Our Guest
Yvonne Caputo, Author
Yvonne Caputo has been a teacher and the head of the HR department of a retirement community. She continues working as a corporate consultant, trainer, psychotherapist, and author. Her two books are Flying with Dad, and Dying with Dad.
Transcript for this episode:
Josh: Hello, welcome back to the Therapist Collective. I’m so excited to have with me Yvonne Caputo. Am I saying your name right, Yvonne? You are. Oh, perfect. That’s, that’s really important to me that I get people’s names right. So Yvonne has been a teacher and the head of the HR department of a retirement community.
She continues working as a corporate consultant, trainer, psychotherapist. and author. I’m especially excited to hear about her books Flying with Dad and Dying with Dad. Yvonne has a lot to contribute in the conversation related to grief and so thank you for being here, Yvonne. I’m excited. Yeah.
So tell us just a little bit about your books and, and how they become such a part of the, the, the service and the care that you provide for other
people.
Yvonne: All therapists will recognize part of this story. I’m sure. My father was greatest generation and I grew up with, we don’t talk about things. We don’t share emotions. We don’t name emotions, but I grew up in a time where I was really wanting for some of those things to happen. And so I had this distant relationship with my dad.
I knew he loved me. There was food on the table. There was a roof over our head. He was in the same room every night. I knew he cared about me, but to have a more intimate relationship with my dad, it didn’t happen until I was in my 60s and he and I were on the phone one night, dark, dreary January night, and he opened up and he told me a quirky, funny, scary, off the wall story about being a navigator.
In World War Two, and I said to him, I said, Dad, wait a minute. I want to get a pencil and paper. I want to take this down. What the hell do you want to do that for? I said, I just think this is interesting. The family would probably really like to have this. So I did the next phone call. I said, if you’re willing, dad, start at the beginning.
And Josh, story after story after story, rolled off his tongue for well over a year. Oh my goodness. And I took notes. And at some point, when I started, I think I was at the fourth chapter. And it was going to be for the family. I had no, I had no idea that it would become a published book, but along about the fourth chapter, I started to think, you know, I’ve got something here because dad was an ordinary GI.
It wasn’t Dwight Eisenhower. It wasn’t FDR. It wasn’t the Battle of the Bulge. It wasn’t any of those kinds of things. It was just this ordinary guy. So, I told him that I wanted to put this in book form. And the more that I listened to his story, the more at ease he became with me, the more he opened up.
Wow. And so, I started to hear.
I started to hear things that I knew were PTSD. I started to hear what he had held back all those years and that I now assume was the source of a lot of the anger that I saw in my father as a child. Wow. Wow. And when it came to those things. He opened up and told me about a recurring nightmare that he had for three years when he came home from the war.
His plane was hit, they were going down, he was trying to get to the bomb bay so that he could parachute out. He had to crawl through a very narrow passage, and in his dream, the passage was lined with stainless steel. And he couldn’t get purchase. He couldn’t pull himself through. Well, he would end up screaming.
My mother would wake him up. She would say, What’s the matter, Mike? His response were, Oh, it’s nothing. Just go back to sleep. However, when he was telling me about this dream sequence, he told me that he literally dug channels in the mattress. Wow. So that mattress had to be destroyed and another one brought in.
And after three years, they just went away. And he never knew why they went away. So that, so when he did that, and when he was telling me that, I explained to him PTSD. I explained the neurobiology of when we see something really stressful, our mind really latches onto it, and his dreams were his mind’s way of trying to help him work through that.
Right. But what I told him was, it saddened me that when he came home from the war, nobody knew that. Yeah, so he’s walking around thinking that there’s something absolutely wrong with him because he’s having these dreams and he sees his friends in town and they don’t talk about nightmares, right? So what’s wrong with me?
So when I was explaining the normalcy of nightmares, I could literally hear my father’s shoulders drop. So. It didn’t surprise me when he told me about an event that I knew was a flashback. He was going to write Patterson Air Force Base. Toledo, Ohio, is it? No, no, it’s not in Toledo, Dayton, Ohio. And he was with a buddy and they made a B line for the B 24.
