The Bullet

(To anyone looking for the most recent Blogworthy Report, a new one has been published below at the same time as this story.)

A Personal Sharing from Austin:

To my memory, I’ve never used the opportunity of the Blogworthy to offer a personal sharing into my life. I experienced something pretty extreme recently that seems like as good a reason as any to break that trend. It’s something that I think some readers might care about, and more may at least find it at least interesting.

I’ll start with the preface: I’m okay, and should make a full recovery from this event (physically and mentally).

The short story is that I got shot. There was a shootout in front of my partner Kat’s house and I was a hit in the crossfire. It was in the leg, left calf, no bone or major arteries were hit.

The longer story has a bit more drama and speaks to the psychological experience of it – what I’ve been defining as trauma. I’ll offer a semi-detailed account with some personal reflections at the end. Warning, it’s a detailed account of a scary violent incident.

It was a beautiful afternoon. Kat was scheduled to move into her new home the next day and we spent all day getting her stuff organized for the move. We were in high spirits and very excited about the move. At around 5:30pm, I went outside to get my car from the street in front of the house to pull it around to the alley out back so we could load some stuff into it.

Kat’s yard is long and narrow, and her house is set back far from the road.

When I made it to the gate, about to open it to step out onto the sidewalk, I heard what I now know were gunshots coming from the nearby street corner. I then saw an SUV screeching out of control around the corner, turning in my direction. It jumped the curb, hitting the neighbor’s car and crashing fully onto the sidewalk. It was coming straight towards me very fast, so I turned and ran about halfway back down Kat’s yard as fast as I could.

The SUV continued crashing through all of the fencing and tree guards before it stopped directly in front of Kat’s house, taking out her fence and gate right where I was standing moments before.

(While Kat’s house is set back from the road, her neighbors’ houses are right up on the sidewalk. Her next-door neighbors have three young children who are frequently on the sidewalk in front of their house, directly in the path of the SUV. Thankfully they were not home.)

Kat heard the noise, rushed to her front door (in her bedroom – a typical shotgun-style house layout) and opened it. She saw everything that unfolded from here.

I turned and began moving towards the car to see if they were okay. I have a vague flash of memory of another car pulling up alongside it, and then another round of gunshots started directly in front of her yard. I began running towards Kat’s house again, and then fell down.

It felt like I had maybe just tripped, but in the moment I knew it was likely that I got shot. I could feel something wrong with my left leg. I looked at it and saw a bump on the inside of my left calf, but I didn’t see an entry wound (it was in the outer-rear, out of my sight), so in the moment I wondered if I got hit by something else.

I was on my hands and knees for a few moments (Kat says I looked frozen) before I glanced back and saw a man get out of the crashed car, jump Kat’s fence, and begin running towards me.

I did not know what was happening or why he was running towards me. There was a quick logic going on in my mind that it didn’t quite make sense that I was a target in any of this, but the look on his face and the way he was running made me think that he was coming for me, possibly to try to kill me. Before that moment, I knew my life was in danger; at that moment, the danger became much more immediate and frightening. Gunshots continued. (The police apparently recovered 30 shell casings afterwards.)

The next minute or two are the blurriest in both mine and Kat’s memories. Without knowing if I even could, I got up and ran literally for my life without looking back again. I remember distinctly thinking, “Thank God I’m able to run right now.” I wasn’t sure how badly my leg was hurt at that point. Kat later mentioned how shockingly fast I ran.

As I ran, I was shouting for Kat to close and lock the door, thinking that the man was chasing me and might come inside the house. I ran to the side door near the back of the house and made it inside and locked it without looking back to see what the man was doing.

Kat was at the front of the house in the bedroom with the dogs, and I went in there continuing to tell her to lock the door. She said she did, and then I told her, “Call 911, I think I’ve been shot.”

In my memory, I can recall even in this moment recognizing how utterly surreal this was, with such a violent, sudden departure from the reality of our happy afternoon together not a minute earlier.

It’s also worth pointing out the events from Kat’s perspective at this point. She heard a horrible crash, ran to the front door, saw me running as gunshots were being fired, and saw me fall to the ground. Then a man jumped her fence and began running towards me. It seemed as though I had either been shot dead, or was going to be killed by this man (who would then possibly proceed kill her and the dogs). I got up and ran, telling her to lock the door, and came in the side door, and into the bedroom telling her I think I’d been shot.

