth of treatment, and if that doesn’t change anything, then we’ll admit her.”

In the following hour, they managed to get it down to high normal (less than 200 systolic and less than 90 diastolic), so the doctor said they would release her. I made sure my objections to the release were on file before I left, because it just didn’t seem like a wise decision to me. We were on our way by 3:45 am, and I got Mom home and in bed, and went home myself to make coffee and get ready for work. At 9:30 am, I got a call from the retirement community where she was living to tell me that her blood pressure was dangerously low and I needed to get her to the hospital right away.

I left work and took her to the ER. Not only was her blood pressure dangerously low, but her heart rate was also dangerously slow. The attending doctor, nurse and I discussed the situation for a couple of hours and they made the decision to admit her. I did not have her living will and DNR with me – since I’d come straight from work and they were at home (a situation I rectified the day after she was admitted) – and I told the nurse I was going home to get them after they took her to a room. The hospital was 5 minutes away, so I ran home and got the documents and by the time I got back, they had given her a heart stimulant (which the DNR and living will would have prohibited) and were moving her to ICU.

I got the documents on file, got her settled in ICU, and went back to work for a few hours to finish some work that had to be finished that day. As soon as I got done, I went back to the hospital into ICU, where a shift change had happened within the hour. Mom had been quiet and docile all day, but now she was fussing and angry. She hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and was furious because she hadn’t had dinner. I went to find a nurse – who promptly told me she was overwhelmed and didn’t usually work in ICU, but she would see what she could do – and within 10 minutes, dinner appeared. Mom was suspicious of it and angry because it wasn’t what she wanted (silent !?! on my part). I finally managed to get her to eat, but she was still fit to be tied by the time I left around 10 pm.

I had talked to Deb earlier in the afternoon to let her know that Mom was being admitted and called her after I left with the update. I went home, ate, and got some much-needed sleep.

I had been up for a couple of hours, planning to run by the hospital and then go to work, when the overwhelmed nurse from the night before called me at 6:30 am to tell me that I needed to get there and get Mom calmed down because she’d given the entire ICU staff a fit during the night. You’re going to get used to seeing a variation of this phrase and/or symbol combination denoting my responses: silent !?! was my response (you are nurses, so isn’t your job to know how to deal with agitated patients? If you don’t know, what in the world makes you think that I know?!?!?).

I was at the hospital before 7 am, and Mom seemed calmer, but was not making any sense when she talked. A cardiologist came in around 7:30 am and was trying to ask her questions and she was all over the place. He looked askance at me and I shrugged my shoulders because I didn’t know what was going on either, and started answering the questions. He explained some tests and medicine that they were going to put her on, since her blood pressure was still very low as was her heart rate, and then left.

Deb got there around 9 am, and we began to be inundated with about 8 hours of the most bizarre experience, to date, that either of us had had with Mom. She spent 90% of the day looking out at the nurse’s station and commenting on what was going on. They ate cake a lot, and at times there were animals, and there was even a plane crash. Initially, Deb and I looked out to observe, but after realizing that nothing she was saying was happening was, we settled into a realization that she was hallucinating. We decided, in a conference during a break from the madness, to just go along with her and not try to correct her.

There was a flash of anger and paranoia just after lunch when she jumped all over Deb and said “Don’t give me that look of hate,” which really upset Deb, but it passed quickly. The afternoon was filled with her seeing letters being written and tracing them with her hands and more plane crashes and exotic animals at the nurse’s station.

But just after dinner, she turned the corner into complete anger and agitation. I went to the nurse’s station and asked for something to calm her down. The nurse there said that older patients tended to get disoriented and agitated with hospital stays and she would call her doctor and get some anti-anxiety medication for the night.

I don’t know how much they gave her during the night, but she was mostly unresponsive the next day. The blood pressure and heart rates were unchanged, but she was mostly “asleep” with sudden bursts of lucidity and conversations about death and Daddy, throughout the day. She had little to eat or drink. Deb and I were convinced it was the end.

But, once again, around 7 pm, she was wide awake and angry and paranoid. I will never forget her looking at me and screaming that I had put her in a nursing home and had not even talked to her about it. She was furious! As the tears stang my eyes and I struggled to control my own anxiety attack, I calmly told her where she was and what was going on. She called me a liar.

I really had to fight my anger and the temptation to completely go off on her, but I went to the nurse’s station and I asked them to move her to a private room. They, to my surprise, said okay, and moved her, which calmed her a little bit, and I got her settled in for the night, and then took the empty bed in the room to stay with her through the night.

By the next morning, she was completely calm, but weak. I had looked at the urine from her catheter, and it occurred to me that she was getting dehydrated. While I was waiting for coffee, I went to the nurse for the floor and asked her if we could give Mom a hydrating drip. She agreed.

Coffee came but the drip was nowhere to be seen. Mom ate a little breakfast, but was weak and soft-spoken, albeit coherent. About 11 am, the nurses finally came to attend to Mom. They asked us to leave the room while they changed the catheter, etc. The door was halfway open, and we heard the shouting, so Deb and I went in, and Mom had collapsed and was in bed. Her blood pressure and heart rate were the lowest they’d been and she was whispering that she was ready to be with Daddy. I told her it was okay to go.

At that point, there were several nurses in the room and a doctor right in my ear telling me we needed to get drugs in her, and I said “No.” As medical POA, my job was to honor her wishes. I said the only thing I had agreed to was hydration and if that corrected the problem, then fine and good, but if it did not, then it was Mom’s time to go. The doctor couldn’t ultimately do anything I didn’t agree to because of the living will and DNR, but she spent a lot of time trying to convince me to take extraordinary measures.

She almost died. The nurse told me after the fact that we were about 30 seconds away. But the hydration worked and she left the hospital within a week.

***************************************************************

Mom’s health outwardly stabilized after that – and I realize now that she was having more frequent TIA’s, but because they were either when she was sleeping or when I was not around, I was not aware of how pervasive they had become – but her mental health was more obviously more iffy. There were more frequent and unexpected sudden outbursts of anger and paranoia against Deb, when she was here visiting, and me on and off on a continual basis. Deb came for Thanksgiving in 2008 and we agreed, after a funky Thanksgiving day, when she went off on both of us, that we would give her the option to spend time with us and if she said “no,” we’d accept it and do our own thing from that time forward.

