HAP

The final version is posted on walkingwithjane.org this morning. Thank you all for your thoughts and guidance. It is better because of your input. Peace, Harry

Thanks. Basically, I'm just being exceedingly cautious, I guess. This is an arrow that once fired is not easily called back. Harry

Dear friends, I've added some things to my original based on what some of you have said here. I'm letting two people who do not have an emotional investment in the piece read it this weekend to make sure in my emotional state I have not ceased making sense. I've heard nothing from either since Friday, which makes me nervous. I sent it to the young woman in question as well. She is having trouble getting through it, she says. She reads a paragraph or two and cries, reads another and cries some more. She assures me it is valuable to her, but I am not sure whether it is truly helping her situation very much. I once wrote a poem that a friend told me was very good--but that she never wanted to see again because it had made the pain in it too real. Part of me is afraid I have done that here. I cannot read it myself without feeling new cracks in my heart that take me back almost to the moment my life shattered. I did the rough layout today for the page but could only do so by keeping my mind at a remove--and even then, it hurt badly enough that I have set other things aside that need doing so I can distract myself. My first rule is, "Do no harm." I worry with this that, though my intentions are good, I will do more harm than good. I know three of you have far more training in psychology than I do. So I ask, "Is this something I should share with an audience of those facing their own deaths and their caregivers? Does it provide sufficient light to make the potential pain worthwhile?" It is one thing to share this here, where we all already know this deep anguish. It may be another matter to share it elsewhere. Peace, Harry

Dear Mary, Anne, and Jan I was fine most of the time I was writing it--the gift of being focussed on the words--though there were moments I nearly broke down. But when i finished and went back through it, I cried like a baby for about ten minutes and have been weepy ever since. I am afraid I tore through a lot of scar tissue today. I have other things I need to do, but they are not getting done. Anne, I know what writing that piece cost you. Bless you. It is the Alzheimer's story for far too many. Jan, thank you for sharing the poem. It is beautiful. While I am going to send this as a reply to her note shortly, I'm not up for the challenge of layout and design tonight for the web page. That requires going in after the best quotes and figuring out where the links go--tasks way beyond my current emotional strength. Thanks for letting me share this here and risk ripping open some of our collective wounds all over again. It's been a long time since I felt this way. But as I wrote to someone earlier, this is what I signed on for the day Jane began to falter. If even one person is helped by this, it was worth the price. Peace, Harry