At this point I was aware that there was some blood on my leg but I still wasn’t sure exactly what happened. She got her phone out and I began to sit down on the ground, but became cognizant that I did not want to bleed on the carpet, so I told her I was going to the kitchen, and went in there and sat down on the ground.

My memory gets clearer at this point. I still did not feel anything specifically wrong with my leg, but I saw now that my shoe was filled with blood (my white sock was completely soaked red) and there was a significant amount of blood pooled on the floor. I didn’t know exactly where on my leg it was coming from, but Kat grabbed some paper towels and put pressure on the general area.

Kat was on the phone with a 911 operator, and eventually I took the phone to answer some of their questions. The woman just said to keep pressure on the wound with a clean cloth, and then continued asking me questions about what happened. I did my best to answer. She sounded very uncaring and unalarmed, but I don’t blame her for that. She never indicated that there was someone on the way to help, so I eventually said, “Is someone on their way? I’m bleeding pretty badly.” She said that someone was on the way.

Around this time, Kat looked outside and saw that the man who we thought was chasing me was in the alley behind her house. The operator then told me to tell Kat to go look for the responders outside.

Kat went to the front door and apparently saw a lot of firefighters kind of mulling around the crash, so she opened the door and shouted to them for help. She led them around the side of her house to the kitchen door, where apparently the man who had been running in her yard popped up from the alley and said, “I’m here, I’m okay.” I’m not sure what happened with him directly after that.

(To the best we can gather, he was the target of the shooting. One of the EMTs told me that the other car circled the block looking for him. We believe he thought it would be better to surrender to the police than risk running and getting killed. He was arrested for felony possession of a handgun, which he had tried to ditch in the neighbor’s yard, where young children play.)

The kitchen door was locked, so I reached up to unlock and open it, saw a flood of firefighters and police, and part of me relaxed knowing that the craziest part was over.

The firefighters came inside and immediately began tending to my wound. Police also came inside, and I was surrounded by men asking me rapid-fire questions about me and the situation. At a certain point, after my wound was fully bandaged and they let me sit up, there was a calmer moment and Kat (who had been watching from the doorway into the kitchen) asked if she could come sit by me and hold my hand. Through the shock I felt some relief knowing the situation would play out somewhat as expected at that point, so I told Kat a few times that we’re okay, and that I’m okay.

During these moments, the firefighters were talking calmly and with humor about the situation. Their station is barely a block away on the street the cars were on, so they apparently even saw the cars racing down the street shooting at each other. A young firefighter told me that as he saw the shootout from in front of their station, he thought they were shooting at him so he ducked. I sarcastically thought, yeah, well they got me.

The EMTs showed up soon after and began taking a closer look at my wound, asking me questions, and getting some more vital readings. They had a stretcher in the alley, so the firefighters helped me to my feet and helped me hop out of Kat’s door, down the stairs, and onto the stretcher. I remember thinking about how comfortable the stretcher was. I then saw the man who ran into her yard sitting behind Kat’s house in handcuffs, surrounded by police.

After a bit longer, I was loaded into the ambulance and taken to the ER.

To spare the details of the hospital, I was ultimately very lucky (given the circumstances). I was in and out of the ER in four hours, with the entry wound cleaned and the bullet still in my leg. (That is apparently standard care for bullets. If they are not actively doing damage, the conventional medical wisdom is that any surgery to remove them is more harmful than leaving them in. The body can heal completely around a bullet. I was shocked at this, as are most people I share this with, but it is apparently true.) Five hours after I got shot in her front yard, I sat on Kat’s couch eating a cookie, unsure if I was still in reality or not.

The above details were mostly written in the couple of days following the incident. As I write this now, it’s been more than three weeks since the incident. I am recovering well, though the frequent medical care appointments are getting tiring. I had to walk with a cane for a couple of weeks, but can now mostly move around mostly normally (though with impairment). I’ve been making frequent trips to my PCP. I’ve had a couple visits with a surgeon, to treat a massive hematoma where the bullet settled, and to see if the bullet might be able to come out (it’s still inconclusive). I officially began physical therapy this past week and will be going twice a week for a little while, to hopefully regain (mostly) full function of my leg. I have been looking for a therapist to help process the after-effects of the event, but I am not experiencing any severe symptoms of PTSD. I do have some lingering effects to my mood, attitude, and cognitive abilities, but nothing keeping me from returning to a normal, peaceful life. Thankfully, Kat successfully moved the following day, so we have not had to be at the site of the shooting at all.