’cause that was his plane. That was the baby. He walked along the nose, side down the fuselage, came around. The tail parked right beside the V 24 was a measurement. 262. German jet. Dad didn’t do fight. He didn’t do flight. He didn’t do freeze. He played dead. Boom. He dropped like a shot. When he came to and his friend asked him what happened, he said, I don’t know.
So I again was able to explain to dad the neurobiology of when we are In a traumatic event, our brain will signal what we need to do to be safe. Yeah. So I said, tell me about the measurement. He said, oh honey, it was so fast. Our gunners couldn’t track it. And they were so nimble. They would come over us.
They would come under us. And they were flying in such tight formations that there wasn’t a way to wiggle around or to evade. And Dad said, we were sitting ducks.
Josh: Yeah,
Yvonne: so here I am in my 60s and my father is sharing these amazing, amazing stories with me. Yeah. So that’s the first book.
Josh: Okay. And so the first book flying with dad are his stories that he shared with you.
Yvonne: And it’s more than that. I sent the third draft into the woman that I chose as my publisher. She threw it back at me. She put it in a blender. And the first part of the book is what life was like in our 1950s home and for people to get the experience of why dad and I were disconnected. Right. The second part is his stories written in his voice.
Okay. And I could do that because I had all the letters that he wrote to my mother during the war. And then the third section is how the writing of the book gave me the father I always wanted. And he got a daughter that he didn’t know he had.
Josh: Yeah. Oh, that gives me chills. Just now hearing that. Yeah. So, so it sounds like there was a lot of healing for him and just sharing those stories.
Yvonne: A lot of healing for the both of us. Yeah. Now, mixed in with this during these this timeframe, I was working at a retirement community and a case came before the ethics committee of A nursing resident, late stages of dementia, non communicative, sores on her heel and foot that the doctors were saying, let’s do Whirlpool baths and antibiotics and the daughter, who is her health care agent, legal health care agent says, no, no treatment or quality of life is so poor quality of life is in her advanced directive.
No treatment. Pennsylvania doesn’t recognize quality of life as one of the things in an advance directive. So it ended up that the case went to court and the court decided that there would be two surrogates. One surrogate would allow for the treatment. If the treatment failed, then the daughter could step in and say no more treatment.
And going through that, I said to myself, I wonder if dad has anything like that. So I called him on the phone. Nope, no advance directive. So I said, if I set up the appointment with the attorney, will you go with me? And he said, sure. So I drove across the state, met with the attorney, the document was created.
We’re good to go. I know somewhat of what my father wants when the end comes. And then in the retirement community, I came across a document called the five wishes. And it takes. It takes an advanced directive and just carries it through to where it really needs to be carried through to. How comfortable do you want to be?
What do you want your family to know? Do you want to be buried or do you want to be cremated? How do you want to be treated? It’s just all of these really Finite questions that took the legal document that we did and spun it on its head. So when I read through this document, I said, this is something I have to do with that because I don’t know any of these things.
Yeah. Yeah. So with major trepidation. I drove six and a half hours across the state. The blue and white five wishes is right beside me on the passenger seat. I got to the hospital because dad was in again. He was a brittle diabetic and I could tell that supper had been served. So that was a good sign. Dad loved to eat.
So at least he would have gotten his dinner. When I got to the room, he was just delighted to see me. He was in a really good mood. So the. The weariness or the leeriness that I had about bringing it up with him again, kind of dissipated. And I said, will you go over another document with me? And he said, sure.
So, we pulled his legs over to the side of the bed, padded the seat beside him so that I could sit and it was warm from his warmth and we had the hospital Thank you. Cart or desk kind of thing that was right in front of us and question by question, we went through it. Do you want this? No. Do you want that?
Yeah. Do you want this? No. One of the questions was, do you want your organs to be donated? And he said, no, he said, I’m 85 years old. I’m a diabetic. They’re not worth anything. No, I don’t want to give them up. So, we crossed that out. What do you want for your funeral? My dad was Roman Catholic. He wanted a high mass.
