Annalouiza  
Today we are honored to spend time with Rebecca Crichton. Rebecca is the executive director of Northwest Center for Creative Aging, the NWCCA. She brings wisdom and purpose to her work with the aging community. She retired from a 21 -year career at Boeing as a writer, curriculum designer, and leadership development coach.

Her encore career uses her knowledge and experience to offer programs and resources related to creative aging in the Seattle area. NWCCA collaborates monthly with Seattle's Town Hall.

Wakil  
Rebecca facilitates wisdom cafes for the King County Library system and writes a regular column for Third Act Magazine. Trained as a hospice volunteer, Rebecca continues to teach and facilitate grief and resilience support groups for several organizations. She has master's degrees in child development and organizational development and is a certified coach. So great to have you.

Annalouiza  
Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Rebecca J Crichton  
Thank you so much for inviting me.

Wakil  So we always like to start with this question, when did you first become aware of death? 

Rebecca J Crichton  
Well, it's an interesting question because it made me think that of course there were family, you know, that the first one that was closest to me was my grandfather dying suddenly when I was a teenager. But also at that same time when I was a teenager, a very dear friend of our family's son died suddenly on a summer trip, you know, and the effect on that family, on his girlfriend, on all of us who knew the family and knew him was devastating, as you might suspect. And I knew nothing about any of that at that point. But it was one of those things that kind of caught my attention. And I had an experience when I was in college. Well, actually, I'll just say. And I've had friends and family died. Both my parents are dead. I've had close friends who've died over the years. And I'm aware that when I was in college, I was in a junior year abroad program and I was not at my happiest. I was actually feeling very down and feeling, you know, kind of indulging, I would say indulging, kind of feeling like, well, I shouldn't be here because my life's a mess and all of that. And I actually went out and bought a pint of whiskey and drank it down thinking that that would help me get out of here, so to speak. And of course I woke up quite drunk and that, and there was a knock on the door and the, the head of the program for that study group was going door to door among our participants to say that one of the members of the group, somebody who I didn't know that well, had died in the shower. We were in southern France, and if you know those showers where the water gets heated through a gas coil, well, the pilot light went out, and so she asphyxiated in the shower. So this was, you know, she's, we're 20 right, in France. 

And it was one of those moments where I thought, pull yourself together, you are alive and she is dead, and you have got to stop this kind of toying a little bit with, well, if I'm not happy, I'll just leave concept, which is sort of what I think sometimes people do when they don't have alternatives or they haven't decided to do therapy or whatever it is that causes them to still to keep to keep the thought of leaving as an option. 

And I was a young person at that time. So that caught me. What led me to this field was actually hearing the term grief counselor, bereavement therapist, from a friend who was talking about another friend of hers who had gone to one and found it helpful. And I said, out of nowhere, I would like to be a bereavement counselor. I'd like to do grief counseling. 

And I thought, you have no idea what you're talking about and why you're talking about it and where this is coming from. So, but since you shouldn't do grief work unless you know something about death, I took two hospice trainings and became a hospice volunteer. But always with the aim of working around grief. And one of the reasons I think I wanted to do that, I wanted to do bereavement work, was that grief is a natural process. It's a process we have within us to deal with loss and change. 

And it's part of how we stay healthy in this world is to be able to manage the things that are losses and that grief groups are wonderful support for people who feel like there's, they don't know how they're gonna go forward with their lives, you know? But in a group, you see people, first of all, finding that, they can help each other. And that they are, you know, that in a time of great grief, as you know, there's a sense of, I don't know who I am or what I'll do or where I'll go or how I'll help. And then they discover that they share something and somebody says, that is so helpful, thank you. So they are reminded that they still are of, that their experience is valuable for others and they come through. 

I love that grief is a process that lets you get through the other side with more knowledge, none that you necessarily sought out, but that helps you live in a different way. And then you become a teacher to others because everybody's going to experience loss and death and disappointment. So my interest in the death and grief field is really about how we do heal. So that's a very long answer to your question.

Wakil  
Well, I love that, you know, just sort of from that perspective of the 20 -year -old, this whole evolution has happened to where now you're really in service to this work. So...