I have also had ongoing contact with the police, but they are not very forthcoming with information about the investigation. The person/people who shot me have not been arrested yet. I have oddly thought very little about them. I do not feel any sense of anger or desire for retribution towards them, but it does concern me that these people armed with guns and with no care for human life walk society freely. For that reason, I’m hoping the police can find them and I will do what I can to help.

Soon after it all happened, as I was pondering the spiritual implications of the catalyst, I got a clear message from my inner guidance that healing was fully possible, and that the primary effect of this catalyst would be in an opening of the heart. I did not quite see how that would happen at the time, but since then I have felt it strongly settling into my heart and doing work there.

I am feeling an almost overwhelming sense of gratitude – for the fact that it wasn’t worse than it was (it could have been so much worse), for Kat, for all that I have in my life, for the first responders, for the ER doctors, for my PCP, for the hospital staff, for everyone who has offered support, for L/L Research, for the Law of One, for Gary and Trish (who have not only been incredibly supportive of my healing process, but helped Kat move the following day, which was a healing gift that can’t really be described), for you who is reading this. Really, thinking about almost any angle of my life surrounding this event, I just feel strong gratitude.

I can also feel that gratitude carrying a heavy weight. When I think about how grateful I am for these things, I also think about the people who don’t have the kind of support I have had, or who have gone through worse experiences and haven’t been able to find peace and healing. Whether it’s trauma or anything else, this experience has highlighted to me how important support is, and what kind of healing and transformation is possible when support is available. I’ve been amazed at the kind of support society has to offer someone like me (not to mention the direct support from friends and family). I want everyone to feel as supported as I have in anything they have to go through. I am so lucky. It’s feeling like a call to service, but I’m not quite sure what form that might take right now. I would like to find a way to pay that support forward, and work towards a society where others have the same opportunities I do. I’m going to continue letting it do its work on my heart as I heal and see what comes as I walk that path.

If you are still reading, thank you for witnessing and for caring. Sincerely from the bottom of my heart, I love you all.

2022-05-27

4/22 – 5/26

Search Engine: One of the principal goals of L/L’s new library website is to create more “surface area” for a virtually endless library of information. That is, to make it more accessible, useable, researchable, and helpful. Toward that end, we are VERY HAPPY to report that on May 25, L/L’s new search engine went live! For the first time in the history of the universe, readers, including us, may search the entire breadth of the Confederation channeling—the Law of One and almost five decades of conscious channeling—as a single, synthesized body of material.

Prague: We are excited to announce that we are resuming holding gatherings outside the US! In collaboration with our friends of the Czech translation team, we opened the Prague Law of One Gathering from Aug 12–14. More information here!

Coming Home Gathering: Opened in the previous BW cycle, registration still open.

Channeling Circles: Our small group continues meeting regularly to receive messages from the Confederation. Semi-monthly we meet in Jim’s living room for our Intermediate Circles, and though we have hit a delay this past month, we plan to continue also meeting once a month for our C/C channeling circles. And thanks to our amazing transcription team, a number of transcripts have gone up these past weeks:

RC Youtube: Trish and Austin (mainly Trish) continued on with the Ra Contact Youtube project, inching ever closer to the finish line:

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  • Working with Translators
    • Chinese – Worked to assist the intrepid Li-Yun as she nears completion of translating A Concept Guide into Chinese, including content questions and the challenges of formatting. | Dialogued with Wen about her great effort to produce a new Chinese RC and our policies on machine translation | Welcomed YiTong into the translator family, connected them with Sean and Terry, and thanked them as they embarked upon a translation of Voices of the Confederation. Thank you, all three!
    • Serbian –Dialogued with Sheyla about Dejan’s effort to produce a Serbian RC. Sheyla is a very active person who loves exercise and lots and lots of work. So huge translation projects are right up her alley. ; ) (<– A note for her if she reads this.) Thank you, Dejan and Sheyla!
    • Danish – Received first contact from Thomas, a fellow interested in translating the Ra Contact into Danish. Worked with Thomas to establish terms and relationship, and off to the races he went. Subsequently assisted with some translation related questions. Thank you, Thomas!
    • Russian – Received from Marina some Russian transcripts and assisted with some interesting questions, including how to translate Latwii, as it risks looking like the country Latvia, and the ever thorny questions of noun gender (such a strange concept to a native English speaker). Thank you, Marina! | And dialogued with Catherine about starting on a new book and translating Carla’s audio lectures from her Basic Principles course into Russian. Thank you, Catherine!
    • Farsi  – Publishing Meysam’s work to the website has ended up being a bit more of a difficult task than initially thought. Daniel has had to do some special coding and reviewing thanks to the right-to-left text, which has also caused some issues thanks to our graphic software stubbornly and pointlessly omitting right-to-left functionality. But after some work and cooperation with Meysam, it is almost ready to go… but before it is launched he will translate a couple more items so that the official Farsi page on our site will have more content in all of the sections. |And a huge shout out to Zachary Horn who helped us to green light a way to lend some additional support to this project. Thank you, Zachary!|  And a beautiful quote from the one known as Meysam: “Indeed, finding the material was like coming across an unexpected oasis after a long but hopeful walk along the desert. That blissful feeling of reading the confederation words has stayed with me every day. Having the chance to share the source of that feeling and knowing that it might be the same for many is the greatest reward.”
    • Portuguese – Had some dialogue with Edgard and Pedro about following the Farsi model (and Bulgarian, actually) by publishing batches of sessions of the material. First batch + front matter of the book shouldn’t be far behind.
    • Romanian – Received from Horia not only his usual insightful reflections on the spiritual journey, but a revised Romanian translation of Esmerelda. Thank you, Horia!
    • French – Received outreach from Geoffrey and after setting up terms and relationship, connected him with Misha and Jochen. Look forward to sharing Geoffrey’s work!
    • Italian – Received from the ever-fun Mauro a few new Italian transcripts along with lovely dialogue. Thank you, Mauro! | And received the annual report from Stazione Celeste of the Italian publication of AWH from Susanna. Thank you, Susanna!
    • Korean – And just a couple of days ago, received outreach from Haru, a reader interested in producing a Korean RC book. Explained that that project was actually already underway and then initiated our processes of setting terms and relationship. We’ll see how it goes!
  • Coming Home/Homecoming/Prague: Even though much is being taken up by L/L’s new Event Manager, particularly in terms of processing registrations and responding to attendee inquiries, still tons of logistical work on our end for three events, from scholarships and using the online store to track and process registrations, to budgets, travel, lodging for us, lodging for the Coming Home event (the first time we’re managing all attendee lodging at a retreat), to coordinating with Vojta for Prague, to Misha and Jochen for their attendance and subsequent activity, to filling out Homecoming, to a variety of attendee-related questions. A lot! Much thanks to our new Event Manager and to Emilly, a Law of One reader and Vojta’s partner, who helped a great deal with some of our European lodging! And a special thank you to the HC attendee who is anonymously contributing a couple of scholarships!
  • Seeker ministry: With our new hire on board, and Trish taking up responding to seeker emails as well, the weekly load of emails from seekers around the world is spread out a bit more and feels more manageable. It is still one of the greatest honors of our position, to connect with seekers looking to share their stories and the fruits of their seeking, to ask questions about the material, or just looking to find some connection.
  • Search Engine: While announced above, there was a lot of work in this! Most of which was on Daniel’s shoulders, but the plenty of design and function-related questions and tasks for us to work through, among which was writing the Guidelines Page, many thanks to Joanna for first drafting that one!
  • Audiobooks:
    • For a while now, we’ve been working with Juliane, a wonderful soul in Brazil who has been editing the audiobook for A Wanderer’s Handbook. She’s been a joy to work with, and has done a great job. The work has been delayed some due to life circumstances, and she has recently opted to set it down completely so that we can find another editor. Thank you so much Juliane!
    • Worked to find, for the first time, a professional third-party audiobook editor to get our long overdue audio library of Jim’s narration to publication!