He wanted us to choose the readings. He wanted my husband, who has a glorious tenor voice, to sing the Lord’s Prayer, Amazing Grace, and the Ave Maria. All of that stuff he stipulated. So, fast forward many years, several years, And dad was back in the hospital again, and we had just crossed the state to see him just come home, and I get a call from him, and he’s livid, I’m holding the phone out here, because I can hear him screaming at me.
Yeah. Yvonne, why did you tell them that I could go home? And I said, Dad, I didn’t tell them you could go home. I said you could go home when you were ready. And it doesn’t sound like you’re ready. And then he did something he’d never done before. He said, Honey, I’m sorry I yelled at you. And I said, It’s okay, Dad.
You were just venting. And then he said, Yvonne, can you come home? I’m scared. I got there the next day, and Josh, two and a half hours later, he was gone. And he went in exactly the way he wanted. Feet 1st out of his own home. Yeah, and I was there to make that happen because the, I mean, when he was on the floor face down, we called the empties.
They were working on him and I said, stop, you know, I’m his health care agent. Well, sorry, ma’am, but we have to work on him until we get him down to the, the. Emergency room. So then I got on the phone and called the hospital and I said, they’re going to bring dad into the emergency room. There’s a do not resuscitate order on his chart.
Get it to there. No more than a minute later. The ER doctor called and said, you can stop working on him. So I laid down beside him, put my arm across his chest, told him that I loved him, told him that he was going to be where he wanted to be, which was with my mother, told him that I would miss him like crazy, and then I did what was the glue on our family.
I said the Lord’s Prayer in his ear, and he was gone. And they put him on the gurney. And if you can imagine Northwestern Pennsylvania, the snow is coming down an inch an hour. The gurney is parked at the end of the ambulance. And the ambulance doors are open, and there is this beautiful light shining on Dad’s face.
And I looked at him, and there was this soft, sweet smile. He was where he wanted to be, and it went the way he wanted it to. And I did this. I went, Yes! And the EMTs looked at me like I’d lost every marble I might have had, and I just said to them He wanted to go feet first out of his home, and that’s what you’ve done.
So, that then, is a part of flying with dad. And I started getting questions from readers, like, How could you do that? Didn’t you want to save him? Where did you find the courage from? Yeah. So that led to the writing of the second book, which is Dying with Dad. Yeah. And I, the title is not as a, as of uplifting as I would like it to be because it’s really very much an uplifting book, but it shares my journey about how I became comfortable talking about death and dying.
Yeah, it isn’t the elephant in the room with me. Sure.
Josh: I believe that. Yeah, what what an incredible journey to get to that point and it sounds like. Just through those opportunities you had to, to hear your dad’s stories, it created a bond that allowed those types of conversations to be very natural between you, where, you know, there’s nothing off limits here.
We can talk about your end of life, we can, we can go there. That’s amazing.
Yvonne: It was funny because there was one topic I wasn’t really willing to dive into. My mother had died. Seven years before and dad started to date and I was fine with that and my brother and sister were fine with that. He was lonely.
All right. Yeah, sure. So on one of the phone calls, he started to talk about sex and I wasn’t going to go there.
Josh: Okay. Understandably.
Yvonne: I’m not going to go there. But in the phone calls with dad, sometimes he would just open up and say, Yvonne, I’m so ready to go. Yeah. And my response would be, okay, dad, talk to God about it.
And you two decide, you know, I’ll miss you, but it’s okay. And then sometimes I would ask him and he would say, Nope, I’m having a pretty good day. It’s been a pretty good week. I want to hang around a little bit more. So it would go back and forth, but it was just a normal part of the conversation that we had.
Josh: Sure. Yeah. Why do you think that that people are so reticent to talk about death and dying and grief? Why do you think it’s so hard for people?
Yvonne: Well, I’ll personalize it. I don’t want to die. Sure. And so does dying talk does talking about it make me think about it? Does talking about it make it more real in a way that I don’t see that reality on a day to day basis.
The problem with that is, although I understand it, is that working in a retirement community, I saw all too well what not talking about it, what not having that paperwork together, what that did to families, it tore them apart.
Josh: Oh, sure. Sure. I think that’s why there’s so much stress associated and family drama sometimes with funerals and things like that.
