HAP

Dear friends, Thank you all for your kind words. I was in a very difficult place last week, especially Wednesday and Thursday. I just started shaking Wednesday afternoon. I knew what was happening, understood it, but also knew there was nothing I could do to slow it down. So I curled up in a chair and just stopped doing anything. It was the worst I've felt in a long while. I am glad for those of you who find prayer useful. Meditation serves that purpose for me--though I think true prayer is a meditation. What bothers me is when prayer--or meditation--becomes the answer to everything. I had several encounters this weekend with people for whom that is the case: "if I just pray a little harder, God will save me from X." Do miracles happen? Sure--one time in a million. The other 999,999 times, people die. On the whole, it is unwise to rely on miracles. Our mere existence is the biggest miracle most of us experience--and that is miracle enough for me. Anything beyond that, I expect to have to work for--and that no amount of prayer or faith will be sufficient to the task absent real effort. I've been reading the Harry Dresden novels over the last year. Harry has a friend who is a Knight of the Cross and is deeply religious. The knight spends several of the early books trying to get Harry to give up magic and become a good Christian. He eventually gives it up as a bad business. He realizes that Harry's magic enables him to do good in the world--and that his own family would be dead several times over were it not for Harry's refusal to give up magic. Magic, he realizes, is not faith. It is something earned and learned and practiced. The price of that knowledge is steep and the responsibilities that go with it equally great. Michael always knows the right thing to do. Harry has to work it out--and live with the consequences unsupported by anything other than himself. Harry does not deny the existence of a higher power--he has seen too much evidence that argues otherwise. And part of him would love to have Michael's simple faith. But he has seen too much and knows too much. He has walked and talked with angels and made a sincere effort to redeem one of the Fallen. He does not see the world in black and white but rather in every color in the rainbow and all the shades between. He knows he wears a mask--and that most people, be they gods, faeries or mortals, wear them as well--and that we all wear several. Santa Claus, for example, is a Knight of Winter who rides with the Wild Hunt. The mask matters less than the real person behind it. He understands evil because he has been evil; understands redemption because he has been redeemed--several times. He has lost the love of his life, experienced death and rebirth, betrayed and been betrayed and come to understand that not everything that looks evil on its face truly is--just as what looks good, isn't always. I don't pretend to understand God's purposes. I see people who need help and try to give it to them. I try not to judge others or their beliefs because I rarely understand their lives and circumstances well enough to form a valid opinion. And I'm not smart enough to see where even my path ends. Sometimes what looks evil isn't and sometimes what looks like good is anything but. So I try to cultivate patience, compassion and love. I do the work that comes my way the best I can. In the end, it is all I can do. Peace, Harry

“Why this is hell, and nor am I out of it.” —Mephistopheles in “Faust" One year ago today, my father left a message on my cell phone—a thing he’d never done before. About an hour later, he had a stroke. One year ago yesterday, they found my niece in a motel room. She was dead of a heroin overdose. One year ago tomorrow, my father died while I was on my way to Seattle. Five years ago Tuesday, Jane had a biopsy on a mass in her liver. Five years ago Sunday, the doctor told us Jane had carcinoid cancer. Less than four months later she died in my arms. This morning, someone told me they would pray more diligently for a cancer cure. I've nothing against prayer. I know many people feel it is a powerful and concrete thing. But prayer alone does not cure disease nor end immediate pain and suffering. The best Christian I know, Jimmy Carter, acts himself to make what he prays for real. To paraphrase a Moslem holy man, he trusts in God, but ties his camel. Today, go hug the people you love; visit someone who is sick or alone or in prison; volunteer for a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter. There are people in the world who need your real and concrete help. Give it to them. Peace,Harry

Dear friends "I am too young to be a widower and too old to be a bachelor," I said to myself on one of those dark days when Jane was in the hospital in one of the three comas that would eventually claim her life. It is the kind of thing I said to myself to convince myself she would not die--that we would find our way through this crisis and she would come home. In the end, I slipped on the mantle of "widower" easily enough when she died. It is the cloak I have worn every day of the 56 months since that night. It is a comfortable and comforting identity for a man who has lost everything he cared about--and who is surrounded by the meaningless reminders of what was. I cannot say that nothing good has come of my taking up that role. My father, who lost my mother less than a year before Jane died, and I found in our shared widowerhood a bridge across all the animosity between us. It gave us a shared experience we could talk about-- a shared pain none of my siblings could comprehend. We made a peace that let us set aside our adversarial past. He died a year ago this week. A part of me was happy for him. My mother was his lodestone. When she died, he was ready to die. In some