One Person's Aftermath of December 12, 2014

 Matthew Ryan Foley  

September 27, 1976 - December 12, 2014

Don't grieve for me, for now I'm free,
I'm following the path God laid for me.
I took His hand when I heard Him call,
I turned my back and left it all.
I could not stay another day,
To laugh, to love, to work or play.

Tasks left undone must stay that way,
I found a place at the close of day.
If my parting has left a void, Then fill it with remembered joy.
A friendship shared, a laugh, a kiss,
Yes these things I too will miss

Be not burdened with times of sorrow,
I wish you the sunshine of tomorrow.
My life has been full I savoured much,
Good friends, good times, a loved one's touch.
Lift up your heart and share with me,
God wanted me now He set me free.

 

 

What to do about my life?

 It is about the lack of meaning and purpose in my life. About the role of my work in my life.

 I have no energy for work. The things that are scheduled get done. Office work gets done. My client list is now eroding. Added to all that is the pressure I put on myself. I need to work as 8 years of caring for Matthew has eroded our savings. Can not bring myself to recruit. Do not know where to begin. Overwhelmed! Loss, grieving, tired of feeling sad, worried about money, can’t pick up the phone and speak to friends let alone leads. STUCK

As most of you know my son Matthew lived with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease for 8 years and he passed away December 12, 2014. I can not find words to describe how I am feeling about his death. This frustrates me because I want to be able to express the pain and sadness away. Irrational I know but I do not know what else to do. I get upset when people ask me about his death and upset when they do not ask. I was shocked at how quickly my work life resumed and at a velocity that bowled me over as clients demands seemed even greater than before Matthew died. I understand that it is their right to expect this service, but that did not make it any easier for me to get up and go.

Monica is dealing with her grieving in her way as are Sean and Adam. None of them are putting pressure on me but I can see the impact of the last 8 years and Matthew's death on their lives.

So far I try to live day by day. Some days are worse than others. On the days that I really miss Matthew it takes a lot of energy to get on with life and I am exhausted by 3:00 pm. This is when I schedule making phone calls especially to the West and never make the calls  so the list of “To Call” grows daily.

Some one advised me not to make any big life decisions and other than deciding to join a ridiculously expensive and under utilized gym membership and trainer, I have only made one work related decision and that is to take on a support program for retired professional and Olympian athletes. The latter decision has been very good for me emotionally given their enthusiasm and zest for life. 

I have referred to the pressure I put on myself to not let my family down, not to let my clients down. Most of the time when I come out of a client session I am energized and gratified by the experience. I feel that I cannot give this up, that if I do not rebuild my client roster I will be letting these clients down. However how can I recruit when I am uncertain whether I am going to continue in this work? 

There is no immediate financial danger, but if I am not renewed and recharged overtime maybe short, maybe medium, income will erode and our lifestyle will be adversely effected. Monica cannot make up for my downside. Our house and home. Wouldn’t like to lose it.

I notice that as I approach 3:00 pm each day I start to think about how good that first cocktail is going to feel. The number of cocktails has peaked, I think, as I am trying harder to control it but I only talk about giving up alcohol and I have type 2 diabetes so wouldn’t it be smart to quit?

I am weary. So much driving. Struggling to get through July as I take much of August off. No meetings.  Everyday promising I will get down to recruiting in September. Maybe. After a rest. When I get my blood sugar under control.To become engaged in life.

As you can see I am experiencing fear, anger, sadness and my intuition tells me nothing except that I am STUCK! 
  
My best outcome is that I discover a new purpose in my life that gives me passion and meaning again.

An acceptable outcome I find my way through this torpor & be the family business consultant that I think I can be. 

 My worst case would be that I do not recover from my journey of self pity…

What would you do? Or advise? Can your wisdom bring me some clarity? Are there  important questions that need asking?  Am I missing something?

I am going to work through "Life Design: Living your life by choice instead of chance" a life planning process developed by Peggy Vaughan and James Vaughan, Ph.D.

Keeo you posted. No pun intended.

Matthew and three fifths of his team.

The brothers Sean, Matthew & Adam.

Matthew & Adam at the end of the world. East coast of Newfoundland. Matthew said that he never felt so alive.

 On September 27, 2014 Matthew held an art show called "Thank You" . 28 pieces of art
using pre-digital prints from his collection. They were collaborations with one of his caregivers August Taiza. Matthew dreams and August executes. Matthew is no longer able to use his hands and arms and he speaks with extreme difficulty letter by letter and despite that he and August work as a fine tuned team. I hope to get the artist's statements scanned so that I can include them in this blog. Meanwhile here is the invitation for this show, a sell out!