We reminded each other not to take what Mom was saying and doing personally, and I will never forget Deb saying “If Mom knew what she was doing, she would be absolutely appalled.” I struggled to remember that in the May to July period of last year, but it was never so far away that I didn’t eventually, no matter how bad, how draining, how painful, how difficult an encounter with her had been, bring it back to the front of my memory.

Things started changing more dramatically in December 2008 (I didn’t realize it then, but hindsight is truly 20/20). Mom started just randomly with no reference point trying to push me away (and at the time, I believed trying to provoke me into abandoning her). She was brutal and harsh and it hurt.

But I had a promise to keep to her and to my daddy and to God, and the reality is that I loved her enough that I couldn’t leave her, especially if she was going – as I believed at the time – insane – vulnerable, unprotected, to the whims of strangers. In many ways, her descent in this disease made our bond stronger. I reminded myself daily that she and Daddy didn’t walk off when we kids were helpless, sick (I was seriously sick enough the first couple of years after they adopted us that Mom and Daddy were not sure I was going to survive), and completely dependent on them for everything. They both set the example for me and now was my time to step up to the plate. I took a lot of deep breaths, prayed almost non-stop, and made a quiet, but determined, commitment  to never quit her.

How I didn’t in those intervening months is a testament to God’s guiding hand and intervention along the way. If I never believed in miracles before (I tend to be of the doubting Thomas ilk: “I need to see it and I’ll believe”), I certainly became a believer in those subsequent years and months.

We rocked along, in every since of the word, in 2009. The year began fairly quietly, but things picked up pace in the spring. Mom ate the noon meal where she lived and her doctor had ordered a low-fat diet, based on her blood pressure, which meant the kitchen had to fix her a piece of baked salmon, cod, beef, or chicken every day instead of what was on the buffet. Mom gradually complained about how slow her food was coming out compared to everyone else’s. I got a call one day from the Director of Residents saying Mom was sitting in the dining room, very upset, and wanted me there.

So I went, and apparently she had made quite a scene after her food didn’t come for an hour and one of the kitchen staff popped off to her in a disrespectful manner and Mom was still madder than a wet hen when I got there. And after listening to the way the dietary manager talk to her, I was convinced that there was some reason for her to be upset, but I was also aware that she had overreacted. She was redder than a beet and shaking from elevated blood pressure. I calmly told the dietary manager that he needed to remember that if it weren’t for the residents he and his staff wouldn’t have jobs there, so they needed to be respectful and responsive, especially to something they are already knew about and that was not an unreasonable request.

He started to get attitude with me and I quietly but firmly told him he was picking the wrong person to go down that road with. I guess something in my voice and/or my demeanor (I wasn’t angry, but everything about my body language told him I meant business) got through to him, and he started backpedaling and apologizing. I told him that he needed to apologize to Mom, not me. He did.

The Director of Residents asked me how we should proceed. I told her that I needed to get Mom back to her apartment and she needed some time to calm down and for us to talk about it. So we agreed that she would come down and discuss it with Mom and me in an hour. I managed to get Mom calmed down, but her decision was simply to cook all her own meals and not eat in the dining hall anymore. When the Director of Residents came in, we gave her Mom’s decision.

When I was on the way out, she came and asked if she could talk with me. She explained that the monthly rate required that the residents eat one meal a day in the dining hall and that couldn’t be changed. I realized even trying to explain that to Mom would be useless, so I told her (they were taking some charge off…not sure what) to just make the adjustment and let Mom do what she wanted without telling her she had to pay for one meal a day. That worked.

Over the next several weeks, Mom started getting in arguments with another resident whom she had known when they lived at the same apartment complex. It got pretty vicious and Mom got downright hateful and she developed an intense dislike and suspicion against this lady. Within 8-10 months, it would be an all-out war.

In July, we went to visit Deb over the 4th of July, and she was fine for the first few days, but we both noticed that her breathing was labored and she was sleeping a lot by Sunday. On Monday, she was dozing most of the day. On Tuesday, when I got up and went downstairs to get coffee, she was waiting for me and said she was sick and needed to go home (we were not supposed to leave until Wednesday). She dozed most of the way home. I asked if she wanted to go to the doctor and she said she didn’t. I got her into bed and told her I’d be back early the next morning and if she wasn’t any better, we were going to the doctor.

I got over to her place around 7 am the next morning and she wasn’t any better, so when the doctor’s office opened, I called, explained what was happening, and they gave us an appointment in the afternoon. Long story short, she was in full congestive heart failure and we went straight from the doctor’s office to the hospital where she was admitted. I notified the family and told everybody just to wait until we got more info about what the doctors were going to do. Her cardiologist recommended a pacemaker, after some of the fluid had been pulled off, and Deb came up for the surgery.

The trouble began right after she had the surgery while she was in recovery. And this was the hospital’s fault because their communication sucked, but she ended up getting transferred to three different rooms in a very short amount of time, and it threw her for a loop. She was already getting in a “mood” the next day after the surgery, because she’d already been moved twice. I remember the look she gave the nurse (who was not “Miss Friendly” to begin with) and then the anger at Deb and me that came out of nowhere. We realized where it was going and telepathically made the decision to leave because it just wasn’t going to be good for anyone. I will never forget booking out of the room and running straight into the arms of our minister who had come to visit and blurting out “she’s all yours!” We talked for a bit and I told him what was going on, and he went in and we left.

Deb and I decided to go get some dinner and just as my food came, my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but then Deb said it was probably the hospital, so I started calling back. Well, the hospital central desk had no clue where she was (they had moved her a third time that afternoon), and gave me a nurse’s station that had no clue who she was and transferred me back down and the transferring to nowhere went on about 10 minutes. While I was waiting for another transfer, my phone rang again and I picked up the call.

