This week we missed Molly Fleming, who was supposed to give her brief talk on "My Favorite 3 Things in Life". Hopefully she will do that next week.
Then we had a donation check of $3,000 presented by Del Mar-Solana Beach Rotary club to Nicole Green of Casa de Amistad.
Following that we had a talk by Lannette Cornell Bloom about "Shifting Our Perspective of Death and the Dying Process". Her daughter Melissa also was our guest and she provided some insights at the end during the Q&A session. Lannette is a registered nurse (RN), healer, and author who is passionate about bringing simple joys to others. As an RN and health practitioner of more than thirty years, she has seen firsthand the need to care for others both emotionally and physically. When her mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness in 2003, she came to understand how critical it is that we talk about death in a more positive way and that emotional healing is possible through mindful choices. She shares her story and that wisdom in her book, Memories and Dragonflies, Simple Lessons for Mindful Dying, which is on Amazon.
She says that there are 90 million unpaid caregivers and many are struggling to care for themselves and their families at the same time. Her focus is to change the negative outlook of dying and turn that into mindful dying by being in the present moment. She elaborated about the 5 ways to look at dying in a positive way --
- Ignore the clock - don't stop living.
- Remember to look up - she talks about her mom one day just wanted to go into a store and look around because that was her favorite store & the store clerk did not even bother to look up.
- Always have a sense of humor - she talks about a story of how her mom was watching TV and saw a fire outside and had her daughter call 911 and it turned out in the end to be just a waving flag reflected in the neighbor's pool that looked like fire :-).
- Spiritual energy - she refers to a red dragon fly that gives energy and shows how to let go of anger.
She mentioned about some funny movies that helps bring humor to the dying process. One of the movies is "Death at a funeral". She also suggested that more information about the dying process can be viewed at https://eldercare.acl.gov/Public/Index.aspx and https://www.aginglifecare.org/.
In the end DMSB Club Vice President Vicky Mallett presented the speaker with the Joshua certificate that represents our club DMSB donating school supplies to schools in Malawi in the name of the speaker.
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