Dying Puts Living In Perspective

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Paul

Dying Puts Living in Perspective

Its weird looking at yourself online!

I’ve been telling myself to write a blog for a few years now, but for a myriad of reasons I have been unable to commit to offering my ideas, observations and concerns about humanity publicly. Today that ends! This first blog represents my personal commitment, in writing, to living a life of levity over gravity, productivity over consumptivity and generosity over greed.

It is my hope that the story I’m about to share will empower you to speak and act in a way that fear had previously inhibited. It certainly has with me!

Hey Bolanile!

Dr. Bolanile Akinwole

This is a story about my friend, Dr. Bolanile Akinwole, who consistently choose to error on the side of generosity, community investment and openness to the plight of others. Bolanile’s default was care, not caution. She is a remarkable example of how to live a spiritually rich life while staring death in the face, literally.

Today is Jan 16th and for the past three weeks I have been immersed in Bolanile’s world (everyone calls her Bola or Dr. Bola).

I thought I knew Bola pretty well up until this past 3 weeks. What I discovered about her through this process has left me a changed man and impressed upon me a model of living that I want to emulate. I have a renewed appreciation for the true role we play in each others lives.

To call Bola a charismatic and street smart woman would be a marked understatement. As a Trauma Physician in Los Angeles’s inner city hospitals she’s seen the gnarliest of the gnarly and saved countless lives.

Volunteering medical services in Mexico

She always found time to teach, lecture and volunteer medical services to impoverished communities internationally. She even rescued, then adopted, a young girl from a very abusive home and took in her 93 year old foster mother, all while being herself disabled.

The essence of her legacy is being in service to others vastly more than she required for herself. Her ratio of services used vs offered was quite extreme. Although Bola made a decent living as a doctor the real wealth she accumulated, a wealth that ended up saving her life a few times over, was respect and reverence… something money can never buy. Bola was rich in respect and reverence. She had a fortune of gratitude got only by being truly supportive to others.

It Starts At Home

Being born an African American orphan in mid-1950’s New York would be considered a terrible starting point for high achievement, but not for Bola. The work ethic she learned as one of the oldest children in her foster home set her apart at an early age. For Bola mediocrity was not an option, nor was apathy. She had to help her foster mother with upwards of 7 other children as well as her foster father David Earls requests with the gardening, grounds maintenance, etc… All this in a time of extreme racial tension and political upheaval.

Work Ethic and Courage

By her own laurels she managed to get acceptance and funding for a Harvard Medical education and graduated top of her class to become one of only a handful of female African American M.D.’s. in the country.

She quickly blossomed into a popular mentor to the many students and residents she encountered while practicing . Dr. Bola’s greatest gift was her ability to impart a level of confidence, zeal and attention to detail that students rarely got elsewhere. With Bola medicine was not a job is was an offering to humanity.

As Fate Would Have It

Our friendship started 9 years ago through a string of auspicious coincidences. I had literally just moved to the Manhattan Beach area of Los Angeles in ’03 to practice at a friend’s private fitness and post-orthopedic rehabilitation facility when I got a call from Bola saying that she had been referred from a friend, to another friend, to my father’s C.H.E.K. Institute office. After two unsuccessful attempts to find a C.H.E.K. practitioner in her area, to help her heal her cervical disk bulge and avoid invasive and risky spinal surgery, she had the tenacity to call back a third time and speak to a new person who happen to know that I had just moved to the area. She called, and just like that we began a respectful friendship that carried on after her neck and arm symptoms improved.

We resonated on many levels, from our dislike of how money has tainted medicine, politics and environmental concerns, to our love for philosophy and spirituality. It felt like we had known each all our lives and we had no problem chatting in her room all night long.

More than anyone in my life Bola made me feel like great change was possible in society and that I could make it; that we could make it.

She was acutely aware of the power authority wields since she had more than one friend in the civil rights movement who got assassinated, she felt, by agents of the then ultra-secretive COINTEL PRO operations conducted by the F.B.I. through the 60’s and early 70’s.

I felt more courageous around her, courage that can only come from being believed in and reassured. On my own I felt more much more fear than when in her presence. I guess that’s what good friends and family can do to the psyche.

The Fear of Death Can Be Quelled by Gratitude

Death, or rather, the speculation of deathly circumstances, as I see it, is a huge X-factor in human decision making.

If one has little fear of it they will bias their choices toward generosity, magnanimity and selflessness. If one is deeply scared of dying they will pass on many opportunities to grow deep community interrelations in favor of jobs and activities that make the most money with the shortest time to pay-out. These jobs do not typically build significant interrelationship amongst workers.

Cash becomes a god of sorts to people who fear physical harm / death too much. Interestingly many of the world’s prominent religions portray figures who act under pressure without fearing death. Jesus realized that he must leave the forest and return to civilization, even though he knew it would cost him his life.

Fear Logic is the thinking that money is the surest way of addressing future problems, because every good or service has a price in the modern world.