The nurse explained who she was, then said “your mom wants to call the police to report that we are holding her against her will and she wants to talk to you. I think you need to come over here right away.” I immediately said that I wasn’t coming, because it would only make things worse, and then told the nurse to get the doctor on call to prescribe some anti-anxiety medication (and not tell her what it was or she wouldn’t take it) or they were all going to be in for a long night. She spent about 20 minutes trying to convince me that I needed to come there, and I kept repeating what I’d already told her. Finally, she agreed and I told her that I would talk to Mom on the phone if she’d transfer me into room. That seemed to calm the nurse down some. She transferred me and the phone just rang and rang with no answer.

I hung up, told Deb the part of the conversation she didn’t hear, then started the hospital phone tag again. I remembered the nurse’s name, so they finally got me, after another 15 minutes or so, to the right nurse’s station. The same nurse answered and said the phone in Mom’s room wasn’t working, so they were getting it replaced. In the meantime, she told Mom that she had called me (she had been trying to call while I was trying to call) and I hadn’t answered, so I was probably busy (which I didn’t know). I told her to go into the room, call me from that phone, and I’d talk to Mom.

She did, and when I answered, she told Mom I was on the phone and tried to hand the phone to her. All I heard was Mom say “well, if she’s too busy to talk to me, then I don’t want to talk to her!” The nurse got back on the phone and I asked her where that came from and then she told me what she’d said to Mom. I groaned and said “you’ve got a long night on your hand.” She never understood what she’d done wrong, but by that time I was so used to Mom twisting, either because of hearing or because of the mental changes, everything she heard into something negative. She was calmer the next day and was “back to normal” by the time she was discharged, but I had already decided to talk to her doctor about prescribing anti-anxiety medication as part of her daily medication, because it dawned on me that anxiety was a large part of the rest of what was going on (including TIA’s).

We had the follow-up appointment with the doctor a week later. When I set up the appointment, I talked with his nurse and asked if I could talk with him alone before he saw her with me in the room and explained why. She whispered in my ear as we were walking back that she would come and get me and we’d go to another room to talk. Which we did. Her doctor agreed that anti-anxiety medication was needed.

But the nurse and me going out of the room together triggered Mom’s paranoia and when we came back in, she was livid and ordered both of us out of the room and demanded that she talk to her doctor alone. I remember Annie, the nurse, looking at me and shaking her head. Her doctor prescribed the medication and I took over making sure that her meds were portioned out every day on a weekly basis.

In the fall I began to notice that doses were randomly getting skipped and I realized she was having a hard time keeping up with them day-to-day. It was late that year when she announced to me that she was tired of taking all the medication and she just wasn’t going to do it anymore. She had, since the follow-up to the pacemaker, not allowed me to go with her to her regular doctor with her (although I took her to the cardiologist and to the emergency room when she needed it, because bowel impactions were becoming a frequent occurrence). She told me that he had said okay based on the diet changes (she got obsessed with curative foods and food-combinations around the same time) she was making. The end of the year were days of things being fine and things not being fine. I noticed a real obsessiveness about random things developing and most of it was harmless, but it, from my viewpoint, was not worth jumping into the fray about.

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January and February of 2010 were snowy, icy, and rocky months. Some days were fine. Others were a disaster. But an interesting – and life-changing for me – thing happened then. Instead of considering Mom the source of the problem, in her more frequent rampages of accusations against and condemnations of me, I began to look deeply at myself and ask God to show me how I was contributing to and making the problem worse. At the same time she was going into the life-changing steps that would change all our lives forever, I also was going into life-changing steps that would examine, test, and change me. For that I am grateful. I’ve always tended to turn inward and look at myself first when things go wrong, but nothing of this magnitude has ever happened before in my life. It was something that I grew and learned from, even though it was sheer hell all the way through the process.

March brought significant changes. Mom started getting dizzy, falling, and passing out. She had now been about four months without medication and doing the diet thing to manage her health. She became even more obsessive about that and about money (she had always been a bit obsessive about it), convinced that everyone, including her doctor and the pharmacies were trying to rip her off. I decided not to fight her on anything.

But when she fell a couple of times – and called me right away and I went over and spent hours with her ensuring she was no worse for the wear or taking her to the emergency room to get checked out or admitted – she began to get a bit more clingy to me. We still had the tense moments, but she was reaching out and I wanted to be there.

April seemed to be the fulcrum. I started noticing the TIA’s while I was around. We went to a church one day, and in between services, while we were eating lunch, she had one and recovered, and as soon as we got back to services, she had another one. I took her home and stayed with her during the afternoon. She did not remember them and thought I was overreacting.

May brought more changes. More paranoia. Less ability to articulate and communicate (I got emails and have seen hand-written documents that make it clear this was another steep and definitive step). The more I tried to help, the more defensive and offensive she would become. The angry outbursts became a fact of life and there was no reasoning with them. She began to take off in the car randomly when I was supposed to pick her up, and that was what began to prod me into stronger action. It was one thing if she died because she was ill. It was another thing if (a) she got in the car and got lost (I already realized that directions and keeping up with the present were a problem) or (b) she killed someone else.

In early June, after another time of just randomly getting in the car to go somewhere when we were supposed to go to church in my car together, I had had enough. I realized she didn’t need to be driving anymore. I called Deb to tell her that Mom had taken off. I got to church and she was there and the car was parked somewhere she would have never normally parked it, and after church when I  went down to where she was parked, she said, angrily, she had stopped for gas and she’d hit the passenger side door mirror on something. I looked at it, with the glass completely broken and gone, and prayed that it wasn’t a person she’d hit. I told her I’d follow her home the back way. It was the second time I had done this in almost as many weeks and it was the most nerve-wracking drive of the two. She had no idea how to stay in her lane and was constantly drifting into either on-coming traffic or the left lane of traffic on a four-lane road. I even made her stop at one point and asked if she was okay, but she got so angry and defensive, that I decided to pray us the rest of the way home.

I called Deb back and told her what had happened and we both made the decision she needed to stop driving. We also made the decision that her doctor had to be the one to tell her, because it would never work coming from us.

Deb called the next morning to say she was coming up and asked me to call her doctor and make us an appointment to talk with him. I made the appointment on Monday and we met with him on Tuesday, where he told us that she was showing all the signs of vascular dementia and he’d ordered a CAT scan to confirm it. We told him that he needed to tell her to stop driving. He agreed, based on the history (I had ten pages going in there), and on what he had seen.

