May 13, 2019
A cancer diagnosis is scary and totalizing. Hospital visits, financial stress, and lingering uncertainty affect the entire family unit. Brad Grammer shares about learning to cry, stupid stuff people say, and the importance of counseling. Along the way, lessons emerge on how to support families well as they grapple with cancer.
00:04- Opening quote by Brad Grammer
Brad Grammer
Spend more time just asking questions and listening just to find out what that person really would be encouraged and benefited by. Maybe they don't get encouraged at all by giving advice about how to deal with your cancer. They just want you to listen and have somebody to cry with, you know.
00:24- Intro
I think he's been sick. She just seems sad all the time. I think something happened at home. What should we do?
You want to help someone when they're going through a hard time. But it can be difficult to know what to do or what to say. Hi, I'm Liesel Mertes and this is the Handle with Care podcast, where we talk about empathy at work.
On each episode. I welcome a guest that has lived through a disruptive life event. We cover topics from death to divorce to that scary diagnosis and in each story, we give you actionable tips on what you can do to show empathy and give support as a manager a co-worker or a friend.
- Thanks.
01:18– Meet Brad Grammer
Liesel Mertes
Today's guest is Brad Grammer. Brad is an old friend of our family and he's been around at some really important moments. For example, when Moses, my youngest son, was preparing for his first open heart surgery, Brad was sitting in the waiting room with us. Also, as we prepared for Moses' open heart surgery, we had this event called Mohawks with Moses where we gave Mo a mohawk and there were a lot of young boys like 4 and 6 year olds that joined in. And Brad was one of the few adults that actually opted, in a show of solidarity, to get a mohawk as well.
Brad himself is no stranger to grief. And today he's speaking about his wife Laura and her journey with an aggressive form of leukemia. But first, before we dive into our conversation, let me offer a little bit of background. As I mentioned, Brad is married to Laura and he is the father of two grown sons. Brad and Laura love adventurous foods.
Brad Grammer
Something told us about a Mexican restaurant that serves a big huge meat platter for like 30 bucks and you could easily feed a family of five or six just from that one plate.
Liesel Mertes
They love travel and watching sports.
Brad Grammer
And sometimes we just sit and relax and don't do anything watch sports. My wife's a big sports fan. So is she. Oh yes yes. For football's special teams local and national international. We're talking about soccer.
Liesel Mertes
She's even watching cricket.
Brad Grammer
Yeah exactly. Yes. Yes.
Liesel Mertes
Brad also loves taking long evening walks. These evening walks are helpful to decompress because of Brad's role as a social worker, which can take a particular toll.
03:09- Life as a social worker
Brad Grammer
For the past two years, I've been a foster care case manager and my job is the foster children are my clients. So my job is to see them each week, engage with them, identify what are the kind of, understand that their backgrounds and what their traumas are. And we've had some training in things like fair play and trust based relational interventions so we like practice these playful activities and engagement with them to help them learn how to develop trust with an adult after they've gone through their own traumas their own betrayal.
03:45- A litany of hard things
Liesel Mertes
While Brad is going to be speaking primarily about his wife, Laura's, cancer diagnosis, her cancer is just one part of a decade of disruption.
Brad Grammer
It probably began about 11 years ago with my wife getting was diagnosed with leukemia and acute lymphoblastic leukemia, which is a bad form of leukemia you get as an adult. And that set off a whole year of treatments. That was intense and very difficult. It's a very difficult cancer to fight and deal with and many people die not because of the leukemia itself but because of the treatment plan the treatment plan is so harsh and intense that it can damage so many things like different organs that all of a sudden give out.
And so there's that in and of itself is just kind of a crazy year of all kinds of things that happen. And that was followed by the death of both of my parents, the loss of relationship with my younger brother the loss of my job. Individuals who we had committed to be in a relationship for life, you know, working together on our lives together and experiencing betrayal with them and losing relationships with several people that I thought we were gonna be friends forever. And I lived in a very urban environment where lots of things happened.
So I'm experiencing regular traumas of, you know, just having an 18 year old shot and killed in front of my house and having my own friend, a pastor friend, shot and killed in his church...seeing his blood and his flesh all over the steps of his church and trying to help his church walk through the grieving process of that. Having people in my own congregation when I was a pastor, people that I loved, commit suicide or die from some other kind of some kind of addictive behavior or trauma in their life. So this is just an ongoing thing that happened for ten eleven years and things still happen to this day.