OK, folks, here it is. I'm emotional wrung out with this. "Everybody is dying of something," Jane's mother told us after she was diagnosed in 2004 with pulmonary fibrosis. "I just know what it is I'm dying from." Jane brought that same attitude to her own death half a dozen years later. But while both women accepted their deaths with enormous grace when they came, neither went willingly or easily. They went on their terms--and only when a fighting chance had become no chance at all. Jane and I were both convinced three days before her death that she would come home--that in February we would go to New Hampshire together and sit looking out over the lake again as we had on our honeymoon. That is not to say we were neither of us prepared for her death when it came. We had begun to prepare for that possibility the moment her doctor said the lump in her liver was probably cancer--even before we had the final diagnosis of carcinoid/NET cancer--even before we went in for the biopsy. The morning we got the preliminary diagnosis, Jane said she wanted one more week of pretending everything was fine. We would not talk about the cancer until the day of the biopsy. We would go back to the Lakes Region, where we had spent our too short honeymoon nearly 21 years before. We would take shorter walks--but we would take them. We would take shorter drives--but we would take them. The cancer haunted the trip from the first day, but we tried to ignore it. The day we arrived, Jane was exhausted and had no appetite. She sent me out for dinner on my own. It was the most painful dinner of our entire married life for me. It was the foretaste of too many dinners bolted down in haste and sorrow over the 28 days she was in the hospital--and the foretaste of the hell of all the solitary dinners since. It was the last meal I ate alone on that trip. We took turns pretending we were hungry or not hungry. We tried to buoy up each other's spirits--and in large part, we were successful. The hotel we had honeymooned in had no room for us when I called for a reservation. But they had another, even nicer, hotel in Meredith and arranged a room for us there. It had an enormous four-poster bed that existed in two different zip codes, a small seating area, a jacuzzi, a window seat overlooking the lake and a small balcony with a similar view. There, at last, for a few hours, the cancer slid away. Jane wasn't very hungry, but wanted some chowder, so I went down the hill to a take-out place and brought some back to the room. We sat in the window seat with our legs entwined and ate and talked and dreamed. Eventually, we climbed the ladders on either side of the bed and slept in each other's arms. In the morning, we took a short walk around the bay. Jane loved taking pictures of landscapes and water scenes. She took her final pictures that morning. Then we recruited someone to take a picture of the two of us together. It is grainy and out of focus, but I framed it after she died and put it on a table where I can see it. We sat on the balcony, read the papers and had a small breakfast. Then we came home. We were rested and ready for the war ahead. I tell you this story because it was the beginning of how we prepared each other for her death. We created a final, powerful and beautiful memory that would sustain us through all the painful struggle that was ahead of us. The first step in preparing for death is to remember how much and how deeply you love each other. The trip was painful in very many ways--but it was also a joyful celebration of who we were--of who we still are. It was more important than any bucket-list because it gave us a pool of remembered strength we could draw on when things became more difficult. And they did become much more difficult. The morning after we came home was the day of the biopsy. I wish they gave spouses the same drugs they give the patient on days like that. Jane said they could have told her she would be dead within the week and it would not have bothered her. She said she finally understood why people became drug addicts. In the days after the biopsy we spent lots of time talking. We spent part of that time remembering the past, but far more of it talking about the future. We would neither of us give up hope until there was no hope: That was our pact. And when there was no hope, it was clear I was to let her go. I did not have to infer that from our conversations It was what she said. It is supremely important that you have this conversation with your loved ones, regardless of whether you are sick or not. You need to know what they want--and they need to know what you want, in terms of what measures to take when you are no longer in a position to make those decisions. Your spouse--or someone else you trust--needs to have a signed medical proxy. If you want a Do Not Resuscitate Order, you need to sign that as well. But you need to know that the language in those, while legally accurate, is medically vague. Your healthcare proxy needs to know precisely what lines you are willing to cross and which ones you are not. Jane and I thought the language was pretty clear and went into the hospital with that understanding. When she had her first carcinoid crisis, I discovered just how medically vague the language could be. Fortunately, I had lots of conversations to fall back on--including the words "fighting chance" that we had often used to describe our bottom line. Those conversations are not easy to have. They mean you are both admitting and accepting the idea of death. The first time I brought it up, Jane accused me of giving up and wanting her dead. I didn't, but talking about even the potential of death was a place she was not ready to go yet. But comfortable or not, those are conversations everyone needs to have. The other thing that needs doing--and a thing we both neglected--is to make sure all the financial affairs are in order. Everyone should have a will. Probate is a major task without one, even for a