Title: Mcreathswolesly Island Artwork:* Colour photograph manipulated by hand and painted using gloss medium Frame: by George Herring, in museum glass with UV protection Artist: Matthew Foley This image is a work of art by Matthew Foley. Matthew is a talented young photographer working and living since 2006, with ALS, a degenerative neural disease. He is co-resident of the artists’ community of Artscape Wychwood Barns, Toronto. This is a group of artists who help to support and look after each other in many ways. Mcreathswolesly Island captures a favourite lake of Matthew’s where he has spent many hours reflecting on nature, art and life. The piece was selected from works exhibited on the occasion of his last show at the Peter MacKendrick Community Gallery at the Artscape Wychwood Barns, September 2014. Mathews’ fellow artists felt the purchase of this piece stood as a heart-felt tribute to his remarkable courage, creativity and generosity. Matthew has learned much from his journey with ALS and advises everyone to accept the help of others when it is needed. In recognizing the vulnerabilities we share we open ourselves to greater healing and intimacy with ourselves and those around us. “I believe that by sharing my art with others in a creative community, I can inspire them to explore new horizons in terms of their own emotions, their craft, and I can be inspired by the things they have to share with me. For me, the act of creation is a sacred thing and it’s 100% positive. There’s nothing else like that in my life.” Matthew Foley From Matthew’s blogsite: http://humanzpotential.blogspot.ca/2011/02/metamorphous-of-matthew-foley-our.html

* Will be added as soon as I get a photo on file.

A Bit About me and my work...

I am dedicated to the field of leadership development. I support my clients by helping them to determine their personal and professional goals, and by emphasizing basic principles of self-awareness, self-management and personal accountability. I believe passionately that personal growth must precede professional growth. My approach generates solid strategies for change and action plans that build success.

As a certified transpersonal psychotherapist and a student of Positive Psychology, I am presently exploring opportunities that address the relationship between emotional intelligence and personal resilience. My specific accomplishments in the field of mentorship and coaching are many and contribute significant insight to my clients.

Most notably, I initiated and participated in Project Life, the first and, to date, only clinical research on the cardiac wellness of Canada’s business leaders. The study indicated that candidates whose diet, exercise and stress management interventions were supported by coaching and mentoring achieved better health results. I also developed The Resilient Leader: From Success to Significance, a program based upon the principles of Positive Psychology and designed to help business leaders embrace and build their legacy in order to find real meaning and purpose in their lives.

I founded Foley Management in 1989, a business advisory and coaching consultancy. Over the years, I have helped scores of business leaders, having participated in more than 8000 hours of one-on-one coaching and facilitated over 400 peer group sessions and workshops.

Prior to entering the field of executive development, I worked for 23 years in the broadcast industry. As corporate vice-president, I led an organization of 600 employees and was responsible for revenues in excess of $400,000,000. I have served as a member of the Board of Directors of various companies, associations and non-profit organizations.

I enjoy a wide range of avocations, particularly live theatre, having acted in several large productions including Oklahoma, The Music Man, West Side Story and The Fantastiks. Through my studies with Theatre Ontario, I have explored several dramatic disciplines including clown and mask drama, improvisation, voice, acting techniques and various scene studies including several by Shakespeare. As a result of this study and practice I co-founded the Sambrian Clowns, a theatrical group which focuses on entertaining and supporting specially challenged children.

I earned my MBA from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business and my undergraduate degree in Communication Studies from the University of Montreal.

I live in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with my life partner Monica, our 3 sons(Sean, Matthew and Adam), 3 grand children and Ben (toy poodle) and Major (Char Pei).

Facing my Demons!

As it turned out I did not have to go very far to confront my fear of death. The opportunity was right in front of me. Monica and 3 other women had founded Markham/Stouffville Hospice and they were looking for volunteers, especially men. So I started my training with great trepidation and got my first client right away. After 3 clients 2 of whom passed away as clients of mine I was advised to take a sabbatical.I will tell the story of my last hospice client. His name is Roger. He was about 45 years old a good husband and father. Roger was diagnosed with a tumour in his sinuses and shortly after meeting him he was moved into the hospital and I visited him there. I remember the day it was decided that he needed to move from chronic care to palliative care. It was December 24th. Mostly I remember Roger's excitement at moving to a new space. He was excited to see the people and the decorations on that floor. He reminded me of something that I read in Graham Green's "Travels with my Aunt". When asked if she had one year to live what would she like to do the aunt says that she would buy a castle with 365 rooms so that she could experience a different room each day and hopefully die while moving to the next room.
What did I learn about death from these wonderful people? I learned about courage, love and humour and their role in acceptance of the inevitable. I saw the fear turn to excitement in their eyes as they contemplated the next phase of life. I learned that discussing death does not have to be depressing. It can be inspirational.

What is this all about?

