The opposite of selfishness is not generosity, it’s sacrifice.

 Selfishness ———-> Generosity ———-> Sacrifice

Last Memorial Day, television actor and Marine Hugh O’Brien spoke to the assembled audience at the Los Angeles National Cemetery and told us that we were there to honor the all who gave some and the some who gave all so the rest of us could be free.  

I didn’t serve in Vietnam because I pulled 363 in the draft lottery. I have spent the last forty years living a good life. My high school classmates, Arthur Stroyman and Paul Dunne, have spent the last forty years on the wall of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. My children age 27, 24 and 19 have also had a blessed life going to nice colleges and now have jobs. During the same time my good friend Jane Bright’s son Evan Ashcraft was killed in Iraq. The pain and anger threatened to consume Jane until she focused on what Evan kept writing to her in his letters: “When I come home from Iraq, I just want to help people. Evan” To fulfill his dream Jane and her husband Jim established the Evan Ashcraft Foundation.

Every day I drive by the intersection of Sepulveda and Wilshire Blvd. in Los Angeles. And each time I usually see a veteran of an older war. They are now beginning to be replaced by veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq, by people the age of my children. On a good day, I’ll roll down my window and give one a dollar. But on most days I’ll be on my Blackberry on a call of questionable import and just wave the veteran on refusing to even make eye contact.

I can no longer sit back and do nothing. (And after reading Jayne Lyn Stahl’s disturbing blog, An Insult to Service I hope you will no longer be able to do nothing either).

I don’t think honoring those who gave so much so we can be free — the soldiers, veterants, police, firefighters and their families — is enough; we need to repay them for their sacrifice.

I dedicated Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for Dummies to those who sacrificed so much to create peace on Earth so they might regain peace of mind.

In celebration of Memorial Day I thought it was timely to spread the word about the Aids and Attendance Program to qualified Vets who could benefit from assistance with their care needs. 

The Veterans’ Administration offers a Special Pension with Aid and Attendance (A&A) benefit that is largely unknown.  This Special Pension (part of the VA Improved Pension program) allows for Veterans and surviving spouses who require the regular attendance of another person to assist in eating, bathing, dressing, undressing or taking care of the needs of nature to receive additional monetary benefits.  It also includes individuals who are blind or a patient in a nursing home because of mental or physical incapacity.  Assisted care in an assisted living facility also qualifies.

This most important benefit is overlooked by many families with Veterans or surviving spouses who need additional monies to help care for ailing parents or loved ones.  This is a “pension benefit” and is not dependent upon service-related injuries for compensation.  Most Veterans who are in need of assistance qualify for this pension.  Aid and Attendance can help pay for care in the home, nursing home or assisted living facility.  A Veteran is eligible for up to $1,632 per month, while a surviving spouse is eligible for up to $1,055 per month.  A couple is eligible for up to $1,949 per month.

Find out more at: VeteranAid.org

PS:  Please forward this information to someone who could use it!   

At 3:15 PM PST today, Friday, May 15, 2009 my long time mentor and beloved friend, Edwin Shneidman, pioneer in the study, prevention and intervention of suicide and suicidal behavior died at age 91 as he would have wished, peacefully at home. To appreciate the magnitude of his being able to do that you need to read:  Waiting for the End, Alone and Unafraid and if you want to read the story behind that story, you will want to read the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard interview with Tom Curwen.

Ed was the founder of The American Association of Suicidology and Professor of Thanatology at UCLA. He authored, co-authored or edited nineteen books on the topic.

I had the occasion to visit him – not as often as I should have -over the past several physically painful years of his life. I believe one of his greatest accomplishments is that he managed to meet all the ten “Criteria for a Good Death” that he set forth in an article with that title published in June, 2007 in Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior published by The American Association of Suicidology.

1. Natural. There are four modes of death–natural, accident, suicide and homicide (NASH). Any survivor would prefer a loved one’s death to be natural. No Suicide is a good death. 
2. Mature. After age 70. Near the pinnacle of mental functioning but old enough to have experienced and savored life. 
3. Expected. Neither sudden nor unexpected. Survivors-to-be do not like to be surprised. A good death should have about a weeks lead time. 
4. Honorable. Filled with honorifics but not dwelling on past failures. Death begins an ongoing obituary, a memory in the minds of the survivors. The Latin phrase is: De mortuis nil nisi bonum (Of the dead [speak] nothing but good). 
5. Prepared. A living trust, prepaid funeral arrangements. That the decedent had given thought and made arrangements for the necessary legalities surrounding death. 
6. Accepted. ”Willing the obligatory,” that is, accepting the immutables of chance and nature and fate; not raging into the night; acceding to nature’s unnegotiable demands. 
7. Civilized. To have some of your loved ones physically present. That the dying scene be enlivened by fresh flowers, beautiful pictures, and cherished music. 
8. Generative. To pass down the wisdom of the tribe to younger generations; to write; to have shared memories and histories; to act like a beneficent sage. 
9. Rueful. To cherish the emotional state which is a bittersweet admixture of sadness, yearning, nostalgia, regret, appreciation, and thoughtfulness. To avoid depression, surrender, or collapse; to die with some projects left to be done; by example, to teach the paradigm that no life is completely complete. 
10. Peaceable. That the dying scene be filled with amicability and love, that physical pain be controlled as much as competent medical care can provide. Each death an ennobling icon of the human race.