On Thursday of that week, with all of us there, he told her that, as a result of chronic small blood vessel ischemia (which produces TIA’s), she had vascular/multi-infarct dementia and it was significant (he showed us the CAT scan and Deb and I could see how much of her brain had been affected), and she needed to stop driving. She was reluctant, but agreed. Of course, as soon as we got home, she started stashing all the car keys in a drawer and told Deb and me we could not take them (we did anyway).

Unless someone has been through this, it seems almost too bizarre to explain. It is bizarre, but usually the person with dementia (and, for Mom, an accompanying diagnosis of Alzheimer’s Disease – one destroys the vessels inside the brain, while the other shrinks, by killing off cells, the outer structure of the brain) can keep it together among people for short periods of time. Mom lost that ability in mid-June, when another dear friend, Martha, came to visit for a few days on her way back from New York, and Mom lost it while we were driving around site-seeing. She lost it, interestingly, at her grandparents’ and aunt’s old home place. 

Daddy (and most of the rest of Mom’s paternal side of the family) is buried in a little church graveyard just up the road from the home place in one of the two plots that one of Mom’s favorite cousins, who was like a brother to her, gave them several years before Daddy died. Mom and I had gone there on Memorial Day (after the Sunday in which she told Deb I was stealing from her and I hated her and Deb called me all upset at her, and I unloaded a month’s worth of frustration of which I had to repent pretty quickly), because that is where she wanted to go. After going there, she wanted to go by her grandpa’s house. Hearing her call it that hit my mind as odd, because she had always called it (as we kids did and do) Aunt Tildie’s place until that day.

On that day in the middle of June, we decided to go out to Daddy’s grave. As we were driving down the road to the cemetery, a car behind me was riding me. This is a little and narrow two-lane curvy mountain road that is unforgiving of mistakes, so I got my hackles up about this car riding right on top of me. I contributed to what followed by saying something, out of fear and not anger, about it. To get away from the car, I turned down the road that Aunt Tildie’s house was on. The car turned with me and stayed on top of me. That made me more tense and nervous and I said something about it. To get the car off my tail, I turned into the driveway of Aunt Tildie’s house, and to my consternation, the car turned in after me. That got me even more tense and nervous, because I didn’t know what to expect. I said something about the car following us into the driveway.

Mom went ballistic. I had the car running, not sure what was going to happen next, so all the doors were locked. She started screaming about her grandpa’s house and slamming herself up against the door trying to get out. She became someone I did not even know. She yelled at me and demanded that I let her out of the car. Martha and I both tried to calm her down and tell her it wasn’t a good idea. She grabbed my arm and said “YOU LET ME OUT NOW!” She then started flinging herself harder against the door, screaming at the top of her lungs at me, and instead of letting her hurt herself, I turned off the car, the doors unlocked, and she got out to go and confront the other driver. I prayed. Supposedly it was someone who knew the cousins that now owned it and the driver was fairly calm in spite of Mom’s in-your-face confrontation. Eventually – and frankly I don’t remember how – Mom got back in the car and we left. I decided then that would be the last time we would go back out there as long as Mom was alive (we did go back out with friends from North Carolina a couple of months later, but Mom had been stabilized with medication, and it went off without a hitch).

That really shook me. As Martha and I talked about it (her mother had several devastating strokes after a heart procedure and developed dementia, and Martha, as the sole caretaker for nine years after her father’s death from congestive heart failure, understood it all completely), she said, much to my surprise, that I had handled the whole thing very well. I, on the other hand, believed that if I hadn’t said anything about the driver and had been calmer, Mom wouldn’t have gotten set off. I blamed myself for the escalation. I remember Martha trying to tell me it wasn’t my fault, but I was convinced that it was.

Mom was furious at me the next day, but as had become my habit when I saw that she was on the dark side of the moon, I simply told her I loved her and that I’d see her the next day and left. This had become my way of coping with the insanity. I simply made sure she knew I loved her and left, determined to try again the next day. In between were many tears and many prayers for God to help me change so I didn’t set her off and to help me to know what to do.

By the following day, I believed we had returned to whatever normal was. What I did not know was that Mom had taken off the night before, gotten as far as a Marine recruiting station, went in and accused me of stealing all her money (she had gotten really paranoid about money and I was taking her to the bank every other day so she could check her balances), and demanded that they call the police to arrest me. Instead they called EMS and she spent the night in the hospital undergoing a toxicology screen and psych evaluation. Why, in retrospect, they released her and didn’t send her to the geriatric psychiatric hospital that night is beyond me.

I found out a few days later what had happened. Deb called me on the following Sunday and told me that Mom had told her she spent Saturday night at the hospital. I said it wasn’t true. She suggested that I try to get Mom involuntarily committed because of the delusions (she was seeing Daddy and she was seeing people come in and out of her apartment on a regular basis by then). I called the psychiatric hospital and told them Mom had vascular dementia and they said they couldn’t commit someone just because they had dementia. I called Deb back and told her and she suggested that I just drive Mom down there and commit her. I told her there was no way in the world that Mom would get in a car with me and voluntarily go to be committed to a psychiatric facility. In fact, I said “it will snow in hell first.”

We talked a little more and I decided to go over to Mom’s to check on her. I pulled into the parking lot into an empty spot beside a police car that was running. I don’t how I knew it but something in my gut said “Mom.” She had called 911 to have the police arrest me for stealing her money. One of the nurses where she lived met me at the door and told me. I waited until she and the cop came back up front and I followed him outside and asked if everything was okay. He said it was. When I went back to her apartment with her, I told her I loved her and I wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. She cried and said she knew I did and she was sorry.

The following Wednesday, I picked her up to do our weekly early morning jaunt to the local farmer’s market. She was fine going, but as soon we left, I saw the mood change. She demanded that I take her to the hospital so she could get “some documents.” I asked what hospital and what documents. Well, that set her off and she started yelling at me. I went to the major hospital, let her out at the emergency room door, and asked her if she wanted me to come in with her. She said “No!” and slammed the door shut. I figured she had just imagined something and they’d turn her around and send her right back out, so I sat there with the car running for about 15 minutes and then decided to go park.

