Sometimes what you don’t know CAN hurt you.  Tim and I took a quick trip back to Ohio last week.  We drove.  So we could bring things back with us…

The four days we had there were a whirlwind.  Fully booked.  We’d get up, blink, and it was five o’clock.  We accomplished everything we’d planned, and then some.  It was a great four days.  And when, at just before six am Monday morning we set out to drive back across the United States – needing to be home by Tuesday night due to work that had to be completed on Wednesday.  That meant over twenty-four hours of driving in about thirty-six hours.

We were good with that.  The time we’d spent in Ohio was worth the drive.  More than worth it.  So we set out in push mode.  We were going to make it to Oklahoma City by Monday night.  We’d sleep a few hours and make it to Phoenix by Tuesday evening.  We listened to movies to help pass the time.  (I watched what I could see of them on the little DVD player.)  We talked and we ate a bit.  I drank a lot of Diet Coke.  We were passing through the world, and yet nothing existed outside of our truck.  One stop to the next, one state to the next, we were in different cultures, different temperatures, different time zones.  And yet, our world, inside the truck, was the same.  And all that was real.

Until, just north of Tulsa, after twelve hours on the road with another two and a half to go, we stopped at a travel plaza for a bathroom break.  On our way back out to the car, we passed an employee who was just arriving.  She told us to be safe.  Tim didn’t hear her.  I didn’t pay attention, until several steps later.  I heard her words repeated in my mind.  And a third time.  I stopped.  Grabbed Tim’s arm.  Told him what I’d heard.

Thank God.  If we’d continued on our way in our isolated world, we’d have driven straight into the numerous tornadoes that desecrated Oklahoma that day.  There was the massive destruction in Moore that hit all the news stations across the country.  And there were many more that touched down from north Tulsa to south Oklahoma City.

You are getting the facts and video from the tragedy in the news.  I won’t take time here to share what we saw.  I do offer a huge prayer of thanks that the death toll was much less than had been released from the coroner’s office to local Tulsa TV Monday night.

The photo up above is one of many we took from our phones as we drove to the nearest exit.  We were on a toll road so the exits were not numerous.  My job was to watch for funnel clouds.  And to keep myself calm.  After eighteen miles, we found a little town a couple of miles off from the storm’s path and got a room for the night. We had to go to more than one place to find a room still available on the ground floor.

Tuesday morning we woke up to continued storms, but no tornado warnings.  We drove half a mile down the road to get diet and coke and coffee for breakfast, but the place was closed due to overnight flooding.  At that point I downloaded a weather radar and alert ap for my phone, and stayed glued to it until we were out of the storm.  We pulled into home at two-thirty-two this morning.

And from now on, I am paying more attention to what’s going on around me.

It’s when you do something that you realize you can.

I’ve learned something very clearly.  If you think you can’t do something that you must do – or even just want to do – stop thinking about it and start.  Just start.  And leave the getting it done to fate.

Tim and I have both just come off the completion of several mammoth work projects.  They seemed impossible to complete, let alone complete well.  We buckled down.  He started his projects.   I started mine.  We got out of bed at five thirty every morning. Worked until six-thirty or seven every night.  Sixteen days straight. And here we are.  Done.  And done well.

It got me to  thinking about other things that I didn’t think I could do.  But I had no choice and I every day I got up and just started them.  Or continued them.

Saturday saw the end of the most impossible task of my life.  It’s done.  I am alive so I lived through it. It took a year.  It was horrible.  But I got up every day and did it for only that day.  Each day.  I knew I couldn’t do a year. Some days I didn’t even think I could do a day.  So I would think about something else.

Because sometimes that is all you can do.  And in the end all you can do is all it takes.

I have a gift for you this week. Someone’s talent that just touched me to the depths of my soul. Even if you don’t share my deep need for this place, you might at least get to know me a little better. It’s a trusted video. I’ve vetted it. Several times!!

That which calms Tara’s soul.

Enjoy!!

You know, I write and talk all the time about living life focused on what matters most.  And as any of you who follow me know I believe with all of my heart that what matters most is heart.  People.  Loving people.  The relationships we have here on earth.

Last week I wrote about a couple who’d lived together and died within days of each other in their home.  To me, that was a happy happy story because it was the story of a love that endured a lifetime and then took their spirits into the next lifetime together.

As I grow through my everyday living, do my work and have normal days, I continue to stumble upon evidence that my belief is whole and truly correct.  I had yet another incident this week – one that is touching me very personally.

I’ve written before about my older brother, my closest friend for many many years.  We were only eighteen months apart, he was older, and I grew up in his shadow.  It was a wonderful place to be.  I loved it there.  I was proud of him.  And thought he was a whole lot cooler than I was.  He did all the people work, the socializing, and I could just follow around behind him enjoying my quiet little space in life.  He was an incredibly talented musician and I never ever tired of listening to him.  That’s us up there in the picture.  He’s on the left.  I’m next to him.  It’s our last family photo.  Taken in front of the family photo hanging on the wall behind us.  It was always my older brother and I – standing there together.