married couple. Everyone is familiar with the four emotional stages of dealing with death. They don't seem to work very well when applied to grief, but they do seem to apply to those facing a fatal illness, whether their own or of someone they care about. We both went through denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance. Of the four, I think the most difficult for couples--or at least for us--was anger. We tend to take our anger out on those who care about us because they are less likely to fight back. Jane's anger was sometimes explosive. I think sometimes she wanted me to explode right back. There were times I probably should have. But I couldn't because I was too aware of where the anger was coming from--and that made her even angrier. You are going to get angry. Your spouse is going to get angry. It is important--in that anger--to remember you really do love each other. Building that final honeymoon reservoir buttressed our reserves--but it was still a near run thing. Jane asked me once why I never seemed to get angry--either with her or the cancer she was fighting. I told her I was enormously angry about it, but I could not afford to let it control me ben for an instant. I needed to keep my mind clear because I could never know when I'd have to make a decision that would require all the knowledge and logic I had. "When we've killed this thing, I'll be able to afford to feel again. Until then, for both our sakes, I have to stay lucid." That sounds cold and heartless, but Jane understood it for the deep and abiding love it demonstrated. We both knew the cost of controlling our emotions to that degree. She also wanted to know how I put up with the constant mood swings she was throwing at me. "Why don't you ever get angry at the things I say and do to you?" "I know that anger is not entirely you," I told her. "Most of the time it's the pain of the cancer talking. Sometimes, it's that I've screwed up and deserve the anger. Whatever the case, me getting angry with you isn't going to help anything." Of course this makes me look like a saint--and I was anything but. I was insanely angry a great deal of the time. I took it out on rotting tree limbs and recalcitrant rocks. I didn't mow the lawn so much as I systematically attacked it. As Jane's body weakened, she had fewer and fewer such outlets--and her anger had to go somewhere. I was willing to become that target. Through it all, we talked and listened constantly and consistently. I cannot tell you what it is to watch the person you most love slowly waste away, becoming more fragile with every passing day. Mark Twain says that efforts to accurately describe grief would bankrupt all the languages of the world. Trying to describe Jane's slide into death would bankrupt all the languages in the universe for me. We had one important conversation the day before she went into the hospital. She told me that I had saved her life--that before we met she was simply passing through a joyless life to a joyless death; she told me that she knew I believed I had done a lot of things wrong in our life together, but that this was not true--and that she forgave me for all the things I thought I had done wrong and all the things I would think I had done wrong in the days ahead; she told me that she did not expect to die from this operation--that she fully intended to live--but that if she did, she did not want me to stop living--that she wanted me to keep moving forward and doing good in the world; that she did not want me to mourn her longer than necessary; that she wanted me to fall in love again; that she wanted me to find happiness again. My wife had a huge heart. I cannot tell you precisely how she came to terms with her death. It was the one thing we never really discussed. She knew it was coming--though not when or where or how. She spent some of that final fall going through her books and papers--not so much organizing them as reading them and looking at them and realizing the huge impact she had had on so many lives. She was a teacher, and a great one. But we all touch many lives and change the lives of all we touch. Some we change for the better if we are careful. Some we change for the worse, though rarely intentionally. We all of us do the best that we can with the time and wisdom and knowledge that we have. I know Jane thought a lot that fall about the lives she had touched and changed and made better. She found in her heart the forgiveness she needed for her failures. It was that understanding of the power of forgiveness she tried to leave me with. It was her final gift. Twenty-six hours before she died she came out of her coma one last time. I told her there was nothing left for us to try--that the balance had finally swung from fighting chance to no chance--and that in the morning they would disconnect the last of the tubes that were keeping her body going. "You're going home to the garden," I told her. She closed her eyes. I kissed her forehead, brushed her lips with mine. "Good night, my warrior princess," I whispered. I knew her soul was gone, then. It was simply a matter of waiting for her body to die and let the last of her go. I started out here to try to help those who are dying--not just of this cancer, but of all the hopeless diseases we still cannot cure or heal--come to terms with death--and help them bring their loved ones to terms with it as well. I cannot say whether I have succeeded in that or in bringing you solace. But it is the best I can give you at this moment in time. I do not fear death or dread it for myself. It is an inconvenient fact that these bodies wear out. Jane and I saw these bodies as vessels for our souls to travel in this earth upon. I feel her soul about me sometimes, but I miss the body that she animated, the sound of her voice, and the touch of her breath when we turned to each other in the night. Death has stolen those things from me--and that loss has changed me in ways neither of us saw coming.

