Transcript of The Step-By-Step Guide For How To Show Up For Sick Or Dying Loved Ones | Mel Robbins Clips

What are some of the things that people say wrong when they are talking to someone, and maybe it's a friend that has a cancer diagnosis, or maybe you find out that somebody's parent is, you know, got dementia, and their hospice is called in. What are some of the things not to say, and what can you say?

Let me start with what you can lead with.

Oh, great.

Which is perhaps that you don't know what to say if you don't know what to say. That's a great place to begin.

What does that mean?

I don't know what to say. This sounds really tough. This is a really big deal. This sounds really difficult for you, but I just I really don't know what to say now. That's a great place to begin rather than try to fill the space with platitudes and, you know, the things that we think that we're supposed to say.

We can just begin with saying, I don't know what to say, and acknowledge and validate their experience. It sounds really hard. Or, how are you feeling? How are you doing with this news? I think if we can keep our focus on the person who is in the experience of it, then we can avoid getting into some really yucky, muddy waters where we're trying to tell them how to feel about their experience.

That's beautiful. And that's probably where the problems come. Are you like, oh, it's gonna be okay and you'll get through it.

And We don't know that. They might die from it.

Well, they're gonna dry at some point.

They're gonna die at some point. It might be this disease. Alzheimer's and dementia is gnarly. It might be going downhill really fast, like saying it'll be okay or, you know, I know what you're going through. That's another thing we should avoid because we don't know what their experience is like.

Even if we have a similar family situation ourselves, I don't know what it's like to be you experiencing this thing right now. And so we can also avoid trying to put ourselves in their shoes or trying to, I say, invalidate what they're experiencing by filling it with what I've experienced or what I would like to experience or what I think the experience should be like.

I love that that I don't know what to say. That sounds like it's very difficult. How are you doing today?

Great. A plus.

Oh my gosh. Thank you. You know, I'm very motivated by doing well, so thank you. I appreciate it. I can do that 1.

I can do that 1. In your experience as a death doula, what are some of the best ways that you can show up for other people when either they're dying or they're supporting somebody else who is?

It's a similar way to approach it, which is you show up, you acknowledge and you validate, and you create space for the person to have their experience, and you keep asking questions. And you just allow them to be, and you allow them to guide the conversation because maybe they also don't wanna talk about it. You know? Maybe they wanna talk about the Kardashians instead, and that's totally fine. That's totally fine.

So it's important that we create space for them to be where they are and to be in their experience primarily.

You know, I mentioned earlier, I've seen this amazing talk that you did online where you talk about how you wanna die at sunset with socks on. If I die with a braun, you're you're coming to haunt everybody.

Everyone.

You wanna die at home with your affairs in order. And then you said, and when my loved ones notice that I've released my last breath, I want them to clap. I want them to clap because I died well. But I died well only because I lived well. Can you talk more about that?

I've never heard anyone say I want you to clap.

I want them to clap. I want them to clap at how authentically I lived my life. I want them to say, yeah. She did her. I want them to clap in honor of a life that I lived and the grace with which I let it go.

I want them to have been proud of me. You know, even at my death, I still want the people that I care about to think, yeah, girl, you did it. I want them to feel as though I I filled out my life and that I lived by example. I want them to think that I was generous and present and I cared and I did my best that I was here for the time that I was here.

I just love the visual of everyone clapping. Isn't that cool? It is. Because I didn't have the context. It it sounds like, you know, your cranky grandmother who you couldn't stand.

Oh my god. Thank god. She's finally let go. Oh, baby. Oh, my But even in that instance, you're clapping because they were a fighter.

Yeah. But I love the acknowledgment of the spirit. What do you think happens?

After we die? Yes. I hear so many theories that I'm constantly cobbling it together myself. 1 of the things that I really love is when somebody presents something that I'm just really struggling to understand, and they give me a little bit more context. Can I share 1 with you?

