Stop being afraid of saying the wrong thing to your friends with chronic illness
Welcome to Dear Nina, conversations about friendship. I’m your host, Nina Badzin. I’ve been writing about friendship since 2014, and I’ve been leading writing groups in Minneapolis since 2015, which is where I met today’s guest, Jennifer Cramer-Miller.
You know those articles and memes that are everywhere reprimanding us about what NOT to say to a friend who is going through a hard time of any kind? Jennifer is here today to say THE OPPOSITE of that. She’s urging us to stop being afraid of saying the wrong things to friends with chronic illness or friends dealing with anything else.
Your friends will never say the perfect thing! WE will sometimes say the “wrong thing” to our friends. And I agree with Jennifer that we need to leave so much more room for people to say the imperfect thing and then LET IT GO.
Meet Jennifer Cramer-Miller
Jennifer is an author, speaker, and four-time kidney transplant recipient. Diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease at 22 and then experiencing the weight and relief of four transplants has given Jennifer a way of seeing life and the people in it that I could not wait to share with listeners.
Jennifer’s memoir, Incurable Optimist: Living with Illness and Chronic Hope is available now where books are sold. She also has lots of essays all over the place but some examples— Zibby Mag, Brevity,Grown & Flown, Star Tribune, and Minnesota Physician— some of which were started in our ModernWell Writing Group!
Find Jennifer on her website, and on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
About the book:
Spanning two-plus decades, this family love story explores loss and acceptance, moving forward with uncertainty, and finding resilience. Four kidney transplants later, Cramer-Miller is here to shine a bright light on people helping people in difficult times with a story that will make you want to hug the humans you love. Because sometimes it’s the sorrows that threaten to break us apart that ultimately unite us in hope.
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A few links mentioned in the episode:
- The National Kidney Foundation for information on becoming a living donor
-
The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness by Robert Waldinger M.D. and Marc Schulz Ph.D
- The guest spot I mentioned was on The Untitled Gen-X Podcast where we did a deep dive into Steel Magnolias
Enjoy so many great quotes from Jennifer:
The largest theme of the book for me is this: How do we let go of the life we’ve planned and try to accept the one that we’re going to have. That’s a hard mission, and I think it’s one that many of us face. Life doesn’t always go according to plan. I think many of us learned that in many different ways, and I certainly did.
One thing I love about memoirs is if I’m in a room with a hundred people, I’m probably the only one who’s a four-time kidney transplant recipient. But I’m certainly not the only one who can speak to, yeah, things didn’t go like I thought they were gonna go, and I had to sort of figure out how to move forward with what I had to deal with.
I’m someone’s friend. I totally care about what they’re going through, and it is not a competition. If we all acted like life was a competition of who has things worse off or who has things better, it just wouldn’t work. I really have come to believe that life is a mix of beauty and bummers. That’s just what it is. If someone’s having a moment that’s their bummer, I want to know all about it. If they’re having a moment that’s their beauty, I want to know all about it. Anybody out there who thinks that you have to tiptoe around somebody else’s issues because you don’t think yours measure up, please stop that right now because that’s not a good component of friendship. Friendship should be two-sided, and we can all deal with each other’s issues together without there being any comparison.
Laughing with friends, you can’t take that away from me. I can be on the verge of kidney failure and I can still laugh with friends. If any of your listeners out there ever feel like they have something going on that’s traumatic and they just kind of want to hide away, I really encourage you to try to fight through that and let your friends be your friends because it makes such a difference to be seen and your friends, “theirness” is healing in itself.
And if you can’t talk to your friends about things that become awkward and then become funny, you’re not good friends. I think one of the biggest things about friendship is grace. Give each other grace. We don’t always say the right thing, no matter what situation we’re in, so let’s just talk about it and we can laugh about it later.
Friends are on my lucky list and there are things that can’t go away. What would we do without our friends? Friends are there to witness life with you. And I think of all the life that I’ve witnessed in my friends and what a special bond that is to have that. So my first reaction to hide was so counterproductive to friendship. Let’s just be with each other through all the hardships and the heartbreak and the humor and the hope. It’s all rolled into one and friendships can absorb all of that.
Now I live with this illness, but I don’t label myself with it. And I don’t think my friends do either. But they know that sometimes I go through something just like they do. At 22, it didn’t seem like anybody else had any issues. But now, with my friends in their forties and fifties, we all have had life happen to us. Life doesn’t discriminate and say that some people have the bummers and some people have the beauty. We all have the beauty and the bummers. We’ve helped each other now through infertility, and the loss of siblings, and life-threatening prematurity—all these things that are just life, we all go through this we need our friends. We just need our friends to support each other through all the things that we go through.
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Latest posts by Nina Badzin (see all)
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One Response
Great episode and helpful to hear of Jennifer’s experience. I just finished Abby Jimenez’s book Yours Truly – and the main character’s brother is dealing with kidney failure and dialysis. I have learned so much!