There is a reason they say “money can’t buy you love.”

The Currency of Gratitude

Every terminally ill patient knows that there is a difference between being “attended to” and being “cared for”. Bola knew the difference and on deaths door she still managed to check herself out of the hospital and die at home. For Bola there was no place like home.

The power of the Currency of Gratitude is the ability to attract, not buy, the help you need in dispirit times, and receive it with love in a familiar environment.

A leap of faith, literally

To spend the Currency of Gratitude though one has to take a “leap of faith” of sort, a energetic “stage dive” if you will, into the crowd of your tribe / friend circle. How many people have to be in the audience before you feel there are enough to dive into without getting dropped?

Bolanile built up a charge, a bank account of gratitude, if you will, by consistently trying to make people visiting or interacting with her more comfortable, valued and respected than they normally felt. That’s how we all drive the Cycle of Gratitude, she was just very good at it!

Dying Gracefully

I learned from Bola that if I am to grow old and/or degenerative, it could be made tolerable if I had quality relations with family and friends to hold me up. She showed me how it could be done… now my goal is to integrate the lessons, integrate her, into my being.

Here are a few examples of good habits that build quality relations [some of these points may seem simple enough, but combined and used consistently and meaningfully one can establish an upwelling current of Levity in your life]:

Etiquette

I'm sorry, I forgot to ask your name...

A) Get in the habit of asking for, committing to memory and addressing people, by name, as often as you can remember; especially if you’re likely to see them again. This is a point I am particularly bad at. If you see everyone as a potential ally then you might be more interested in knowing people’s names.

B) Take the time to ask something about the person serving you in a restaurant, spa, medical facility, convenience store, governmental office, etc. Obviously Bola didn’t ask everyone she met, but if she saw something in them, or expected to see them with any regularity, she would take the time to get to know them a little.

A little interest can uplift the spirit

C) Always be looking for something unique or beautiful to compliment people about. Bola would regularly compliment a smile, a hair-do, a job well done and even a job done poorly if she felt the person needed a compliment.

When you tip, tip generously

D) Tip generously, tip often. Classic Bola, she would order a round of hot Saki for all the sushi chefs at the restaurant. She would slip every nurse that helped her a 20 spot. She would tip the street performer and make generous donations to any religious or spiritual event she attended.

Not only did she tip, she took the extra few seconds to make sure she handed it to them personally and thanked them with a smile (it certainly helps to have a smile like Bola’s.) People naturally respond to generosity.

E) Go out of your way to acknowledge significant players in your life with a thank you card, e-mail, note, message or text. She always had a complete collection of cards to honor every aspect of living; birthdays, graduations, birth, death and a job well done. Send cards if you like receiving them. Send them if there is any doubt.

F) Listen. When someone listens to your deepest thoughts and feelings it moves you closer to acting on those streams of consciousness.

Bola was one of the first truly accomplished and worldly people to listen to me patiently and help me see the nuances of how i could help others. Around her I felt like not trying to live to my potential was a greater crime than mediocrity.

Listening is a skill

My dad taught me this formula: “Thoughts -> Words -> Deeds.”

Listening helps others transition thoughts to deeds.

You never know when you’ll hear brilliance or be the last person someone needed to tell before they had the courage to act.

Take the time to listen when in doubt.

Labor of Love

Are you working for "The Man"

We all have an inner compass that tells us when we are working in our own best interest and when we are working for “the man”.

Being in service to others has a magical way of being nurturing to our own being. Admittedly it’s not always obvious what service truly is and the rewards are not always as timely as we like. However, we do not live in a vacuum and goods deeds are often noticed by more people than the one you help.

Respect and Gratitude are tied proportionally to the frequency and rarity of the service. As an E.R. doctor Bola certainly existed on one extreme end of the frequency / rarity curve… the rarity part. It you saw Dr. Bola twice in her professional environment you were quite unlucky or very reckless.

Regardless, the most memorable part was often not the technical service, but rather how comfortable and attended to Dr. Bola made her patient feel. The less rare the service the more important the interactive elements become in building a charge of gratitude.

If you must work jobs that put you in little contact with the public then it becomes vastly more important to be kind, patient and as generous as possible to colleagues. The reason being that the only way to have more access to the public is to rise up through the labor force to the level where you interface with new customers directly. Employees prefer to work for those they like.

So you see there is always a relationship between material and spiritual stability through the axis of revery and gratitude that can be found in nearly every job.

Avoid Antiquated Ideas

Dr. Bola broke the mold of almost every possible stereo-type in her life and avoided getting caught up in these antiquated ideas (see below.) By not getting stuck in these ways she became that much more present with the people she served and interacting with.

1) Racism is false. As a daughter of black woman and a white man Bola did not have the luxury of getting overly identified with one race over another. Science has proven that when you get down to it there is virtually no difference in potential between the so called “races” of the world.