Yvonne: I was even talking to someone yesterday and she’s at the realization that there’s a name that needs to come off her mother’s documents because the person whose name is there is not capable of making the kind of decision that that mother might want. Yeah. You know, so the reality is for us therapists.
We know when we’re dealing with someone who has a toxic relationship with their family, right? And they need to get out of that toxic relationship. So they couldn’t be a health care agent, you know. So there’s, there’s that piece of things that may make it difficult. Who within my family can I talk, talk to about it?
Josh: So as a therapist, is that something that when you’re working with people who, who know that they’re going to die or who are. Kind of at the later stages of life. Is that something that you make sure to process with them? How, how do we do that as therapists? Cause that
Yvonne: We do what we do best and we listen and we listen for what’s coming underneath.
And so, gee, am I hearing some fear around death?
I went to a conference one time, and it was on trauma, and I’d been working with someone who was acutely ill. It started when she was a senior in college, but it was a congenital kind of thing. It just started to rear its head when she got older. And… She would come and go and we would work and she’d be okay and then months later she would call again and we’d go back and it got to the point where I really began to question, am I doing any good here?
So, at this conference, I approached the man who was teaching it and I gave him the story that I’ve just given you and he said, there’s really only 1 question you need to ask. I said, okay, and the question is this, how do you want to live? Until you die.
I was blown away, Josh. The whole afternoon of the conference, I really didn’t pay attention because I was so locked into that question. How do you want to live until you die?
Josh: That’s an amazing question. Isn’t it? Because Oh man, okay, I’m going to have to sit with that one for a little bit. I love it because it captures so much about, I mean it’s so empowering, but at the same time it deals with reality and it’s not avoidant.
Yvonne: That’s right. So the next time she called months later, we were having our normal conversation and I’m thinking to myself, can I ask her? Can I ask her? How do I ask her? What do we do about this? I mean, I was really so when we therapists get quiet and we think and and that stuff is wrestling around in our heads.
I opened it by saying, I’m going to ask you. A question that I find difficult asking, but I’m going to do it anyway. Yeah. How do you want to live until you die? Josh, my client, broke up. She was belly laughing. She was belly laughing. Not what I expected. Right. And what she said to me through the tears that were coming from the belly laughter, she said, Yvonne, that’s the best question you’ve ever asked me.
Wow. And from then on, when she would come in for a tune up, we would begin with that question. How do you want to live till you die? Where are you now? Yeah. What’s changed? But with those changes, what are you capable of doing? And how do you want to live till you die?
Josh: Yeah, that’s a great question. Sorry, that’s a great question to ask even if you’re not at a place where you, you know, are anticipating your own death or you have like a chronic disease or something that’s terminal.
Yvonne: Yeah, someone with depression, someone with anxiety, someone who’s in a job they don’t like. Yeah. I just want to live.
Josh: Yeah.
There’s a lot of power in that.
Yvonne: So that particular question and being able to ask it of that client and her response to it was just one of the other things that helped me to be successful. More and more comfortable all the time about talking about death and dying and certainly the residents in the retirement community did I was up on the third floor.
My door was always often open. Rather sooner or later, somebody would walk in and I could tell they had something that they wanted to say and I closed the door and said, tell me, Yvonne, I want to go. Tell me about that. Tell me what makes you say that. Yeah, I’m tired. I’m tired of hurting all the time. I’m tired of missing my family.
I’m tired of not having my spouse. I’m tired of not being able to read. I’m tired of not having a purpose. I am just so ready. And a lot of times what our staff would do would be they would say something. Oh, don’t say that. We want you around. It wouldn’t be the same place. And so, and that kind of a response just quashed it.
Oh, right. And, and invalidated where that resident was at that moment.
Josh: Yeah, well, it minimizes the reality that they’re dealing with, and I could only imagine that it leads to them bypassing and not feeling really ready when that’s what they’re trying to do is become ready.
Yvonne: So there are other things in my growing up, but I think learning about that question. Learning about an advanced directive, having residents talk to me about death and dying those were all the steps that led to the writing of the first book and then following it up with the second book.
Josh: Yeah. And so do you feel like now especially after writing your books that this has become kind of a like a niche for you or just kind of where your emphasis is?