Please. Okay. So there was a client not that long ago, who at the 11th hour decided that she needed to be baptized, that she was not sure about anything that happened, but she felt that she needed to go back to the religion of her childhood because that may get her into heaven or wherever else after she died. And so I asked what had been going on, like, why she got to that point. She had been having these really incredible dreams, right before she died, when she was in her unconscious state, and she'd see a great big eye in the sky.

When she said that, I thought she meant the, you know, the capital I in the nondualistic perspective, like the eye that exists within us all. But she meant an actual, like, eyeball in the sky. Really?

Yeah. That sounded scary.

Like, watching us all the time? I got very uncomfortable all of a sudden. And as we talked through that, she said, yeah, an eyeball that she sees in the sky that sees all and also that we'll go back to so we can watch all. And she thinks of that as heaven. And so she wants to get baptized to go to heaven to that eye in the sky.

And is that a piece that you cobbled together that helps you think about what you believe about what happened?

I like the idea of an I, but I like the idea of the letter I, the capital I.

Yeah. The eyeball scares me.

The eyeball is makes me a little uncomfortable.

So what have you cobbled together in terms of how you think about what happens?

Well, what I've cobbled together is this is tricky because it's changing all the time. And also the more I talk about it, the less it makes space for my clients to have whatever experience that they may be having. You know, when I when I fill the space with what I think or how I feel, it makes it a little harder for other people to share with me what they think or feel because, first of all, everybody thinks I'm right because of the work that I wanna hear it.

Now I really wanna

hear it.

They think I'm right because of the work I do. You know, my hope is that we can all return to all that ever was and all that ever will be in a place of absolute perfect and profound stillness and perfection and peace and love, the transcendent, the space from before we were born, where I have no conscious memory of, which I think was also a perfect place because it made a perfect human along the way. And my perfect death will hopefully lead me back to that real juicy perfect place.

I think I think I believe something very similar.

Yeah.

Yeah. I think a lot about the fact that when you're at the moment of creation and you're in your mother's womb, you have no consciousness about the world that you're about to be born into.

Yeah.

And I feel that death is the exact same sort of birth, that there is a entire world, and I have no consciousness of what it might be. I know what I hope it might be, but I just trust that as the transition happens, that it is another form of birthing yourself from 1 world and 1 state of consciousness to another.

Well, every death is a birth into something new, and every birth is also a death. You know, upon my birth, I died from the womb. I changed the way I breathe. I changed probably how I think. I changed how I experienced the world.

I changed my sensory experience. I died from that experience into this, so I'll likely be dying from this into something else. Now what? I don't know. I hope it feels like riding a glitter wave for all of eternity, where I just see sparkles, and I am in that perfect place reconnected with everything that ever was.

Hey, Lua. I'll see you there. Right on that sparkle wave. I have never been present when somebody died. Can you walk us through kind of what happens in those moments?

Sure. So dying itself doesn't happen linearly when people are dying from disease. However, it generally happens that the cells shut down and then the systems, the tissues, etcetera. So it goes outward like that. So it looks different for every person.

But for the most part, what I experienced more often than not is that the person starts to recede in the days before death. You can tell that there is a distance that's happening. If they have a death rally, it'll probably happen right before that time. And the death rally is, I think, when the last little bit of life's light is just all burned off, all the energy is used up. And so if the rally has occurred, there is a stillness that starts to happen that you can tell on the person.

They recede, they likely fall asleep and stay asleep for a while And the breathing changes. The skin color changes. Breathing gets kind of jagged. You can tell that the body has kind of taken over. It is doing what it needs to do to die, and I trust everybody's innate capacity to know how to die.

And so it's doing what it must do. And at some point, when the space between the breasts gets very long, you can tell that there is a separation that's occurring, and then there is a stillness. And the stillness comes when the breath has stopped.

And do you, in your work, feel that separation and you feel an essence or spirit of a person leaving? Or

I can tell that something has occurred because the room seems to get very full. Like, it feels like there's a blanket in the space, but like a warm, cozy blanket. You know, there's it. If you've been in the space of it, you know what I'm talking about. Like, after the breath is complete, it room is still very thick.