Well by now you have probably guessed that this is about our son Matthew's journey to the end of his life and the lesson's I am learning walking with him. It is my wish not to teach you about the lessons I learn but simply to expose them to you for you to think about on your journey. It is inevitable that each of us will wake up from this dream and experience another reality, yet we spend very little time talking about our mortality. Actually we spend much more time and effort jogging and running away from death. I do not believe that the discussion needs to be depressing or macabre, we can approach it with humour and a search for clarity. The proof of that pudding will be in the eating as my dear mother used to say.
In some ways all of my life has been preparing me for this journey with Matthew. As a young child my first experience with death was the passing away of my maternal grandmother, Pearls. I recall her with great love and affection because she treated me with great love and affection. Next my paternal grandmother,Nana, who was waked at her home. The casket was open and I recall the coolness of her skin as my father made me touch her hands. Shortly after that my paternal grandfather, Billo, followed Nana. My childhood friend Michael Brown who died on a construction site when tons of earth buried him in a foundation. In university Gail Spooner died in a car accident and as a young man my friend Sean Palmer killed himself. My mother-in-law Nora who I loved deeply came to stay with us for 3 weeks while her eldest daughter Johanna, who died of ALS, traveled to Ireland with her daughter and son-in-law. Nora was with us for a year and died with us. There were also great aunts and uncles that passed on. When I was first married to my life partner and my partner for life, Monica, I would sometimes wake up and look at her sleeping and think 'O my God we will only have 40 years together if we are lucky. I loved her so much that 40 years seemed like a very short time. I became aware that I had developed a very strong fear of death and loss.

What to do about it? About this time in my life I became interested in the eastern wisdom tradition and I read somewhere that the only way to deal with our fear is to confront it. To walk into death. But where could I confront my demons?

The Metamorphous of Matthew Foley Our Butterfly.

 From the time I was seven I had a camera in my hand, loved taking pictures of anything and eagerly waited for the film to be developed so I could see the results. However, I did not see photography as a profession until I had an opportunity to participate in the Ontario Futures Program during high school. This was the mid nineties and like many of my peers I was feeling uncertain of the direction my career should take.

The Futures Program provided me an opportunity to work as a photographer’s apprentice for three months.  That experience became the intersection of my where interest in photography crossed the realization that this was to be my chosen profession.  For the next decade I continued to develop my skills both independently and as an assistant for many well regarded professional photographers in Toronto. 

My experience with the Futures Program not only gave me the opportunity for self-expression – and with that, a sense of purpose, but a sense of gratitude for that community support.

I have approached my art and my work with a sense of sharing and ‘giving back’.  I have had the occasion to exhibit my work at the St. James Town Arts and Culture Festival. This turned our to be an important learning opportunity early in my career.   Being a young white male who grew up in the suburbs, I stuck out like a sore thumb in this high-density, deeply diverse immigrant community. The interaction I experienced in and with the community was magical.  It was then I understood that Art helps us over come many boundaries. I vividly recall the twinkling eyes of the many people who weren’t yet comfortable with their English but who responded to my work.  As for those people who I did have conversations with, I found that sharing my perspective and my inspiration enriched both of us.

After a few years of freelance photography and working as an assistant, I saw an opportunity to grow through formal learning.  I was accepted to Ryerson University’s Image Arts program, with a specialty in photography.

Ryerson was a holistic and personally rewarding experience. Our days ranged from studying production, art history and theory, to how to exhibit work and run our businesses.  It was a very fertile time, full of possibilities.  During this time I began experimenting with collage and assemblage, using my own considerable photo library. The sources included everything from family portraits and fashion to studies of the urban landscape and the characters it attracts. These lead to creating curious and sometimes edgy work with emotional heft.

Travel has influenced my work as well and I have be fortunate to enjoy New Zealand, France, Holland, England, the Caribbean and of course across Canada.

I have been very fortunate over the course of my career to work with many of the best commercial and editorial photographers in the city.  I worked on everything from product shoots to album covers to book projects (like the series on Las Vegas wedding chapels). Some of my other projects included interior design, fashion, magazine editorial, travel brochures, and documenting the work of local designers and artists. 

All of this work did more than just pay the bills – nearly every project I worked on opened my eyes to a side of life I might not otherwise have seen and gave me inspiration for my own artistic exploits.  

I have been invited to speak to classrooms high school students to share my journey and hopefully inspire them into finding their way and doing what they love.

I enjoyed many successes working in commercial photography, but my temperament is that of an artist.

I began to keep a scrapbook journal.  Before long, my scrapbooks developed into sketchbooks and my whole way of making art began to change and evolve.

I now have dozens of these books filled with several hundred collage sketches using a variety of techniques -  cutting, folding, tearing, and taping photos to create new ways of seeing what many people call “everyday” things.  The collages always had plenty of room to breathe, as they floated in the middle of a giant scrapbook page. 

