Brian Sightings

Dealing with loss often teaches us how to live more fully in times of spiritual peace. Since losing Brian Katie, Stacy and I often have chances to relate times when we feel Brian's presence or notice an effect of his short 24 years on this planet. We affectionately call these moments Brian Sightings.

When I am in a place of perfect natural beauty I pause and inhale and look around. When Gary and I went backpacking in the Rocky Mountain National Park in 2010 I walked into a lovely meadow with wild flowers and a little rabbit hopped by. I stopped and looked around as Gary kept walking enjoying the beat of my heart and the labored breathing under my backpack. The sky was blue and a gentle breeze was blowing. I thought of Brian who loved to backpack and then out of nowhere a fine mist sprinkled on my face and sparkled in the air. I laughed out loud! I was sure it was Brian splashing water on my hot face, red from the effort of hiking. I ran to catch up to Gary panting and crying a little.

My most recent Brian Sighting was not quite as profound, but still made me smile. I am retired now and do some writing for different curriculum projects in Math and Science. I often include a story problem with Brian or Stacy as the subject of the problem. They both completed original research and  I write about the hypotheses of their research when I can. This fall I wrote assessment items for Hawkes Learning Systems and wrote a simple story problem with Brian earning rates of pay at two jobs. The problem showed up on the Final Exam Review written by the Bay College Math Department! I only wrote it a couple of months ago!

The realization of the blessing of being open to these little nuances of the presence of souls who have touched my soul is not limited to those who are dead. I also have this experience for people who I used to work with or travel with. The connection with people is lovely. I am not a social butterfly, but when I find someone that I resonate with I find they often expand my way of seeing the world.

When Stacy was little she used to love watching American Tale. The song "Somewhere Out There" was sung on drives to Brian's hockey games or family vacations many times. Now that she is in Brazil, I sing that song to myself often.
Somewhere Out There

Researching Our Journey

I just was looking through Brian's Chemo Blog:

I found a post by me 5 years ago:

Post a Comment On: Brian's Health Update Page

Three Years Since 50th State

When we are stressed we are often anaerobic, holding our breath without knowing it until we get a bit of a reprieve and we exhale then inhale and take in the life giving oxygen. That is what I am experiencing now that I am looking ahead to my retirement. I want to keep moving and interacting and living life to the fullest, but I will insist on pausing to breath.

My friends are mostly younger than me and don't realize that they are moving in a frenzied pace as I did without giving themselves time to inhale. I love the life that I am blessed with, but I wish that I could step back and slow things down a bit. As a young adult I felt as though my mother, teachers, and other adults were always imploring me to hurry up. I felt like a lazy sloth that could not keep up with the pace of becoming an adult. I would drink coffee, Diet Coke, and Diet Mountain Dew to attempt to keep up with the pace of the life that I was living. With these aids I felt better equipped to teach, exercise, parent, house-keep and be the super-wife that would make everyone happy. Being a teacher I had the summers off, but between sports camps, manic vacations on our boat, and summer professional development opportunities I didn't feel that I had the luxury to stop.

As my children left the nest I felt the need to maintain that pace to avoid the emptiness that their independence afforded me. I filled the void with teaching and running. Setting goals for myself to run the 50 United States of America gave me a personal space to commit energy to. I felt selfish, but am wonderfully supported by Gary who still tolerates my frenzied calendar of races. It has been three years since I finished running  a marathon in all of the 50 states. I still am having a hard time ratcheting down to low gear.

In the last 5 years, I have become even more conscious of my health and the health of the planet. I also have been dealing with menopause. To tackle the weight gain and hot flashes I have made some significant health changes.

• Vegan: I have been lactose intolerant since I was pregnant with Stacy who is now 26. So modifying my diet to exclude all dairy except the most aged cheeses was pretty much part of my lifestyle. When Stacy became vegan, she taught me how significant our meat consumption was to the health of the planet. Since then I saw the Discovery Channel's Racing Extinction. They stated that for every person that changes to a vegetable based diet it is like taking 1,000 cars off of the road. This is due to methane production of livestock. 
• Reliv: This vitamin supplement has helped my recovery between races, stopped hot-flashes and reduces brain fog making it's way into my neural networks. 
• Training: I have reduced the number of miles that I run. I get up at least 3 days a week with the sun, or in the winter before the sun comes up, to run with Krista Maline. My weekly mileage ranges from 15-36 miles. I give myself more rest days. 
• Emotional Health: In life I have felt like a plodder trying to amp up my output

Reflecting on Reflections

Yesterday I posted one of Brian's blogs about him wrestling with Bertrand Russell on the nature of and the existence of God. I read and reread what he wrote contemplating the relevance of it with the journey that he had not taken nor could have even foreseen.