Rebecca J Crichton  
Yeah, and you know, I would also say that part of what I'm very interested in these days is around the choices we make as we age and have diagnoses that are difficult. So end of life, you know, death with dignity, voluntary stopping eating and drinking, some of the choices that people are now making around, I no longer want to, my life is coming to an end and I don't want to suffer.

What are the choices and I think I recognize that when a young person decides there's nothing to live for we do all we can I think to help them see that this may just be a passing experience as they grow but that when an older person who's dealing with multiple diagnoses or losses decides that this is it I don't want to be here for what's going to happen to my body next I don't want to do this to my family.

How do we support people and talk about those choices and support them with the people around them who often have more problems with the choices than the person themselves. So I see an interesting connection between these two which I hadn't necessarily put together before.

Annalouiza  
Wow.

Rebecca J Crichton  
I could go on. Be careful about asking me questions here. I just go on, you know.

Annalouiza  
Well, it appears that you have answered the first three questions with one. 

Well, you said that you were working with grief. So what are your biggest challenges that you find with the work that you do?

Rebecca J Crichton  
Being careful with my own energy, making sure that I take care of myself, accepting where others are on the spectrum of dealing with death and talking about death. And so the challenges are to figure out what is mine to do in particular.

Part of what's been lovely about listening to your podcasts is the recognition that everybody in the field is drawn there for their own needs, for their own experience, and to bring what they bring to it, and that we're not in competition with each other. There's plenty of death to go around. And I used to say when I started working in the field, there's a joke, death is the new sex.
  
It's like after all the taboos we have that we had around sex, we also had them and still have them around death, that people still get very uncomfortable. But there's more and more of a desire to be able to talk about it, to be able to look at it, to look at options, especially in a state that allows choice around end of life. 

So the other thing that I want to say is that when I started to do hospice work, I became very interested in, it was during the early days, it was during the kind of some of the new agey stuff that was going on. There was a lot out there around how we think affects how we act. There was also stuff that I didn't like which was blaming the victim. You know, well you just didn't think hard enough or you weren't positive enough and that's why you're cancer. I hate that. I don't ever want to do that. 

And what was coming out at that same time as some of the new age ideas was the development of positive psychology on the part of people like Martin Seligman and some of his students, looking at, in fact, the clarity around how we think, how we talk to ourselves, affects the choices we make and the success we have in our world, right? So I began to kind of look at some of the positive psychology and resilience work that started probably about 25 years ago. 

And now, you know, after all of these years of kind of being in the grief field where every, you know, for a long time, people was just like, what's the five stages? And you go through the, you know, we now know that's not true anymore. Although what Kubler-Ross talked about, those, those emotions are true in grief, right? But they're not necessarily one, two, three, four, five, and then you're done. You know, it's kind of more of a spiral. 

But part of what's been interesting to me is that when grief works first started being acknowledged, and the importance of grieving. A lot of the research was anecdotal and there were assumptions that people had a loss and never got over it and would be in grief forever and all that kind of thing. And in the past 20 years there has been a movement in the grief field to look at resilience and positive psychology and how it affects how people grieve. And so there's a wonderful book. Do you know Lucy Hones work? Resilient Grieving?

She has a TED talk. It's worth looking at her. She is somebody who studied resilience and positive psychology. She's from New Zealand. So she studied in Pennsylvania with Seligman and his folks and went back to Christchurch, New Zealand and was there in time for the earthquakes that killed so many people. And she was able to use her work to help people get through that terrible time.
  
And then in 2014, I think, she and her family, she had three kids at the time, decided to rent a house near the coast and be there together for the summer. And right at the last minute, her daughter decided to drive with her friend, her friend's mother and her friend's daughter. And they all got in a... So there were two cars going down. 

