The life and times of a little hippie in the Bersagel-Briese clan.
A video was produced about the climb that we did while in New York City.
[ed note: I have also added it to the original post about the trip, so you don't need to watch it twice if your now just catching up on the blog.] [PS - if that's the case....where have you been?]
Whew. Can’t say that I’m too disappointed that the holiday season is over. Sure, having family around and seeing Ezra enjoy himself has been a great experience, but there was a gigantic hole in this year’s celebrations that just couldn’t be filled with any amount of presents, decorations, cheer, or music. Being bombarded with a never ending barrage of “merry” or “happy” or “best wishes” or “2011 was awesome for us” or “joyous” or “new year” does take it’s toll – especially when feeling those things are a passing notion at best.
Another contributing factor to a less-than-stellar season was my work schedule: at work for the Thurs/Fri of Thanksgiving, for 4 of the days of Hanukkah, for the 23/25 of Christmas, and for New Year’s Eve. It certainly was my turn to be at work, and without the seniority to get it off, I had no problem being there….not complaining about that. It just makes it really difficult to celebrate with a family that operates within the schedule of the rest of society. Take an already off year, and compound it with a lot of ‘celebrating at the firehouse’ and things become even more subdued.
We did have some highlights of the season, and foremost was the inclusion of family. Without the ability to travel at all during that time period due to work, we were fortunate to have family come to us. Dave and Mary Jo spent the Christmas week here in Colorado, and we had the pleasure of spending 10 days with some of my family from Israel who were here on vacation (even got a day skiing in with them). The best thing about having family here was certainly the distraction that they provided, the need to focus on something else some of the time.
Despite everything, we were able to celebrate Thanksgiving together (a day early, and again at the firehouse), we did get to spend Christmas morning together (thanks Scott for holding over for a couple hours), we were able to light a few nights of the candles (thankfully that holiday is designed to last eight nights), and New Year’s was spent….well, who cares, it was New Year’s (2011 did have some good moments, but by and large, I hope that it has a wonderful existence in the past – never to be relived again).
A resolution for the new year? Not normally into those. Any day seems like a good day for a change…but here is one that I can think of: cry just a little less and smile just a little more. This year already hasn’t started off with a lot of reasons to believe that this will be easy, but one can always hope, right? That said, here is some help in that goal: pictures of Ezra almost always make me smile (you will notice the spot on the tree that Ezra decorated – everything facing the wrong way, as well as the different take on the Christmas tree photo – swirly).
A selection of random images from the past two months that haven’t made it to the blog (but may have appeared elsewhere) in any other format (that I can remember).
As any of you who have been following this blog for more than a week or so know, I have been extremely fortunate to be involved with an amazing event: the 9/11 Memorial Stair Climbs. The climb started here in Denver in 2005 and two years ago, went national through the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation. The Foundation met with us and we devised a plan to take it to the masses, with 2011 ending with some 55+ climbs in four countries, and over 5,000 climbers participating. The purpose of the event is primarily a memorial event, and in Denver, we only allow 343 firefighters (the same number killed on 9-11) to climb the 110 stories (the same number as the WTC). As part of the Steering Committee for the Foundation, I had a very unique and special opportunity to attend a meeting in New York City earlier in December.
As part of the trip, I did build in about two days of photographic sightseeing (photos included below: Flatiron Building and the High Line Park are well worth your time) and found the chance to catch up with a long-time childhood friend whom I haven’t seen in probably almost 15 years. I also discovered that (at least in lower Manhattan), should you live there, you exist without the following items in your life: trees, babies, and the sun. But you do have access to these items in your life: great street food, vegetarian restaraunts a plenty, several million tourists, and a solo life lived behind iPod earphones.
And while all that is neat, the purpose of the trip was extraordinary. We were able to stay at a hotel that sat directly adjacent to Ground Zero, and my hotel room’s windows opened to reveal one of the memorial pools where a tower once stood. It was breathtaking each and every time I was witness to that sight. We did visit the 9/11 Memorial, and there really isn’t anything that I could write that would do it justice. Even though the museum isn’t open yet (and is behind schedule), just being there, seeing what they have been able to rebuild, and seeing how they have been able to remember, is an experience that you should not miss out upon. The pools are stunning in their simplicity, and the grounds are quiet amongst all the noise.
On the morning of the meeting, we all met at 6am to do an impromptu stair climb at the hotel. It meant that we would be climbing the building 6.5 times in order to achieve 110 flights, but it also meant that we would be able to do a tribute like that one only feet from where the firefighters actually died. It really was everything that you would imagine it to be, including very emotional. I’m not sure that anyone said anything to anyone else in the stair well, mostly because there wasn’t a need to say anything at all. And then once we got to the top of the building for the last time, walked onto the roof, and looked down onto Ground Zero…..wow.