ways, he spent the last three years of his life waiting to die. His ashes and hers are mixed in my sister's garden. He was 85 years old. He had lived a good, interesting and productive life. He had six children, all of whom were still living when he died. And his work in engineering will likely survive even his great grandchildren. But he was interested in the world until the day he left it. He was a widower, but the word did not entirely define him. He was ready to die, but he didn't want to. He was too curious about what was over the next hill. If someone had offered him a good quality of life for another 50 years, I think he would have taken it. But his body was failing him--and he knew it. For the last six weeks I've been teaching a journalism course in Boston. It was good for me. It forced me to think about something other than cancer and loss for a few hours every day. It reminded me that I am too young to be a traditional widower. I am not old enough to spend what remains of my life waiting for death. I am, in that regard, my father's son--and likely would be even if I were much older. I want to see what is over the next hill. I want to see the death of cancer. I want to see the things Jane never got to see, that my mother never got to see, that my father never got to see. But I have become too comfortable with the cloak of widowerhood. I need to be something more--need people to see me as something more. Jane is gone--and I am still broken in so many ways. But Jane would not be happy--actually, she'd be damned angry--if I let the word "widower" define however many years I have left in my life. I wrote earlier about the topiary heart Jane made early in our marriage--and how it was the one houseplant that died during her illness. I talked about having found another piece of ivy growing in another pot and how I had trained it onto Jane's original mold. The original strand has stalled in its journey maybe three inches short of a full circuit. But new shoots have emerged from the surface and are moving up the base. Perhaps they will fill the space that remains. Perhaps then my soul will heal. This much I know: I am 63 years old. I am still too young to be a widower. I am still too old to be a bachelor in any traditional sense. I am caught between two things I really have no interest in being--because I am more than either of those things--or at least I think I am. We all have many roles we play in life--and it is easy to define ourselves by any one of them. But when a single role ensnares us--when we let that single role determine not only how we see ourselves but how we allow the world to see us--we stop growing and begin to embrace our own deaths. At the end of Arthur Miller's play The Crucible, John Proctor asks, "What is John Proctor?" He is a complicated man facing the immediacy of his own death. And the answer to that question will determine what his life means--whether he will go to the gallows and die or live a lie. Yes, I am a widower. But I am more than that--even though I have forgotten that fact more often than not in recent years. I am a writer, a teacher, a warrior, and a peacemaker. I cook, I garden, I build. I go for long walks and long drives. And I love. I am a human being--and no death changes that. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, First, thank you all for your kind words. I never know when I write something if it will speak to anyone other than me--and i am always surprised when it does. I know that likely sounds crazy, but there you are. I have been absent for quite a bit here. I am teaching at Boston University this summer in a program for high school journalism students. I am in bed at 9 p.m. and up at 4:45 to make the 90 minute commute to Boston each day. I teach for 2-3 hours, then drive home. It doesn't leave much time for writing--here or elsewhere. But the break is doing me good. It takes me out of the world of cancer and lets me talk to young people again about the things Jane and I cared about. Which is not to say Walking with Jane is being ignored. I'm prepping for the Marathon Walk, putting together a miniature golf tournament for late August and trying to put together items for two big craft fairs between now and early September. But July is a slow month on the website, as I've learned from the last few years. I guess you don't take cancer to the beach. The people at Dana-Farber want to meet with me on Monday afternoon about an "opportunity." I don't know what that means--and they won't tell me before then. I suspect there will be a major announcement on the NET cancer front in the next few weeks and they want me involved with whatever it is. Anniversaries are tough--a major metaphysical trigger all by themselves. I'll face our 26th September 2. It will be the fifth since Jane died. I am not looking forward to it. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, I finished redoing the living room today. Six weeks ago, I ordered two love seats to replace the couch and love seat Jane and I bought when we built this house just over twenty years ago. I’d finally figured out that even with new slipcovers, those two pieces set me off every time I entered the room. In the process of getting everything in the room balanced—I’ve never studied feng shui, but I know when things are arranged right I feel better than when they aren’t—I decided to remove the next level of knick-knacks that I have kept out as reminders of the couple we were. Fifty-five months and 15 days is long enough to keep the two doll-sized mugs embossed with "My Sweetheart” out where they can remind me every day of what I’ve lost. That seems silly as I look up at the collage of pictures of Jane on the wall across from me. It dominates the room in ways no collection of small glass rabbits and tiny teapots