And Lucy and her family got to their vacation house and set up and were waiting for their friends to arrive and there was a knock on the door and it was a policeman that the car had there had been an accident and all of them were killed suddenly. And so there she was with her whole family, suddenly, you know, her daughter and her best friend and, and that experience, which certainly qualifies it as, as one of the more difficult ones you can imagine. She, found that people would come to her to say some of the stuff around grief that used to be said, you know, you're good, this is going to, you know, for the next five years, you will have no life and you will be miserable and this will never, you know, and she kept saying to herself, wait, you know, if we all just gave up every time there was a loss, nobody would be alive anymore. You know, we're, we're functionally meant to be able to get through loss and difficulties. We are, you know, that's, that's how we survive in the world, I think. 

And, she began to apply some of her resilience and positive psychology ideas to her own grief and to her family and wrote a book called Resilient Grieving, which I think is a very important book. So I love, yeah, yeah, definitely. And so positive psychology as it applies to end of life and how we talk about it as well, very much interests me. It's kind of one of my little areas. So.

Wakil  
Yeah, great. Thank you. Yeah, we'll definitely add that to our podcast notes and find that link somewhere. If you have a link to it, you could send that to us. Yeah. So one of the things we always like to know is what do you do or what kind of things do you have in your life that help you feel supported in the work that you're doing?

Rebecca J Crichton  
Thank you. That's a very good question. I'm very much a community person in the sense that I have many people in my life in different areas. I have interests of my... I take very good care of myself. I have friends who, they help others, they live to help others, and they don't take care of themselves. And I look at them and I think, this is not a good choice. There's a way we help others and still take care of ourselves. So I eat well, I exercise, I do things that are fun, and I talk to people. I'm an extrovert, and so I get a lot of support from friends and colleagues to help understand stuff. 

I'm always asking people about what they think and how they see things. I'm a writer, and so I do my website. Every month there's an essay that I do. And then when I'm working on that essay, I'm usually asking people what they think about it. So like, I'm always kind of collecting ideas. My essay for June is going to be about what is the good, what is good? And we talk about the good death and a good life and good enough. And I'm always curious about how those things operate in our lives. So I feel very, very connected in this world to others who support me.

Wakil  
Really wonderful. 

Annalouiza  
Yeah. So what frightens you about the end of life?

Rebecca J Crichton  
I think the whole concept of unnecessary suffering, I don't believe that we get, I don't think we are enabled, ennobled by our suffering. It's not a core belief that I have at all. I want to be as clear as I possibly can about the options I would choose if something happened to me. My daughter, as I said, is a hospice social worker, so she has no issues with me. One of the sort of ironic things is that, my daughter's father and I, who are still very close, her father has a terminal diagnosis. He's 89 and he has a diagnosis that we thought he would not survive until Christmas. He survived past Christmas. We thought he would not survive through his 89th birthday. At the end of March, he survived his 89th birthday. And who knows how long he has. And both my daughter and I, who are very comfortable having end of life discussions, he doesn't want to have those discussions.

He says, I know I'm dying, but I'm not dying today. Okay. So it's interesting to just be in a place with somebody who we love and care about, who basically says, I don't need to talk about this. He lives in Canada. So he's set up with medical assistance in dying with a M.A.I.D. practitioner and he has a hospice person and he's not in pain. He's not on meds.

He's an 89 -year -old man who gets tired and also is dying, but not in a rush. So it's caught both my daughter and me, I think, with this kind of like, OK, not everybody wants to talk about this. And it doesn't matter how good you are or how you know how to do that conversation. If another person doesn't want to go there, they're not going to go there. And to kind of honor that, it reminds me, I'll just say, this quickly that I've been on care teams for people who are dying. And at one point there was a woman who I was on her care team and she was she wound up in Swedish hospital and she was a she was somebody I mean you know the phrase that we we die the way we live you know that there's in some ways people's personalities go right up until the end unless they choose something different unless and which they can. 

But this woman was dying and she was an angry bitter person in general and I tried to talk to her about possible forgiveness or ways to see things differently or whatever, and the hospice social worker listened to me and she took me aside and said, Rebecca, you know, it's very kind of you to be here. And she said, and I hear you wanting to help this woman have more ease, have more acceptance in her death. And she said, you know what? None of us know what it's like to come to the end of our lives and not imagine being here.

