Sharon

Sharon passed away this morning just after 8:00 a.m. His beautiful, loving wife, as Jeff described her; Laura and Tom's beautiful, loving mother; our beautiful, loving friend.

Those two words pretty much sum Sharon up. She was beautiful on the outside, for sure, and even more beautiful within. Always smiling, always kind, so healthy and strong, quick to laugh at life and its many funny moments, quick to help a friend.
Here's a photo I like of her with Laura that Nickie took in Budapest.

Jeff, Laura, Tom and Sharon's mother were with her at the end, which brings great comfort to know.

I keep thinking of the image I posted in April from a guru/guide in California:

"The human personality self could be likened to your left thumb as
you are sitting in a cathedral where there is beautiful architecture,
and colored glass, and holy sounds being made by a choir. If you
turned your attention fully to your thumb, you would not notice any of
that. You would only notice your thumb.

As a soul, you are sitting in a cathedral of eternal love, and
perfection, and creativity, and beauty, and goodness. And, a certain
part of your attention is focusing on your thumb. In other words, what
you experience as you-as-a-human is a small portion of the attention,
or the awareness, of you-as-an-eternal soul. The rest of the awareness
of you-as-an-eternal-soul is blocked out from your human awareness.

When your body meets death, that 'sliver' of soul consciousness
that has been focusing on its thumb is turned back to the full
attention in the cathedral. What you experience as you simply stops
being small, and it becomes large. It does not vanish. So, your human
self does not vanish. It simply wakes up to its existence as an
eternal soul. Nothing is lost."

This is how I want to think of her, waking up to the full stupendous wondrousness of the whole cathedral -- with who she is and all that she is having gotten that much bigger, more beautiful and overflowing with love and peace and joy. That's how I want to think of Sharon from now on.

Happy Solstice!

It's the first day of summer, my very favorite day of the year, and I'm with all those crazy people in Stonehenge this morning -- 24,000 druids, pagans, drummers and partygoers -- who welcomed and celebrated the sun on this longest day -- yeah! I also love that for thousands of years this was the big pre-Christian holiday and celebration: of life, of Spring, of renewal, of fertility, of love and lust and all things hedonistic and spiritual at the same time.

Actually I love the whole three months leading up to this red-letter occasion, when the sun rises a little bit earlier each dawn, allowing us early morning people to exercise and write and otherwise operate in daylight instead of darkness. To see the sky go from black to gray to pink to red to blue-gray and then blue by 6 a.m. is amazing! It makes you feel happy to be up and alive, but bittersweet to mark yet another change of season on this fast-moving merry-go-round we're all hanging onto.

Another bonus is I'm here writing a happy post today instead of a gloomy one. Despite the ongoing story of Sharon's illness, I do feel more hopeful and lighthearted for a change. One reason may be that I just picked up my business cards from the printer, and I love them. (Thank you, Evelyn!) They make it seem absolutely real that I've started my own company and now have three actual clients -- yikes.

Also, my youngest child graduated from 8th grade yesterday and moves on to high school in the fall, as both her sisters go off to college. Oh lord, only one child and a high schooler -- my life is changing faster than I can process these days.

Also, I've made a new deal with myself to write just two pages of my novel every day -- that's a chapter a week. I figure I can always squeeze out two pages, no matter how busy or tired I am, right? So there are no excuses not to. Although come to think of it, I didn't do it today. OK, right after I finish this...

And finally, I'm running 12 miles with my marathon partner Jane on Saturday. We're into the double digits now and it ain't gonna get any easier. Except that after this we get a break and only have to do six next weekend. Then 14,7,16,8,18,9,20,10,23,8,10,26!!, then 8,8,8 and then the big day. In this program you run the full thing before the day of the race. So if all goes well I'll actually run TWO marathons this fall, and then I will shut up about this, cross it off my list, and never do anything so utterly stupid and tiring again as long as I live.

Happy summer solstice -- go out and do something crazy.

No Good News

I haven't written on my blog in almost a month, because every time I log on I see the prevous posts about Sharon and I just plain lose heart. How can I write about interesting or good things happening in my life, or about whatever idea or question pops into my head, when my 47-year-old friend, who was completely healthy and in the prime of her life just two months ago, is lying in a hospital dying.

Sharon's first round of chemo didn't go well at all. She'd been in and out of the hospital with an infection, but they had already waited so long to start treatment that they decided to go ahead and try traditional chemo, instead of waiting to start a clinical trial at Georgetown. Within a few days she was back in the hospital, sicker than ever. They've now decided as a family not to continue treatment, to just focus on keeping her as comfortable as possible. She's not seeing any non-family visitors, which I can totally understand.

So this means I and everyone else who knows and loves her will very possibly never see her again. It's a shocking, incredible and much-too-fast turn of events, even for an illness we all knew was agressive and incurable. It's so terrible and tragic and impossible to understand and absorb.

And then when life goes on and I find myself laughing or enjoying a moment with friends, such as at Ginny's annual fitness party the other night, I realized how truly out of sync and abnormal and unacceptable this whole thing is. And yet we have no say -- it just IS. And my heart sinks, and I just get on with things, because no matter how anyone feels life simply won't stop for the rest of us. We have no choice but to carry on. And yet doing so feels unreal, and like a betrayal somehow. I know Sharon would never want anyone to feel this way, but what's happening -- as childish and whiny as it probably sounds -- is just so goddamed bloody unfair. It's just SO F$%&ING WRONG.