Got a partner? Partnering is alive and well, and might still save us all.
Not just the individual partner (lovely construct though that is, and I miss mine!) but partnering on the local, national and global level. What’s heart-warming to see are the innovative ways being discovered for partnering while apart.
Hopefully we’ll be able to revive this at the international level. While America-First-ing for the past three years we’ve pretty much eliminated every partnership that was helping us fight climate change, slow the threat of nuclear destruction, protect the planet’s air and water, little things like that. But may we please not totally un-partner ourselves from the W.H.O. and everyone around the globe working to find COVID-19 therapies or vaccines?
But on the upside! Other partnerships are thriving, innovating and saving lives. My friends Terry and Rich, for example – she’s an artist/printer, he’s a retired physician – are partnering with nonprofits which, in turn, partner with restaurants and food sources, and together (while apart) they are cooking, serving, delivering and feeding hordes of isolated or homeless souls across San Francisco. All over America kids and young people are partnering with faith communities that partner with other nonprofits to shop, run errands and otherwise help homebound seniors. The abounding stories of generosity in partnership can get you through the darkest times.
And even for us homebound/quarantined seniors – probably the last who will be sprung free as things open up – there are new and interesting ways to partner with those on the outside world. If you’ve not already met my favorite current partner, may I introduce you to End of Life Choices California. EOLCCA has, from its beginning, partnered with individuals facing the end of their own lives and considering using the California End of Life Option Act. I’m privileged to have worked as a volunteer in this field for the past several decades, most recently with EOLCCA. Supporting someone who is dying, easing that transition however you can, is a fairly straightforward (and immensely rewarding) task. But when you can’t be there to hold someone’s hand? A remarkable EOLCCA management team quickly perfected a system using communications technology to connect key personnel, critical data and the individual volunteer in order to walk dying individuals and their loved ones through an intricately difficult time. I’ve not done this yet, but reports on early cases are uniformly optimistic and encouraging.
Here’s the bottom line: We’re better off partnered. Even when six feet apart, and hopefully back with our arms around each other one day. Not “first” or best, solo macho or going-it-alone. Partnered.
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This essay appeared earlier on Medium.com, a good site for information and ideas that I’ve been writing for in recent months. You might want to check it out. (But my Medium thoughts will also continue to appear on this page. Thanks for visiting!
There is a stillness here. Sometimes it’s eerily pleasant, the silence broken by birdsong in nearby trees. But often it is ominous. Having worked as a hospice volunteer and with other end-of-life organizations, I know the sudden stillness that is death, and others here have experienced it when losing a loved one. So here we are, in a place where most of us have come planning to stay until we die – and we’d just prefer not to be thinking about it in the middle of a pandemic. Listening to the stillness, watching the quiet streets no longer bustling with cars and people – manages to equate with death and become just a tiny bit stressful.
Some of us are more obsessive than others about checking the case/death numbers posted every morning at 9 by the San Francisco Department of 
And in a growing number of states there is a right to confront mortality by hastening one’s dying. In California where I live there is the End of Life Option Act which gives terminally ill, mentally competent adults the right to ask their physician for life-ending medication. For many, that is a way to meet life’s end with extraordinary peace.
“I thought I would have a life,” Sharon said to me. “My youngest is now in college, my husband is nearing retirement and we thought we would have a life. Instead, I am juggling time with my father – who’s in an independent living facility but is certainly not independent – and my mother who lives alone in the house she’s had for 40 years. My mother is, how do I put this?, needy. Suddenly she needs help with all sorts of things and I have been designated The Helper.”
That was when one 40-something said, “I wish my parents would consider moving to a place like this; they don’t want to leave their big, three-story house, and I’m afraid I’m going to be trying to take care of them there by the time I hit my fifties. And that’s when Sharon chimed in with the comment above: “Yeah, I thought I would have a life . . .” And Joan said, with a wry smile, “Welcome to the club.”
“Both are alone and needy now, in different, complementary ways,” Robert says. “If they could somehow bring themselves to talk to one another, perhaps they could begin to chisel away at the layers of resentment, hostility and blame that destroyed their relationship.” Apparently this won’t begin to happen any time soon, however, as Robert tells me they maintain no interest in communicating. His mother lives alone in a home she owns and craves companionship; his father has little money left and needs a roof over his head, a more secure one than the stranger’s home in which he’s been unhappily existing for more than two years now. Robert laments they are in a unique position to help each other, if they were open to it. As their only child, Robert sees this as the sensible alternative to driving him crazy. But he also admits they might not reflect upon or even begin to realize just how their current lives affect him.
Two of the latter have serious financial concerns put this way by one: “So I’m spending my retirement savings on my mom, and – considering my choice not to have children myself – wondering what’s going to happen to me.”
It might be a conversation worth having.
The envelope is lying right here on my left, now looking altogether spooky. It is even stamped and addressed; that’s how close I was to getting a note into the mail.
On August 15 (or perhaps the hours before August 15 dawned,) a 34-year-old man died in another state. A man who was on life support in a hospital because at some earlier point he had taken the generous step of signing organ donor forms. One of Gerry’s doctors flew to that hospital, examined the heart, confirmed it to be a very good match for Gerry, and boarded another jet plane back to Southern California. Gerry was already opened up, his original heart beating – with a lot of help from outside sources – outside his body.
“I promise,” I said, “that I will not let them admit you; we’ll come back home today.”