It was on my mind when my friend Jane called:

I have been planning on taking a road trip with my wonderful and amazing friend Jane. She is a huge inspiration to me helping to motivate me through the fear of the emotion of being vulnerable and sharing a deeper look into my life. We were planning on taking her 4-year old dog Rex who had been diagnosed with lymphoma to Florida for therapy.

He did not make it. Yesterday, on Brian's birthday she called me. Her heart had broken. Rexxie made it home from the hospital and was only home for a few minutes when he quit breathing. My empathy for her situation was not lost on her as she screamed and cursed at God for allowing such a pure and innocent creature to be taken from her. No being as perfect as him deserved death. She had planned on fixing him and letting him heal in the Florida sun next week. She blamed him, but also blamed herself: "I am an unfit mother. He was going to make it. Why didn't I just start CPR? His head went limp on my lap!"  Her raw emotion flowed over my soul as I tried to find words to console her, knowing that those words did not exist.
One conclusion that she drew was difficult for me to comprehend much less find a way to defend against. She felt that since God took the very best from her, and left her ex husband alive to enjoy his material things, that he was rewarding the wicked materialistic humans and punishing those of us who found mortal souls to love deeply. The argument against this sentiment that I brought up was that those people who find pleasure and satisfaction in the material world do not know that joy that a pure and deep love that cannot be quantified by money can bring. She said that that sucks because those people just keep doing what they do, driving their BMWs and Jaguars and buying their big houses, unhurt by losing the very dearest ones they know. She compared her feelings of loss to hell, and what else could God do to her that would be worse than this? I was speechless. I let her talk, hoping that knowing that I heard her and shared her grief that she will eventually find peace. She has more boys (that's what she calls her rescue dogs) at home and they need her.
As difficult as it was to hear her soul wrenching sobs and her lamentations to heaven, part of me wanted to join the chorus and add my verse to the painful litany. I don't believe that God gave me my lovely son just to take him away, but the little girl in me wants to say whenever I get something nice it always gets ruined. And listening to Jane pound her own chest cursing herself for not being a good mother, makes my blood run cold and I understand the guilt that I own. I also have this terror that I will lose Stacy, because of my inadequacy as a parent. This is a completely irrational fear as she is a competent, beautiful young woman who is realizing her dreams, but I still feel afraid that I will get another phone call that will end my life.

365 Days of Reflection

http://emailbri.blogspot.com/2006/11/my-wrestling-match-with-bertrand.html

Brian wrote about his wrestling match with philosopher Bertrand Russell I think I will let his words speak for themselves. Again this was BC, BC: Brian Charles, Before Cancer.

My life has been so blessed with two amazing children. As I retire and take advantage of the opportunity to reinvent myself I want to pledge to daily post some tidbit of wisdom inspired by love.

Ecology of My Soul

I have spent the last week in a arid desert climate. I met a young doctor of acupuncture on my flight Anchorage in June. I asked her what she would recommend for a woman going through men
to help in menopause. She said that in this transitional period of a woman's life she is drying up. Dry skin, hair and vagina, Ha, ha I know... not what I expected to hear (although I can't deny the manifestations of the physical being). She recommended avocados, water, flax seeds, chia, and soy. All of these find their way into my vegan lifestyle but it made me giggle to think that this doctor implied that menopause implied a drying up of my physical form.
When I found myself in the desert, in an environment that caused me to dehydrate with every breath, it made me more sympathetic to the arid environment that I had always avoided and squinted at when I was required to face it. Animals that are adapted to the dry environment are nocturnal to avoid the suns rays, too intense to be active during the day. As I am challenged by my menopausal consequences ( I hate to call them symptoms, because that implies a pathogenic origin and it is not a pathogen), I find a kinship with the desert creatures. The night used to offer sleep and regeneration of life giving energy, now I battle to sleep after the sun goes down, Restless legs, hot flashes and my brain refuses to turn off and allow the subconscious to take over, leading to mornings that I wake with the sunlight feeling unquenched but restless.
I saw some scorpions on the road close to the finish line yesterday at the Extraterrestrial Full Moon Midnight Marathon in Rachel, Nevada. Normally they would have creeped me out, but they managed to adapt to an arid environment and my crunchy dry menopausal soul respected their ability to crawl around in the desert with their little poison points at the end of their curved tails and find a way to survive. Speak softly and carry a big stick.
Wisdom of the Day: Eat Avocados!