Genevieve Taylor’s Blog

CHANGE. THE LONG & SHORT OF IT. (PART 1 OF 4)

Death of a Good Woman

It has been several weeks since I have last posted. For good reason – summer work travel notwithstanding, my grandmother, Donna Brown, passed away suddenly on July 27. She had been showing her age – 78 – for the last few months, but was such a delight to be around, with hearty laughter, irreverent jokes, great stories, and the best hugs, that we only noticed it vaguely. In retrospect, we had had to help her down steps more and more; she couldn’t walk very far; she fell for the first time several weeks before; she was out of breath quite often. I think the first real sign of her age was her pacemaker, implanted a couple of years ago; and at the end, that artificial heart was all that held her together. Until that too couldn’t quite do the job; she slipped away that Sunday around 9:30 pm, her family singing her Amazing Grace.

Change. Whether it is in your family, in your team, in your organization, the psychological ramifications of change are powerful, subtle, and themselves temper a person, as much as the event itself.

We have all been riding, as the days have gone by, the roller coaster of change. When I first received the phone call that she was in the hospital, I had every belief that she would end up fine. I found out later that my cousin Kenny, who had sent Grandma to the hospital via ambulance earlier that day, also thought she would get better.

Then, that Sunday, after hours in the Intensive Care Unit, and for a variety of health reasons, it became obvious that she wasn’t getting any better, and never would, and the decision was made to put her on comfort care. That conversation was challenging – many of us were grieving, some were facing anxiety, a couple of us were in denial, and angry that the family was not doing more to save her.

The Process of Transition

The Process of Transition

This has been a challenging couple of years in my family – Grandma was the third person in our close circle who had passed on in the last 18 months. As a result, I have gotten more and more accustomed to managing change – I have come to expect the wave of emotions sweeping myself and those around me; I have started to look for the joy in the situation, as there always is; I have been able to help others accept what is happening as well. As the graphic above makes obvious, it is very possible to get “derailed” from the natural process of change, into denial or hostility. Even more common is to get “stuck” in a certain feeling – the nervous feeling of guilt that never quite goes away; the fear or anxiety around the future; the depression. The model described above is a take-off from Dr. Kubler-Ross’ work on grief and transition; she wrote her book On Death and Dying in the 1970s, and her thinking was an enormous contribution to understanding transition and change of all types.