Time for reflection

Dear friends,

I face my sixth holiday season without Jane this year. I am not using “holiday season” to be either offensive or politically correct. Jane and I celebrated each of the festivals and holy days that mark this time of year in every faith and tradition. I still observe them all. I’d like to say it has become easier with time. It hasn’t–different, but not easier.

Have a blessed holiday season…

The end of each year is a time of both rejoicing and remembering. It is a time to look at the past and to plan for the future. I’ll spend many of the next days reflecting on the events of the year now ending and how those things connect not only to the past but also to the future.

A year of challenges

2015 has been a challenge on many levels. We lost my father-in-law, the last of our four parents, in September, one day before the ninth anniversary of his wife’s death. His body simply shut down over the course of about a week. His surviving daughter, Gail, broke her heel in the midst of that. Her surgery followed closely on her father’s funeral.

I still observe them all.

I also lost more than a few former students this year, the most recent barely two weeks ago. When people much older than me die, it is easier to accept. When a young person dies–especially one Jane and I held in our hearts–it is particularly difficult.

And I lost several friends I have made in the NETS community. Each one strikes me and reminds me of the urgency of the work I try to do every day. In my heart, I know I am doing all that I can, but I still wish I could find a way to do more.

A year of growth

Walking with Jane continues to grow in influence, if not in size. By the first of the year, we should have over 24,000 hits for 2015 on the website–an increase of nearly fifty percent over last year. We have directly generated nearly $95,000 in funds for research and awareness–though most of that money never passed through our coffers–and helped to launch 3-in-3: The Campaign to Cure NET Cancer at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston on December 9. Next year looks likely to continue to build on those efforts.

…I lost several friends…

Personally, I’ve navigated some difficult waters this year. But I’ve also done a number of things outside of NET cancer I am pleased with. I taught for six weeks this summer at the New England Center for Investigative Reporting’s summer program for high school students at Boston University–a thing I thoroughly enjoyed despite the long daily commute.

I continued my ongoing landscaping and interior decorating projects, have decided to get back into serious photography–the one visual art I seem to have any small talent for–read more novels than I can count, pretended to play some golf, listened to some live music, and witnessed the completion of the initial loop of the topiary heart I restarted after Jane’s death. Tomorrow, they put enough solar panels on the roof of the house to generate all the electrical power I currently use in the course of a year.

A time to heal

I am not yet fully healed from the events of five years ago. Honestly, I don’t think I ever will be. But I am hopeful in ways I have not been for a very long time. This season of the year is about rekindling the fire in our lives and beginning anew the things that define us.

…a thing I thoroughly enjoyed…

I think I am ready for that this year.

I hope you and yours are as well.

Have a blessed holiday season–regardless of your faith or lack of it–and a glorious New Year. As a friend once put it: A year of new light–let it shine.

Pax et lux

Harry