Involuntary Membership Program (IMP)
The Clubs Nobody Wants to Join
Many people are members of a frequent flyer program. If your business requires that you fly a lot, or if you happen to make several long-distance flights, you'll be rewarded. You'll be encouraged to join, and your loyalty will mean benefits accrue at some point in the future. Just before COVID, I had achieved Gold Status. As sad as this sounds, I wrung all I could out of the lounge access and loved the ability to legally jump queues getting on a plane. No travel during COVID put my Gold Status to the sword, and now I'm just like everybody else travelling on planes.
I strategically chose to join this frequent flyer program, knowing that I could gain the status to allow me special treatment compared to most of my fellow travellers. This is why we join clubs and organisations. With an investment, we see some exclusive benefits for us down the road. However, there are a few programs that we unwittingly join where there are no benefits to be gained in the short or long term. This club will give you the feeling of exclusivity from many in society, but no one else wants your status.
Involuntary Membership Program
An IMP, or "Involuntary Membership Program," is a conceptual term that I use to describe a profound and unwelcome transformation that occurs after experiencing a deeply traumatic event.
The Involuntary Membership Program (IMP) I'm talking about is losing a child. There's something peculiar about this loss that differentiates it from how other deaths are perceived. This has taken me many years to understand and adapt to this. In the beginning, I found it incredibly hard, and how or if I shared my membership of the Child Loss IMP felt very haphazard on my part. As time has progressed, I have to manage other people when I share the news. I must pick my audience carefully and not expect anything like a normalised reaction from them. The only comparison I can think of is sharing with a person you had spent time in prison with for a crime. It would beg lots of questions that they may or may not ask. I'm not comparing losing a child to being a criminal. It's that most of us don't meet many convicted criminals in our day-to-day lives. When we find this out, we don't really know what to do with the information. It demands a follow-up question from you that you probably don't really want to know the answer to.
Upsetting Conversations
This IMP that you've joined can sometimes be very interesting to others, but also have the potential of upsetting them. It takes some social grace to work out how much of the conversation should be extended without disturbing any of the participants. A kind person won't want to upset the person who has lost a child. A slightly unkind person will want to avoid the bereaved parent getting emotional on them. This is the time we all want an AI Chatbot to take over our conversations. ChatGPT, if prompted correctly, will deal with these situations much better than most of us. Many of our face-to-face conversations have boundaries or edges that we comfortably sense without crossing too many red lines. If you're talking to a person of a particular age, then we can make certain assumptions or even see fit to check these assumptions as any conversation proceeds. Sometimes it can be very hard to judge where certain boundaries may be.
Meeting People for the First Time
I'll give you an example. I caught up with some friends in the city last week. They had invited an extended member of their family whom I had never met. I'll call him John for the sake of this article. John appeared to be a decent man who conducted himself in a very socially acceptable manner within the group. Once you realised what job he had, it was clear why he was good at talking to people and would try to hold a conversation on most topics whilst being self-aware enough not to cause any unnecessary offence.
Most people at the table were in their 50s. One of the main topics for this demographic is looking after elderly parents. If your parents are alive and you're in this age bracket, most of them will fall between 75 and 85 years old. At this age in life, older people will need a bit more support, or even a lot of care; they may be moving into age care facilities. Often, they're being diagnosed with chronic conditions that may not kill them but will reduce their capacity. Nothing I've written here sounds unreasonable, and when John, whom I had just met, turned to me and asked if my parents were still alive and if so, how they were doing, I didn't think anything of it. I told him my mother was still alive and well, but my father was deceased. When asked, I gave one of several expected responses to his reasonable line of questioning. I had shared with him a very tragic event in my life: the loss of an aging parent to a chronic condition. Both of us felt a level of comfort discussing this even though we had just met.
Questions You Don't Think About
John didn't ask how many children I have and are they all alive. This would have been strange to me and the rest of the group listening in to our conversation. I imagine he wouldn't have thought that he would have to ask questions like this. What he didn't realise was that I was making a conscious effort to steer the conversation away from clarifying how many kids I have by never asking him about his children. I tried to weave a web through the evening in which I didn't leave an opening to have to reveal my membership of a certain IMP. I didn't want him to start making up exclusive questions for me that would make him and the group feel uncomfortable. Sometimes it's easier to avoid this for everyone involved, including yourself. I have learnt to make these different mental calculations about any new person I meet. Is it worth discussing certain topics. This has taken time and I discussed it in the article "When the Numbers Count."
A Permanent Shift
This IMP creates a permanent shift in your perception of what "normal" life is. Once enrolled, an old person you love dying is sad, but you're far more aware of much sadder things. The trick for me is to remind myself that these people aren't enrolled in the IMP and what the benefit is for myself and others in sharing information about its existence. This isn't merely an intellectual understanding as I'm making it sound. It is a persistent emotional awareness. The world is suddenly viewed differently, and there's a disconnect from others who seem unable to perceive the same as you. This new paradigm is an inability to live in denial about our ultimate fate. Sometimes we talk about our parents’ demise like it will never happen to us because we are their children. I do hope that most people can die and the worst grief they will experience will be losing their parents. This isn't the case for many of us, yet we can all strangely cling to this comfortable belief.
I do think it's important to reflect on all the IMPs that exist and who may or may not be members of this group. People can lose a parent at a young age; they may have major health conditions that aren't immediately apparent, or live in a warzone and witnessed horrific things. I must have had many conversations with people in my company and not realised this. There is one thing, though, that I cannot easily accept. It might be a lifelong challenge I may never overcome. Parents who have lost their children do suffer terribly, but the person who has suffered the most is the thing in their lives they love beyond anything. The one thing that can make any suffering seem worth the struggle… their child.