But it's just there doesn't seem to be as intense as during those 10-11 years where it just seemed like that it was one month to the next month to the next month. Something was happening every month that was just all these different tragedies and traumas and feeling completely unprepared initially facing these things. How do I deal with this? What, how do I survive? At that point, you're just talking survival you're not even talking about dealing with it well. You're just like, how do I even survive? How do I even know that I'm going to be able to get up the next day and still breathe going through all of this?
That was it was quite overwhelming. And and then kind of looking back on those years, be able to see how how do you not only survive it but then how do you process it in a way that that you're not just a dysfunctional adult, now you can't do anything and can't function at all because there is definitely period of time where I thought I wasn't gonna be able to function anymore as an adult and would I be able to keep a job, would I be able to stay in relationship with anybody? Because I just wasn't handling that trauma well and figuring out how to be come healthy and how to heal from those things was a very lengthy process.
07:11– The diagnosis of Laura’s cancer
Liesel Mertes
There's so many pieces of that story that I want to touch on. Let's...let's begin: you commented on those early stages of trying to find any sort of equilibrium, the shock, the sense of that. Which brings us to where we began in 2007. What was your life stage with Laura and what did it look like in those first couple of months of reckoning with the news of this very aggressive cancer and how that was affecting your life roles and your position? Tell us a little bit of that.
Brad Grammer
Yeah my wife at that time was working in a school; she was dean of the school she was working in and I was a pastor of a small Sunday evening congregation at that time and we had two young boys: ten and eleven years old. And so here we are really liking our roles, enjoying our jobs and, and all of a sudden get slammed with this news. My wife had become very ill in October; we thought she was just having like flu symptoms and would go to the emergency room because she was just really in this intense pain. And then they kind of misdiagnosed her as maybe having rheumatoid arthritis and sent her home but after she went to her doctor about a week or two later and got blood tests, they found that she had leukemia.
08:33- Immediate hospitalization
Brad Grammer
I think part of the shock of that is you don't get any time to think about it. Within two hours of being told we were in the hospital, you started treatment in the hospital. They told her she'd be there for 30 days that she wouldn't be able to work for a year. And me being the person who runs the finances of the home, I'm thinking I'm gonna have to sell my house because she made two thirds of the income. And we kind of live we need her income to be able to survive.
So we're gonna have to sell the house. So for the first couple weeks I think she was in shock, just being jarred with this news and having to be thrown into treatment immediately because if she didn't receive treatment immediately she could die within a week or two. So it was like, it had to be quick. It had to start right away. And for me I'd have to go home and cry myself to sleep for a couple weeks. Fortunately I was somebody who already understood the value of having a therapist in your life, somebody that you can trust to go to and talk. And so I hadn't been to him in a while so I'm like well this is the time to go. So I went to him.
09:37- The importance of counseling
Brad Grammer
It's time to back on the couch exactly because I learned, as an adult, an adult skill and many adults haven't learned this. But when you hit an area or a season of time that you don't know what to do, you ask for help just like what we teach our kids. If you don't know how to do this one task, then ask the adult to help you. Well, that's what we do as adults. Ideally, we should be asking for help when we're hitting a difficult season of life. So that's what I did.
10:06- Be the hope
Brad Grammer
I went to him and and he asked me why I was cried myself to sleep at night and I was thinking about her dying, my wife, and how my kids are going to be affected. And so he said, "Well do you want her to die?" "No!" I was offended that you asked that. Please clarify. "Well, you know Brad, she's alive today and you have her today so each day you can just take one day at a time and face the day and know that as long as she is alive, there is hope and you keep engaging and you never have to tell your boys about the possibility of dying even though she was getting a 20 percent chance to live."
We just don't share that information with them; it's too much for kids to handle. It's hard enough for me as an adult to handle that. So, I took his advice. It was invaluable advice just to, because I didn't realize, I think...I don't know if it's an American way of living, but I didn't realize how much I'm living in the future before it comes. I was thinking, planning, what's coming next. And that experience forced me to face the moment, live in the moment today. And that helped me to be the hope that my wife needed when she was overwhelmed and shocked by all this in this treatment because her body's being thrown into this chaos as well as just emotionally dealing with like, "Am I gonna live or die?"
