Wind Beneath My Wings

This week, I met with a client I've had for a while and was trying to get her to open up more. I was hoping we could really process her situation, as it is rather hard. She's in her 50s and has a disease process where she understands what is going on, she's completely aware of her situation, but cannot do anything to stop it. She's at the age where she feels that she should be starting to take care of her parents and helping her son get ready for his wedding, but instead her parents and son are now having to take care of her. It's hard for her to stay in bed when she'd rather be outside, or rather, would rather be anywhere but a nursing home.


She enjoys the music she listened to when she was younger, which happens to be 80s popular music. With that in mind, I pulled out Bette Midler's "Wind Beneath My Wings", which you can listen to below.

Before I sang it, I asked her to think about who this song describes for her. After the song was finished, she said, "That's easy. It makes me think of my parents." We began talking about her parents and she was saying how they were such good people and really had tried everything to help her. As she was talking, her expression seemed to show that she was thinking very hard. At one point she stopped and said, "Me being in this situation must be really hard for them, too." I was so glad she made that shift in perspective. Not that she was complaining about herself before, but now it seemed that she was aware that her parents were grieving for her and it helped her to appreciate them that much more. She shared some stories of how they have helped her and then we discussed plans for her to tell them how much they mean to her. 


I don't know if she has or will let them know how much they mean to her, but I know that she really is grateful for them and I just hope they know it.


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New blog to check out is : Bliss Music Therapy. She hasn't updated her blog for a while, but what she has posted is good information!

Perspective on Goodbye

A few weeks ago, I visited a woman who I have only seen a handful of times. Despite her fairly short time with us so far, we have built a very strong therapeutic relationship. This is dangerous for me, because I know that one way or the other, she will leave our services. She will either get better and be inappropriate for hospice services or she will decline further and die. This is the hardest aspect of hospice care. As a hospice worker, I need to be able to protect myself, keep boundaries between myself and my clients. Every once-in-a-while, however, I don't do a very good job.

This particular client played organ for 30+ years in her church and enjoys a lot of hymns that I've never heard before, so she's been challenging me and stretching me musically. She's still very gracious, though, when I mess up. She still has her cognitive abilities, so she converses easily and I do not feel like I need to "perform" or pretend to be extroverted in our sessions. It's one visit I know I can be myself. I say all this to say that during our last session, she was tearful when we were saying goodbye. She had a pretty quick decline for a few days and she was saying what she thought would be our final goodbye. She shook my hand and said, with tears, "I don't know that I should say 'See you later' this time." I thought for a second and said, "It doesn't matter to me what you say. Either way, whether we see each other or not, I'm glad we've had this time. If we have more time, I'll be very happy, but we can't count on that. We should be grateful for the time we've had and take it one day at a time." That seemed to put it in perspective for her and we said our goodbyes.

Those conversations are always hard to have with people. I guess, on some level, it's a conversation we should all be having all the time. There are so many things that could happen - car accidents, disease, etc - that could make "see you later" not applicable. I know a lot of people take Easter weekends to spend time with family and friends, so I encourage you to take this to heart. Nothing is guaranteed, so make sure every goodbye is suitable for be the last.

Grief Group Self-Review

Yesterday, I led a grief group in place of the bereavement coordinator. I haven't led a group for quite some time, and had never led solo. I wanted to just talk a bit about what I did and what I would have done differently.

I started off with "The Rose", which I did some research on. Apparently, the song was voted #83 of American Film Institute's "100 Years of the Greatest Songs" in 2004. This song was written by Andrea McBloom, but was made famous by Bette Midler. Other covers done by Conway Twitty, Leann Rimes, and Westlife.

I sang the song and we talked about different lyrics of the song that stood out to them and compared them to their grief journey. It turned out that this song was used for the funeral of the mother of one of the participants, so it already carried quite a punch. We talked about the lyrics and it sort of went on a few rabbit trails after that. I tried to concentrate on coping strategies, especially when they talked about being angry or depressed. At the end, I tried to lead a relaxation exercise, but it didn't really work out very well.

I think some of this next section may be due to walking into a new group. I had never met any of these people before and some of them had other issues that they were dealing with. I try not to blame others, but one lady in particular tended to dominate the conversation, which was actually a bit of help at first. In the end, however, I wish I had attempted to take a little more control so I could include others, one in particular who didn't actually say anything. Another thing I would have liked to see happen is some realizations toward the end. I understand that everybody works at a different pace, but I felt as though the participants were more depressed when they left.

Despite this, I do feel that there was a lot of great sharing. My intentions were good and I felt I did stay mentally present throughout the entire session. I felt that I was able to take a tangents and connect them to some lessons that I've learned working with patients. I especially tried to show that they were very connected through their grief and I encouraged them to lean on each other when they are feeling depressed or needed to talk.

I guess that's all I have. Sorry for the ramblings, but this blog is great for me to process how things went. That's important for anybody to do.