Through Living we Remember

by Tom on December 20, 2012

6 months have passed. 6 months that I felt would never pass yet 6 months that passed in an instant. Time has never felt more uncertain. I feel as if I am a recovering stroke victim. It wasn’t ischemia in a vessel in my brain but a schism in the nexus of my soul which impaired me. Rather than learning how to walk and talk again, I am learning how to live and feel again. I wake up thankful each day to be alive and thankful for my family, for Anne and for all I have, but I also recognize every day that half of me died 6 months ago today.

Anne asked me more than a few times if we would remember her if she passed away. “How could we not?” I would reply. Not only was she central to all our lives but we also believe we will be together again. Even when the pain, loneliness and loss have been replaced by the hope of being reunited as the defining trait of our feelings about her, she will be ever present in our hearts. I feel far from that future state. My emotions about Anne are complex and varied but still are mostly focused on what has been lost.

While dealing with that loss, the kids and I are putting together a second life. I am enjoying work. I have a fun and talented team and we are doing some interesting and audacious things. I am also getting myself into shape. The kids appear to be dealing with it in their own way. We each have bad days and you can tell when one of us is going through one, and needs some space or support.

Holidays, anniversaries and birthdays are especially hard. Rather than just treating them as normal holidays we are changing things up. On our anniversary I ran on the beach until I couldn’t take another step, happy to have the physical pain eclipse the emotional pain. I have not run like that in 20 years. For her birthday we looked at pictures and shared great memories of Anne. I anticipated Thanksgiving was going to be a hard holiday. It wouldn’t be hard because Anne loved it but rather because she hated it and nearly every year she would have me cook it. It wasn’t my favorite either but I was glad to create something out of the day. This year, rather than stick around and suffer through a bad Thanksgiving without her, we got out of Dodge.

The kids and I headed up the coast. Here we were, the 5 of us traveling again and it didn’t feel awkward, it felt right. It was a beautiful Thanksgiving morning and we were taking the long meandering trip along the coast on Highway 1.

Throwing rocks at the sun
I had driven that way a couple of times as a kid. I remembered the hippies in Big Sur, the opulence of Hearst Castle and the beauty of the area. It was time to share those experiences with the kids. We talked a little about Mom early on and decided to listen to one of her favorite books, “The Poisonwood Bible.” We listened and drove,. The winter sun crawled along behind us as we wound our way between the mountains and the sea. Listening to a book about Africa was a great way to remember our own month-long wondering journey around the southern part of the continent. It also is a great book to keep our own family’s personalities and trials in perspective. Although unconventional and crazy at times, the experiences we have shared have all ended up as positives in the end..

It was a unique Thanksgiving, we stopped to see and take pictures of the elephant seals. We were going to visit Hearst Castle but it was closed. We drove up to the gate and found it busy with Asian tourists taking pictures of the castle in the distance. As the sun went lower on the horizon we stopped the car 7 or 8 times to get pictures of an ever increasingly spectacular sunset.

I don’t know if Anne was there with us, I like to think she was, at least for part of it. When the sun went down we decided to leave the coast and head to San Jose where we were staying the night in hopes of finding a place to eat Thanksgiving dinner.

We found a group of restaurants which we thought would be open that night. When we arrived in San Jose the streets were deserted and the first 3 restaurants we visited were closed. I started to get worried that we might be having gas station food for dinner. That was not a tradition I wanted to start. Fortunately we found a family style Japanese place. In an odd sense of irony we had what Anne would have thought was our best Thanksgiving meal ever.

The rest of the weekend was wonderful. A friend of mine took us to the best Dim Sum place in San Francisco and the Asian Art Museum. We met another friend at Muir Woods and took the night Alcatraz tour and cruise. The 5 of us found ways to make our 2 queen bed hotel room work and for a brief moment we remembered we were a traveling family once again.


Fortunately there is still much of the world we haven’t explored, even parts that are within a day’s drive. There is also a lot of living we will need to do. With each step of each journey and over the course of each day we remember and celebrate Anne; Anne, who pushed us to explore new lands, read great books, and enjoy the company of amazing people, “how can we not?”

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3 Months Out

by Tom on September 24, 2012

It has been 3 months since Anne passed away. The kids and I continue to have good and bad days. It feels as if the bad days are getting a little further apart, and the good days are less muted. I have thought about writing something on Sixintheworld, but I didn’t want to do it on a bad day and the good days all feel overly busy. Today is a good day and I am currently sitting on a cross-country flight, which makes this a good time to share.

