Navigating Grief and Identity Crises with Pam Reece

Yuliana Kim-Grant's Phoenix Tales

On this week’s episode of Phoenix Tales, Yuliana welcomes Pam Reece to the show to talk about the moment when her father lost his job, his subsequent battle with Alzheimer’s disease, and how those events shaped her outlook on life. A former yoga instructor who now offers her many skills to help women in corporate America achieve success, Reece opens today’s conversation by describing the length of her father’s career and the identity crisis that took place when that career was suddenly taken from him. She learned that professions aren’t always stable, as she once believed, and it gave her the courage to follow her occupational dreams, because she knew that it could be taken from her in the blink of an eye.

The pair also talk about Reece’s father’s terminal battle with Alzheimer’s, and how, as his sole caregiver, Pam learned how to compartmentalize her emotions to help coordinate and plan his medical treatment. She details the guilt she felt being so far away from him during his time of suffering and how that distance helped her cope as well. The weight of it all, however, didn’t hit her until a few months after his passing. Since then, she has worked as a yoga instructor and gone on to help women struggling with stressful jobs better cope with their seemingly insurmountable workload. Yuliana closes this moving conversation by asking Pam what song speaks to her dad and why. While Reece initially isn’t quite sure, she eventually concludes that Van Morrison’s “Into The Mystic” feels right.

Episode Highlights:

• How Pam's father lost his job
• His identity crisis
• Reece’s realization that she should build a career she’s passionate about.
• Her father’s Alzheimer's diagnosis
• Reece’s experience as his sole caretaker
• The guilt she felt being so far away
• Alzheimer’s as a long goodbye
• How grief hit Pam months after her father’s death
• How his death altered her empathetic capacity
• Her love for Van Morrison’s lyrics in “Into The Mystic”

Quotes:

“I thought the message that I got was, ‘Wow, he put all this time in, worked his way up, was very loyal to this company, and then snap. It’s gone. So why would I do something that I didn’t really love or care about and put that time in, when it could be taken away instantly?’”

“The lesson of seeing your identity be wrapped up in a job, a career that doesn’t fulfill you, that was always in the back of my mind, that was always looping there that you don’t want to do that.”

“It’s impossible to really describe until, you know, when you meet someone who is in a similar situation, and their parent has been diagnosed at a younger age. There’s this knowing amongst us, because as you said, there’s a certain point when someone is much older—you can be a bit more sanguine about it, but when they’re younger, it’s devastating.”

“Well, you know, the thing which is said about Alzheimer’s is that it’s a very long goodbye. When he passed to another plane, I did not realize how difficult that would be, because I guess I thought ‘You’ve been saying goodbye all along.’”

“The more human experience that you have, certainly, the bigger your empathy grows. And I’ve always thought of myself as an empathetic person, but certainly, you are able to see how people do what I did, what a lot of us do, you just fare forward, you steal yourself and keep going.”

“It’s interesting how grief somehow then opens up, at least for me, the flood of memories from much, much further back. Because, again, I’m not in the moment of needing to figure out what we need to do today. So suddenly, everything can open up and you can look back and relive a lot of great things, great times.”

Links:

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