In my response I'm not saying that I did it all well. You know, you make a lot of mistakes when you're going through it, especially because I, like most adults, are unprepared for when things like this happen. And so we're kind of learning as you go along. So I learned that it was important that I be the hope when she felt despairing and to always believe that she was going to live unless there was absolutely no evidence to show that she was going to live. That I needed to be the one to keep hoping and that until her last breath went away, I was not going to believe that she was going to die.
And that's what my counselor encouraged me, like you don't need to think about her dying. It's like, if it happens, then you can deal with it. But until then, you don't have to be thinking about that and all your focus is: she's alive today. How can I be there with her present today? If I was thinking about the future, that would weigh my heart down so much, it would it would prevent me from hearing her from seeing her, from knowing what does she need each day as she was going through this process.
I think sometimes I can be so hopeful that I wasn't able to like just sit and grieve with her about what was happening. And I think that's sometimes why I've missed it with her, as just being attentive to her. I'm just feeling sorrow, feeling pain, comforting her with this hugs and then just being with her. Sometimes, I was so, I was on so much adrenaline trying to attend to the needs of my job, my kids and her and trying to balance all this out but sometimes I feel like I did neglect what she was feeling and just trying to pay attention to that.
So I vacillated between being good at being present and hopeful and encouraging and then missing her sometimes because I was too busy trying to keep it all together.
13:30– Feeling hopeless and what to do about it
Liesel Mertes
Where did you feel hopeless? And what actually spoke into those feelings as you walked with that?
Brad Grammer
I think that, for me, the hopelessness was that I, I don't think I can get through this and I don't have what it takes. And how, how am I going to recover from this? Whether it's even after my wife had this treatment for a year and we had just a beautiful gift that somebody gave us to go away and travel and do this trip and just and she was able to travel. The doctors at that time weren't sure if she was gonna relapse, there's a 50 percent chance of relapse the first year after treatment. So it's like, he was kind of saying like, "Hey, if there's anything you want to do in life, this is the time to do it."
So we asked him if we can travel to this one place in this one country. And he said Yeah and somebody had just given us this gift, so it didn't cost us anything. And I remember, just while my wife is having a great time, I was having this, basically a breakdown, an emotional breakdown. I was crying every day and then...I actually think that when I feel hopeless and despairing, it's important to remember to cry because that is part of what my heart feels. And that's one of the ways that you take care of your heart is that you need to plan in time to cry. It's very important because something bad has happened. There's something really sad that has gone on and it's very important to not try and act like I can handle this.
You know the American mentality. I can pull myself by my own bootstraps and I can, I can, I can still make it. That's really important to like allow yourself to be weak and to cry and invite people into that life. There's got to be at least a couple people that you can invite into that. For some people who maybe don't have those kind of relationships, what they find is having a support group for whether you've like, there's a there's a support group for people with leukemia and lymphoma and there for people with the disease as well as those that are caretakers.
They were, I didn't go for very long, but I just remember the great piece of advice that they gave us, like get away, take a break, go on a retreat by yourself. And I just couldn't do it because I was like, "But what if my wife dies while I'm away?" like I would just think. And they were just saying, you got to do it anyway. And they were like, at that moment it was a great piece of advice, I needed to get away.
16:01- The importance of 2 AM friends
Brad Grammer
And that's part of what helped me turn me up in the time where I was just like hopeless and having, for me I did have friends who are like, "You call me at 2:00 in the morning if that's when you're you need to call," because, sometimes your pain and grief, it's not convenient time wise. It does happen in the middle of the night. So I had a couple of friends I could call anytime of the day or night. That's very important when you feel weak and hopeless. That's again, the adult skill. That's when you asked for help. That's when you let people know. I remember one time I was just crying in the hospital my brother in law and sister in law just, you know, held me and cried with me, you know, and that is hugely encouraging for me. That may not be for other people you know but for me that helped gird me, to know that I wasn't in that pain alone. Somebody was willing to feel the pain with me they weren't afraid of the pain and they're willing to feel it with me. So those are the kind of things; I think it was more than a human contact, more personal connection, is what strengthened me at that time where I just felt like I couldn't go on and where I felt hopeless. For me, it was just purely relationship.