Ever the articulate humorous iconoclast, I think Ed would have eschewed the pomp and circumstance I ellaborated above and prefer that I had just said that he hoped he had simply followed the dictum of his mentor, Henry A. Murray: “A good death is dying so as to be as little a pain in the ass to your family as possible.”

I will be forever grateful to Ed who early in my career had enough confidence in me to entrust some of the most suicidal patients from the UCLA in patient wards when they needed to be discharged, but were still suicidal. He did it with a simple phone call: “Hello Mark, this is Ed. I am sitting with a lovely young woman. She’s in a lot of pain. You can help her. SEE her.”

I also owe Ed a singular skill to help such people when he told me: “Mark, if you listen for hurt, fear and pain, it is always there. And when the other person feels you listening andfeeling them, they will lower their guard, open their minds and hearts to you, allow you to enter and comfort them and if you’re fortunate, will let you walk them out of hell.”

And Ed, regarding being “as little a pain in the ass to your family possible”… I think you actually pulled that off.

Now it’s time to thank you for how many millions of people your life work has helped to face death and to bid farewell to you Ed, using the same words you would use when I would leave your home during recent visits: “Goodbye, dear man.”

Be at peace, I will miss you.

How successful and happy you will be in your career and life
hinges on how effective you are in crucial conversations
where the opinions vary and stakes and emotions run high.
When you’re ineffective, you become exhausted and lose big;
When you’re effective, you win big, because you’ll not only
achieve or exceed the goals you set for yourself,
you will surpass the vast majority of people who aren’t effective.

-Joseph Grenny, co-author Crucial Conversations

I have a real treat in store for you.  On May 20 at 2:00 PM EST you and your team can attend a webinar where I host Joseph Grenny through the Center for Great Management. Joseph will provide a powerpoint presentation that he and his colleagues at VitalSmarts have offered to 300 of the Fortune 500 entitled based on their New York Times best selling book: Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High and entitled: “Get Unstuck! Move your people from dialogue to effective action.” 

I have seen this presentation and I believe it is a guaranteed-to-help-you opportunity that will change the way you communicate with everyone and as he mentioned above will affect how successful and happy you will be in your career and life.

Another great way to increase your chance of becoming successful and happy is to go out and buy my friend Keith Ferrazzi’s brand new book, Who’s Got Your Back? You will discover how to achieve what you never thought possible if you can surround yourself with just three people who care about you, will hold you accountable and who will kick your butt when you need them to.  Check out Keith’s book tour to catch one of his incredible presentations. It’s another way to change your life.

Before you can be authentic, you must be grateful;
before you can be grateful, you must be forgiving;
before you can be forgiving, you will need to
start focusing on what you have and become a better person
and stop focusing on what you don’t and stay a bitter person.

President Obama seems to me to be one of the most authentic Presidents we have had in some time (okay cynics, have at me). I think he gets much of it from being grateful to his mother and his grandparents for their sacrifices and their dedication to him. They appeared to focus on what they had instead of dwelling on what they didn’t and I think President Obama took that into his marrow and wants to “pay it forward.”

It seems to me that when you dwell on what is missing in your life or your personality, you spend much of your energy filling that deficiency or as the Beatles sang: “fixing a hole where the rain (i.e. pain) gets in.” You can’t be totally present when a piece of you is absent and you’re looking to fill it. To make matters worse, you need to hide that, or else others will discover that you really don’t care about them.  That’s because you fear if they realized that, they would be even more reluctant to give to you and that would only make the hole bigger and make you more absent than present and even less authentic.

UPCOMING EVENTS PLEASE  GET THE WORD OUT:

May 19 – Get set for the launch of my friend, Keith Ferrazzi’s new book, Who’s Got Your Back?  Get on board for a signing near you.  Find out about his FREE RESOURCES.

May 20 – Catch one of the best webinars you will ever see in Crucial Conversations with Joseph Grenny at 2 PM EST through the Center for Great Management.

When you can’t say, “Yes,”
because you don’t have anything left to give;

When you can’t ask for help,
because you can’t hear someone give another excuse for why they can’t
and because you wouldn’t know what to ask for anyway;

When you deal with the above by withdrawing
and becoming sullen and irritable with your family;

AND when the cycle repeats itself daily
and every day is Groundhog Day;

YOU are depressed.

If this speaks to you, what do you do? If’s it’s about someone you care about, how have you helped them?

Read More at: Are You Anxious or Depressed?

Depression and Suicide see: “I’m going to kill myself”

Don’t isolate, reach out and share your hurt and what you’re doing about it at: Are You Depressed

Resources for Depression:

NIMH
WebMD
NAMI
Mayo Clinic
Wikipedia