The 'how' of coping

‘How did you cope?’ Well, I said deflecting, the food was always good. ‘Dad! I’m serious. How?’

We are out for dinner in the city where she is at university, and I do, of course, owe my eldest daughter an answer. There’s little point in my commissioning articles by lawyers for World Mental Health Day that laud the importance of openness on the topic if I can’t answer her.

Not least, she was there for it all – a period (2007-2020) that included, when she was four, the birth of her sister who, it turned out, was complexly and severely disabled. For years her sister was often unhappy, uncomfortable and difficult to manage, and had many difficult hospital appointments and admissions.

What else? There was her grandmother, my mother’s, 13 years of treatment for terminal cancer; my grandmother’s dementia; seemingly daily battles with public services. My eldest daughter was there because, well, where else would she be?

I type none of that looking for sympathy. Being someone who can mostly move work around to find time for a coffee or a walk with them, I know friends and the contacts I deal with have to cope with all kinds of things.

But it is context for my reply. The ‘how’ of ‘cope’, in my head at least, involves resilience. So here’s what I said.

Resilience isn’t just something you have, or don’t have, though people often talk about it as if it is. Neither is it the ability to give yourself a personal pep talk.

Some people start with more resilience than others for all sorts of reasons – but in using your resilience, you are depleting it. Some people burn through it faster than others, but for everyone, it is something that needs topping up.

Her sister meant we circled the wagons a bit, but we never stopped seeing friends (though for practical reasons, we then tended to do this separately – special needs childcare can be difficult to source). On holiday, if you can’t always go down the beach to the sea together, you take it in turns – but you still go down to the sea.

You triage what’s important to you, and try to find ways to fit it in. That’s about attaching value to something other than problems.

Work was important, always. And I’ve always had jobs where I have a high degree of control over my work – and trust, and (mostly) respect from those I deal with. (If I interviewed you during that time, or you asked me to do things, or got in touch with story ideas, then thank you.)

When I lost my job, editing a legal magazine which folded at the height of the global financial crisis, I found people spoke up for me and I found work. Lots of work, and eventually conversations that led me to the Gazette. This was heartening for me.

We talk about work/life balance – of the two, I always thought work was the easier side of the equation, but it still had to be right, feel worthwhile and be rewarding.

My mother’s cancer treatment was at UCHL, Bloomsbury, and once at the Gazette, with the editor’s permission, I’d take a long lunch break to sit with her and chat during her weekly chemo sessions. Having the flexibility to do that was important.

What else? I think it helps to feel there is a way of understanding any testing position you’re in – a way of thinking about it. Around 2009, I pulled War and Peace off the shelf (an incredibly easy read – it just happens to be long).

I related to the group at the heart of Tolstoy’s account – young people who go into adulthood with high expectations that are whipped away from them by events. They (with one exception) come out the other side – challenged, changed, a bit damaged, but still standing with their integrity intact. They have learned what to trust and see that fairly clearly. The drama of the comparison I drew appealed to me.

Sometimes I wrote about what was going on – not for public consumption, but because I know words are how I order my world.

My grandmother took a long time dying from dementia, which she did in 2016. Caring for her also used up a great deal of my mother’s periods of remission (in one tragi-comic week, they were in different wards of the same hospital – me flitting between floors). My mother died in a hospice in 2020 (middle of the pandemic), which is when I end the period I’m reflecting on.

We always, I told my daughter, tried to be honest with you about what was going on. Children are clever. They can tell when something’s wrong, but in the absence of a reason, they might blame themselves. And they need a sense that there is some sort of plan, which we tried to convey. We tried to make sure you had proper attention too.

As a postscript, there is an awful lot that is easier now. Life’s never simple, but mostly it’s a time to put some capital back in the ‘resilience bank’.

Talking about mental health, destructive stress and resilience in the legal sector, there are lessons I draw from my experience as firms and legal departments increasingly declare what they are doing to support their people.

There are a few things I try to judge those efforts against. An atmosphere where openness is important, but it is not enough. Their people will cope better with the challenges and the stress they face if they are respected, trusted and have good control over how they order the things they have to do.

Sympathy is fine, but flexibility is also needed. Credit for achievements is helpful. This year LawCare has focused its campaign on the need for good management to support staff and lawyers’ wellbeing. That’s absolutely spot on.

I think, as noted above, that very little of all this is about giving yourself a pep-talk. But some of it is about giving yourself and others credit for what is done well, not least because it is important to feel something productive has come from the sheer effort put into managing and balancing difficult things.