And then it wasn’t.  In the time it took a car to come over the hill on the wrong side of the road he was gone.  All of the things he had yet to do, the fame he was going to reach with his music, the dreams and plans he had for his huge life, the possibilities, they were all gone.  All the people he would have touched with his special charm, the lives he could have effected…done.

And it wasn’t long before the world went on without him.  I carried the grief of losing him in the deepest parts of me.  My Mom and Dad hurt to their cores.  My little brother would never be the same.  But the world went on.  It was as though, except for in the four of us, his heart had been snuffed out.

But it hadn’t been.  Once again I am shown the power of love. It reaches out and bonds us all, holds us all together, even though we can’t see it there.  It surpasses time, and even death.

This week I received a note.  It was from the girl I believe my brother loved like no other.  She was a goddess to him.  Everything he thought a woman should be.  They fell in love.  Went steady.  They didn’t marry.  She went away to college and eventually they drifted apart.  But he still held her in the highest esteem.  Never speaking ill of her or showing any bitterness.  If she’d ever chosen to walk back in his door, it was evident to us that he’d have welcomed her with open arms.  And here she was, more than thirty years later, knocking on my cyber door.  Because what they had drew her back to him.

More than thirty years later, she remembers, not only him, but things he’d told her.  Menial things, like a song that was never mentioned in our home.  She’s happily married with a wonderful family that she adores, and still she cares for and about a man who’s been gone since 1982.  The heart that drew them all those years ago lives on.

Because he mattered.  Heart matters.  Not just today.  Not just in this moment.  But forever.  As we live on this earth we come in contact with hundreds or thousands of people.  We have relationships, big and small, throughout our lives.  And whether we know it or not, choose it or not, things stick.  We might move on.  We might never again have physical contact, or conversation, but the spirits of those beings we cared about remain inside of us.  And we are in them.  It’s not a choice we make.  We don’t have the ability to make it go away.  We might choose not to focus on it.  To think about it consciously.  But it remains inside of us, and maybe a song, a word, a picture, or nothing at all will suddenly prompt that spirit to remind us that it’s there.  To give us strength.

Or simply to remind us what matters most.

I can’t name names.  I can’t post pictures.  But I have to tell you all about their story.

I was on the phone with someone last week.  She sounded bothered and said she had to tell me something she’d just heard.  Or rather, that she’d just verified as fact.  It was about a couple.  She was horrified and sad and, I think, a bit grossed out.  She told me their story and I was moved to tears.  I repeated the story a few times, to those close to me.  Pretty much everyone had the same initial reaction as my original teller.

I didn’t.  I saw the most beautiful love story.  One that is worth telling, and repeating.  I have since done a lot of research on this couple.  I know about his parents and where he lived as a boy.  I know he had a sister.  And I know that when he was in his forties he was ‘taken’ by a swindler in Alabama.  I also know that, rather than retaliating in a angry way, he filed a court case.  And won.  He won on appeal as well.  He’d trusted a man, and when his trust was abused, he handled the situation the right way.  He didn’t become a permanent ‘victim’ and remain taken.  And he didn’t let anger or bitterness rule him, either.  He simply stood up for himself, enacted his rights, and took care of the situation.

I didn’t find any evidence that this couple ever had children.  They were married for many many years.  When they were in their forties they bought almost an acre of beautiful land near a mountain.  They had a home built.  And lived in it for the rest of their lives.  As they grew older, the woman was diagnosed with Alzheimers.  The man made the choice to care for her himself.  By himself.  In the room they’d had built and lived in, right there in their own personal paradise.  He was going to see her live out her days in the life they’d built together.  The life, I believe, they must have loved.  They got older.  He was eighty-three and she was eighty.  And he cared for her, day in and day out.  Until one day, in their kitchen, he had a heart attack and died.

No one knew.  His wife, now in severely advanced stages of disease causing dementia, wandered around him, and their property.  For three weeks she wandered.  I suspect that every time she saw him she thought he was sleeping and was waiting for him to wake up.  She’d wander away and come back and wait, thinking she was waiting for the first time.  And when she could wander no more, she laid down and died, too.  She was outside, under the carport, next to the driver’s side of their Corvette.  Like she’d been going to take a drive.  And also, in direct view of where he lay, just feet away, on the other side of the door.  She could have seen him from where she was standing.

The beauty here is moving beyond gardens of roses and gorgeous sunsets.  We are all going to go at some point.  And I think this was the perfect love story.  He, in sound mind, would have been the one to be aware of their earthly separation had she gone first.  He would have known severe grief.  But at the same time, he wouldn’t have wanted to go first because, clearly, he did not want her to have to live out her last days in a home, being cared for by strangers.  He wanted her home, close, with everything that could possibly be in any way familiar to her.  He wanted her to feel his love.

They lived a lifetime together.  And they were together until the end.  Because their love was strong enough to surpass a mind debilitating disease – and even death.  That’s the kind of love I write about.  The kind of love I believe in.  The kind of love I live.