Dear friends, As most of you know, I have become very involved these last several months with support groups for carcinoid/NET cancer. Last night I received a personal message online from one of those individuals. She has been told there is not much left they can do for her and that she should get her affairs in order. She has asked me to write about how Jane prepared for her death and--interestingly--how Jane prepared me for her eventual departure. I started to write something last night, but then the phone rang. By the time I got back to her request and read through what I had written I knew what I had to that point was useless. I sent her a brief email saying I needed some time to think things through--which was certainly the truth. I awoke this morning with an understanding replying to her was going to require a much greater length than I had at first thought--and likely take me back to some places I need to explore, but that are going to be painful to do. And I am a bit worried about putting my foot on a land mine that may blow up on her as well. So I am writing this morning with two strange and, perhaps difficult requests. First, would anyone object to my posting the piece here for comments before I send it along to her? Second, if any of you would like to share how your spouse prepared for this--and prepared you for it, it might help as well. Finally, I think when the piece is done, I'll post it on walkingwithjane because I think it may prove useful to the larger communities. If that happens, I will make sure your thoughts are kept confidential. Thanks. Peace, Harry

The kid is as tough as his mother. Happy for all concerned. Harry

Dear friends July has been insane. But here's the good news: I signed off on the final federal paperwork for Walking with Jane's 501 © (3) status this morning. Now we wait--sort of. Because now that we've finished that I discover there is state paperwork that could only be done after we finished the federal stuff. It just never ends. But we launched a team for the Fall River Half Marathon yesterday. I'm hoping that will prove a low energy, high return operation from my perspective. Back to the salt mine. I have 25 more items that need to get done this week just on the Walking with Jane front. We won't talk about all the housework and yard work in front of me. Peace, Harry

Dear Mary, I hold you both in my heart and in my mind. Be well. Peace, Harry

I'm waiting on a piece of fact-checking from DFCI--and I'll need to figure out a new opening paragraph, but it is on the list of things to run. --H.