could ever hope to. Equally, each piece of furniture has one or more of the cross-stitch pillows Jane made for us on it. But neither the photographs nor the pillows ambush me when I walk into the room the way those small pieces did. That’s the trouble with triggers: they lurk in the corners and catch you by surprise. They can turn a good day on its head in an instant. And sometimes they get you even when you know they are there. Some nights, I sit across from that collage and nothing happens. Then, I look up and the loneliness and loss descend like a brick and hit me in the head with concussion-inducing force. And the things are everywhere. I’m teaching a journalism course in Boston this summer. To get there, I have to drive a portion of the route we took to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute seemingly every week in the last months of Jane’s life. It’s a route I’ve driven often enough since that it feels pretty safe to me most of the time. But one Friday this month they were cutting the trees back from along the road, as they had been that fall. The sight of the men and the machines took me back in an instant and suddenly the depression rolled in and crushed me. Of course the real crushers are, generally, around the house. A pen, a piece of furniture, a candle, a bit of ribbon, the scrape of a chair on the deck—anything can set us off, especially in the early days of grief. What astounds me is how susceptible to those triggers we remain even years later. You would think that, eventually, simple household items we see and use every day would lose their ability to hurt us. But you’d be wrong. And there is no simple logic to what hurts us and what doesn’t. In my case, the couch and love seat created a constant ache, no matter how I rearranged them or covered their original fabric with a slip cover. But I sleep every night in the same bed Jane and I bought when we got married, surrounded by the same chest, dresser and bedside table bought at the same time. Of course I moved that furniture out of the bedroom it was in and repainted the walls in the new room a radically different color. The furniture is also set up in a very different way than it was when Jane was alive. I also replaced the mattress. I suspect somewhere in there is the reason I can sleep there comfortably. I also know that I had real trouble sleeping before I did all that. But removing triggers also comes with a price—and I’m not talking about the financial cost. When I watched the love seat and couch going out the door Thursday—even though they were only going as far as the basement—it was an emotional experience. It took us three months to find those pieces 20 years ago. We lived on them all summer and all winter. That couch is where Jane fell asleep in my arms many nights. It is where I massaged her feet almost every night. We watched the Red Sox finally win a World Series there—and watched them come back from a 3-0 deficit against the Yankees. Every stick of furniture, every cup, every plate, every knife, every fork, every spoon, every vase and every candle holder is pregnant with memory. And every one of them can trigger a wave of grief—just as giving them away or replacing them can. A friend, who lost her husband of fewer years well before I lost Jane, tells me she still encounters things that trigger new waves of grief. She expects that will continue to be the case for as long as she lives. And I believe her. We don’t stop loving someone when they die—and we don’t stop missing them. We do find ways to cope with that heartache. We do find ways to deal with the triggers that set off new waves of grief. Sometimes, we embrace those triggers until, by force of repetition, they begin to lose their power over us. Sometimes, we find we can avoid specific triggers by avoiding particular stores or places that meant too much to ever lose their power. Sometimes, we repaint or redecorate or repurpose a room. Sometimes, we simply endure. There is no right answer for any of this. There is only what works for us as individuals in our particular circumstances. And no matter what we do, specific days, specific moments, specific incidents, will jump on us when we least expect it and take us back into the darkest times our souls experience. But we persevere. We find purpose again. We find life again. We keep moving forward. Peace, Harry

Relay is over for another year. We raised $7776. Now I need some recovery time. But I start teaching tomorrow. At lest I won't be talking about cancer. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, I know this does not really belong here in some respects, but... My father and I were not close until Jane died not long after my mother. We were two widowers whose wives defined who we were in many ways. The loss brought us together. If you had told me 10 years ago that I would miss him, I would have laughed. We rarely spoke and even more rarely agreed on anything. Jane once had to physically separate us or we would have come to blows. Then my mother died and Jane died and we finally had something in common. Today is the first Father's Day since he died. I'm glad we finally were able to make peace. I just wish the cost had not been so high for both of us. I was 40 before my father said he was proud of me. He hated nearly every choice I made from junior high school on--and he made sure I knew how disappointed he was in me. His attitude drove a wedge between us it took the deaths of both our wives to heal. My father wanted an engineer or a scientist. I wanted to teach English and write. My father wanted a conservative. I was a liberal, at best. My father was raised in violence--and that violence colored his choices when it came to discipline to such an extent that it colored my choice about not having children for fear