17:18– Practical ways to help: meals, rides, gifts, and health insurance
Liesel Mertes
On top of this human care and interaction, there were some really practical tasks that people assisted Brad and Lara with that were especially meaningful.
Brad Grammer
It was really beautiful because both of our workplaces were jarred quite a bit by this. Because our work communities loved us and cared about us as a family as well as individuals. And so, one thing that they did, it was just so amazing, is that both my wife's workplace and my workplace appointed, they had an appointed person and so if I needed anything, I called one of those people and said hey I need this. And that's all I had to do and they would set off and contact people to do whatever, whether and they set up a meal plan. And this is a meal plan for a whole year wasn't just for two weeks when you're set up for a whole year.
Liesel Mertes
And so you said, "Please, I prefer ethnic food."
[Brad Grammer
Exactly. That's all I want more than anything. But that was, so meal plans were all set up. I sometimes, I, my wife she needed, she had to be either in the hospital every day or go to the hospital every day. So if she wasn't, if she was at home then she needed a ride to the hospital. A lot of times, I could do it. But there are times I just couldn't right and Laura needs a ride. And that's a particular need and the fact that she just doesn't want anybody because she wants somebody that's comfortable with her throwing up in their car.
So, and you know, you want to feel comfortable with this person to some degree in order to throw up in their car.
Liesel Mertes
It's like benchmarks of intimacy.
Brad Grammer
Right. Exactly. Throwing up as a little bit more intimate issue than just getting a general ride and you know my boys needed rides at school, sometime needed to be watched.
Some ladies were so beautiful, they just would come and just clean my house. They didn't even ask me. They said, they would just say, "Hey, we're coming over this day and we're gonna come clean your house." It even, just, during the Christmas holiday season I had somebody just offer to do this and I said of course and they just took the boys Christmas shopping for us as their parents. It felt so thoughtful.
One of the most amazing things this one person did is a lady that said, I don't, "I'm trying to figure out what I can do to support you. I thought I'm going to do what I'm good at." So she normally is in H.R. and businesses and she said let me just handle all your medical bills. So I would give all my medical bills to her, because unfortunately, you know insurance companies would deny a certain percentage naturally just because they're trying to not pay for everything. And so, they would deny bills that are meant to be covered by the insurance companies. So she would handle all that problem and all she would do is, that like she'd hand me a bill and say pay this bill.
And you know I had a stack maybe six inches or more tall of bills that, there are bills where like a million dollars from that year. And fortunately, we had insurance. So very grateful for that. But that was such a huge gift something I would never have thought about. Like I just thought that was something I would have to be responsible for but that was such an amazing gift. Just to take that detail that really was quite burdensome and to manage it all and just all I had to do is just pay the bill whatever she gave me.
Liesel Mertes
As someone who has lost so many hours of my life to talking on the phone to figuring out those insurance bills, crying on the phone, I listen to that and I go, oh my gosh, yes, that was like a priceless gift. Huge!
Brad Grammer
Yes. That's, you, yeah, I mean, it was something that you just don't normally think about. But that was the best way to serve.
21:01- Learning to ask for help
Brad Grammer
You know, one thing I was thinking about is that I would communicate to people is what a friend of mine who actually is going through cancer treatment at that time...he was a pastor himself and told me to be sure and just tell people what you want. Anything. It doesn't have to be even a legitimate thing. If you want a gift card to Starbucks, just say so. You know, so like, I would ask for, you know gas cards because we were driving in the hospital all the time and they're quite far away from home. And then, or I just ask for Starbucks cards. I was set for Starbucks for a year. I was set up, I got Starbucks
Liesel Mertes
Sometimes there's nothing that communicates comfort like a latte!
Brad Grammer
For me getting up in the morning and sitting in the hospital room, sometimes that was just the best part of my day, was just to have a nice latte while I'm just waking up with my wife. You know, and she's dealing with another day of treatment and I was just thinking, like that was so amazing. Because not only would people do that gladly and happily, that it showed just the support, the level of support. I got a gift card from Thailand from people who live in Thailand, a Starbucks gift card. And I was like, What? But just to show that people were thinking of you all over the world was a huge encouragement, just to get those little things.