I don’t claim any extra insight into how to handle the death of a spouse and mother now that we are going through it. In fact, I am continually surprised that we do handle it. I told a friend, I thought we were much better at deciding how to handle the cancer than we are at handling Anne’s passing. Cancer brought us all together in a number of ways; it was humbling and a fight. We grew together, put our gloves on, and fought like our lives were on the line. Anne’s literally was. What would you call what we are doing now? Living? Surviving? It feels less like a choice and more like something innate. I know it will take time and, fortunately, we have each other. The most shocking realization to me is how much life goes on. Anne was our world: before she was sick, she took care of us and after she was sick everything we did turned to focus on her. I knew life wouldn’t end if she passed away, but I have been surprised how busy our lives have become, the almost normality of days and the funny things I do to remember Anne.

This is where I always expect to find her.

Holding hands

When she couldn't do anything else, she still held my hand

I can’t speak for the kids as they have their own ways to remember Anne, but I have found myself doing a handful of things to remember or reach out to her. I have purchased everything in her Amazon cart, I am working my way through her bookshelf, reading books she talked to me about. Note to others, “Don’t start with Crossing to Safety. Angle of Repose is my favorite novel, and Anne is who had me read it. With our shared love of that book, Stegnar felt like a great place to start. The person sitting next to me on the plane, as I sobbed my way through the final chapters of the book didn’t think it was a good choice. I listen to her playlist(she only had 1 playlist, why would she listen to something other than her favorites.) I read her notes in her scriptures, I have put aside a specific time of the day to think about her, and I have continued to take a picture around sunset everyday, a practice I started at the beginning of the year.

Everyday a different sunset.

We remember Anne all the time, but the reality is most days and time is busy spent living our lives. In July, McKane and I were able to attend a tiny but amazing conference in Jackson Hole. It is a new kind of conference where the attendees all put together the agenda on the fly and share their expertise with the other participants. I have been before and knew what to expect but it was a shock for McKane. Before he knew it he was on a panel discussing being a teenager in our age of technology. Mac did great on the panel and throughout the conference, meeting amazing people and representing our family very well, I am sure Anne was watching and was very proud of him.

Ready to run the Snake River

I am doing what my doctor ordered and getting my self back into shape and fully engaging with work. I am still on the board of Rhapsody and help out a few small companies but the big change this year is I have a great and exciting day job. I work for, what I would call, the worlds most audacious company, AEG. They state bold visions and then make them happen. (Next big step Football in LA) I am building a small tech team inside AEG called axs.com. We have our own vision and will use new technologies to change the live event business. We have a lot to do and a big hill to climb, but the journey is rich with unique experiences. Last week I had the opportunity to hang out with the Stanley Cup, tour a room signed by every artist who has played at a major venue in SF over the last 30 years, and, in case you think it’s all fun and games, I also had to work on preparing to take over the ticketing for 2 of the 3 busiest venues in the world.

In August, the 3 younger kids all went back to school. Each goes to a different school with different schedules. Dax is helping out in the short term. Oxford didn’t allow him to just take a semester off, but, rather, are having him return exactly a year after he withdrew to be with Anne. He has only 1 1/3 years worth of school left before he can sit for his degree. This state of limbo is hard for him. He is still busy; he has studies and papers to write for school, he is tutoring Kieran, he is running the Oxford Starcraft Society from afar and is writing and potentially doing some consulting about competitive video gaming. Kieran is back in swimming and is way better at League of Legends than a 12 year old should be. Asher is on Malibu’s travelling soccer team and has taken up dance. McKane is embracing his senior year, prepping for college. He was recently named a National Merit semifinalist and is taking a full load of APs. His goal is to pass 1 more test than Dax did. Had Dax known Mac would shoot that high, I am sure he would have taken more, but at the time 11 felt like plenty.

Asher doing that soccer thing

Getting by on top of a mountain

Short of not having a mom in the house, our lives are as normal as they have been for a few years. I bring all that up to say that, even though we each have days where I am sure we would like to stay in bed and days where we each lash out in anger, sadness, or frustration, we are moving forward. We are living, we are surviving, we aren’t thriving yet and we aren’t travelling. Someday we will. One of the books in Anne’s Amazon cart was a travel book entitled, “100 Journeys for Your Spirit”. I smiled when I received it, Anne and I had had hit about 20 of them, and I’m optimistic that there are still another 80 for the kids and I to do at some point in our lives.

Life does go on.

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Celebrating an Amazing Lady

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You know that friend you want to talk to but haven’t for years. As each year goes past, it becomes harder and harder to reach out. That is what has happened with this blog. I have wanted to write something for a while but haven’t because: we don’t have certainty, we don’t want to share [...]

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Holy Cow!

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It is hard to believe that is was only a year and 3 months ago that Anne was diagnosed with Cancer. It has been a long 15 months. The last 5 months have been exceptionally trying and tender. When Anne had her recurrence and was diagnosed with metastatic disease, our lives, which were already shaky [...]

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