Do you feel like. You’ve developed some some passion over helping people with this particular subject area.
Yvonne: I had seen so much heartache with residents that prior to my retiring full time I took hospice training. I thought I would be really comfortable sitting with people that didn’t have anybody else. So it influenced me in that way. Now it’s. Finding places to speak. I’m associated with a hospital in our area, and I’ve gone out and done a presentation for them.
I’ve done 1 for Sotomayor. I talk, I talk at libraries. I talk at retirement.
For me, I’ll take it to what I say about grieving. I do grieve the loss of my father. I sat, I sat with our dog the other night listening to some classical music and I became a puddle, just a puddle. But paradoxically, on the other side of that, there is this joy. This sacredness, this love that I get from my father because he trusted me, he trusted me with his last journey.
What can be better than that?
So, so I call it in my book, The Divine Paradox, and this is in Dying with Dad, that doing something so difficult created something so beautiful. I can look at the picture of my father and mother, and it’s right over here on my desk, and I see my dad smiling, and there’s a joy that I experience when I see that smile.
I know it.
Josh: Doing something so difficult created something so beautiful, and it would have been missed
would have been
Yvonne: absolutely I’ve been through some experience experiences in life. That has to be the most sacred one I’ve ever been through, and so that, that resonates with me all of the time. Sure. You know, there’s, I don’t have any regrets. Yeah. A I got to know the father in a, my father in a way. I wanted to get to know him through book number one, and, and then, Participating being being an equal participant and equal partner when he went, that’s, that’s just so sacred.
Josh: Yeah, we, we often will try to insulate ourselves from that. Experiences that are difficult or uncomfortable, not realizing that there’s a cost to that.
And that doesn’t have to just do with, with death losses, because there’s lots of, lots of types of loss that we experience. Do you find that when it comes to loss in general, that But people who try to avoid dealing with it or talking about it I mean, do you feel like they miss out in, in seeing things more clearly or experiencing those, that something beautiful in other ways as well? A book has come across my desk that I now recommend to every client I see, and that’s Susan Cain’s Bittersweet. And in it, she talks, she starts out by talking about the classical music that she would listen to that would bring her to tears.
Yvonne: And the people that were surrounding her just said, why do you do that? Why do you listen to things that bring you to tears? And her response, she says, the music’s so beautiful. The music is just so beautiful. So that led her to thinking about that contradiction, or what I would call a paradox. And in her book, Bittersweet, she explores it.
And she explores it in such a way. That my hope is people who read it will not shy away from feeling the sadness, from feeling the regret, from feeling all of the downside, because in allowing to feel that, and allowing to speak it, The other side of the coin is this beauty, and I’ll give you an example. I lost my brother in 1978.
He was 26 years old, car accident, and he and I had been together in Pittsburgh with his girlfriend and one of my good friends. And I called him after I got home from our visit on a Sunday, or I called my, I called my girlfriend and I said, tell Mark I had a wonderful time. And she said, no, she said, I’m going to hand you the phone.
You can tell him yourself. So, he and I were talking about what a great time we had. We need to spend more time like that together. It was just a real hoot. And he said to me, he said, I love you sis. And I said, and I love you. That was the last time we talked. So, not holding back on those kinds of things is.
Really important to me because I understand my parents didn’t get that. My brother and sister didn’t get that. So in my grieving processes, as hard as it was, he and I had ended our conversation was saying, I love you. Now, here’s the spin off. Of course. I told my parents that, of course, I told my brother and sister that we never were.
We never ended a phone call. We never ended a visit. We never ended anything without verbally saying, I love you. Because what it taught us was, we may never have that chance. So, that’s the other thing that happens when we open up to the hard side of life. And we kind of need it head on. Is we create for ourselves opportunities to experience bliss.
Josh: Right. Yeah, that’s so powerful. In the way that I kind of compare this in counseling sometimes is, is when people try to avoid those lows, they miss out on the full range of, of emotion. And sometimes I think what happens is when you don’t feel the lows, your highs are not as high. And eventually what we end up having is what, instead of kind of like a, like an EKG where we’ve got ups and downs, it gets more flat.