So, I remember just that's an important thing to tell people be sure and just let people...people want to do things for you. And people, they're walking through this with you and they feel helpless. So when you say little things like that, if they feel like they can do something and this is their way of supporting you, and that's a huge thing. To make sure that people, because some people, my wife is one of these people, she was pretty independent, pretty self-sufficient. She can handle her life pretty much and so she wasn't used to asking for help. I think I tend to be the weaker one; I ask for help more so it was easy for me to ask. But, I know for some people, it might be hard because they're just not used to doing that. But, just to remind them that people really do want to support you and help you. And that's one way you can do is just, something even simple and easy.
23:16 – Stupid advice, comments, and small talk
Liesel Mertes
In many ways Brad was well supported but he was also missed. As you think about this arc of what happened, whether it was Laura's diagnosis or the death of your parents or, you know, this trauma. What are some things that rise to the fore where you go, this was really painful in how this individual responded or I was so missed here.
Brad Grammer
There was, I think when my wife was sick with cancer, people come up with all kinds of things like, well you know you read that, like, if you just didn't drink too much milk...this will really help with the, you know, that cancer diminishing cancer cells and stuff. So people come up with all kinds of ideas and and they will offer that information without thinking, like maybe the person doesn't want to hear that information or maybe their information is very inaccurate and not helpful at all. And so, that can be kind of discouraging, just to have people kind of throw information at you without checking to see if you even want to hear it.
You know, I think, probably one of the things I would really encourage people to do is spend more time just asking questions and listening, just to find out what that person really would be encouraged by or benefited by. Maybe they don't get encouraged at all by giving advice about how to deal with your cancer. They just want you to listen and have somebody to cry with, you know. I remember one guy and I think it was kind of a trigger for me. I was just livid with him. He came up and asked me, "Have you been able to get enough time to exercise?" I'm like, exercise?!?! Inside, I was going, to exercise. I'm like, I'm going to the hospital everyday, I'm taking care of my kids, I'm doing my job. I don't have time to breathe and I'm getting five hours of sleep a night. Maybe I don't have time to do anything.
And, but from his perspective, he was thinking and I and I do remember kind of going off on him in a little bit and he responded by saying exercise helped him when he's really stressed. Exercise is a great stress reliever. Well part of that is just his ignorance about knowing what my life was like, how every day was just full and very intense and difficult. And you know, there's some things that just you have to put to the wayside. And he just unaware because he'd never gone through something like this before so he was only reverting to what was familiar to him.
So, it would have been good and important for him to be able to ask me questions first to see what my daily life was like and that would help him to see, like, oh I shouldn't make this kind of comment, you know. And it doesn't have to be a hurtful comment, like you said, it was just a pretty innocent thing. He was asking about, it was such a trigger for me because it signified, like, you have no idea what I'm going through then you don't care because you didn't even ask what my life is like.
26:12- The importance of listening
Brad Grammer
And so, I think just really listening and hearing what a person's life is like each day can be way more valuable than giving any advice or asking questions like that. That's, I think, for me where people most miss. They assume, maybe, that you're, you're dealing with it better than you are and there's an assumption that, that you could have just a normal conversation when, in actuality, it's hard for you to even have a normal conversation. And the best thing you could do is just ask questions and listen.
26:50- Words of insight
Liesel Mertes
You mentioned the importance of learning how to walk with these experiences and integrate them into your life in a way that allowed you to be a healthy version of yourself instead of someone who had just endured something or gotten through and, how, what were, what are the things that you would offer to someone who is walking in the year, the two years, the three years after something like this has happened that have been important for you as you move beyond that immediate stage of loss and tragedy and what's it like?
27:31- Tell your story
Brad Grammer
There's quite a few things. I was actually thinking even just this conversation with you this morning is healing because even though there's so many things that have been years later, just to be able to look back and talk about it is very encouraging. It's part of life. I think you're probably well aware of this as you've been talking about people and what they're going through, how important is to reprocess your story again, talk about it again. Because sometimes when you, something else will come to you and you realize, Oh I think I think I maybe need to that or you know, so like right regularly revisiting your story with somebody that you trust, just to be able to, can help, just to be able to not only remind yourself of things that you've learned that have been a good thing that help you to continue moving forward so that you know what to do. If you just don't talk about it then it's a lot harder to identify what do you need to be healthy in doing this.