I would do to them what he had done to me. In the last years of his life I came to love my father for the person he had become after I moved out of the house. He cared for my mother through her 15 year journey through Alzheimer's--even though she rarely knew who he was and tried on at least one occasion to kill him. When my sister's boyfriend turned into a physically abusive brute, he took her and her daughter in. I always admired his mind and the things he had done with it--he worked on the Nautilus, the testing for the Apollo heat shield, designed testing systems for nuclear power plants, and a dozen other things he was not allowed to talk about. At some point, that massive intellect grew a soul--and the workaholic found a life that was not bounded by solving engineering problems. I am--and am not--his son. I hope that wherever he is now that my mother is there with him with her mind back and that he knows that much as I hated him for years, I eventually did love the person he became. Happy Father's Day, Dad. May your next life be easier than this one. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, I got a call this morning from the woman who owns the miniature golf course we have scheduled our tournament at. She's decided to donate whatever money they get from people who don't want to play in the tournament but still want to use the course that night to our Jimmy Fund walk effort. This may work yet. Kay, he didn't look very good when i visited tonight. The procedure for the stool transplant is Tuesday. I am keeping my fingers crossed. If it fails to change things, I suspect he will stop dialysis. He's had enough. Peace, Harry

Dear Fae, Anne and Kay, Thank you all for your kind words and thoughts. Kay, I agree with you: most lives are a mixture of happy and sad. I always thought Sophocles had missed the mark there, but I've only read Oedipus in translation, and who knows what the original Greek actually means. And Creon is not the most wise of characters, as I think on this now--and I think the words are his. And Anne, there is more than a little truth to what you say about having a life that needs to be lived. We are sustained less by memory than by what we do with the time we have to hand. Memory can carry us through the lean times but when we rely too much on memory we begin to live in the past rather than confronting the future. I think that's part of what Jane meant when she said she wanted me to keep moving forward. It would be good if I could remember how to do that some days. Fae, I was watching season three of the most recent BBC Sherlock Holmes--which is set in the present day. Watson asks Holmes to be the best man at his wedding--he is his best friend, after all. In the midst of that, I realized that while I have many friends and acquaintances, I buried my best friend when I buried Jane--and that there is no one who is even close to that position in my life. I do not have that level of mental intimacy one associates with a best friend. It is at once a measure of what Jane and i had in each other and a measure of my emotional poverty since her death. If I don't look out for me, no one else will. Monday, I sat down to do some writing and designing about 9 a.m. The next thing I knew was it was 2 p.m. and I hadn't eaten since 6:30 a.m. I was not hungry, but I got up and ate anyway. Then I vanished into the work again until about 7:30 p.m. I am not supposed to let myself do that but it is what happens when I am completely focussed on the problem at hand. Working without a break is bad for me physically--and I know that. Forgetting to eat is bad for me--and I know that. Jane would make me take a break every hour or so. I did the same for her when she became over-focussed. Something similar happened yesterday. This time it was working in the yard and the garden. I planned to work for an hour or so. It turned into four--but it seemed like only an hour had passed--except the sun was setting and the bugs were beginning to chase me around the yard. I came up the stairs and only then realized I was thirsty--and that I hadn't bothered to drink anything over the time I was out there. I do try to remember to take care of me. And the work does nurture portions of me better than most anything else. It gets me out in the world and involved with people. Like Dr. Who, I need to be around people. Otherwise, I become Sherlock's high functioning sociopath, obsessed with myself and my immediate needs. It's not that my needs don't matter--they do. But there has to be a rational balance between what I need and what others need. And I'd rather err on the right side of that equation than the left. There is a wonderful line in Dr. Who where he says that the truly good people don't need rules--they instinctively know and do what is right. But he does not see himself as a good man. That's why he has so many rules that guide his daily existence. If i ever finish the grief book, I think my second will be an explanation of the plethora of rules on my list. "But I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep." Peace, Harry