Yeah. The clapping would help.

Clapping would break it out Yeah. For sure. For sure.

Wow. Thank you for sharing. How do you bring this conversation up with your parents? There are so many people listening around the world who have parents that are aging, and I personally kinda tap dance around it. I'll then say, hey.

You know, we should probably have the conversation, and my mom will say something like, yeah. We should. And she'll remark about how there's so much stuff in this house. Like, I'm not even gonna do anything with it. You and your brother are gonna have to clear it out.

And so it's more about the surface level stuff. But do you have advice for the best way to set up a conversation with your parents so that you can talk about this topic?

I love that your mom is bringing it up.

Yeah. And

she's bringing it up that way. Yeah. And I think that the deeper emotional, spiritual, psychological stuff that happens. Great. Yeah.

Because as she's talking about it, like, oh, I won't be here, and so I don't need this thing anymore, she

can

explain to you

what the meaning behind certain objects were. That meaning has her look back on her life. Oh, I got this in 1967 when we were kids and we were doing this. You know what I mean? Yeah.

So it's a way into, like, the deeper emotional stuff.

Thank you for saying that. Yeah. Because I, maybe it's my discomfort, but every time I go home to Michigan where I grew up and we start going through stuff, and she's, like, so focused on, what do you want? What do you want? Let's get this stuff out of here.

And she's only 70 something. I mean, she is, like, full of, like, you know, like, let's go. She's got a lot of life in her. Thank god. But I always was thinking this is a deflection.

Yeah. And that's not you're saying, actually, no. This is fantastic.

She's talking about it. I'm so glad to hear she's talking about it. It's an entry point, you know, to talk about the things or the practical things. And often, as I was saying, it it shows what else is under the surface. You know?

It may be through an object, but when talking to people about what they want with their body after they die, I'll hear people say things like, I can't think of my body burning when talking about cremation, or I can't think of myself burning. That suggests to me that they think of themselves and their body as 1, or they don't because they said my body is burning. So that's an opening into the deeper spiritual conversation. This it's all in front of us. We can tell how people think about their death based on how they talk, and certainly when they're talking about their stuff.

That's another way into thank you, Mel's mom.

We're flipping through a bunch of framed things that used to hang on the wall that have now been replaced, and like, oh, I love that thing. Oh, those are drawings for my kids. Like, we'll take that. Like, I love this. Is there in that moment where you're engaging in the stuff, is there a way to just crack the door open a little bit more to go a little deeper.

Into the emotional stuff? Yeah. Well, 1 way is to if you're noticing that she likes particular objects or if there's something that she likes, maybe you can ask if this is a way that she liked to be remembered. When I see a spoon, will this help me think of you? And she'll maybe say yes or I don't care or whatever else, but maybe she'll say, well, I really like butterflies or I feel like your aunt Helen visits me through the butterflies or something to start that part of the conversation also.

Well, she's been very funny about it because I know exactly what she wants to happen.

Yeah.

She's literally like, melt down all my jewelry.

Great.

And then get an urn, and let's put the jewelry all over the urn, cremate me, and then that urn can rotate between you and your brother's house. And when your father dies, he goes in there too. Great. I'm like, okay.

Thanks. She's giving me some pretty clear instructions.

Oh, yes. I'm into it. Okay.

Mom gets an a plus too.

Wow. She's gonna be really happy about that. And meanwhile, I feel like a jerk because I've been sitting here going, we haven't talked about the end of life care. We haven't talked about where you're going. We haven't talked about whether or not you're gonna stay in this house or whether or not we're gonna look for something else.

When what you're saying is that those conversations actually are an open door, and they represent somebody processing this reality.