28:36- Let yourself cry
Brad Grammer
I think regularly grieving is a good thing for the long term. Like that's I know, I have a friend who when he first started facing his sexual abuse, I think just giving him permission to hurt over that was a big important step. But when he started crying, he cried every day for three months and it was really intense crying. Sometimes, he would lose his hearing when he would cry. It was a hard crying. I think a lot of people are afraid of that and part of the reason they're afraid of that is that they feel like they'll never stop crying and that it will kill them. I mean, it's, it's an irrational fear but that's part of what they feel. But your heart really needs it. And so, like then, just to encourage people, you won't die and you will make it through it and you will stop crying. So, just giving yourself permission to cry as much as you need to and eventually you will, you will stop crying, you will start to feel healthier, you start to feel stronger.
29:41- General tips on anxiety and self-care
Brad Grammer
There's lots of things I've been doing, just little things. Because after a lot of trauma I've been through, one of the things that was hard for me is just to be out in public. I would get anxiety attacks and I never understood that before and, even me helping people. But now I understand it. It's a, it's a really irrational thing. It doesn't always make sense but it feels like impending doom. It feels like you're not, something that, really bad is going to happen. And so I understand those attacks now. So I'd be one to know, like how much time I need to be alone and be away from people is real important. Regularly reading things, like fun reading but also like reading that talks about the specific aspects of what I've been through, whether it's the grief, depression, sorrow. But doing what I can to learn to help myself and getting exercise was an important part of
Liesel Mertes
Screw that guy!
Brad Grammer
I know exactly, it's like, I hate that he said that but I, but I think it still is important, like as I'm in the healing path, it's real important that I do even just if all I can do is walk. Like, even through my own cancer treatment. I was so exhausted by it all but if I could just walk that was still something good, good for me to be able to.
31:06- Spirituality and community
Brad Grammer
You know, I'm a spiritual person. I identify as a Christian so praying was really important to, say to regularly pray and read the Bible. So I would get so much encouragement just from what I would read. And what I would pray and then praying with other people and visiting with people who will, who will really hear you and really know you. Like it's important to spend time not just with people but with those people you know who who do feed you, who do build into you, who are a strength for you.
So that means sometimes I would really limit a lot of my social involvement and I would just be restricted to those important people. All those components together were part of the healing process and part of helping me to be able to be stronger to handle the next tragedy that's going to happen.
31:58- It takes time to heal
Brad Grammer
And also not putting a time limit on when I need to heal. I think that stresses some people out as they feel like they need to be healed within three to six months or something. And sometimes it takes years to recover from something and that's OK. I mean, our culture does not have patience for people and does not respect that. But to honor being a human being you must respect the fact that there are some things that just take a long time to heal from and it's OK. Yeah. You don't have to shame yourself for that.
32:35- The perils of small talk
Brad Grammer
Because we don't really have any guidance or education on these things. People don't know how to handle it. And so they every time somebody sees you they'll ask you how are things going. And some days that'll just trigger, you know, like I feel horrible. I feel like I'm going to die and I want to punch you right now.
Liesel Mertes
Or, you know, you just feel it, the compulsion to default to: fine.
Brad Grammer
Yeah. Exactly. Just, just to get him out of your face because you just don't even want to deal with it. And I remember I was going through, funny enough, I was going through a Starbucks drive through and getting, with my gift card and I just remember, I was just feeling so horrible inside because my wife was just doing so poorly and I'm just really struggling. I was not in a good space and, and I was just being honest with the guy and he does that to me like, "So how are you doing today?" I said, "I'm doing really shitty." And he goes like, "Why? Are you having a bad day?". And I lost it. I'm like, "I don't have the luxury of having a bad day. My wife has cancer!" and he was like, "Oh I'm so sorry." He's like, panicking,
Liesel Mertes
Now, was this in person or through the drive window?
Brad Grammer
Through the drive thru window. And he was like, "Here's your coffee, goodbye."
Liesel Mertes
He should have comped you that drink.
Brad Grammer
I was sat there thinking, like, I wish I could go back and just ask forgiveness for that because I lost it with him and he had nothing to do with it at all. He was just doing like the motions of the social niceties, you know. But I think like those social niceties like, like if somebody knows that I'm going through a hard time I'm probably not the best question to ask is, "How are you doing?"
