Tribute to Hillary

Sugata and I did our 2nd Triathalon together this weekend in Carpenteria, CA.  We decided to join in with many others in this event to remember our friend Hillary who died earlier this year in a cycling accident.  She was an incredible athlete (along with her husband Brent) and it was an honor to be a part of such a great event.  T-shirts had been designed and made for everyone involved and so as the race ensued, I passed many people I didn’t know who, like me had Hillary’s memorial shirt on, and often we called out to each other HILLARY!  The shirt had a great design on the front, but the back in my mind was even better.  It showed a glowing picture of Hillary in her bike gear with her normally huge smile, so that all could see the beautiful woman we were there to remember.

I had a moment of grief well up on the beach at the race start. All of us in the race were in our wetsuits getting ready to head into the ocean waves.  I had just said goodbye to Sugata as he got into his wave and Brent came by.  Just seeing him there, I was so overcome by the pain of his loss.  Tears flooded up.  I know we never fully understand the unique loss of another, but there is also that universal experience of grief that I touched into, just knowing the pain of losing my brothers Spencer and Drew and my Dad – all young too… like Hillary. It is so hard to accept sometimes that there are no guarantees in life and we never know day to day if we have 1 or thousands of days left to journey.  I just send my loving support to Brent and Hillary’s families as they walk through their grief.  I honor Hillary for her great smile, competitive streak and joy for the outdoor adventures of life. May her spirit of joy for life live on in all of us who knew her.

I just choose now to live in that uncertainty without any more fear of pain and a willingness to just experience all that that has, does and will make up my life.  I simply want to be able to look back and feel complete in having lived with my heart wide open and without regrets.  May I pass that to my children somewhere along the way, as I know they struggle to feel safe in this regard having seen their Uncle Drew walk out the door and not come back home. We miss you Drew. We miss you Hillary. Good bye for now.

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Namaste from Drew

I created a piece of artwork I call The New Heart that symbolizes how my brother Drew gave me a tremendous gift in his death. Drew was my baby brother, 14 years younger than me. He came to live with our family during 2005 for a short time while preparing for grad school. At the time, we had no idea what a blessing it was going to turn out to be. I just thought it would be great to have him around and get to know him as an adult finally.
Before living with us, I mostly had memories of Drew as a baby and child. Our age difference and the size of our family limited how close our connection was. (There were 8 children originally but that expanded to 12 with my mom’s remarriage and the adoption of 2 more). The few months in 2005-06 when he lived with us, built my stockpile of memories to overflowing in comparison to what I had before. I got to see his kindness, gratitude, silliness, sense of humor, love of books and music, passion for conservation, and so many other simple things in life. I got to see him play with my children, fall in love for a short time again, play the guitar, hear his big strong laugh and struggle with a variety of things.
Then one day I heard him walk out our door to take a jog. My daughter begged me to take her somewhere and minutes later we found ourselves at an emergency scene down the street. I stopped to see if I could help and discovered Drew fallen on the sidewalk leaving this life. In the days after Drew died, I ran by the spot where he died and cried over and over. Sometimes having to stop and sit on the curb until I was done. Then I began to dialogue with Drew about my grief, my love for him, what I wished I had done, what I was glad we did do, and so on. Many times I felt Drew’s presence with me running by my side sending me comfort and love back in return. One of the images that most stuck with me from these experiences is a mental impression of him standing at the sidewalk where he died, holding his hands together, palms facing each other, in front of his heart, in the position that people do when they say “Namaste.”
Namaste is roughly translated to be a sign of greeting that conveys ‘the divine in my soul honors the divine in yours.’ As he honored my soul, I caught vision of how I could honor it too – by living with an open heart. I realized I could not protect myself in life by being closed or attempting to shield my heart from pain. I saw that a life lived without regret meant to be willing to be vulnerable and open my heart to all life has to offer – the joy and the pain. This small recognition had a huge effect on my ability to heal and live with more purpose and meaning. I created this piece to remember the lesson I learned that day. The outer portion of the piece represents the enlarged heart that led to his death, the hands represent Drew’s offering me a gift. The gift is represented by the small, new heart, symbolizing the new open-hearted way of life that he inspired in me. Thank you Drew. May I always live with an open heart and be present to receive all the gifts that life has to offer me.