It's starting to happen. You know, I people often say people don't wanna talk about death or older folks don't wanna talk about death, and I think that they do. I think we're uncomfortable with it. And so when we hear the opportunity, we shun it, or we pretend it's not happening, or we make it mean something else, or there goes mom being crotchety again, or mom is starting to engage you with her end of life because they are thinking about it. Okay?

I mean, the older I get, the more I think about my mortality because I feel it in my kneecaps. And so at, like, 80 something, you're definitely thinking about it more and more. Your friends are dying. You're seeing people that you grew up with die on TV. Like

It's true. I think about my dad who just turned 80, and he's had 3 very close friends die very suddenly, including his best friend. He had a a surgery, you know, on his eye for, like, glaucoma go wrong. And so he's got now floaters in there, and he can't quite see. And I know that makes him feel, like, frail.

And he just had back surgery because of a pickleball injury. And so I've been thinking a lot about him, and he's very stoic and doesn't talk a lot about that kind of stuff the way my mom is very out there. Get the urn. Melt the jewelry. Let's go.

Get this crap out of this house. I'm not cleaning this out. This is on you and your brother. I mean,

just Bless her.

How do I engage my father?

You already said some really useful things. The fact that his friends are dying, that's a great place to begin. What's his grief like? What happened when they died? Did somebody have an accident?

Was there a surgery? What happened medically? Like using the deaths of people in their lives is a great place to begin just to ask them how they're feeling or what their thoughts are around it. You can also, if that's not happening in your family, you can also talk about celebrities or people that are happening in popular culture, people that are dying there as another entryway in. Did you like what happened?

Did you not like it? I got to be with a group of black elders around the time Aretha Franklin died. And when I tell you all their end of life plans were done by the time that we left, because 1 of them was like, I can't believe they had her in all these outfits, and I would never want a glass coffin, and nobody better put shoes on me when I die. Got it. Got it.

Got it. You know what I mean? These are great ways to start the conversation. It's available. Well, you

know, it's true. We all go to weddings. Yeah. And let's be honest. We enjoy ourselves, and then either on the way home or the next morning, we're, like, picking apart.

I do this. I wouldn't do this. Why did

they do that? Bap bap bap bap bap bap bap

bap bap bap bap bap bap bap bap bap bap

bap bap. Never even thought about funerals. Being a point of understanding what people like, what they don't like, what they want, what they don't want, what they're comfortable with, what they don't, what they're

like, get no open casket for me.

Absolutely not. Cremation all the way. You don't wanna be viewed at all. Oh my god. No.

That's helpful. Absolutely not.

Yeah. And there was this thing that happened at my father in law's funeral that I thought was the coolest thing in the world that I had ever seen. I absolutely want this to happen. He was cremated, and my mother-in-law I don't know if she went to, like, eBay or whatever. She bought all of these tiny little, remember the film canisters that were metal that you would kinda screw apart?

She got, like, a 100 of them. And I just have this image of her spooning his ashes into all these canisters. And at his end of life celebration, she came out and had them in this huge salad bowl, and she invited anyone who wanted to have a piece of can to come up and take a canister, but there was 1 requirement. You had to spread his ashes somewhere or keep him in a certain place. And when you did it, she requested that you write her a letter and send a photo of the place where he is.

And she now has this extraordinary photo album of him all over the world. We I have a friend that snuck onto the US Open golf course the last night of the tournament and poured him into, like, the 10th hole, and then he was sealed up. He's overseas. He's been on bike trips. He you know, my husband, every time he rides his bike, he puts his little he takes his canister of his father and tucks it underneath and is just a beautiful way to see what he meant to other people.

And that's what I want.

That's incredible.

Ain't that cool?

Have you written it down?

No. Okay.

Well, I'm glad now we've recorded it. Now we know. That's what you want.

We're all dying, and we're all gonna die. Correct.

We are all dying, and we should be talking about death. When I'm thinking about my death, it allows me to see exactly who I've become and knowing that I'm still living, I have an opportunity to change it. I think death can be a great inspiration for us to start living more authentically and be real with who we are and who we wanna be.