A million thoughts were going through my head, but I prayed for calm. I had been sitting there in the heat for about 30 minutes, with the windows down, when I saw someone who looked like a security guard walking out from the ER door toward the parking lot. Something in my gut told me that she was looking for me. She headed straight to the car and asked “Did you bring an elderly lady in here?” Inward groan and “yes, that’s my mom,” and she asked me to come with her. I had no idea what I was walking into so my trepidation level was pretty high.

The guard took me back to the intake room and the circus got rolling. I guess apprehension heightens your senses because I was aware that all the desks were occupied with ER patients and, perhaps to sort of deal with Mom sitting at a desk with an intake nurse with several people around, I intuitively tuned in to the conversations around. On my right, a younger guy was being asked whether he used drugs, and at first he said “no,” then he said “well, I smoked some pot last night. Does that count?” That’s the conversation I remember as I was thinking I was in some kind of surreal dream that I would wake up from because my mind was just having a hard time taking the moment in.

Mom was sitting down at the desk and I could tell she was livid. The intake nurse told me that they weren’t sure why she was there, and although her blood pressure was extremely high, they really didn’t know what they could do for her. I told her I didn’t know either, but that Mom had told me she needed to come in and get documentation. The intake nurse asked me “For what?” I said I didn’t know. The intake nurse looked at her computer and said the last admittance they had for Mom was June 17.

All of the sudden the pieces clicked together in my brain that this was the “night” she had told Deb about that I thought was a delusion. I asked what time, why, and how long. When I got the answer, I asked Mom what she wanted to do.

She refused to look at me, but loudly announced to the entire intake room the following: “Okay, you can just take all my money, because that’s what you want. You planned this all along. I hope you are happy!” I tried to be rational and she further went on to scream that I was stealing all her money and that if I wanted it that badly, I could have it. She also said that I hated her and wanted her out the way. I was speechless and embarrassed. I didn’t even respond to her accusations, but said quietly, “Mom, we need to go.”

After saying this several times, she got up, turn on her heels, and stomped out ahead of me. I followed quickly and she stopped outside the emergency room door and started yelling at me again, telling me I could take all her money and all she needed was $1000 to fly to South America. (All this time, my mind is reeling because I have no idea what to do.) I told her we needed to get in the car and leave. She refused to go the car with me and started yelling me about her money again. (Just to clarify, she had set up a living trust that only reverted to me at her death or if she became mentally incompetent. At that time, I had no access to any of her money. That Friday, though, I called the attorney who set up the trust, explained what was going on, and had him do the legal paperwork to turn the trust over to me.)

We stood outside that door for an hour, with her yelling at me, making crazy statements, and accusing me of stealing from her. All I did was try to explain to her that we could not stay there all day and we needed to get in the car and go home.

She finally told me to take her to the bank (that was after telling me to take her to the library so she could find a job). We got in the car and I drove her to the bank, which had become almost a daily ritual by this point. She was in there a while, but she came back out with a piece of paper with all her account balances on it. I took her home, her still seething, and told her the same thing I said every time we had one of these: “I love you and I’ll see you tomorrow.” She told me not to tell her I loved her because it wasn’t true and walked inside.

I started sobbing and praying on the way home asking God for help. And things kind of calmed down for a week or so. Mom was seeing Daddy, people folding towels in her room, and young boy and girl walking into her room every she left and stealing things (things were constantly disappearing and I’d have to search high and low to find them), but she wasn’t angry at me.

Elaine came into town the Wednesday evening before July 4th weekend. She took a flight, then rented a car, so she was running late to meet us at Mom’s for dinner. I went to Mom’s to wait around 5 in the afternoon and Mom was in her nightgown, in bed, sleeping. I thought it was odd, but I didn’t wake her until Elaine called me to tell me she was almost there. We had an appointment with a psychologist that Mom’s doctor had set up right after the diagnosis the next day in the morning and then an appointment with her doctor that afternoon.

Elaine didn’t see much of a problem the whole weekend. The psychologist, after talking with Mom for a while and then me, told her that she needed to trust me to help her with financial matters, and Elaine didn’t understand why. The appointment with her doctor went about the same way for Elaine. She’s been around Mom very little since Daddy died and because she’s lives on the left coast, getting back here has been limited to three trips in the last 12 1/2 years. So, she’s pretty much out of the loop in the day-to-day. We talk a few times a year, so she just doesn’t know what’s going on. Elaine left on Saturday.

On Sunday, I took biscuits and coffee over to Mom’s for breakfast. Things initially went well, but at some point she got agitated and then went into a full rage and started threatening me with a knife (just before that she’d thrown a small toolbox at me). That was my last straw. I told her that she needed to sit down and calm down. I remember saying “you are out of control!” to her. She threatened me again and I took the knife away and ordered her to sit down and be quiet. She did, not happily, but she did. I got her calmed down and I left. That gave me great pause.

I went back the next morning and we had a pretty good day. But by Tuesday, the tide was turning again. Nothing over the top, but I could tell we were back into dangerous territory. By Wednesday, it was a strong storm. By Thursday, it was full-blown. She banished me from ever seeing her again and in the afternoon began stalker-calling Deb and accusing both Deb and me of conspiring against her and stealing all her money. Deb called me and she was shaken.

I went over early Friday morning and when I got to her apartment, the door was slightly ajar, with a big plastic bin sitting in front of it, and her sitting in a chair across the room watching the door. It reminded me of someone sitting on a porch with a shotgun waiting for intruders. I asked what was going on and she accused me of stealing one of her notebooks (which I found stashed behind a dresser after she was hospitalized) and she told me I needed to get out of there before the cops came to arrest me. I searched that room from top to bottom (except behind the dresser!) looking for that notebook. I went outside and called Deb and told her what was happening and to see if she had any suggestions on where to look and she suggested even more bizarre places to look.

I couldn’t find it and Mom kept getting angrier and telling me to leave if I didn’t want to get arrested. I left, and she started stalker-calling Deb with the same statement and more accusations. I dismissed the whole arrest thing until I went to talk to the Director of Residents and she informed me that Adult Protective Services was doing an investigation to see if I was stealing money from Mom because she had told her that I was stealing her money. Then I realized the seriousness of the whole thing. I told her I would be back that afternoon with a full financial record for Mom that would prove I hadn’t touched her money.