Dear friends, I wanted to call this piece "Four-and-a-half years," which is the same as fifty-four months in terms of time, but not, somehow, in meaning. With a child, we draw the line around 48 months. With death--at least with Jane's--it appears to be different. My father died almost a year ago. My mother died 10 months before Jane did. I lost a good friend to triple negative breast cancer just over a year ago. I have no problem talking about their deaths in terms of years. Of course I didn't spend the last month of their lives in a hospital room holding their hands, either. The last month has been a difficult one. Half-a-dozen patients I've become close to--two of them significant figures in creating foundations and support groups--have killed their NET cancer the same way Jane did: by dying and taking it with them. I've done what little I can for their spouses and loved ones. It never seems as though it is enough. Nothing I do ever seems like enough. Friends tell me I can only do what I can do--that one person can only do so much. And intellectually, I can agree with them. But my heart can't accept that. I've seen too much pain and too much suffering and been unable to do much to alleviate either one. My Buddhist training tells me I should take a very different lesson from that than I do. I am not a very good Buddhist. My Taoist training insists there is little constructive I can do--that waiting is. I am not a very good Taoist. The Christian part of me talks about all of this being part of the divine plan. I am a lousy Christian. If killing people with that hideous form of cancer is divinely inspired, I want no part of that divinity. There is a sign on the wall opposite my bed. It is placed so it is the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning. It says, "It is never too late to be what you might have been." It reminds me that the failures of the day before are no reason to give up on the work of today. It refuses to let me set down the work I have adopted as my own. It refuses to let me stop striving to embody what I believe. I accept that suffering exists in the world--but that does not mean I don't try to ease it for others where and when I can. I accept that there are things I may not be able to change, but I try to change them anyway because I cannot know what is impossible until I try. Divinity can want what it wants; I can only do what my heart tells me is right. I am more concerned with humanity than I am with the needs or desires of any god. People tell me constantly how pleased Jane must be with what I am doing. I do none of what I do to make her happy. Jane is far beyond my ability to make happy or sad now. It is not that I love her less than I did when she was alive, but our work was for--and with--the living--and my work still is. I feel frustrated this month. The anniversary of Jane's death was much more difficult this month than last. All the deaths of the last month have taken me back to Jane's last days over and over again. Financially, Walking with Jane is running behind last year's numbers. In terms of raising awareness about NET cancer, our efforts seem stalled because I can't figure out how to extend our reach. The goals I set at the beginning of the year seem to be sliding out of reach. I'm having trouble getting pieces of writing to work--and my book on grief is the worst of it. I feel mentally constipated and my usual laxatives are not working very well. Even the garden is struggling. But I am too stubborn--or too stupid--to quit. It doesn't matter which it is. Last night I had a series of dreams about individuals solving problems that improved human lives. Most of them were nameless folks who saw something that needed to be done and did it. They were frustrated at times, too. But they kept working at whatever it was. Sometimes they solved the problem. Sometimes, they created the groundwork others built on. Sometimes, they failed completely. At the end of Oedipus, Rex, one of the characters says we should never count a person's life as happy or sad until we have seen the end of it. Equally, we should never consider a person's life as successful or not until we have the whole body of that life to look at. Jane's life was an unequivocal success. But my life is not over and no one should judge it one way or the other until it is--including me. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, June is turning into an insanely busy month. We had a successful craft fair June 7, have scheduled a miniature golf tournament for late August, continued with a range of garden projects, and are preparing for Relay for Life in less than two weeks. July, I am teaching fundamentals of journalism five mornings a week in Boston, which will be a vacation of sorts because it will take me out of full time cancer fighting mode for about six weeks. Then, things get intense until the end of November, when i'll try to take an extended break through the holidays. I saw Jane's dad this weekend. He looks very good. He is alert and interested in the world again. He's even reading the newspaper and talking about politics. They are doing a stool transplant next week to address his c-diff. The hope is he will finally be able to go home by mid-July. Like, QMary, I thought I should check in so people know I haven't simply vanished. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, While I moved the ring from my right hand to my left on April 10, I have, outside people who have read this post, not made any real announcement of that fact locally before our Walking with Jane board meeting yesterday. It fit into something I was talking about with regard to my mental state since our last meeting, so it seemed the right time to let the people on the board know. After nearly six weeks, the indentation on my left hand is still there, nearly as sharp as the day I moved the ring off of it. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, We had a good--if long overdue--Walking with Jane board meeting yesterday. We generally meet in January, but between my ongoing oral surgeries and the snow--not to mention a dozen different scheduling conflicts--this was the earliest we could get everyone together. I chose people for the board not only because they were our good friends but because I knew I could trust them to be honest about their thoughts and concerns. We spent a lot of time yesterday talking about where we need to go and what we need to do next. It's time to focus entirely on our primary missions: educating people about NET cancer and funding research. That may mean upsetting a few people in the larger cancer community whose focus is elsewhere, but it can't be helped if we are going to be effective in what we are trying to do. I have a plate filled with new assignments coming out of that meeting. Some of those things are pretty straight-forward and easy. Some are pretty complicated and time consuming. But, taken together, they are the next steps in carrying out this mission to kill NET cancer. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Jane's dad is hanging in there. They are talking about a stool transplant after June 1 if the current round of antibiotics does not take down the c-diff. That is about 95 percent effective, they say. I wonder why they are only getting to it now if it is that effective. He sleeps a great deal, but is eating and doing his rehab stuff--though what he can do is a long way from where he was a few weeks ago. He is one tough Marine. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, I promised pictures when the landscaping projects I started way back when were finally finished. I still have some mulching to finish in the back of the house, but here are the projects that were complete as of Saturday afternoon. I still have a number of things I'm working on--even in the back of the house--including a small orchard that likely won't go in before fall or next spring, a walkway from the deck to the vegetable garden and a perennial border on three sides of that garden. The south end of that last piece needs to be mulched, but the plants I've nurtured all winter went in the ground this weekend. The bed around the mailbox is also done, but is currently bordered by what is left of the five yards of mulch I had brought in to put the finishing touches on things. I'll post pictures of that once the mulch is off the driveway. Peace, Harry

Drop this fool like the hot potato he clearly is. You may have issues of your own, but from what you've written here, he has issues you can't be dealing with in addition to your grief-inside issues.. He has a drinking problem. He has a behavior problem. You have fond memories of him from another place and time when you were both someone else. Your needs in grief have to take priority. Peace, Harry

I think that's then other problem: I think she is concerned that's how her dad will take it, Kay.

Thanks, Marty. This may help when I talk with her tomorrow. Harry

Dear friends, I just got off the phone with Jane's sister, Gail, a few minutes ago. Hank is not doing very well. He has little appetite and is very tired. He has told them that if he stops breathing, they are not to resuscitate him. He has a bracelet on his wrist to that effect. Gail thinks he is only staying alive because he thinks she wants him to keep fighting. There is no way, however, she can bring herself to tell him that he can let go, even though she wants him to know it is ok.. His doctor will have a fit if she says it--and since he is also her doctor... Personally, I think we are looking at days before this is over. He is tired of fighting through dialysis, through c-diff, through prostate cancer, through bone cancer, and the bone weariness the combination of those things has brought on. He does not now really expect--and he has said this--to come home to his apartment. He lost his wife almost nine years ago to pulmonary fibrosis. He lost his younger daughter, Jane, to carcinoid just over 53 months ago. He lost his best friend, Jane's uncle, who lived just up the hill from them, this winter. He could not go to the funeral because of his own health--but the funeral procession drove by his window and he stood there and waved. He has had enough of watching other people die. He was a Marine--1st division, 11th regiment--until the regiment was nearly wiped out in retaking Guadalcanal during WWII. They moved him to the fifth regiment after that and he fought his way across the Pacific. He was on Guam preparing for Operation Coronet--the invasion of Japan--when they dropped the atom bombs that ended the war. He met Pappy Boyington--the Marine ace in the Pacific they made a TV show about--and thought he was an ass. But then, the infantry never did have much use for those flyboys. That alone was a life. His own mother didn't recognize him when he got home. He had malaria--and it came back every summer in the 1950s, then vanished. He ran weaving machines in the mills, then became a police officer--and eventually a sergeant. He passed on becoming a lieutenant because he said some jobs weren't worth the aggravation no matter how much they pay you. He once arrested a childhood buddy who could not believe Hank was working the other side of the street. I guess he'd really been a hellion as a youngster. He was the oldest child in the family--and the Depression was tough on him. He never forgot that poverty nor the embarrassment it put him through. He has a sister and a sister-in-law left, and both are failing. He was a tough man, shaped by tough times--but who cried when the family dog died and was both very happy and very sad when Jane married me and left home. For a while after she died, he blamed me for her death--a thing that he seems to have gotten past. He told me the other night that he loved me. I think I was--at last--the son he never had and always wanted. He is not gone yet. We've been here before a couple of times. He may yet decide he is not done with living just yet. But there are an awful lot of things on his plate to fight off--and all of them are fatal eventually. I hope he goes peacefully in his sleep. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Mary I am sorry to hear about your sister, but I agree being locked in like that is a terrible thing. I saw Hank last night at the nursing facility. He was exhausted after a long day of dialysis and moving back in, so we didn't stay long. He looks better than he did a week ago. I've had a long day of fighting with the Walking with Jane tax forms that are due tomorrow, so I won't see him again before Saturday. Gail knows to call if she needs me. Off to bed shortly. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Thank you all for your kind words. I was reminded again last night of how important a single act of kindness can be--and how important saying thank you is. I was at UMass-Boston--my alma mater--last night for the annual celebration of scholarships the university does each year. The chancellor said he rarely heard the words thank you before he arrived on our campus nearly 15 years ago. He had handed a student a check for a $250 scholarship--something he thought of as nothing. The young woman thanked him with tears streaming down her face--as though he had handed her a million dollars. Those of us in the audience who were graduates understood her thanks and her tears. UMB is not a school filled with rich students--and never has been. When I graduated, the average entering student was 28 years old with a spouse, two children and a 40 hour a week job. The only differences between now and then are the costs have gone up and the average entering student is 25. For us, every dollar made a difference--and to today's students, every dollar still does. That $250 meant everything to that young woman. It likely meant she could buy some used textbooks rather than sit in the library to read them on reserve. And that meant time at home with her husband and children. The smallest kindness means everything when you have nothing. Those of you newly widowed know that feeling of having nothing. It is not just a financial emptiness but a spiritual and emotional emptiness as well. I still, 53 months into this journey, find myself reaching for my wife in the middle of the night; I still leave kisses and flowers at her grave every week--and every month. Someone hugged me last week--the first physical hug I've had in months--and I felt like someone had handed me the greatest gift I could receive. I will live on the memory of that hug for weeks. It was like that student getting that $250 check. I was literally a pauper as an undergraduate. I lived on ketchup soup and was too often too close to being homeless to think for one moment that the homeless and the hungry are substantially different from the rest of us. And today I know how close everyone I know is to being a widow or a widower. We are reduced in the moment of our spouse's death to a spiritual and emotional poverty every bit as grinding as physical poverty. And there are few emotional equivalents to that $250 check. Last night I wrote something every one of my fellow alumni would understand immediately: "Success is not measured in dollars and cents but in the lives you touch and the dreams you create, nurture and sustain." This place is an oasis in the vast desert of grief. It touches the lives of each of us. It is a dream it is up to each of us to nurture and sustain. Thank you, Marty, for dreaming this dream and making it real. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Gail called last night. The hospital is releasing him today and sending him for another stint in rehab. Back on the rollercoaster. Peace, Harry

Nah. I'm just an onion in the petunia patch--or maybe a garlic bulb in the petunia patch. --H.

Dear Friends, If one can tell the state of a man's mind and marriage, as one of the characters in Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club insists, my garden has told a very sad story over the last five-and-a-half years. In October of 2009, Jane came down with the H1N1 flu. Normally, October and November were button-down months for us. We would pull out the dead annuals, divide those perennials that preferred fall separations, mulch the shrubs, clear the detritus from the vegetable garden, spread compost to let it work it's way into the soil over the winter. The flu hit Jane hard. It put her flat on her back for several days. Just as she began to recover, pneumonia sent her back to bed. On Halloween, she watched the trick-or-treaters from the window. I would not let her near the open door, afraid some chill would put her back to bed. My attention was riveted on her. I managed to mow the lawn periodically, but the rest of the yard work was beyond both of us. We left everything for spring. Jane stayed weak all winter, but did the spring pruning. She got up on the stepladder and cut back the Rose-of-Sharon that was--and is--the centerpiece of one bed. Normally, that was a fall project. I coaxed the vegetable garden back to life, but we bought most of the plants that year. Usually, we started the vegetables from seed so we could be certain what they were and that no one had treated them with pesticides. We both knew something wasn't right. She tired easily. Every day, her ankles were swollen. She told me later there were times the world seemed to fade around her--that when people spoke, sometimes they seemed to be very far away. She kept that from everyone. She said she had promises to keep to her students. The garden suffered that summer. Jane's legs were so bad she had to give up her two hours of tennis every day. Normally, I would walk for an hour while she played, then come home and weed and do the other things it takes to make a garden grow. Instead, we tried to walk together every day. When we came home, we would read and talk. The garden didn't matter much that summer. I neglected the weeds, the rabbits and the groundhogs. My focus was elsewhere. I was terrified--terrified that I was losing her. I think she was terrified, too. But we hid that terror from each other. She was probably better