Liesel Mertes
The social niceties, which are really just meant to kind of grease an interaction become painful
34:20– Learn to ask better good questions
Brad Grammer
Exactly and like, and be able to equip people with different kinds of questions is, is important on a social interaction. But we don't, where did we learn that skill? It's not like you really have somebody who will teach you that. But ideally, it would be great if, if there's somebody that could teach us like, OK when somebody with a really hard time, these questions are actually better, yeah, than the social niceties that don't work. Like the social niceties, what they come across as is belittling the person's life and making it seem like it's manageable when that person feels like my life is not manageable. I am our of control. I feel horrible and not feeling that they're free to say that. And because it's not acceptable to be honest in many places, maybe the work environment in particular, it's like it's OK, to say like, I'm having a rough day but that's it. OK let's stop right there.
Liesel Mertes
But it certainly won't affect my productivity...
Brad Grammer
Right exactly. I will of course be the most the best employee ever as a result of my trauma.
Liesel Mertes
As you look back at the younger version of yourself, if there were words that you could offer to that, you know, still finding his equilibrium Brad or someone who's going through something similar. You've had a lot to offer, but just, as a sense, what would you say to that younger version of yourself?
35:47- Get a therapist and go to a support group
Brad Grammer
I would say definitely go to a therapist or go to a support group for the thing that you're going through. You don't realize how important that is, just to have a listening ear, a compassionate response, somebody who can say, "Oh me too I'm going through the same thing," how invaluable that is. Because a lot of times, maybe we can work out the details of like you know how we're going to do dinner who's going to give a ride or...but it's that emotional support is typically where we are unprepared emotionally to handle the trauma that we're going through or the tragedies.
36:23- Ask people for help
Brad Grammer
So it's really important to always pursue people ask for help. Don't try and be the independent, I can handle this myself. That will not get you through this time at all. It'll only create problems for you later if not immediately. So always seek out help. Oh, and if you're not a person who normally is used to asking for that kind of support, it may be difficult to push through it. You will always benefit from it. And I would also remind myself that people make mistakes. So we have to be ready to offer forgiveness at some point for people who make mistakes. But to always remember that they they are trying to care for you and they are trying to show, in their awkward and sometimes childish way, they are trying to offer something.
37:14- You won’t be perfect
Brad Grammer
And so to get to, to not feel like I have to have this pressure to act perfectly and give them grace and just be this perfect person, but that just, at some point to know that, lik,e you know, people are really ill equipped to handle these things in life.
Liesel Mertes
Thank you Brad for joining us.
Brad Grammer
Like I said, thank you for even asking and having me here. Like that, there's a healing element that happens, Just having somebody pursue and ask questions. It's a beautiful thing.
37:55 – Closing thoughts
Liesel Mertes
Brad is a teacher at heart and he certainly gave us a lot of actionable tips that he wove throughout this story of his journey with Laura towards healing. Here are three closing thoughts.
38:07- #1, find support networks and the Cancer Support Community
Liesel Mertes
One if you or someone you love is going through cancer. Reach out to available support networks. Find a counselor or a support group. And if you don't know where to start, a great resource for those of you in Indianapolis is the Cancer Support Community. I was just at their building today. They're located off of 71 Street near Eagle Creek. And the Cancer Support Community offers free resources to those with cancer as well as their caregivers. There's a yoga studio, community gardens, cooking classes and one on one counseling available. The Cancer Support Community can be found online at cancersupportindy.org
38:52- #2, there are many ways to help, find one!
Liesel Mertes
Number two, if someone in your office or community is journeying with cancer, there are so many ways to help. Organized meals, offer rides, give Starbucks gift cards or help to process those medical bills. Reach out and offer what is in your power to give.
39:16- #3, beware of social niceties
Liesel Mertes
And finally, number three, be wary of those easy social niceties. We so often default to easy clichés or trite phrases or giving advice when it's not actually wanted. Take more time to actually listen and weigh your words before offering canned comfort.
39:44- Outro
Thanks for listening to the Handle with Care podcast. Handle with Care is produced by Brian Wheat at Village Recording studios. Original music is composed by the talented musical pairing, Duo Futur.
If you like what you hear. Please take a moment to subscribe, rate, and review the show. It helps other people find us. Thanks for listening. This is a Liesel Mertes and I will be back next time. As we build empathy at work.