Dear Rita, Her illness was diagnosed very late--it had already progressed to carcinoid heart disease. There was a point I was very angry with the medical establishment, but really, I find it hard to get angry with legitimate ignorance. At the time she could have been diagnosed, NET was not even talked about in medical schools because it was considered--based on the evidence they had at the time--so rare that few doctors would ever see a case in their entire professional career. That ignorance also meant virtually no money was spent on research, which meant our ability to detect the disease did not improve at all for about 40 years--and what we did not know about that kept both our knowledge of the disease and the size of the problem largely in the dark. Things were so bad that we spent as much on Jane's care in the last four months of her life as we spent on research that entire year on the disease. Because Jane was an active science person--she taught high school physics, chemistry and AP biology all at the same time--we did all we could to get double duty out of the money spent on her care. It was the deepest look into an advanced case of the disease that anyone had ever had. I've been told her single case doubled all the knowledge gained about carcinoid/NETs previously. Her death also resulted in the launch of the Program in Neuroendocrine and Carcinoid Tumors at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, a thing they had discussed for some years before that but not set up. Jane was that kind of patient that people remember long after they are gone. Jane died 43 months and 18 days ago. In mid-August it will be four years since we first heard the words Carcinoid Cancer. In that time, we have gone from about 10,000 cases being diagnosed each year to about 15,000 cases diagnosed a year. It isn't that the disease has become more common; it's that doctors are increasingly aware of the disease's existence and we have begun to develop better diagnostic methods. In the last few years we have developed new types of scans that reveal the tumors where once all we could see were shadows that looked like artifacts that could be easily dismissed. We have two new blood tests in the works as well. But the size of the disease is still unclear in terms of the number of people who may have the disease and not know it. The worst case scenario--based on an autopsy study of about 15,000 random bodies--is that, potentially, 3 million Americans have undiagnosed carcinoid/NETs. This would mean we have a major cancer in our midst that we ignored for 40 years because we could not see it. But the truth is we really do not know how prevalent the disease is--and likely won't for a considerable time yet. I certainly hope the 3 million number is off by a significant order of magnitude. We just don't know and have no way of knowing with certainty at this point. We do know that about 10 percent of those diagnosed with the disease die each year--about the same number that we diagnose. The good news--if we can say there is good news about a disease that plagues its victims with nearly constant diarrhea and gas that causes extensive and painful bloating--is that many people live ten or more years with the disease with the treatments we now have. The quality of that life is another question entirely. We have made some progress in treating the disease. Caught early enough, we can surgically remove the tumors before they begin to spread--and before the hormones and peptides they secrete can begin to do really significant damage. Unfortunately, we still only rarely find them early enough. We have some promising drug and radiation therapies that can slow the course of the disease and alleviate some of the symptoms, but nothing that looks like a real cure--not yet. In 2010, we spent less than $2 million on carcinoid/NETs research in the US. The American Cancer Society did not even have a listing for the disease on its website. This year, the carcinoid/NETs community will raise--and spend--if the current trends hold, about $10 million. That is a significant increase, but still barely a rounding error on what we spend each year on breast, lung, or prostate cancer. There are carcinoid forms of each of those that are particularly deadly and particularly aggressive--and under-studied despite that. To put that in real terms, when Jane was first diagnosed, Dana-Farber had one full-time person dividing time between research and the clinic and one person dividing her time in the clinic between carcinoid and other gastrointestinal cancers and dividing her research time that way as well. Today, DFCI has two full-time people working in the clinic and the lab, two full time researchers, two additional post-docs, and four lab assistants. They need another clinician to help handle the number of patients they are now seeing and hope that is going to happen this year. Other programs across the country are seeing similar growth, but the numbers are still too small. Too many patients live so far away from a real specialist with experience with the disease that 700 mile and longer trips that insurance won't pay for are not unusual. I know very few longterm patients who do not face significant financial difficulties as a result of their fight with the disease. We won't discuss the battles they go through with their insurance companies over coverage because I can't do so without the use of expletives one should not use in polite company. I will only say there is no stronger argument for single-payer healthcare in this country than the testimony of carcinoid/NETs patient stories. Today, I work on finding money for carcinoid/NETs research and raising awareness in the medical and lay population about the disease. I work and speak regularly with some of the preeminent researchers and activists in the field and continue to have a close relationship with the doctor who finally figured out what it was Jane had. Jane and I both knew that cursing people for their ignorance was a pointless exercise. We both believed that in a dark place the best thing to do is figure out how to create some light so you--and others--can see what you are doing. I'm still angered and hurt by Jane's death, but I don't blame any human agency for her death any more than my grandfather blamed doctors for the death of his first wife during the Influenza Pandemic of 1919. We did not know enough to save either of them at the time--but someday, with enough effort, we will know enough to save others. This certainly is probably way more than you asked for or wanted to know, but I hope it answers your questions. Peace, Harry p.s. I may decide to use an edited version of this on our website at walkingwithjane.org.