I went home, called our minister, and tearfully told him what was going on from the diagnosis since. I told him I felt like he needed to know in case I got arrested. That was divine intervention. No doubt in my mind. Mom, meanwhile, was alternately calling Deb and me to give us grief. Deb had called me to tell me what she was doing and we agreed that neither of us would answer. I got the records together and took them back to the Director of Residents, who took one look and said “This is a closed matter. What this tells me is you’ve done a great job of helping your mom stay on a budget because there is very little difference between the amount she came in her with and what she has now. I’ll take care of Adult Protective Services.”

I went back home, called Deb and told her what had transpired, and then finished the work I had to do that afternoon. Mom continued to call and I ignored it until about 5 pm when I finally picked up the phone. She had burned herself out and she was very quiet and very docile. I told her I loved her and I’d see her in the morning.

The next morning my mom was back. It was as if we’d erased 10 or 15 years. She was happy, polite, loving, and a joy to be around. I was shocked. But when I went back later that afternoon to pick her up for church, I saw that the dark cloud had returned. I didn’t say a word on the way to church and we sat separately – she at the front so she could hear and me in my usual place in the back. The tirade began as soon as we began driving home and she worked herself up in a full-blown rage. One of the things I learned along the way was not to fuel the fire by answering. I learned to practice silence. I didn’t answer her this time either and it made her angrier, but I refused to do it because I knew it would only make things worse. I let her off at her place and said “I love you and I’ll see you in the morning.” She said “Quit saying you love me because it’s not true!,” slammed the car door and stalked into her place.

And I went home. Mind racing. Stomach churning. Realizing that this was all so far out of control and not knowing what to do. I paced and I prayed until my phone rang at 10:30 that night. Mom had called some fellow church members and wanted them to have me arrested for stealing. The wife talked with me for almost two hours as I spelled out what had been going on and her diagnosis and assured me that she understood (which I have no doubt of) and that she thought her husband had gotten Mom calmed down. During our conversation, our minister had called and told me that the same two people had called him about Mom and he told them to call me and that if I needed him to come down to let him know.

I spent the rest of the night pacing and praying. I told God that this was bigger than me and He needed to help me because I just didn’t know what to do. I remember standing outside in the wee hours of the morning on my patio, with my hands outstretched, pleading with God to take over and take care of it.

I was on my second cup of coffee when the phone rang at 7:15 on Sunday morning. I just knew it had something to do with Mom. When I answered, the woman on the other end identified herself as a counselor at the local mental health facility. She told me that Mom had called EMS around 3 am and they’d transported her to the emergency room and the decision had been made to involuntarily commit her to a geriatric psychiatric hospital. She asked me if that was okay. My answer was “Absolutely.” I called Deb and told her what was going on and she agreed that it was the only option at this point.

Later that day, after I’d cleaned her apartment, found the notebook, and gotten together the clothes the lady told me to bring, I went to the hospital and changed the commitment from involuntary from the hospital to voluntary by me. The hospital, the next two weeks are for another post. Let me suffice it to say that nothing changes you like an experience like that. But to recount that here is more than I have in me right now as this has taken a lot out of me already.

The final diagnosis, which we’re still living with today, was mid to late-stage vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. Today, with an effective combination of psychiatric medications to stabilize her moods and anxiety, Mom is living in a memory-care assisted living facility here in town. Though I see the mental decline on a daily basis and evidence of mental filters disappearing and the continued presence at times of delusions and hallucinations, I am thankful that the extreme emotional roller coaster, at least for now, is over.

It may come back if something else doesn’t take her life first (the health problems continue). I keep wondering where you go after you’ve gotten to the dark side of the moon. I hope neither of us has to find out. 

The next several posts will be about the interactive relationships involved in teamwork, project management, and leadership. They will analyze, in a building block fashion, the components and processes, and then will analyze what factors – and they can happen anywhere and, sometimes, everywhere in the relationships – determine success or failure in the big picture.

As initially tedious and uninteresting as this may seem, there are actually a lot of life lessons, physically and spiritually, to be gleaned from this discussion. This post will deal with the people-as-individuals component, both as team members and leaders.

But first, a brief overview of the big-picture and the responsibilities from a leadership standpoint.

In any organization, there are discrete business units (departments or divisions), and those business units have projects and goals they are expected to complete accurately, on-time, and within a budget. Depending on the size of the organization, a business unit may have only a single team and single leader or it may have many teams and many leaders, each of which is working on just a part – that will be combined with those of the rests of the teams upon completion to form “the project” – of the business unit’s projects.

A leader’s function is to macro-manage his or her project or part of the project. Let me say that not all leaders are good managers and not all managers are good leaders. That is a sure way to hinder any team-based endeavor from the start, and it happens a lot of the time. However, some teams manage to coalesce and thrive in spite of poor management and/or leadership, and why that can happen is really the core of this post. I will use my own method of leadership, which I’ve developed from my own experience – and frustration – with poor management and poor leadership, which has proven to be effective most of the time, as the model for how this process should work.

The first thing that a good leader recognizes is that you manage things – money and resources – and not people. People manage themselves. A good leader should provide an atmosphere that encourages investment, growth, and development, in which people learn to manage themselves in a way that meets or exceeds the core values and principles of the business unit (the leader sets the example; more often than not, in the 21st Century, organizations as a whole are the most abysmal examples of good core values and principles, so this leader stands out in strong contrast to a general environment of dishonesty, corruption, and bottom-line greed). In other words, by the end of a project, team members should be co-owners and they should have demonstrable growth in both competency and value to the organization.

A good leader is also responsible for providing the framework for the team and assigning tasks to each team member, making sure that the task and the person are suitably matched (another pitfall of poor management and poor leadership) to ensure the best result. That means the leader has to actually know and understand his or her team members, know their strengths and weaknesses, and be willing to shake things up and move people and responsibilities around to maximize the productivity of the available skill set and also to avoid setting anyone up for failure (everyone will fail from time to time, and some people will fail all the time, but to not even have a chance to succeed is a leadership failure). “That’s the way we’ve always done it” is the one answer I will not accept as a reason for why something is being done a certain way, because that answer tells me that the job or function is being performed on archaic or non-existence data that may have made sense back in the day, but is totally useless now.