And she said, you know, you need to let her die the way she is going to die. You've got to let this go. And it was one of those, but, but, but, it's like, no, no. So accepting people where they are, accepting that people will go out with whatever belief systems they have if they want to think about it differently, if they want to reconsider relationships and ask forgiveness and all that, that's great. But, that's an individual choice, you know? So, you know.

Wakil  
Yeah, I really, I love the whole concept of just being there where they are, being with people where they are, because that's such an important thing. And so great. 

So as far around that fear that you talked about and around that whole concept of being in acceptance, what kind of work, while you're doing this work, what kind of work would you suggest or what kind of suggestions could you make to others around being in a place of acceptance and supporting themselves, yourself with that fear of not having to, first of all, the fear that you don't want to go through pain. There's ways of course to deal with that and to talk about that ahead of time. But there's also things that you could maybe suggest to people, just being present for people where they are.

Rebecca J Crichton  
Well, you know, there's the famous line that they have in hospice, which is don't just do something, sit there. It's a reminder not to try to fix it, not to try to make it better necessarily unless asked. Recently, this past year, a friend of mine's ex -wife decided to use death with dignity.

And at the end, and her two daughters were involved with her. And there's a story that I heard that I found so appalling that I thought I need to think about it. It was that somebody had sent to them a bunch of questions that could be asked before this person died. So we're talking about the day they're dying, right? And one of the questions was, do you have any regrets? At the very last part of this woman's life, they're asking about regrets. And I was shocked by it because I think it's legitimate to talk about what we regret or what we feel good about or what we're proud of or what... I think those are discussions you have before the end of your life, before the day you die. 

And the woman, she wasn't much upset about it, but she was surprised by it, and then she wound up saying something that upset everybody to hear. So it was one of those moments where I thought, well, don't do that. So I guess what I would suggest to people is, it's what most of your guests are saying, the more we talk about this, the more we normalize the concept of we will all die, what does it mean? What's important?

Wakil  
Right.

Rebecca J Crichton  
What's important to say? What's important to do? What's important to share as we near it and as we know that we're dying? And for some people, like my daughter's dad, what's important for him is to live every day. That's what he wants to do. And I think he won't have any trouble as far as I know he's not afraid of dying. So that's, you know, again, to accept wherever somebody is.

Wakil  
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Rebecca J Crichton  
and support them with that.

Wakil  
Right.

Yeah, yeah. And I think one of the things you mentioned a bit was kind of the having those conversations ahead of time and thinking about how you can prepare ahead of time. Like, you know, I do a class called Before You Go, which is basically trying to help people really understand all of the things that you can do ahead of time as a gift to those who will be there when you die. And as a, you know, just preparations, everything from, you know, wills and trusts and all that, but also advanced care directives, dementia care directives. And then, you know, what do you want to have happen when you die and who needs to be contacted 

Rebecca J Crichton  
You probably know about the University of Washington's Death Over Dinner project, which is an interesting project. And what they've done is they've created quite a rich website with lots and lots of resources. So it's a very, it's one you should include in your resources.

Wakil  
Yeah, yeah.

Rebecca J Crichton  
But the expectation about Death Over Dinner was that people would kind of get a bunch of people together, they would look at some of the resources and then talk about Death Over Dinner. And I like the concept, but I don't like the non-facilitated part of it. I think that when you have discussions like this, it's helpful to have somebody who knows how to frame it and to keep it safe and to make sure that everybody listens well and all of those things. And those are not...

Those are not characteristics you can count on general population to have, to listen well, first of all. So I've started to offer through my organization what I'm calling food and finality. It's a variation on the theme of death over dinner. But the way I'm doing it is whoever's interested in pulling together six to 10 friends and pick a date and feed us food.

I come and I facilitate a discussion. Beforehand, I usually find out what people are wanting to talk about. And when I come, we have dinner, I go away and they pay me, which is also good because I think it's important to be paid for some of this kind of work. And so I've done two of them and it was very interesting because we actually wound up, I'm Jewish, they were all Catholic. We wound up actually having an interesting discussion around sin and what sin is, all of that. 

