It shouldn’t take the holidays to get introspective.  But unfortunately, we all get so rutted in our everyday rat race that we often forget to hit the brakes and just breathe in everything that’s around us.  We’re just so focused on the next moment of our lives and in such a rush to get there that we’ve lost track of the joy in the journey.  For once this week, forget about rushing to your next moment and breathe in.

We spend every day saying, ‘I can’t wait until the weekend.’  We spend the evenings with our children working on their homework saying, ‘I can’t wait until summer break.’  It’s always ‘I can’t wait until’ something. Everything is such a rush.  I’m no different.

Every winter I look forward to the two weeks off I have around Christmas time.  This year, I had customers in town taking delivery of aircraft until December 23 at 10PM.  Right up until the very end.  I was bummed.  I didn’t get to take my time off.  Every day I rushed and hurried through every action, every interaction, and every conversation.  Hurry….let’s get to the winter break.  Don’t get caught up in the journey, just get to the destination.  Hurry.

So here I am.  Now what?  I’m made it to my break.  Now what?  What can I rush toward now?

To get me off this speeding railway of life, I did one thing, albeit very inadvertently. I listened.  I was stuck in traffic and there was no way I could rush.  I was stopped and the music on the stereo had my attention.

Anyone who knows anything about me knows one specific thing about me; I love music.  It’s incredibly important to me.  The right music marks waypoints in your life.  And similarly it can provide a soundtrack to your life.  I’ve always thought the sense of hearing was just as strong as the sense of smell.  Hearing the right piece of music at the precise moment in your life can change everything for you and you’ll ALWAYS remember that moment.  You can look back through my entries here and you’ll see evidence of it weaving through everything from the soundtracks of the entries, to the design, to the topics, and right down to the titles of my entries.  But this time of year I was ignoring what the music around me was telling me.

To be fair, this time of year I easily get into a funk.  I’m usually sick with some sort of elusive and undiagnosed virus from the petri dish of a home which I live due to the kids being in public school.  But his year was different.  I was sick the week before Christmas. So I got that going for me.

Enough of that whining; back to the music.  If you recall, I was stuck in traffic and my stereo had my attention.

Unbeknownst to me, I was going to get throat punched by one of my favorite artists of all time.  No it’s not Adele.  Adele couldn’t hold this artist’s jock.  And no I’m not going to tell you who it is now.  It’s time to use the age-old slow burn of plot development.  I’d been in a hurry with everything.  Rushing and complaining through it all.  And now, I was stuck in an immobile grid lock of traffic on the valley freeway somewhere between Auburn and Pacific and IT happened.  I was grumbling about who cut me off and stressing about how, when, and what I was going to do for Christmas gifts.  Welcome to the 1^st world problems of my life.

Granted, it’s been more than this.  I’ve been dealing with the imminent effects of life moving forward.  I still struggle with being alone.  He’s gone, not here.  It’s over only a driver’s license and bent wheel remains.  She’s gone too.  Nothing more than a frozen paw print in plaster.  I’ve watched health erode in those closest to me and in my own body.  What is 100% anyway?  I’ve seen the superhero of my life slow to an above-average human in strength and will.  At home, I’ve worried about my relevance.  Now on an unfamiliar path of life, my self-awareness and image has been tarnished from what I once believed was invaluable.  The periphery of family has been on wearing on my heart too.  And then there is work; something I typically will not discuss on the internets.  My new role at work has been a humbling reality where I’ve discovered that I am no longer the center of the universe in terms of desired hired gun in our selling campaigns.  I’m now the QB of the team calling the plays in the big game rather than the third down receiver.  I suck at it right now.  It’s going to be a long journey to be a hall of famer in this position.  I’m not used to being average in my work.  Ultimately, my identity in my existence is changing with all of this change.

‘Live fast die young’ has changed to ‘Live with knee pain, a headache and bills while your kids play Minecraft.’

We all go through these changes and a metamorphosis in who we are to ourselves and others.  I just haven’t been doing well with who I am now becoming to me and others.  I’m fighting the system and not going gently into this.  Would you expect anything different?

But I was reminded on my drive home that you always have a friend and confidant in music.  It’s always there for you.  And strangely, it always knows what you need to hear when you need to hear it.  The drive home helped.  Hell, it resulted in me writing on this blog for the second time in two weeks.  Also, it inspired me to post my feelings about it on Facebook.  And you know me, I’m not a big fan of the ‘Whinebook.’  And to follow my own rules, I’ve uploaded it here for your listening pleasure.  It changed my life that day at that waypoint in my life.  The song was upbeat.  It was soulful.  It was driven.  And if cathartically choreographed, it had a message about how music can help you.  It grabbed my attention and once it had it, I heard what it had to say to me.  No misunderstanding here; it was called ‘Coming to You’ by Jill Scott and it was coming right at me. 

And I listened.

Then I felt better.  Then I listened to it again.  Then I listened at least another half dozen times and I felt even better.

And that’s my point here.  Just listen when music is playing.  It’s so important.  So cathartic.  So poignant.  Your soundtrack will carry you when you’re tired, lead you when you’re lost, inspire you when you’re withered, heal you when you’re hurt, and make you dance in the middle of a crowd of human lemmings.  Dance, sing, and feel it all.