The meeting itself was a true treat. I am again amazed at how I have found myself in the middle of a great group of people that have all stumbled on such a great project. In 2011, the stair climbs were able to raise $200,000 in total, and that money has already gone to the FDNY for use. The meeting was hosted by the FDNY at their training center, and we were greeted by the Commissioner of the FDNY for a few minutes as we started. He was able to share with us that the money that we were able to help raise will go towards the FDNY Counseling Unit – a unit that would have closed it’s doors without this influx of funding. The unit is responsible for family, relationship, career, and peer-to-peer counseling for the members/families of the FDNY, and will now be funded for another year with this money. To quote the Commissioner, “With the money that you have given us, you are saving lives and families with your work.”
Opportunities like this one don’t come along very often, and I am so thankful to be apart of something that is actually making a difference on many levels. There is no way that we would have been able to do something like this – that started in Denver – without the support of family (namely Ahna and Dad), friends, the department, and all the firefighters who have shown up each year to do the climb. It’s been a helluva trip so far, and I can’t wait to see where this goes in the future.
[ed note: lots of pictures in crazy order. because some are so darn good (ha!), please don't steal them without asking]
So WordPress (wow, WordPress comes up as misspelled – even on their own site) sent out this interesting e-mail the other day highlighting the “Year in Blogging” for Ourlittlehippie.com. Here’s the highlights of the highlights…and thank you for showing us such tremendous support during this past year through the blogosphere!
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 120,000 times in 2011. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 5 days for that many people to see it. In 2011, there were 145 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 700 posts. There were 582 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 67mb. That’s about 2 pictures per day. The busiest day of the year was February 19th with 2,503 views. The most popular post that day was Liam.
The top referring sites in 2011 were:
Most visitors came from The United States. Canada & Israel were not far behind. Other countries that visited the site include: Brazil, South Africa, Algeria, Senegal, Turkey, Sweden, the UK, Russia, Germany, the UAE, India, South Korea, Vietnam, Australia, and New Zealand.
And finally, the five most active commenters (in order): Tori, Jan, Christi, Katy, Marilyn.
One of the other parents in our group shared this with us. Here is part of the story titled “Welcome To Holland” written by Emily Perl Kingsley.
When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”
“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”
But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.
The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around…. and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills….and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy… and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away… because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.
But… if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things … about Holland.
Ever look into the clouds? Well, I found a way to do a cloud with the blog (in Helvetica no less)….and below are the results of the first word cloud that has been generated through the postings on this site. I have stared and tried to figure it out, but mostly it’s just a reaction of ‘yup, seems about right.’
We explored a few more topics over the last few weeks of the nine week session, none more timely or charged than the holidays. The holidays have taken on a whole new dimension this year, and there are several reasons for that….but unfortunately, I’m not going into them here. It turns out that these feelings and thoughts are too close to the vest to openly explore with everyone – maybe in the future sometime. What I am willing to share is that the holidays are a really difficult time for us. For one, we are missing Liam. It’s hard to see all of this unabashed cheer and thankfulness without crashing back quickly to reality. It’s not that we don’t have things to be thankful for or happy about, but; well I don’t need to explain it to you. As the weather has turned colder, the memories of last year at this time are hard and fast. I think that the combination of the season and the time of year have made it especially hard right now.
The group is done. We have had nine weeks of amazing conversation, and incredible sharing. We will have a reunion in January, and we will stay in touch with these beautiful people for many years to come. I’m not sure what exactly I got out of the group, beyond weekly introspection, but I feel a little better than when we started. We have made some great new friends, and we have learned about some awesome kids. I will miss the routine and the faces of the meetings, but we have discovered some new avenues to continue this process.
I am going to repost the Bereaved Parents Wish List that we put up here not long after Liam died. It seems relevant again, and applicable as we are slipping into a more turbulent time. If we are being ‘grinches’ this season, you don’t have to fix it, just let us be. If we are being quiet, introspective, or step away…don’t take it personally, it’s cool. We have limits.
This list is adapted from something that the hospital gave us and another parent had put together. It is our hope that you read this and it will hopefully allow you to feel more comfortable around and with us. This is a very difficult time for everyone, and we know that none of us really know what to do or say.
- We wish that Liam hadn’t died. We wish that we had him back.
- We wish that you won’t be afraid to speak Liam’s name. He lived and was very important to us. We need to hear that he was important to you also.
- If we cry and get emotional when you talk about Liam, we wish you knew that it isn’t because you have hurt us. Liam’s death is the cause of our tears. You have talked about him, and you have allowed us to share in our grief. We thank you for both.
- Being a bereaved parent isn’t contagious, so please don’t shy away from us. We need you now more than ever.
- We need diversions, so we do want to hear about you, your family, and your life. But we also want you to hear about us. We might be sad or cry, but please also let us talk about Liam.
- We know that you think and pray for us often. We also know that Liam’s death pains you, too. We wish you would let us know these things through a phone call, a card, a note, an e-mail, a text, or a real big hug.
- We wish that you won’t expect our grief to be over in six months. These first months are traumatic for us, but we hope that you understand that our grief will never be over. We will suffer the loss of Liam until the day that we die.
- We are working very hard in our recovery, but we wish you could understand that we will never fully recover. We will always miss Liam, and we will always grieve that he is dead.