    • Trish adds: “The process to find a professional audiobook editor definitely took me out of my comfort zone – in a good way, though. I’ve never been in a position where I was the sole individual in charge of deciding who should be hired for a certain role. I would much rather act as a sounding board/cheerleader to an individual making a decision than be the actual individual making the decision. (Do not ask me where I want to go for dinner because that is way too much pressure for me. And honest to Bob, I almost certainly have zero preference anyway. “Is there a salad on the menu? Cool, I’m set.”)  Adding to my discomfort, my personal vocabulary for this particular job is, well, limited. I edited the audio for our TRC audiobook, but I did so as a novice. The processes I developed to edit that audio were largely discovered through trial and error. So for me to find the language to dialogue with a professional audiobook editors required some finagling. I very much felt like a high schooler interviewing a post-grad student. But thanks to a combination of intuition and help from my home team, we signed a contract with an amazing 4-person company. I genuinely look forward to hearing what they produce.”
  • Typo Project: We reported in the previous Blogworthy that a reader discovering typos in the 40th Anniversary Edition of the Law of One books became a bit of a can of worms. Since then, that can of worms have become a barrel of worms. Perhaps an oil tanker of worms. The publisher has been working kindly with us to sort out the issue, but it has necessitated a significant amount of effort on our part to begin to unravel their mistakes so that they can be undone by a reprint. A thorough process is unfolding of meticulously comparing three different versions of the text to note both mistakes made during an OCR scanning process and edits done without our approval. Trish began the process by discovering around 163 errors in the five books just by an eye scan alone. Since then, we had to create a process to compare three different documents in order to ferret out the additional errors and wrongfully made edits, and anywhere from 2–3 of our team have been working on it at a time. | Had a couple of video meet-ups with the publisher on the matter and various emails. Maybe another week or two and it will be finished.
    • Trish adds: “Fun fact: Between editing the TRC audiobook, creating the YouTube videos that utilize the original channeling audio, and going through this second round of error-finding, I will have essentially read the books just for these purposes five times now. And each time I am discovering juicy li’l nugs of inspiration. ❤”
    • “I have never researched grammar so much in my life, BTW. I feel like I have a pretty robust understanding of the English language. But dang does this project make me question the mechanics of hyphenation more than ever before.”
  • Social Media/Printed Book Sharing of the Confederation’s Message:
    • Updated Facebook and Twitter with Confederations quotes, created and shared Instagram images, and updated Patreon with L/L news and offerings.
    • Continuing working on producing the Ra Contact YouTube Videos.
    • Shipped book orders around the world and managed the online store, with various customer inquiries to process.
    • Implemented edits to channeling transcripts on the website and continued to support the volunteer transcribers in the question to fill in some holes in our channeling library.
    • Continued project of digitizing channeling audio, including discovering channelings and meetings that have yet to be transcribed/added to the website. The sometimes haphazard way that cassettes were recorded and recovered over and non-systematically stored at the time is humorous.
    • Continued to work on editing and finalizing podcast transcripts. Completed 3 podcast transcript edits this period.
  • Prison Ministry Program
    • Chose 5 volunteers to work with us on the Prison Ministry and onboarded them to the systems we use to manage our correspondence
    • Since the program re-launched, our volunteers have helped to send out 5 letters.
  • Nuts & Bolts:
    • All of the typical maintenance, typo correction, etc. with the library site and the online store. |IT stuff – addressing software issues, investigating solutions to problems, integrating technology into our processes. All regular activities in our daily rounds.
    • Online store issues, again: Over the past few weeks, multiple random issues have popped up . The platform is an open source piece of software, which has its benefits, but among the drawbacks is that there is no real professional help available, and more unique bugs that don’t necessarily affect the whole community will often be ignored. So we have to scrape by with our own limited skillset.
    • Took another step on the long journey with a tangled copyright question with the help of attorneys, this one bringing us much closer to resolution.
    • Could not find the time to perform the in-depth analysis for our annual tax returns, so sought and gained an extension.
    • Pursued all sorts of questions with the Law of One publisher related to underreported and missing sales (due not to foul play on their end but mechanical mistakes…. that persist) and other related logistics. Fortunately they are cooperative in good faith and continue to work toward resolution.
    • Completed five weeks’ worth of the bookkeeping
  • Smatterings: Helped to facilitate Jim’s ongoing work with the final student of the “Basic Principles” course | Held some dialogue with the CSC | Had a video meet-up with the Swedish translator and our friend, Lana, after a long lapse in communication | Held rounds of dialogue with Aaron Maret, seed of the AVLLOO study group, about efforts to teach the LOO | Enjoyed a couple emails with the Tarot deck team | met with a journalist for an online magazine who had questions about the Law of One and L/L | Made a push toward completion of editing the transcript of the Nov, 2021 interview with Morris about early L/L history after a long hiatus. Just a few pages away!

