KS&L 345 Is How You Dress Who You Are?

There are lots of television shows, and magazine articles about people who are told that they really need a ‘make-over’ because their fashion ‘look’ is outdated, messy, uncaring, and/or age inappropriate. The person is shown how they look, on national television. They are then shown how to shop, what to wear and why. Then hair and makeup are redone. The person is utterly transformed. Every time, the person says that they feel like a different person. Can wardrobe, hair and makeup really change who we are? Can those exterior changes change who we are inside?

Perhaps the answer is yes and no. Beauty may be only skin-deep, but our perceptions of ourselves go to the very core of who we are. We project our self-image of who we think we are, through what we wear and how we put ourselves together.

At the same time, people judge us by how we present ourselves, so it becomes a bit more complicated than just a bit of hair and makeup. Even friends and family members, who love us, react to us by how we appear to them. Strangers react to us by what they initially see. What they see, what they sense about us tells them a lot through unconscious cues. Most people are not even remotely aware of how powerful those cues are, but they exist and we unconsciously broadcast those cues wherever we go.

Human beings are very judgmental. People have to decide how to react, behave and respond to the person in front of them and often how we physically appear tells them how we expect people to respond to us. Maybe it is good for us to look in a mirror now and then and ask ourselves what message we are broadcasting. Let us look at some examples of how we appear and how people judge our appearance.

• On one show, a woman had a massive head of dread-locked hair that had not been washed in ten years. She wore no makeup and she claimed she did not care what people thought about her appearance. Who knew that this appearance made even her friends and family members very uncomfortable? Her ‘I have a chip on my shoulder’ attitude and ‘I am shoving my appearance in your face’ subtle cue literally became offensive to everyone around her. After her ‘make-over’, her entire demeanor softened although only to a degree. It was quite obvious that she resented ‘conforming’ to the rest of the world.

• Another woman was about forty pounds overweight, never did hair and makeup, wore sweat clothes and she was in an executive position. She couldn’t be bothered with taking the time to care for herself. Once she was ‘made over’, she saw how much better people related to her, literally, her ‘I am somewhat embarrassed about my weight, so I wear clothes that hide me demeanor’ vanished when she could see that her appearance alone was telling people how to relate to her.

• The make-over of a harried mom, told this lady that putting yourself last is not okay to do and that it really does mean a great deal to family and friends who loved her, to see her spend a bit of time on herself. Literally, she was telling people she ‘wasn’t worth the time’ to look good. She was so busy being a caregiver that she forgot to be the care-taker of herself. There were several women on the show in this type of position and one of them actually said out loud that she felt guilty spending time and money on herself!

• A twenty-year old fresh from college needed to learn how to dress appropriately for the business world so that she could command respect. Her ‘campus wardrobe’ prevented anyone taking her seriously and it very much hampered her effectiveness. Her personality and self-confidence made a dramatic change when she was shown how her appearance affected those around her. Once she watched people respond to her differently, she literally blossomed into a more professional executive.

Perhaps the message here is to take some time to analyze the image that you are projecting and then to decide if you like the message you are transmitting. If you do not like the message, then it is really time to change the hair, makeup and wardrobe of the messenger!

KS&L 344 Dismantling the Structures of Someone's Life Part 3

When you dismantle someone’s life, you find yourself not only going through their papers and documents, but also, through your own emotions. These emotions can be triggered by something as simple as the greeting cards they may have kept for 70 years. Why would someone keep a lifetime of Christmas or Birthday cards? Perhaps they kept them because each hand written sentiment meant something. Many cards will be found in their original envelopes with photographs of friends and family members still inside. Some people wrote on the cards received, as if cataloging them in their minds and hearts.

You my find yourself distracted for several hours while you read through all the cards. You may or may not remember that you even sent the card. However, there is a haunting poignancy to seeing your own handwriting from decades past as you wrote to your Mom about your life and how much you loved her. You will quietly find yourself smiling as you gently open the yellowed pictures you made as a three year old. How touching that these primitive little boy or girl pictures were as precious to your Mom as any expensive art.

Many times you find these things in the homes of even the most difficult person. Maybe you thought you knew them. Maybe the view you had of this cantankerous grandmother or irritable grandfather was not quite accurate. Each of us has a mindset about the people in our lives. How surprising to realize that that difficult mother-in-law did cherish all the photographs you sent. Maybe she mellowed over the years. The challenge for the family members settling the estate of an elderly relative is sorting through all of the emotions that go with touching their things, and reading their written thoughts.

Adult children often discover that their parents carefully saved all the projects that their children made in school and all of the funny cards given on Mother’s day.

Many an adult son has asked himself, why his Dad was so difficult to read or understand. Why didn’t his Dad want to spend more time with him, or teach him more ‘manly’ things of the world? Some men feel sad that they never once heard their father say that he loved his son.

Often it is hard to think of rigid seeming parents as ever having been in love, yet many a granddaughter has only gotten to know her grandparents through the tenderly saved love letters, carefully tied with a blue ribbon and tucked neatly in a drawer. Who would have guessed that her grandfather could write such passionate letters from his lonely post in China during World War II? Imagine getting to know what their early marriage years were like from silly greeting cards.

What about the angry letters one spouse sent to another? Conversely, what a shattering thought to learn how deeply troubled your parent’s marriage was, right from the beginning. How will you feel? You may have many a bewildered moment as you realize that the falsely happy face they showed to the world did not reflect the empty feeling they harbored deep in their hearts.