Ceramic Piece: The New Heart

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Tears at the Triathalon

Yesterday I did my first triathalon, to commemorate turning 40 this year. It was a great experience but what I wanted to share here is one of those sudden moments of healing that come in the least expected ways. Halfway through the event, after I had already finished a 1/2 mile ocean swim and biked nearly 18 miles, I passed a biker on the side of the road laying flat on his back. He was surrounded by emergency personnel and an ambulance was across the street. I managed to catch a glimpse of him and see that he was breathing and it even looked like he was able to talk. That was a relief of course.

As I sped by, suddenly I was completely overcome by a rush of memories of when my brother Drew died. The scene was not completely the same, but it was enough to trigger a watershed of grief. I was right back there at the scene in our neighborhood where he had collapsed on a roadside, where we had circled around him trying to get him breathing again, where the ambulance had come to rush him to the hospital, where in the end we had to accept that he was physically not going to live.

I had the experience of just breaking into huge sobs right then without warning. I did my best to just allow myself to cry and let it out. After a while, I passed a camera man and tried to smile though it anyway. That might be a strange picture in the end, but for me it was a moment of allowing my healing to show up where ever it wanted. I guess yesterday, that moment of healing was on my bike along the Pacific Coast Highway.  Wow, did it surprise me in coming up and in how intense it was.  I remember it now to honor that feeling and to remember that although it hurts it is a sign of the great love we shared for each other.  Drew I miss you.

If you want to hear the other details of my triathalon you can read them at my other blog http://embracingyourpath.blogspot.com/

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My Journey With Grief

I’ve been fairly well acquainted with being a griever during my life. It started with a phone call from my mom during my freshman year of college to tell me my father had developed a brain tumor. We watched him deteriorate over the following year while enduring radiation, a little chemo and surgery. He died young, just 44 years old. I was the second oldest of eight children, six of them still at home as dependents. My mom was immediately consumed with learning to make a living and raising the younger children alone. My Dad had a big, dynamic personality in my world, so there was a black hole felt in my life on many levels. It felt like a dismantling of the family to me. I wandered on through college, fairly depressed and married a couple years later, happy to have found love and to be starting a new life.

Shortly after my marriage, while both my husband and I were in graduate school together, we received another unthinkable phone call. My brother Spencer had disappeared and was discovered dead at the bottom of a cliff after going out hiking alone late in the day in an unfamiliar canyon. He was just 21 years old, newly in love and had just embarked on his dream to attend violin-making school. We suspect he was affected while climbing by a heart murmer he had. I felt so heartbroken that there was so much he was never to experience in life. I struggled through my 2nd year of grad school and went on as best as I knew how.

Ten years later my youngest brother Drew died from an undetected heart condition while living with me, my husband and three daughters in 2006. I can’t even explain how shocked I was to be facing death again. It was just a few days shy of his 24th birthday and he was preparing to go to graduate school in environmental sciences. In a way I felt like a 2nd mother to Drew due to the gap in our ages and nature of our relationship. Each morning when I woke up and re-remembered he was gone, my heart just sank in my chest.

They were all deep losses in my life but there was a teaching I saw clearly in my experience with Drew’s death that I did not see or embrace with the others. His death became a catalyst for waking me up to living life fully, with purpose. I had already recognized that my life was not what I wanted before he died. I had taken up a new spiritual path by leaving my traditional religious upbringing. I quit my job after building a 10-year career in the corporate world and I went back to school to study Spiritual Psychology. So it wasn’t as if I wasn’t trying. Nevertheless, somewhere in the deep grief I felt over his death and all that I wished had been different between us or what I’d wished we’d had more of — I felt this recognition that I was not being fully true to myself.

Someday, my life was going to end, perhaps even abruptly like Drew’s, and I knew I had not yet released all my fears and given life my greatest dreams and passions. Life was still passing me by in a reduced form of what it could be. This recognition turned out to be a gift, a huge one. It was the beginning of truly acknowledging that I was the only one that was responsible, and I was the only one in the way. But, that is the beautiful thing about taking full responsibility for your life – it means you can change it.

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