We all are. --H

The good news is we always find each other again--though we sometimes take a few lifetimes to pull it off. --H.

Dear friends, Part of what I am dealing with this month is that Jane's new body was conceived earlier this month. She will be reborn in April, 2015. As that date comes nearer, she will increasingly less be here--and then gone into that new life. That is the pain that goes with Buddhist/Taoist belief--which come as close to what we are as anything. Sometimes I feel I am losing her all over again. Peace, Harry

Dear Melina, It seems like every time we begin to get a handle on things something new emerges that finds a new way to kick us to the ground. I spent a week earlier this month with an old friend who also lost her husband. Then her mother-in-law, with whom she had been very close, died. She left to head for her memorial service, but that death opened old wounds I thought I had healed. That was followed by word of two deaths in the NET cancer communities I am involved with. I spent yesterday in a fog I could not afford as I am teaching a course this month and find myself putting lots of chores into the weekend. So I am up at 4:30 a.m., wide awake and filled with guilt and pain and anxiety. In short, a day like any other. I feel your pain as intimately as if it were my own. You have children. You are going to have grandchildren. You are going to be a grandma. Yes, they are far from you--as your grandchildren will be. But you and your husband raised children who can fly--and they will raise children who can fly. And they have a grandmother who has seen the world and has a heart tested by the worst strains imaginable, yet who still remains a compassionate and caring human being. Their other grandparents may be close to hand, but you are the one whose strength and love they will come to admire. I envy you all of that. Jane and I were childless. Our legacy is more tenuous, more fragile. Ideals instilled by parents and grandparents have greater durability than those instilled in brief contacts with teachers or small philanthropies. What you have may seem a small blessing and a difficult one to reconcile. But there is great joy in it--and great consolation if you choose to embrace it. I am trying this summer to look at what I have rather than at what I have lost. It's hard because the riches I had were so great and what remains seems so small by comparison. I think, for all of us who have had a great love, that is the case. But while much is taken, as Tennyson's Ulysses says, much remains. The gods have hurt our souls but the spirit of who we were--and who we are--is still there. So, like George Washington Carver, we put our buckets down where we are and drink what sweet water there is to be found in them. I'm just down the road in Massachusetts. Enjoy Maine--and all that is dear to you there. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, I’m a very lucky man on very many levels. I was reminded of this last week when an old friend came to visit for a few days. Her husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s less than two years after they got married. By the time his cancer took him he hardly knew who she was. They had less than ten years together—and he was seriously ill for most of them. By contrast, including the time we were friends and going out together, Jane and I had nearly a quarter century—and were married for 21 years, four months and eight days of that time. She was brilliant, caring, strikingly beautiful—and my best friend—as I was hers. Very few people get the gift that we were given. We both loved teaching and learning. Together we drove back the walls of ignorance, both in our own lives and in the lives of others. Just as importantly, we became role models for students who too often lacked them. Ours was a marriage young people aspired to, as were the lives we led in the public square. Jane broke every stereotype for women there was. She worked in chemistry and biology and physics. She didn’t just tell her female students they could aspire to be anything they wanted to be—she showed them by being as good—or better—than any man in the sciences. She told them, “If I can be here and do this, so can you.” And then she showed them how. Our marriage broke all kinds of other stereotypes as well. We shared every chore. We both cooked, we both cleaned, we both did laundry, shoveled snow, mowed the lawn, and tended the garden. Everything we did, we did by consensus. Neither of us had the final say on anything. We had the best marriage two flawed human beings could have. We fought sometimes. We had significant, private, disagreements. But we loved each other too much to let those disagreements be more than shallow potholes in our lives to be filled as soon as we could manage. There were nights we went to bed angry, but we never woke up that way. We faced her cancer the same way we faced everything else in our lives: together. It would have surprised everyone who knew us if it had been otherwise. That I have continued that fight since her death should equally surprise no one. But it does. I can’t tell you how often people ask why I keep doing this—why I don’t just move on with my life. They point to other spouses who cared for their husbands and wives passionately, right up to the end. But once the coffin was lowered into the ground they walked away from the disease responsible as though it never existed. And there is some truth to what they say. But there is also much they do not understand. Mourning does not end with the funeral service. It does not end in a month or a year. We get better at dealing with the empty side of the bed and the empty seat in the car. We get better at presenting a painless face to the world. Sometimes, we can even laugh. But the pain of loss is a constant that follows us everywhere on every day. We never know when we will turn a corner and be forced to fight back tears from a flower that triggers a memory of another time and place when we were truly happy. And I understand too well the pain that sends people rushing away from the illness that took the one they loved. Every encounter I have with a NET cancer patient is loaded with emotional triggers. There is something about their eyes, something about the way they carry themselves, something about their faces and their conversations, that can take me back in an instant to Jane and her long struggle with a disease we could not name until four months before her death. There are days I wish I could walk away from the vow Jane and I took the day she was diagnosed to kill this disease. There are days I wish I could turn my back on those who still live with this disease—could somehow ignore their suffering so I could bury my own grief and move on with my own life. My contributions to the battle against carcinoid/NETs may not be much, but the scientists tell me they are making a difference. If I can save even one life from the death Jane confronted, it will also save a husband or a wife, it will save a son or a daughter or a parent or a brother or a sister from the throes of grief so many of us endure. In less than a month, I will observe the fourth anniversary of the day Jane and I first heard the words "carcinoid cancer." Less than three weeks later, I will observe what would have been the celebration of our 25th year of marriage. Both days will be somber and painful in ways only those who have similar losses will understand. Too often, lately, I feel the weight of those two dates approaching. I get up each morning with the best of intentions. But as the day winds down, I look at my list of things to do and discover too little done and too much left to do. I hear Jane’s voice in my head telling me it’s OK, but it isn’t. Not really. People are dying needlessly—suffering needlessly--and I’m not doing enough to help stop it. I am crippled by grief—but I am still a lucky man. I had 21 years, four months and eight days of the kind of marriage few people get to experience for even one day. There is a price to pay for such a marriage. And I pay it every day. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Happy Independence Day. I'll do my annual reading of the Declaration and the Constitution, then curl up with 1776. The only fireworks will be Nature's tonight as Arthur pays us a glancing visit. We've had our first squall line move through but the heavy stuff won't arrive until tonight. The Cape looks like it will get the worst of it. Here, we will get lots of rain and mugginess if the track remains where it is. I spent yesterday trying to bring order back to the house after June's lunacy. More of that to do today--and AC units to put in. My good news is the lethargy and depression that always follows a big project is finally lifting. Have a good Fourth. Peace, Harry

Hat and sunscreen in my case. --H.