Months go by and I never make time to chronicle my thoughts and feelings.  By some odd coincidence, three people during the same week asked if I was still writing on my blog.  It’s not that I haven’t wanted to write or appreciate the exhaustive therapy from writing.  It’s just that inspiration comes at awkward times.  Those inspiration moments are insanely difficult to replicate later when you want to retell how you were feeling at that moment in time.  Recently, I’m just busy trying to maintain.  Maintain; that has been tough to do these last few months.  I can’t say I’ve been much of pleasure to be around.  Proof point when my wife gave me a firm talkin’ to one night few weeks back.

I could take this entry into some ethereal long winded diatribe and camouflage my feelings with words but instead I’m just going to get to the point; I have been in a moopy place these last few months.

In what felt like an instant, my pet went from the pillar of health, strength, and normalcy, changed to weakness, deterioration, and suffering.  In an emergency visit to the veterinarian, I learned that her health was so far gone, that there was really no choice but to make a life altering decision for both of us and let her go in peace.

12 years old.  She lived through several three house moves, flown on more airplanes than some people, adjusted to the addition of two boys and one runaway dog, a marriage, and loss of family members, an became to stoic alpha of our family.  Through those 12 years, she was always my emotional backbone.  After my brother died, she was the one thing that helped me stay focused on moving forward.  Every day at lunch I’d come home from work to walk her around the dog park.  It was a break in the monotony.

We rescued her from the animal shelter and she rescued us when I lost my brother and my wife lost her mother.  And so as it came full circle and let her spirit go back.  While it was the right decision given the context and circumstances, the process of arriving at the decision and admitting it was nothing short of gut wrenching.  I feel like I lost a very important piece of me that day.  Possibly one of the last pieces of a life from long ago.  I guess I wasn’t ready to lose that piece yet.

Realizing that I wasn’t doing OK after making this choice got me thinking about larger things in life like my parents and my mortality.  I always believed that my little brother would be here when things got tough.  He was level headed, and me, well I’m nothing close to that.  It’s an unspoken confidence you have in someone in your life.  I always knew he would man up and help take care of things when shit got sideways.  Losing Stacey and not being able to cope with it was a harsh reminder that my brother was gone and not here to help.

There’s been so many reminders these last few months.  Some good and some bad.  Some feel like picking at a wound that never really healed.  If nothing else, it’s definitely reminded me that I’m still feeling lost in all of this.  But I suppose that’s the small satisfaction of still carrying those memories.  We carry those we lost in our hearts.  Forever. 

I’ve been taking so much of this out on those around me; my family.  At the end of all of this, that’s all we really have; family.  It has been very surreal to write this entry.  I’ve gone from feeling alone and depressed to appreciative and accepting.  Time has continued to tick away and that emotional ground zero is a long way back in the rear view mirror.  Many people I know now don’t even know I had a brother.  Life has moved on and I can’t expect them to live in my past when they were never there to begin with.  Nevertheless, it’s hard to have constant reminders of all of your missing parts.  As far as you think you may have come, it’s never really that far sometimes.

And I’ve found much peace in the music and film I’ve experienced recently.  It’s helped me get past some of the negativity.  It’s allowed me to carry those memories in my heart with new vigor.  My brother and I may never create a new memory together; but we do have every bit of richness from the 24 years we did have; Christmas Eves sleeping in the same room, picking him up from junior high school to play basketball, Cougar football games, the Commodore 64 and Nintendo game marathons, all the laughs and the stupid fights.  And that’s just to name a few.  What about the cars?  The cars; the riced out Hondas, the Subarus, the street rods and muscle cars, and all of the drama and fun that came with them.  I think the cars are the one of the best memories.  And those memories are always within my reach.

No matter where you are, whether it's a quarter mile away or halfway across the world.  You'll always be with me.  You'll always be my brother.

There was a day where I didn't think I'd ever get over the loss.  Those first minutes, hours, days, and months dragged on.  It's like the sands of time grinding against you as if it was 30 grit sand paper.  But then you stop counting the minutes and days and months. It becomes years and the milestones are farther apart.  Then it's a struggle to remember the milestones.  And it's not that you don't want to remember, it's that there's distance between you and that emotional ground zero where you once were.  Other milestones, some good and some bad, begin to populate your memory and consume your emotional bandwidth.

It's a horrible feeling because you wonder if you’re beginning to forget the memories.  And even worse, wondering if you’re beginning to forget person.

But it's natural to grow and step forward.  At least that’s what I’m telling myself these days.  Our head and hearts have finite amount of space to remember everything.  We talk about infinite love in our hearts but when it comes to the etchings of pain and joy, you end up ‘writing’ over some things on a long enough timeline.

This last year has been marked with much stress and anxiety.  And I’m feeling like those near term moments are starting to impede on other long term memories.  I've gotten to the point where my emotional multitasking has become incredibly inefficient and possibly ineffective.

It's been 11 years. 11. Writing that number is like almost admitting that you're starting to forget and that isn't fair to him or me.  It’s easy to say that “time heals” and make excuses like “well I’ve been busy.”  Those little clichés help you justify that you don’t think about it as much as you think you should.  But what is the right amount?  The guilt I'm having is the reminder of remembering him. It’s acceptance today that I can forget somethings and remember others.

I may not remember exactly each moment we had or what words were said.  I may not even feel the exact same despair and grief as I did 11 years ago.  That doesn’t mean I’ve forgot. That doesn’t mean the love or grief is any less.  I’m just learning to live and not use the loss and grief as an excuse for being messed up.  I can remember and forget, together, and that’s OK.

I can remember that somehow we'll carry on

I can remember that sometimes we’ll forget things

I can remember that we spent a lot of happy times together      

I can remember that you were my closest friend

I can remember that you’re still my brother