at it than I was. I wear every emotion, unguarded, on my face. I did the bare and necessary minimums in the yard that fall. Walking across the lawn one Saturday afternoon my foot disappeared into a sudden sink hole nearly to the knee. It was the only time that Jane was sick that I let my anger out. The air got an earful. All the anger I felt about the cruelty of what was going on with her spewed out in a handful of words before I got control. Jane died just over a month later. The hole in the ground stayed marked, but unrepaired, until spring. I am still working on dealing with it. I've made abortive efforts in my garden every year since. The first spring, I pruned the Rose-of-Sharon. I found a hummingbird nest in it and started off the ladder to tell Jane. The realization she was not there shattered me. I went through the motions of putting some plants in the ground, but my heart was in none of it. Nearly two years ago, I started putting a fence around the garden to keep the groundhogs out. Last year, I managed to prune the plants in two of the foundation beds and plant two small trees. I kept starting landscaping projects, but never seemed to finish any of them. Every inch of every bed looked like ground under repair. They were a perfect reflection of my life, my mind, my heart, and my soul. Their unfinished state is a perfect metaphor for every other aspect of my existence. A friend once said, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who want to die with everything done and those who want to die with a thousand things still to do. There are times I feel I must fall into the latter category: I have a foundation to fight Jane's cancer that always has at least three new projects hanging fire--and whose government paperwork seems endless; I have the beginnings of two novels, a book on journalism, a book on mourning all started and in various stages of completion; I have three landscaping projects in progress and plans for another three in mind; and then there are rooms to paint, carpet to replace, and a basement to clean out and rework into the office Walking with Jane really needs. There are times, even now, I am overwhelmed by all of it. But somewhere in April, something changed. Part of it was the 52-month rebirth ceremony I celebrated alone in the rain at Jane's grave. I felt they way people say you are supposed to feel after the funeral--but never do if you are the spouse or the children. The weight lifted and I could see the world of possibility again. But part of it was also finally getting into the garden as something more than a chore. I started April determined to get all the beds truly cleaned out for the first time since the fall of 2009, determined to finish the groundhog defense system, determined to finish the enlarged bed around the mailbox with the perennials I spent the winter raising from seed. Each day, I made--and saw--visible progress. In mid-April, I realized I was no longer thinking about the gardens--I was seeing them as they would be; I was sleeping the night through and no longer awakening from strange and troubling dreams; and the lists I made of things I wanted to do had fewer and fewer tasks unfinished at each day's end. I still have awful days. Sunday marked 53 months since Jane's death and I got lost in her grave for quite a while that day. I built her a planter of white geraniums, white impatiens, and purple petunias--that last a gesture to her mother who is buried beneath the same headstone. When I came home, I did some housekeeping and moved some furniture around. But this time I was not trying to forget my pain in those things. An engineer was coming Monday afternoon to look at the house for solar power. He needed to be able to get to the attic and be able to see some things that are tucked behind the furniture. Finally, I am seeing glimpses of the longer future and there are things I need to do to prepare for it. For both of us, it was important to live our values and beliefs. Our gardens were a symbol of those things--as those solar panels on the roof will be. Our gardens did not just feed the body, they fed our souls. I forgot that somewhere in the last few years. Neglecting them was evidence of how badly injured my soul was when Jane died. They've tried to nourish me despite how badly I've neglected them. And now that I am truly paying attention again, the dividends are greater than I could have imagined. The ground is still under repair--both in the garden and in my life. Truth be told, they always were--and they always will be. But if a garden is truly the image of a man's soul, then mine seems to be in healing and growing mode: the stone paths in the vegetable garden are nearly finished; the peas and onions and radishes are out of the ground, the tomato transplants are doing well and the eggplant is ready to move from the cold-frame to the garden; the daylily transplants have taken hold, as have the coneflowers and alyssum; last year's hydrangea and lilies have sprouted; the azaleas are in bloom and the peonies have formed their flower buds. For the first time in years, my heart feels light--and the possibilities are endless. Peace, Harry

Dear friends, Two days ago, they old us Jane's dad would go home on Saturday. He was chipper and walking all over the rehab facility for the last two weeks. Tuesday the declared the c-diff dead. Tonight he is back in the hospital--so weak he could not get out of bed. The rehab called Gail about 10:30 tonight to tell her they were moving him. His nurse said he looked jaundiced. We won't get anything more than that before morning. Gail thinks this may well be the end--and says she is ready to let him go if it is. I agree with her. But he has fooled us all before more than once. One just never knows--but it doesn't look good. Peace, Harry