A good leader shows what the end result should look like, but does not micro-manage the process and the team members every step of the way. There is a saying that there are many ways to skin a cat (I don’t even want to think about the context from which that saying came to be). But, using that phrase, a leader’s job is to recognize and communicate acceptable guidelines and definitive outcomes, then let his or her team take the ball and run with it. I’ve learned my way is not always the best way, the smartest way, the fastest way, or the most efficient way to do something, and I’ve actually learned a lot along the way from my teams. So, not only does this invest them, but it provides growth and development for everyone. 

A good leader guides, advises, steps in to help or intervene if the situation requires it, and provides feedback along the way. The feedback mechanism, which is the informal process of day-to-day interaction and involvement with each team member as well as the formal process of regularly-scheduled performance development reviews, will be discussed in the next post, along with the annual performance review.

But let’s talk about people, the core component of teams and leaders. The driving force that determines how every person thinks, is, and interacts with everything else he or she comes into contact with is attitude/mindset/motivation, hereafter referred to simply as mindset. When you strip away all the layers of complexity we humans are both designed with and develop, there are two basic mindsets that we approach life with. One is “have to.” The other is “want to.”

Although at times, we all switch between the two – there are routine “have-to’s” that are associated with life that we may not necessarily want to do – each of us has a predominant mindset, because it’s become how we relate.

And the success or failure of both teams and leaders is directly tied to these two mindsets. The first thing that a mindset tells about a person is how they see themselves in relationship to everything else. One of the key differences in these two mindsets is that a half-to will do something because it benefits him or her, while a wants-to will do something because it benefits everyone. So the have-to mindset is all about me, while the wants-to mindset is all about us.

Want-to’s tend to thoroughly immerse themselves into whatever they’re involved in. They go beyond what is spelled out and clarify and question until they understand the totality of what is required of them. Want-to’s are living, eating, breathing whatever they’re involved in. They are totally invested. Want-to’s will spend whatever time and effort is required to achieve a successful outcome. They usually delivered better-than-expected results.

Want-to’s are in tune with the world around them. Because they think in terms of “us,” want-to’s will, without prompting or threatening, do something simply because it needs to be done or because someone needs help. Want-to’s are background people who don’t demand or want attention and the spotlight on them. They need affirmation in a personal and quiet way that they are on the right track or that their contributions are helping everyone, but they prefer attention-wise to fly below the radar.

Want-to’s see and understand the big picture. They understand that what they do is a key element in how well the whole turns out, and they also understand that helping others when they’re able is also a key element in the final outcome. Want-to’s understand that “we all stand together or fall together.” A want-to’s mantra is “what can I do?” They, interestingly, are also interested in fairness, but from a completely different angle than a have-to. Want-to’s address fairness head-on when they see others being treated unfairly. King David, the patriarch Abraham, and Christ come to mind when I think of want-to’s.

Have-to’s are letter-of-the-law. Their involvement in any part of life tends to be superficial. Have-to’s never see the big picture. They are the proverbial tree-watchers. Have-to’s are good actors, and will usually talk a good game, but they never deliver the results. They will do exactly what is spelled out and no more. Have-to’s are attention junkies. If something isn’t about them, they will find a way to twist it around to make it about them.

Have-to’s are clock-watchers, never giving more than the absolute minimum required in time and effort. They will not volunteer to help anyone else and tend to be disdainful and condescending in their relationships. The only time have-to’s will take on anything outside of their codified scope is if they believe they will gain something in return. And even then, the first thing a have-to will say is “that’s not my job.” This is a half-to mantra.

Have-to’s are not invested in anything but themselves and their entire lives revolve strictly around themselves. They do not build and apply knowledge and carry it with them through life. Have-to’s are never wrong. If something goes wrong, it’s always someone else’s fault. Have’to’s, additionally, spend an inordinate amount of time with the issue of fairness - specifically to or toward them. “You’re not being fair” is the favorite phrase have-to’s have about fairness. They also talk a lot about their rights. The Pharisees, as a group, are a good example, as well as Judas, of a have-to mindset.

So what happens when both of these mindsets exist on a team? How do they interact with each other and with the team leader? How do they respond to performance development and performance reviews? How does this affect the outcome of projects? I’ll examine that in the next post.

Filed under: Thinking Out Loud Tagged: attitude, mindset, motivation, relationships, teamwork, the big picture ]]> http://allthstrangehrs.wordpress.com/2011/05/28/the-mind-is-its-own-place/feed/ 2 allthstrangehrs http://allthstrangehrs.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/a-little-life-lesson/ http://allthstrangehrs.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/a-little-life-lesson/#comments Wed, 04 May 2011 13:52:04 +0000 allthstrangehrs http://allthstrangehrs.wordpress.com/?p=372 ]]> No pithy quotes, meaningful lines from a poem or song for this post, which is a first (and likely last) occurrence for this blog. But a little event this week made me think I needed to write this so I can remember it in the future when other similar circumstances occur.

I was working on my main computer Monday night when it suddenly flickered, I saw a flash of the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (hereafter, referred to by its techie acronym – BSOD), and the computer rebooted.

I didn’t panic. After all, I deal with this kind of stuff for a living, so stuff happens.

The computer rebooted to the familiar “Windows unexpectedly shut down” screen, where I had several options to restart. I chose the most obvious, which was to restart with the last known good configuration (always assume that even if you weren’t changing anything, something got changed).

The computer rebooted, flashed the BSOD, and went back to the same screen. I still didn’t panic. Sometimes the registry can corrupt itself and I knew if I could get into a safe mode (which were the other options), I could likely repair the problem.

I chose to restart in “safe mode with networking,” because I wanted Google handy in case I needed it.

The computer rebooted, flashed the BSOD, and went back to the screen with restart options. No panic, but concern.

I tried rebooting with every option on the restart screen, all with the same result. Still no panic, but in the back of mind, the realization that this might be the end of the line for this computer, which I’ve had for six years, and me.