Dear friends, I forgot to post this pre-Relay picture. I challenged donors in the last month as a fundraiser--and ended up shaving my head for the event. Here's the pic. Laugh as you will. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Relay is over and I am at least partially recovered. I can now begin to close the books on that effort for another year. When the dust finally settles, our team will have raised about $9000 for the American Cancer Society--fourth best among our Relay teams, at least for now. I have some things to tie up this week for that, some serious house cleaning to get on top of--things get messy when crunch time arrives--and a couple of things I need to get done for the Marathon Walk. Next week a friend is coming in for a few days, so I'll take an extended break then. The stuff about spirals was interesting. I've read The Golden Bough, but clearly need to go back to it--it has been too many years and I have forgotten so much. Too hot to sit with the computer in my lap. I need to go put the ACs in the windows or I'll have trouble sleeping the next few days. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, First, Kay, people just have no clue. It is a pity they open their mouths sometimes. The last three days have been an emotional roller-coaster for me between the Nw England Carcinoid Conference, at which Jane's oncologist spoke and I finally got to put faces to some people I feel I've known forever online, the 19 hours of our local Relay for Life, and some strange news from my brother in Seattle. I'll write about the first two here and elsewhere later, but the news about my brother I will post here and now. Those of you out west may know that there has been considerable trouble in Seattle over police use of force. They are functioning under an agreement with the federal court to fix that problem. My brother was asked to work on putting together the training program for this back in January as the lieutenant. That has meant designing the curriculum and course for the program--and eventually teaching them. About a month ago, Seattle appointed a new police chief. About two weeks ago there was an incident in the South Precinct involving an alleged excessive use of force on a handcuffed woman following--or during--a domestic violence dispute. The precinct was under the command of an acting commander who was the senior lieutenant because the precinct commander had retired in May. Thursday, my youngest brother was promoted to captain and assigned command of the South Precinct. He has been a police officer for 25 years in Seattle and spent most of his career in that precinct. He has served there at every level and in pretty much every area. He says that if he has a police family, it is the South Precinct. But he has been away from it long enough--before the education assignment he was the lead LT. for emergency communications and pretty much ran the place, reforming everything about it in the process--that he knows where the problems are without being associated with them. It will be a good fit. Dave has been the department's designated firefighter for a long time. When there is a problem, they assign him to fix it. Like me, he is quite capable of being a plain blunt man who will not blink in the face of even a friend who has done wrong. He was one of the officers at the WTO conference in Seattle and did not hesitate to publicly criticize his superiors for their lack of effort in preparing the force adequately for that event. And he had no qualms about dismissing an old friend when the guy was not up to the task of handling emergency calls. He didn't like doing it, but people's lives were at stake. He led the move to community policing, created and trained officers for the bike patrol program, and was one of the people who created the original Seattle earthquake plan. I'm very proud of him--and pleased for him as well. Peace, Harry

Kay, that is indeed a big positive. --Harry

Thank you all. I can't really take much of a break before Saturday afternoon, but I think from there to at least Tuesday I'm going on a bit of a retreat. I have some loose ends that need tied up, but I hear a week of rest coming in the not distant future. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, I'm supposed to be packing things up to ship to Relay tomorrow. Instead... This morning I woke up--for the third time this week--with my arms wrapped firmly around one of Jane's pillows. This might have made sense to me in the weeks after her death, but it didn't happen then. Instead, three-and-a-half years later my subconscious mind is suddenly trying to suck the last fumes of her scent from her pillow. Suddenly, I find myself wandering aimlessly around the house like I did in the days just after Jane died. I had begun to find the silences acceptable. Today, I want to blast the stereo at maximum volume the way I did the day after she died. Every hummingbird sighting takes me back to the day that first spring after she died when I found the hummingbird nest and started to run back into the house to tell her. Part of this, I suspect, comes from my increasing involvement with NET cancer patients. They are facing the same things Jane went through and it brings all those memories screaming back into me. The simple solution is to walk away from doing that but it is something I am called to do. Having taken that step forward, I am more than reluctant to give that progress back. I need to keep moving forward. And dealing with Relay is looking particularly tough this year. The survivor ceremony has always been difficult for me: I am so jealous of those survivors, so envious of their spouses and families. At the end, they will not go home alone. I will--and there is a deep and abiding sadness in that truth. As chairman the last two years I was too busy to think on those things. This year, I have fewer distractions. But it's time to take off the bandages. I feel that in my heart as well. It is going to sting a bit--the scabs are stuck to the material in places and the adhesive is stuck to the hair. But the wrappings need to come off before the wound festers. I have to keep moving forward. That was among Jane's last wishes, and that wish needs to be honored. Other of her wishes, I am not ready to confront yet. I know i am not entirely healed and that the wounds, once they've aired a bit, will need new, if smaller and lighter, dressings. This sucking chest wound has taken 42 months to get to this point in the healing process. It will likely take many more before it is healed enough for me to live what passes for normal life--if it happens at all. Peace, Harry

Mary, I have no words. I hold you all in my heart and in my mind as you face this. Not knowing the details, I will tell you there are cases where this is a mistake--where the person's computer has been hacked. Hard to imagine, I know. It is also entirely possible he has done this, in which case it is very hard to forgive--and I can understand your rage. I feel it myself, and I don't even know him. Faith may tell us to hate the sin and forgive the sinner, but this kind of thing is hard to get there with. Please know we are all here for you and yours as you go through this. Peace, Harry