- We wish that you wouldn’t expect us not to think about it or to be happy. Neither will happen for a very long time, so don’t frustrate yourself.
- We don’t want to have a pity party, but we do wish you would let us grieve. We must hurt before we can heal.
- We wish you understood how our lives have shattered. We know it is miserable for you to be around us when we’re feeling miserable. Please be as patient with us as we are with you.
- When we say we are doing okay, we wish you could understand that we don’t feel okay and that we struggle daily.
- We wish you knew that all of the grief reactions we are having are very normal. Depression, anger, hopelessness and overwhelming sadness are all to be expected. So please excuse us when we are quiet and withdrawn or irritable and cranky.
- Your advice to ‘take one day at a time’ is excellent advice. However, sometimes a day is too much and too fast for us right now. We wish that you could understand that sometimes the best way is a minute or an hour at a time.
- We hope that if you see us out and about that you say hi. We might be smiling or laughing, joking or having a good time – that’s okay to do. Please don’t think that it’s because we are not appropriately grieving.
- Please excuse us if we are rude, it is certainly not our intent. Sometimes the world around us goes by too fast, and we need to get off. When we walk away, please let us find a quiet place to spend some time alone.
- We wish you understood that grief changes people. When Liam died, a big part of us died with him. We are not the same people that we were before Liam died, and we will never be those people again.
- We wish very much that you could understand – understand our loss and our grief, our silence and our tears, our void and our pain. But we pray daily that you will never, ever understand.
Weeks four and five of the parent’s group brought an interesting and surprising metaphor into play: water. The two weeks centered on acknowledging, expressing, and coping with grief; and we spent a fair amount of time trying to understand things that I’m not sure that we were ever meant to understand – at least by historical reference. Now, I don’t mean that in any sort of ‘put-down’ kind of way, it’s just that we have to go do these special places and groups, talk with special people, only to try to begin to scratch the surface of some deep seeded feelings that we are experiencing daily. Why is that the case? Why can’t we be more open with each other, or more understanding of each other? Why are some feelings/topics taboo in education and discussion until they become something that we have to talk about in order to stop from internal detonation? Death is something that every single person will have to face in some fashion in their lives (hopefully in more ‘normal’ ways), and this seems like an extraordinarily reactive measure to something so common. It makes it hard to retrospectively try to grab control of your feelings after they all have been released like buckshot. But this is exactly where we find ourselves: trying to pick up the pieces, trying to make any sense of the future.
“You must learn to run your kayak by a sort of jujitsu. You must learn to tell what the river will do to you, and given those parameters see how you can live with it. You must absorb its force and covert it to your use as best you can. Even with the quickness and agility of a kayak, you are not faster than the river, not stronger, and you can beat it only by understanding it.” – Stung, Curtis, & Perry: Whitewater
One of the ways that we went about exploring how each of us was dealing with the grief in our normal lives was to list out all of our stresses on a chart. Of the 50 or so things listed on the chart, between us, we circled somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 things (!)….stuff like new assignments at work, family stresses, little good sleep, health worries, financial concerns, etc. These are all certainly issues that perhaps you are even facing, but when you compound those with a loss of a child, they all take on a heavier load.
“Men may dam it and say they made a lake, but it will still be a river. It will keep its nature and bide its time, like a caged animal alert for the slightest opening. In time, it will have it’s way; the dam, like the ancient cliffs, will be carried away piecemeal in the currents.” – Wendell Berry
So here we sit, in the middle of a rapid filled river, trying to figure out how to get to calmer water. We spent some time discussing the things that we are going to need on this trip on the river…things like a boat, a paddle, some sort of protection (helmet), a life jacket, a good mind, some food, and some rest. It’s a way of describing the self care that is needed to make it through these times somewhat sane. We did an exercise that asked the question: Who is in the boat with you? and it netted some really surprising results. Actually, probably not that surprising, but more confirming a reality that perhaps I would not have expected if I had to project the results of that question last year. There are people in to boat with us that I certainly didn’t expect to be sitting right there, and there are others who I expected to be in the boat that have long since watched it drift down the river from safe banks. One thing that I am certainly thankful for is the community of folks that surround us. We have heard horror stories of what people/family/friends have said to others in similar situations to us, and we are truly grateful that we have all of you. We have gained and we have lost during this time. We will reconnect with some people, and not with others.
We were given an article, and to be honest, it didn’t strike me as very interesting the first time that I read it (it seems a little embellished or overly dramatic…). I have since revisited it, and have found it’s underlying message to be helpful. Click here for the link to the story: Making music with what we have left.
I’m just going to borrow the posting that I did in 2009 for this anniversary:
December 7, 2008, Tim Abernethy was on duty as a Houston Police Officer. During a ‘routine’ (I hate that word) traffic stop, things turned really ugly and Tim was murdered by the person whose car he pulled over. He lived his life selflessly: serving his country in the Navy, serving his neighbors as a police officer, and serving his family as a father, husband, son, brother, and role model.
Tim: we miss you and promise to never forget your sacrifice. Your life serves as a daily reminder of what we should be doing to better ourselves and how to be better members of our community. We will never, ever forget.