This is exhausting work. You find that emotionally you can only do so much each day. It takes time to process the information you learn. It is also good to remember that there is residual energy left on every object your relative touched and you may sense their presence more strongly precisely because of this remaining energy.

Sometimes as a person aged, they were unable to maintain their residence as they once did. The quiet shabbiness of their dusty surroundings stands as humble testament to their steady decline. Maybe you wish you could have visited him or her more. Perhaps you wish this parent had been easier to get along with so you would have wanted to visit them instead of dreading each encounter with their cantankerous personality.

What about the feeling of despair you would feel as you encounter movies of your Mom or Dad before Alzheimer’s set in and destroyed the person you had always known? Often times the why of their lives remains unanswered. Is Alzheimer’s a retreat from the vicissitudes of day-to-day life? Perhaps you would have grieved their soul personality long before death claimed their mortal body.

If your family member committed suicide, you will come face to face, through letters, documents, books and often art, with the darknesses that haunted them literally to death. Perhaps in that moment you will find a way to forgive your loved one for leaving you to find peace in death. Once you understand that you could never have eased their emotional terrors, you may be able to forgive yourself for being unable to stop their tragic actions.

After you have finished the physical sorting, you may find that no matter how you grieve him or her, you will need many months to finish the emotional sorting out of your relationship. Mortal life is complicated and the tightly woven matrix of interpersonal relationships is often profoundly convoluted.

Emotional peace can be achieved through suspending judgment of your love one and yourself. Observe their life from a spectator’s vantage point and know that as you have dismantled this person’s life, you have simply learned a bit more about your own life and times.

KS&L 343 Dismantling the Structures of Someone's Life Part 2

Things give our life structure. Like the sea creature that takes on or creates a shell around itself, we use our homes to give us that protective shell and we fill it with the things that make life more than livable. ‘Things’ make life wonderful. So when someone dies, families are required to ‘settle their estate’ but what they are really doing is dismantling that person’s life.

How family members approach that task, will depend on their relationship with the person who has died. If family members are all grieving the person, the task of taking apart their beloved’s person’s life will be a torture for each of them, literally, the job will seem like one continuous avalanche of emotion. If the family knew the person would be passing, they ‘pre-grieved’ him or her. After the death, there is an anticipated finality and dismantling that loved one’s life will be somewhat less traumatic. If the person was difficult all of their life, and virtually no one is grieving, then settling the estate may have little grief attached, but an odd sense of bewilderment at how the person chose to live their life.

So, just how do we dismantle the things that gave meaning and structure to someone’s life? What does it feel like to go through their things? First of all, it is completely exhausting because so much very stagnant energy is now being moved. It is dusty, often dirty work, moving furniture, going through piles of papers sorting, deciding.

At first, the task feels like utter chaos. Sometimes the person saved mountains of things that seem like garbage to family members, especially if the loved one who died was a depression era person. This means that every single scrap of paper will have to be carefully analyzed. Those folks saved everything! Sorting through this will take hours, because you will never know what precious document is stored along with the empty envelopes. One lady had unused stamps from the Civil War mixed in with local pizza ads. You also have to be careful when you move things. One elderly lady kept her precious jewelry and valuable World War II artifacts, under a fully loaded file cabinet in the basement. Some people keep money in books while others absent-mindedly stash cash in envelopes that look like junk mail.

We learn a lot about a person’s life, their mindset as we pour through old documents, go through their clothes and gently run our hands in and out of all of the pockets, making sure that nothing precious is left there. We may even have to take apart furniture as one family discovered when they tried to move their grandmother’s brass bed. The old lady had stored a lifetime of silver dollars in the four brass posts and never mentioned it to anyone!

In a sense, going through the elements of someone’s life is a treasure hunt. We are looking for the precious things the person left behind. Slowly but surely we catalog, organize, clean and sort the things that defined the person. If the person left no instructions for the disposition of these things, then families must use the dismantling event as an opportunity to learn about their loved one, and each other as they divide among themselves, the elements of the estate. It is not an easy task. Patience, consideration and care are required.

Each person will take away not just a ring or a painting, a stack of towels, kitchen or garage tools, but memories of the person. Some things will be donated, some sold and some elements will simply be disposed of as trash. It is important to understand that you cannot keep everything.

However, the person will live on in everyone’s life through the things that they keep, display, use and cherish. We will dismantle the physical structures of someone’s life, but we can never dismantle, take apart or lose the memories of the person, no matter what our relationship to them. Memories and experiences are the elements we entered mortal life to gain and those are the things we take with us when we leave. Things will be dismantled because they served their usefulness for us. Souls do not need things. Souls take the experiential memories of life on Earth, on their sojourn through the heaven world. We, who are left behind, can still use those dismantled things to create or re-create our own experiences and memories.

Antiques are created as something of inherent value is passed down over time because of the strength it continues to hold. Even if we no longer remember who originally owned it, the item still serves, offering structure, memories and experiences. Eventually, someone will dismantle the structures of our own lives, rediscover treasured objects and marvel at what we created around ourselves. . . and so it just continues on and on and on. Maybe the lesson for all of us is to let go of attachment when we can, and hopefully make the task of dismantling our own lives just that much simpler.

As we dismantle the structure of a life, we must then begin to dismantle the structure of the emotions we have toward that person as well.

In Part 3, dismantling our emotions.