As a child of the civil rights era, it would have been easy to say “white people” were the problem but Bola saw past the racial charge to the spiritual struggle for identity underneath… Do the same.

2) Nationalism / regionalism is false. Being the by-product of an immigrant father and a mother (only the Indigenous are not immigrants in America) helped Bola escape the trap of national / regionalism. She remained open to the gifts all cultures had to offer and had her favorite Korean Spa, Japanese restaurant, Native American artist, Latin musician, African clothier, etc.

3) Class divisions mask the shared plight of humanity. Being born, poor and being raised in a low income foster home, made looking down on the poor impossible for her. Throughout her life she could very well of had her landscaper over for dinner as easily as her famous friends.

4) Sexism is physical bias and not the truth of gender. Bola explored her masculine energy as much as her feminine. The body may be defined by its organ and fat placement, but the person is defined by the logic, spirit and understanding.

See past the flesh and you’ll see that a woman can teach you how to play professional football and a man can make an amazing midwife.

5) Be spiritual, not religious. Many of our most intense conversations were about how spirituality pervades all world religions regardless of race and region. Even though she identified with Catholicism and Buddhism at different points in her life she was emphatic that every religion and spiritual practice had some merit and value in humanity. One of her favorite teachers was Joseph Campbell (1904 – 1987) who taught that all humans share a common inner spiritual life despite the language, art and cultural differences we often get hung up on.

Don’t let religious projections stop you from befriending someone.

Her Last Two Weeks

Bola insisted that she live out her last days at home (insisted in an understatement, hehe.) At first I was scared of what that meant since she was so very sick. I had never even seen someone as sick as she was, let alone be caregiver for someone in such shape. However what I got to witness changed me, day by day. To be brief i’ll bullet point some of the amazing things that happened as she spent her bank account of gratitude and revery.

–> Her house only had some basic equipment. Within 2 days, through her friend network alone, we got all the components, medicine and training required to attend to her severe respiratory needs. Odds and ends such as nebulizer, oxygen, humidity and ventilation equipment seemed to arrive right on time and with joy from the bearer.

Special thanks to Stephanie, Suzie, Jo-Anne, Linda, Marynell and David to name a few.

–> In an emergency bout of dehydration a nurse friend came by who very adept at installing an IV drip line and barely got the needle into Bola’s right arm. No joke, this was one of the hardest arms one could ever try and get a line into. That friendship alone gave Bola an extra 4 days of life.

This is just one of many near death experiences averted by revery. Let me tell you, very few could or would try and install that line. Thank you Aileen!

–> Every day friends arrived with food for the 3 of us who were there round the clock and for the steady stream of guests every day. What a godsend healthy food is for tired care workers and patient guests.

Thanks to Linnea, Veronica, Carol and Bob, Linda, Roseanne, Mary-Rose and everyone who brought food, snacks and drink.

–> Every day spiritual workers arrived to bless, sing, chant and pray. Not only did Bola appreciate the acts, guests were regularly in awe of the presence and devotion of the Llama’s and Priests and fueled the revery for life itself. There was so much conversation about living spawned by this.

There were a few days in particular that only her spiritually inclined friends provided any real comfort to her. Thank you Linnea, Veronica, Amila and others from Aribode Sanga. Thank you Father Michael, Lisa (Z) and everyone else who’s names I am not remembering.

–> Every day at least one former student stopped by to pay gratitude to one of the few teachers who really fired them up about medicine as a life path.

–> Every day Bola took the time to thank and value everyone personally. With me personally she gave me a heart-felt thank you for nearly everything I did for her from holding up her ventilator mask when she was tired, preparing her medicines, to simply bringing her a cold drink. When someone appreciates what you do that genuinely it makes doing anything they need a real joy no matter how dark the overall situation is.

This is a small account, but in all honesty, if even half of what occurred in the last 2 weeks of Bola’s life happened for me when I become truly in need of care I will be a very happy man.

At her St Katherine’s service (1-16-12) approximately 200 hundred people showed up with one week’s notice. Wow, enough said. If I were to die today I’d probably have a dozen or less. Clearly Bola has set a high bar in the Revery dept!

It was incredibly beautiful to see the nearly endless parade of people personally thank and console the remaining family.

Do What Needs to Be Done

This post represents my attempt at doing what I feel needs to be done. In this case sharing in writing what I learned from Bola. Over the years Bola always encouraged me to be a productive man among the people and do more outreach. Although I am still getting over my writing hump and fears of being “out there” her words still stoke my fire for humanity!

Even when Bola was clearly very sick she still did her best to advance her goals of improving the field of Bio-Ethics, start a more holistically structured hospice care system and increase the amount of scholarship money available to economically disadvantaged students.

Bola lived to make a difference. And now in death I am proud to say she still is. That’s a legacy I am trying to emulate.

I really wanted her to see what I was capable of but sometimes it takes death to exclamate how to live!

Bolanile, thank you for what you have shown me!

Brother from another mother,

Paul Chek, Jr