I turned the computer off, unplugged the wireless router and cable modem and went downstairs, where I set the laptop up, got them hooked up, and went to Google to see if the next steps I was thinking of were reasonable. All the techie sites I used were in agreement. I decided to call it a night (it was almost midnight by then) and try them first thing on Tuesday morning.

I did. They failed with the same results as Monday evening. By now, I had accepted that, whether the timing was good or not, I was going to have to buy a new CPU. I took the computer down to a techie friend of mine to see if he could get to the hard drive to get my data (at that point, I knew something critical had failed, but not exactly what it was) off.

Most of it I was not particularly concerned about because I do regular backups and I knew I had fairly recent (as of Sunday) backups of both my work folders and my important personal folders. However, I’d changed both groups on Monday and so there was that day of data that had not been backed up.

My real concern was my Outlook .pst file that I have imported from computer to computer for the last 10 years. The last backup I did on it was three months ago (I usually do a quarterly backup of it), so at best, I’d be minus three months worth of emails. 

And then something interesting happened. After I dropped the computer off, I started making peace with a change that I frankly have known some time was going to come, either because I was forced to (as in a catastrophic crash) or because I have recognized that I needed to bite the bullet and do it.

You see the old computer was running Windows XP and I was using old Office programs (Office 2003 and FrontPage 2003 for some web stuff – I started using Dreamweaver a couple of years ago, but never found its interface as intuitive as FrontPage, especially for quick and dirty changes to several web sites at the same time, which is about 1/2 of what I do with web development/maintenance), and all the software I had installed worked perfectly in that OS.

Here’s the irony. As a chief technical officer, two of my primary functions are strategic planning and change management, so when we decided to upgrade all the computers at the company I work for, I recommended Windows 7 Professional and Office 2010 as the platform. I like Windows 7, but I hate Office 2010 because I find it clunky on an intuitive basis and the learning curve, even when going from an earlier Office installation, is high. But, from a business perspective, it made sense.

From a personal perspective (both in terms of functionality and financial cost to make the change), it did not. And, yet over the past several months, a niggling thought in the back of my mind has been that I needed to go ahead and do it because the longer I stayed where I was, the harder the change was going to be ahead.

I made a conscious decision to wait until I had no choice. And that day came yesterday.

I was more calm about it – it’s always easier to spend someone else’s money and get it right than it is to spend your own limited financial resources, stay within a minimal budget, and get it right – than I expected to be. I figured out why during my habitual middle of the night, wide awake, let’s review life time earlier today (it was about 2 am this morning) and therein lies the little life lesson.

Yesterday, though, was a series of whirlwind analyses, research quests, and final decisions because although I’d thought of this in big-picture terms (“I need to do this at some point”), I had never figured out the details of how. Under the gun, I had no choice but to get it all together.

My first decision was hardware. I realized my laptop has most of the same software as my old computer. I considered just transitioning to it and keeping the status quo with no cost. However, a critical piece of software I use a lot is not on my laptop and my laptop doesn’t have enough memory to run it. So that option was out.

Then I had to decide between buying another laptop or another CPU. I pretty quickly realized that most laptop screens are too hard on my eyes to be considered a viable option when I have a 27″ monitor upstairs in the office that at times even strains my eyes when I spend too much time staring at it during computer-extensive projects. So the decision was a CPU.

I found the perfect one at Best Buy for a price that was very reasonable. Decision made.

Then I had to deal with software. Best Buy loads all their systems with Windows 7 Home, so I knew I had to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional. I got a price on that.

Then I started scouring eBay for reasonably-priced copies of Office 2010 and Expression Web 4 Professional (the FrontPage replacement…that took about an hour just to figure out what the differences were between the professional version and the ultimate version…I decided I could live without being ultimate after realizing there was a $500 difference between that and being professional). I had to check to make sure that Office 2010 would run on Windows XP (which is the OS on this computer I’m on and the laptop), since I needed to have the same version on all three computers.

I found academic versions (Office 2010 with 3 licenses, which is exactly what I need) of both and was able to get those for far less than I expected to pay.

I got the call late last evening from my friend who was looking at my computer and he gave me the post mortem. The hard drive was good and he was copying all the data. The rest not so good. A couple of components had failed and the Windows XP installation had gotten corrupt as a result. My only option was to start from scratch.

No choice but to move forward.

Other than this being an unexpected expense that I was loathe to undertake and that took me a while to just accept that there was no other option, the rest of this was a calm and rational process, when realistically it could have all been quite a major upheaval. I remember thinking yesterday morning that there was a reason that maybe I didn’t see today for this happening and that if I lost my 10-year-old .pst file, then maybe it was time to let go of the past and start over. And that was surprisingly all okay for me.

The reasons are a life lesson.

First, I was mentally prepared. I had already seen the handwriting on the wall and knew that I needed to make this change. So the only surprise was that I had to make it yesterday, instead of being able to plan and do it on my terms. And, I suspect that’s probably really a good thing, because I know, primarily because of the financial cost, which has really been what’s held me back from doing it before now, I would have put it off indefinitely.

Second, I was physically prepared. Most techies are the worst at backing up their data, even though they preach it to everyone else. I’ve dealt with so many of other people’s critical data losses over the years (I remember a real critical hard drive failure last year with no backup, and I actually put the hard drive in the freezer overnight to see if the malfunction was mechanical and I could overcome that by constriction – yes, it works! – and get the data off) that backing up my own data has always been a no-brainer. I know the cost of losing it.

Third, I was experientially prepared. I’ve done this very process many times in my career in all kinds of settings, companies, and situations. Usually, at least at the individual level, it happens in crisis mode (the person’s having a crisis and I have to be the level head to manage it, which includes helping them on a personal level and taking care of the problem by providing the best solution), and since I’ve always been the crisis manager, I went into that mode as if I were dealing with my situation, not as the personal me, but the professional me. Makes a huge difference in the approach and in having the clarity to ask and answer the right questions quickly.

Funny how life brings you to these moments where you see the culmination of all that’s been before come together to move you from one place to another…a place you want to go, need to go, and should go, but couldn’t get to without a defining and decisive intervening event that makes that the only possible option.

All in all, everything works together for good.