Mhm. And we know what flatline means, right? That means death. And that’s how people, sometimes people live more dead than alive because they, they don’t let themselves feel those lows.
Yvonne: And I tell people that negative feelings are simply stop signs. So play along with me, Josh. What do you do when you’re driving and you get to a stop sign?
Josh: I’m supposed to stop.
I do. I stop. Sometimes it’s more rolling than actual stop. But yeah, I slow down and I pause and then I move through the intersection.
Yvonne: Okay. What do you do once you’re stopped?
Josh: Look both ways. Make sure it’s my turn to go.
Yvonne: And your reason for looking both ways?
Josh: Just to stay safe. I don’t want to get, I don’t want to harm anybody.
I don’t want to get hurt.
Yvonne: So here’s the deal.
Negative feelings are just internal stop signs. They are meant to make us stop. I’m angry. Why am I angry? Da da da da da da da. What do I need to do to bring the prefrontal cortex in the line to think because it can be hijacked when feelings are really intense. So you bring the prefrontal cortex in line and you say, what do I want to do?
And for me, how do I want to handle the anger according to the value system that I hold dear? Right. And if I don’t acknowledge that feeling, I could be blowing right through that intersection and getting creamed and then wondering what in the heck happened.
Josh: Right. Yeah. That’s a great analogy. So much good there.
So do you think that, you know, as therapists do you think a lot of therapists know or are equipped to adequately help people work through their grief?
Or maybe a better way of asking.
Yvonne: Yeah, go ahead. I’ll go back to this. When I was in grad school, it was the summer course and I came to school early and there was a bunch of my classmates sitting in a circle and we were talking about existential psychology. , they were rather, well, I don’t care what I feel.
I don’t care that I know who I am. I don’t need to be self-aware to be a therapist. And I remember thinking, holy mackerel, if, if you can’t do those kinds of things, what kind of a therapist are you gonna be? I think that by going through the things that we do in a healthy way, , we are far more prepared to be better for our clients.
Far more prepared.
Josh: I agree. 100%. 100%. And so maybe what the application of that is, that if, if therapists have not spent time attuning to their own losses or their own grief, or how to sit with those difficult and uncomfortable emotions, how can they help people? Well, to, to deal with their own impending death or, or other losses.
Yvonne: My mother died in 2002. And the first thing that I did when I got back home after the funeral was I picked up the phone and called a therapist. And, and I did that because. It never occurred to me that I was going to be without a mother, and I just felt so loosey goosey with that concept that I knew. Now, my husband is compassionate and my friends are compassionate, but I wanted that object, that objectivity.
To help me to deal with that situation so that I didn’t things that didn’t need to be put on my family.
Josh: Yeah, I think that that’s a lot of a lot of therapists are hesitant to seek their own therapy for some reason. I don’t know. I know there’s a lot of reasons for that. But having that as a resource to help you deal with your own stuff I think so, so important. Wow. Well, Yvonne, this has been really great. You’ve got some, some deep wisdom.
That’s hard thought. Hard one. Thank you for sharing that with us today. Oh, you’re welcome. Yeah. Suppose people wanted to you know, ask questions or they’ve got something else that they’re interested in hearing about. What’s the best way for them to, to reach you?
Yvonne: My email is fairly easy. It’s Yvonne, Y V O N N E, author.
A U T H O R, the number four, at gmail. com. Okay. And maybe you can put that in the show notes. Sure. YvonneAuthor4@gmail.com. And Flying with Dad and Dying with Dad are on the market. I talk about independent bookstores. If there’s an independent bookstore that you are really fond of, they’ll order it for you.
Perfect. But you can, you can also get either of the two books at any online retailer. Okay.
Josh: Awesome. Awesome. And that’d be a way that they can not only hear more, but also support your work and, and tap into maybe some of their own grief and how they can help the people that they might be working with.
Yeah. Well, thank you again so much for joining me today. I’m going to be sitting with a lot of what you said, cause I think it’s, it’s so good, especially just this question of. How do you want to live until you die? What, what a great question to ask for the rest of my day, right? How do I want to live until I die today?
Yeah. Yeah. That’s so great. All right.
Yvonne: Thanks again. Thank you.