Yesterday I was at Hospice House, making my phone calls and ran into an experience I've not yet had. Well, at least via Hospice.

I'm going to backtrack a little, if you don't mind. An ex-boyfriend of mine used to refer to my habit of doing this as "going around the block and coming in the back door". Sometimes my thoughts are very scattered and it takes me a while to put them together. Anyway, I read an article in Oprah last month that described me exactly. This woman said she wrote so she'd know what she was thinking. As succinct as that is, it perfectly describes why I write sometimes.

Often, I feel agitated, or sad, or any of the other various emotions but can't put my finger on it until I start writing. Some of my blog posts have started out as one thing and ended as something vastly different. Sometimes, so different that I'm compelled to change the title of the post.

I've mentioned this before, that I'm not often very good with verbal communication, especially when it's something very important to me. It's because my thoughts are all up in my head, swimming around like alphabet soup. Writing out my thoughts, then putting them in some sort of order usually gives me the answer(s) I was looking for, or at least explains to me why I'm feeling a certain way.

I even have a book lurking on my hard drive, but like the thoughts in my brain, it's so jumbled right now that it's nowhere near ready for editing or publishing. I believe (and have been told) it's compelling, and the message behind it is important, but I have to wait until I feel up to organizing it so it makes sense to the reader.

So, onto yesterday's experience.

I love it when I have the opportunity to talk to several family members. It gives me more insight to family dynamics than if I'd of just talked to one person. The difficult part of this is that I cannot tell one family member that I've talked to another family member because what I do falls under HIPAA laws. For example; a daughter was worried that her mother wasn't doing enough to handle her grieving. I had just talked to the mother prior to this call and knew that she was going to one of our seminars as well as had just signed up for a six week group. I knew that her mother was doing a lot to care for herself, but I couldn't reassure the daughter. That's difficult for someone like me, because I am such a caretaker. I wanted to be able to reassure her, but couldn't.

The call I was referring to at the beginning of this post really tested my resolve to separate my personal life and feelings from my Hospice experiences. The person on the other end of the call said that she was handling the death of our patient OK, but wanted to know if we had any books on grieving a child that was given up for adoption. We went on to talk about this topic for over a half an hour, and I knew that I could not talk about my personal experiences or share with her resources that I'm aware of to help her find her child. I had to watch what I said very, very carefully.

My job yesterday was that of a grief volunteer, not adoption resource. I suspect that giving her any information outside of those boundaries would have violated some type of rule and I was not willing to put my organization in jeopardy.

I sent her some booklets on grieving and wrote her a little note that after reading through them, I felt she could replace the word 'death' with 'adoption' in her mind as she read the literature. I sent my thoughts her way as I sealed and addressed the packet, and I wished for her that she finds what she is looking for.

Days like yesterday make me realize that I cannot save the world. I must do what I can within the opportunity and boundaries that I'm given. The important part is to learn to accept those boundaries and move on.