  • Daniel: If Daniel made his own report, it would be a long one all by itself. The Trello Boards we share with him for website work are filled with cards as far as the eye can see…
  • Intermediate Circles: On our own time, joined Kathy and Jim at Jim’s on 4/28 and 5/11 for two intermediate circles. 4/28 was about the tension between surrender and responsibility, and 5/11 held space for individual questions.
  • C/C Circles: Did not have our monthly C/C circle due to Austin receiving a bullet in his leg (see post above this one), Gary’s Dad passing, and Trish being blessed with a breakthrough case of COVID-19 that laid her out for a week.

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Personal Sharings

Gary: Celebrated Jim’s 75th birthday in this period. He is still full of vigor and energy for service and seeking.

And then on a less celebratory note—unless the completion of the incarnation is celebrated, which seems appropriate on the metaphysical level—after a few years of advancing dementia, my father passed away peacefully in his sleep on April 27. We will hold a service in June to say goodbye as a family. In the meantime I wrote a little piece.

About My Dad’s Closing Chapters

I think we have two basic fundamental choices regarding how we relate to our suffering. Do we dig in and face it in order to learn, grow, and be better than we were, thereby transmuting the misery into expanded being? Or we do resist, run away from, and avoid our difficulties, thereby extending their duration and increasing their intensity?

Most of us vacillate between these two, I believe. My dad often chose the latter path. Whether through alcohol or a cocktail of pharmaceutical numbing agents, he spent a lot of time not facing himself. I don’t judge him for this, particularly as I see similar threads in me—my dad just didn’t have the tools or the wherewithal to really dig into those things that troubled him in the deeper layers, and to face the fears and pains buried there. Instead I want to share my admiration for what he *was* able to accomplish.

Beginning sometime in the late 2000s, sometime after the divorce when his own long dark night got underway, when he began to turn increasingly to prescription medication for some kind of solution, some sort of false release from pain, he made a conscious, intentional vow to himself to release his anger and “negativism.” For him, this meant to no longer complain, to not speak ill of others, to not waste an extra minute of his life in anger, to see the positive, and to be grateful for the blessings that life gifts all of us.

In the very difficult subsequent years—driven in large part by his deep well of guilt and self-punishment for perceived wrongdoings—he held onto that vow tightly. And from the trenches he somehow managed to fulfill his promise. Gradually he transformed. He released his anger. He became such a soft, gentle, and kindhearted man. He expressed love and gratitude so often. As suffering has a way of doing, he was humbled. Underneath the daily game of running from pain, his chief wish in life seemed to be to relate to others with love.

After the stroke and onset of vascular dementia, that process of opening his heart accelerated. As dementia stripped him of his memories, he became so innocent, so much more in his heart. He seemed to express even more love and gratitude. He was a light.

And what few memories he could hold onto he cherished. Endlessly he loved showing everyone his “memories” in the form of pictures hanging up around his walls. And in every conversation he cycled through the handful of memories he could recall. (He seemed to have a different set of for everyone he talked to. His favorite with me was remembering how he and I marched in our hometown Memorial Day parade together in our military uniforms.)

Due to his years spent self-medicating and then the dementia, it feels like we’ve been losing him for a long time such that the actual passing feels like a formality, an official confirmation and graceful close to the long unfolding separation, like seeing the boat you are watching grow smaller from the shore finally vanish over the horizon. So there is great peace in my heart with his transition.

But the tears come thinking that that great and proud man who I called “dad,” who as a little kid was a giant to me, is no longer here with us, at least while we live and breathe on this side of the veil of forgetting.

For all your human imperfections, and the inadvertent pain you brought to others, you did your best, Dad. Of this I have no doubt. I admire what you were able to accomplish in this life. I see your perseverance when you were at bottom and wanted to end it all. I thank you for those gifts which are too many for the counting, among which includes the gift of life, the gift of your years and long hours of hard work to provide for us, the gift of giving me the protected space in a difficult world to grow into who I am, and even, in the end, the gift of your vulnerability as you became a portal into innocence for us.

And I thank my brother Adam for the mountains he moved to offer that fatherly service in reverse to our own father, and my sister-in-law Lori who so lovingly carried that weight alongside of Adam, and to my Aunt Sue for the selfless love of a sister that sheltered and sustained my dad’s heart through challenging times, and my mom who underwent her own hard times with my dad but put aside her suffering to stand by him in mutual service to their four kids.

Dad. I love you. We will meet again.