And then we talked a little bit about a concept which you probably know of, which is it's sometimes called the ethical will. It comes out of a Jewish background, but it's now being called legacy letters or whatever. And that's when people actually write down what their values have been, what they would hope for the future. You know, it's kind of not just who gets the candlesticks, but here's who I am and who I want you to know I am. And if you can talk about that stuff ahead of time, great. If you can do a podcast, a recording, but to think about that, what's the legacy?

Wakil  
Right.

Yeah, that's great. I'm glad to hear that other term for it. I do talk about that in my class, but I've called it an ethical will. That's what Bodhi, my teacher, called it. But I like I like legacy letters better 

Rebecca J Crichton  
I think just to say that there's enormous value in being able to have these conversations. And I appreciate being invited to do this. And I encourage people to be able to start having, thinking about what is it? What do they want? Have they done all the stuff they need to do it? But to kind of have a sense of what is, to understand their own life purpose, to have a sense of who they've been in their lives. Because I think one of the things that, I have a document that I sometimes send to people right near the end of their lives, I send it to their families, which is about five things that you can say as people are in transition, so to speak, and among them, they're obvious ones. It's like, tell them you love them. Tell them that whatever they did that they want forgiveness for, that they're forgiven. Ask who they need to forgive. So those two things. To say that everybody here will be okay, which is often why people hang on sometimes, because they're not sure that people will be okay here. To give them permission to go. To say, again, depending on faith beliefs, you're more than your body, you know, you're whatever exists, exists, depending on what you know about these people. And what I found is that those ideas are helpful ideas, not just at the end of life, but as we live to think about and forgiveness, certainly, and compassion, the importance of those loving kindness, some of the Buddhist things I love.

Wakil  
Yeah, perfect.

Rebecca J Crichton  
So yeah, I think that's all. That's probably enough.

Wakil  
Okay, thank you so much. It's been really nice talking to you. You had sent us a quote from Catherine Mannix. Do you want to read that or do you want one of us to?

Rebecca J Crichton  
Well, why don't you? That'd be great.

Wakil  
Okay, do you want to read it Annalouiza? Do you have it?

Annalouiza  
Here we go, let's see. 
"With the end in mind, dying death and wisdom in an age of denial" by Catherine Mannix. 

"I am fascinated by the conundrum of death, by the ineffable change from alive to no longer alive, by the dignity with which the seriously ill can approach their deaths, by the challenge to be honest yet kind in discussing illness and the possibility of never getting better. By the moments of common humanity at the at the bedsides of the dying, when I realized that it is a rare privilege to be present and to serve those who are approaching their unmaking, I was discovering that I was not afraid of death. Rather, I was in awe of it and of its impact on our lives. What would happen if we ever found a cure for death. Immortality seems in many ways an uninviting option. It is the fact that every day counts us down that makes each one such a gift. There are only two days with fewer than 24 hours in each lifetime. Sitting like bookends astride our lives. One is celebrated every year, yet is it is the other one that makes us see living as precious. "

That is really beautiful.

Wakil  
Wow. Yeah.

Rebecca J Crichton  
I love that quote. Is that some quote? The two of the bookends sitting astride. 

Annalouiza  
I love that.

Wakil  
I love that. Yeah. We actually, we just, we will be airing a podcast in the next couple of weeks from a scientist who is working on extending life and then thought that's a really bad idea.

Annalouiza  
Yeah.

Rebecca J Crichton  
I find it a bad idea. When people say that they want to live forever, I guess not even why, it's like in the service of what, in order to do what. And I think that's always, you know, one of the things in the aging field is it shows up on all the lists of what's important is a sense of purpose. And when I talk to people who are aging and struggling, almost invariably we're talking about, well, I don't know what to do. I don't feel useful. I don't feel valued. And we have value right up to the ends of our lives if we can own it, if we're honored for it, you know. 

Wakil  Yeah. Thank you so much, Rebecca. It's really been kind of you to show up. And we got to meet in person a little while ago. I really enjoyed our time with you. So we will see you again. We'll be in touch.