Talked to my dad earlier this evening; he'd had a transient ischemic attack after being off aspirin for 3 weeks. Still trying to process this, but I have one request:
Assume another 20 years of life, at least. Assume survival and thriving. Any time you are talking to him, or even to someone who talks to him, whether it's over the phone or in person or even via text, assume these things. Believe it and let that belief saturate everything you say. I'm not advocating overdoing things, or grandiose posturing, or ignoring risk factors or treatment options, or ignoring planning (heck, I ride a motorcycle, I've done some planning in the event of my untimely demise, and I'm only in my mid-30's). Not in the slightest. Just... assume health the way you assume that technologically simple thing you've had for decades is going to keep on working. Know it the way you know the sun is going to rise tomorrow, the way you know that it's almost spring and it will get gradually warmer. Find a metaphor that works for you and believe it.
I ask this because, having studied neuro-linguistic programming and associated things for the past 5 years, I know that subtle word choice - what tense you choose amongst the dozens (I don't know what the real number is) available for a given verb - can have a positive effect on people. And here's the thing - only 10% of our communication is in just the words. The rest of it is pitch, volume, timbre, timing, tempo, all the myriad facial expressions no matter how minute, what we do with our eyes, all the gross-motor stuff we do with our body, and even our clothes and haircuts. And all that is affected by what you believe, whether you realize it consciously or not.
My business partner, who is getting paid to help people using everything we've learned, can have a noticeable - as in noticeable to a third party - effect on his clients in the space of an hour. In 6 months to a year's worth of weekly meetings, his clients' lives have turned around - they are successful in business, all their relationships are strengthened, they're living the lives they really want to live.
More than half of what he does is with the other 90% of our communication channels. The non-verbals are vital. Remember that on the phone, everything you do with your voice (and by extension, your upper body posture) that's not the words themselves can be heard. So make your non-verbals convey, "you're going to be around for a good long while." Assume life. There's another route to this if the one I described doesn't make sense yet, and it's really easy: compassion. Not the grieving type of compassion. Just the being-present kind of joyful compassion.
