In my youth, I had hoped to become a doctor. (Although Dr. Seuss did have me giving serious consideration to running a zoo at one time.)

I was preparing for a pre-med focus at Indiana U in Bloomington when, in the middle of my freshman year, my grandfather had the first of what would be MANY strokes. I got to see first hand while visiting this large Greek construction worker, suddenly half-paralyzed and unable to speak, that we were (and still are) much better at preserving life's quantity than its quality. 

While none of us were comfortable accomodating my grandfather's pantomimed requests that we smother him with a pillow in the hospital, I couldn't see myself becoming a doctor if that meant having to prolong someone's life against their will.

Welcome to my first career crisis. 

I was still a "helper" at heart though, so I opted to do the next best thing. I decided to study psychology so I could help people deal with the fallout of medical crises.

After I completed my Bachelor's Degrees in Psychology and Sociology at I. U., I entered the Gerontological Counseling Program at the Univ. of Notre Dame. I had been a volunteer at a local nursing home for many years (sometimes as a member of a professional clown troupe) and loved it so much that gerontology was a natural draw.

Unfortunately the Psychology Department dissolved the program just two years after my acceptance. Very quickly, my younger professors left to join Gerontology programs elswhere. To make matters worse, when it came time for my community-based training, the geriatric hospital I was to work at had also stopped accepting students, leaving me with no place to work with older people. The next best alternative was a local rehabilitation hospital. The remaining professors thought I would at least have the opportunity to work with stroke patients there, who tend to be older, so that is where I landed.

Little did I know my own mother would be one of those stroke patients in that same hospital 20 years later. Same floor. Same medical director. Many of the same co-workers. Yes, it was eerie.

While working in rehabilitation (and mostly with younger head and spinal cord injured people as it turned out), I  found a perfect melding of my love of medicine and my chosen field of psychology.  I completed my specialized training with an internship through Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Hospital in Chicago. In fact, during that time, I lived for several months with the very same grandfather who put me on this career path before I decided to make my home in the Chicago area permanently.

Although the internship was to cap off my doctoral training, I didn't complete my PhD so you can't call me "Dr." The short, but far less entertaining, version is that on top of the disbanding of the program, my advisor failed to make tenure. The combination left me with the ridiculously convoluted problem of weaving together the necessary resources to get my disseration completed and I had a job offer in hand that I could accept without the PhD. So, I got licensed with my Master's degree and worked as a psychotherapist in a Pain Management program in Wheaton, IL for the next ten years. I also met my husband during my internship year so I had a double reason not to go back to South Bend. (Let's hear it now, "Awwww, she did it for love....")

After ten years of working in pain management, I discovered life coaching while on a protocol development team for a wellness center the hospital was hoping to open. Health care was already undergoing massive changes that made it very difficult for me to work in the way I believed was most beneficial for my clients, so I had been wrestling with burnout for some time. Coaching was like a breath of much-needed fresh air. Everything I was learning led me to believe coaching would allow me to serve my clients more effectively than I could through the medical (pathology-based) model under which the field of psychology currently operates.  That, and getting sick of working on that protocol for four years straight, led me to jump ship.

I got trained through Coach U and embarked on my next career, establishing my first company, Wellspring Coaching, in 1999.  

Over the next 10 years as a coach, I provided support and guidance to individuals facing a host of very difficult life transitions such as the loss of significant relationships, forced or chosen career changes, coping with ill, debilitated or otherwise unavailable significant others, transitioning to the "empty nest" (including those who wished for but did not have children), dealing with caregiver and "sandwich generation" issues, as well as significant illnesses and bereavement. 

And, like any good self-employed personal development professional, I became adept at using the Web. As happens to far more life coaches than will admit it, I ended up with a blogging, Facebooking, experitise-declaring "avatar" who was living one version of my life while in the real world I was beginning to live another. Just as my business was booming I found myself coping with two newly disabled parents (living in two different States and none of them mine) and contemplating the anticipated loss of my best friend. 

Suddenly many of the life issues I was helping others through were getting very personal and I got a new view on just how tough they were.

For a while I got very good at bleeding in public. I took my blog readers along with me through my Mom's stroke, my Dad's heart surgery, and my anticipatory grief for my friend, Michael, and that was okay for a time. But there were downsides as well. There was always a lag between where I was emotionally, and what I was sharing publicly. Understandably, I'd wait to write about an emotionally difficult issue until after I had dealt with it enough that I could openly share it. But just as understandably, my caring readers who were reading my posts fresh couldn't help but be concerned and often wanted to help get me through the tough times. The time lag just made for a weird dynamic. And, as someone who was making her living helping others, I was never sure how much of my own life to share even though I received a lot of encouragement, from readers and clients alike, to do so.

Ultimately, all those losses I had been anticipating happened. In the space of a year, I lost my best friend's father, my 19 year old cat, my father's dog, my father and then my best friend and I was very much involved with each in their last chapters. While the anticipatory grief process I often wrote about did lesson the blow of the grief that was to come, it certainly didn't allow me to completely circumvent it.

I'm still learning what it means to navigate life without these people I love still here with me. The whole process of being a companion to the dying has taught me humility like nothing else could have. 

That humility has made going back to my life coaching practice as I had done it, and which I disbanded due to caregiving demands, impossible for me. In a profession where everyone is necessarily devoted to convincing you of their "expert status", the truth is I'm no longer comfortable proclaiming myself to be as an expert in "life". That's ironic, because personally I'm more clear, self-confident and focused than I've ever been. I've walked a hard road, have earned my stripes and I know it. I have some very strongly held beliefs and viewpoints as a result. Some of the issues I have had to explore are extremely complex and I now have an "insider's view" that not many people have had. 

I feel strongly that others should have the benefit of my hard won experience, not because I want to be perceived of as an expert, but because I know how unique my experience was and how fortunate I was to have been included in the dying process of some pretty remarkable individuals. Many of us will be caregivers at some time in our lives (if we aren't already), and nearly all of us will be on the receiving end some day. 

I know in my own circle I have been the first one to lose "one of us", a friend my own age. I'm certainly the only one of my circle who ever helped a friend choose their coffin.

Was it painful?

Oh, Hell Yes! But it was so much more than that. It was a kind of precious I don't know I'll ever have the words for. I just came through the richest two years of my life and I wouldn't trade a single second of pain because of all the love and laughter that accompanied it along the way.

A lot of people who had been following my journey through these losses told me it helped them to look over my shoulder and read a note or two "from the road" as it were. Turns out, there are quite a few of us walking the same road and for many of my readers I became something of an "advance scout" for those seeing shakey times ahead in their own lives or in the lives of their loved ones.

No Safe Distance is where the story continues to unfold. Behind the scenes I'm working on a full-fledged, in-depth book of my experiences as a blog could never do justice to what occured while these relationships were drawing to an earthly close. I will still blog alongside my writing, however, so you can see how I'm getting along with things.  I hope you bookmark this place and my blog so you can see what's underway if you find my perspective and insights useful.

Since I've been blogging and writing articles for many years, you'll find a kaleidoscope of topics to explore as my writing and photography  dove-tail here. I'll also try to turn you on to some sites and resources that have impressed me as relevant and high quality resources for getting through tough times.

Just grab a cup of tea and meander. And please, even though I'm not working with individual clients at this time, it you feel a desire to connect, or want to respond to something I've written, by all means use the contact page or my email below to drop me a note. I'd love to hear from you.


Laura Young
(630) 750-2365 (Chicago area)
Laura@nosafedistance.com