Through this process I have been able to inject meaning and emotion into the images and the journals are a valuable means of self-expression that offer a unique perspective to the observer.

The smaller collages have since given way to a variety of larger-format productions: giant, thickly-laminated floor pieces, computer scans, lacquered, three-dimensional collages encased in shadow-boxes, and – my recent focus – larger scale collages on canvas, using scissors, tearing, glue, and lacquer to give my photos depth, texture, and emotional weight.  

I am also working on a collaborative project with my two brothers – a book project that marries my scrapbook entries with poems written by Sean Foley, bound in a volume designed by Adam Foley.  In the short term, we are working on a website to

showcase the project.

In summary, photography has been my calling in life; my camera has been my closest companion, my instrument of exploration and a way of working things out.

I started tearing and folding and taping original and found photographs into scrapbooks.

I filled volume after volume with my studies and collages, until each one looked and felt like a well loved, epic pop-up storybook, held together by an unchanged metal spiral. A portrait unfolded thru this process of the pressures and pleasures of this rare, flawed, and beautiful existence.

I’ve come to cherish the sense of touch, of contact with my pictures. The photographs and the feelings I have about them become more vivid as I sculpt them with my hands, find the folds and the tears, the places to cut, the parts to weld to the surface. These canvases are my carefully crafted reflections on the things I have experienced so far. Nature, relationships, pain, loss, determination, love, time, growth, change, beauty, and ugliness – these are the things I feel in my bones; they are the soul’s lifeblood; they are the ultimate unifying truth.

If my eyes, my heart, and my hands can somehow connect you to that, well then, how fortunate am I.

Present Day

My body’s capabilities are changing daily, however through out my journey on the ALS Express my mind will be untouched. I still continue to create art as best I can, and I am open to changing my media and my method as my physical needs change.

More than anything, I see my work as an open book. I have no secrets – only a way of feeling and of expressing those feelings.  My art is a growing, living thing – where it goes from here is anybody’s guess. 

I believe that by sharing my art with others in a creative community, I can inspire them to explore new horizons in terms of their own emotions, their craft, and I can be inspired by the things they have to share with me.

For me, the act of creation is a sacred thing and it’s 100% positive.  There’s nothing else like that in my life.                                                      

                                                                                 Matthew Foley, BFA                                                                                                            Toronto Ontario                                                                                                                     December 2010.

On September 27, 2006, Matthew’s 30th birthday, he first heard the diagnosis of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) or Lou Gehrig’s disease (www.alsont.ca).

In November 2006 Matthew was definitively diagnosed. ALS is a neuro-muscular disease for which there is no known cause, nor any cure. It normally affects adults between the ages of 55 and 65. The outcome over on average 3-5 years is death.

Matthew lives and works in a very special artist’s community in Toronto, known as Artscape at the Wychwood Barns, under the care of his personal care team of 4 young men who provide him with care 24 hours 7 days a week.

His courage and determination is a constant inspiration to all who know him with his many friends calling on him to support him and also to bathe in his love and compassion for them. A past love visits him with her daughter and thanks Matthew for teaching her how to love.

He is an inspiration to friends of mine who have terminal diseases. They always ask me how Matthew is doing and they tell me how thinking of him enables them to make the most of their lives.

Matthew continues to work on his art everyday except when the weather is so beautiful that he has to be outside for a prolonged time. How he works with virtually useless arms and hands I do not know. All I know is that his work is ever more beautiful and a salve for one’s troubled soul. He is planning his next show which will be his narrative on nature and how valuable it is to his well being knowing full well that what is deeply personal is also universal he believes that all will resonate with his feelings.

Early on what Matthew refers to as his journey on the ALS Express he told me that this disease has given his life meaning and purpose. An interesting reflection given that I know for a fact that he has never read Viktor Frankel’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”. In this work Frankel credits 3 sources for meaning and purpose in our lives, our work, our family and the courage with which we face adversity. There is no question in my mind that while Matthew draws meaning from his work and his family his fountainhead is his courage. 

 Matthew has made many regrettable decisions in his young life but his character values have come through unscathed and they support him on his journey.

Top Strength: Appreciation and Beauty

Second Strength: Curiosity and Interest in the World

Third Strength: Honesty, Authenticity, and Genuineness

Fourth Strength: Bravery and Valor

Fifth Strength: Gratitude

Sixth Strength: Creativity, Ingenuity, and Originality

I have noted when my mother and father passed away how odd it felt to be among people who were unaware that they had walked among us. Thank you VIA for this opportunity to let all who read this document know that Matthew is walking among us!

Brian Foley

Matthew’s Father

Toronto, ON

January 2011