Walk with me; see the green grass, the trees in the breeze.  The ruffle of a feather, the old man on his knees.  Stand, hold my hand, and watch as the sun sets on a time full of high seas and low tides.  Run; run, as we dance to the shimmer of the water.  Hold tight, come close, and sit beside me as we entangle our souls.  Souls bound by endless greed, the need, it started with one seed, bound by time, not ready to be freed.  Lie down, hold tight, sleep, hold tight.  Dream, hold tight.  Watch, wait, stand, walk, run, keep up, hold on, and dance to the strings that play in my heart.  Laugh till we cry, love forever more; live, until we die.

I have loved the first paragraph of this since I wrote it New Year’s Eve three years ago.  The title is “The Lucky Ones.”  I have always felt that it encompasses so well how we have lived our lives together.  From the first day I touched her hand I knew I would never let it go, and if I had to guess, out of twenty-two years together we have been apart less than a hundred days.  When I read that paragraph I read it with a pretty fast cadence.  To me it is the urgency of my love and passion coming out, but also it was the speed that Tammy lived life.  Tammy lived life like the grand finale’ on the Fourth of July.  Fireworks going off everywhere.  She had a fire in her that I sometimes had a hard time keeping up with.  If you need proof you need not look any further than our two oldest kids who happen to be the same age for a month and a half every year.  Yes, we had two one year old’s.  Then a two and a one year old, and then a three, two, and one year old.  I was pretty sure we were going to give Lanelle, our Parents as Teachers person, a heart attack.  Every time she was scheduled I was afraid she was going to cancel because she was afraid Tammy was going to tell her she was pregnant again.  Tammy didn’t miss a beat though.  She loved them all so much that she wanted another one six years later.

If I had to pin one word on Tammy it would be passionate.  She did everything with passion.  There was never much of a middle ground with her.  If it was sports, she practiced hard and played harder.  As a teacher, she was going to give you everything you needed to be successful.  Then she was going to love and care enough about you, to make you believe in yourself.  She always loved the underdog because she took the time to see the potential that they had.  She taught them to never give up on themselves, because no matter what, they knew that Tammy would never give up on them.  Some of you listening right now are one of those people, and I assure you, Momma Bear is still watching over you, and when times get tough that voice in your head will say, never give up, never give up.

Tammy took on cancer just like she took on everything else.  She took each step and attacked it with passion.   As I would look down the road she would stay laser focused on whatever was right in front of her.  Tammy was never known for her defense on the basketball court.  She was known for her offense, and so she went on the offensive and attacked it.  She fought it with every ounce of strength that she had.  I will never tell you that Tammy lost her battle with cancer.  She beat it every step of the way.  She beat it with her attitude.  She beat it with her heart, her courage, and most of all she beat it with her smile.  She smiled every day including the last day.

How do you sum up someone’s life in a few short words?  I feel I have lost my eloquence.  I miss her dearly already.  The only thing I can think to do is leave you with a final story.  The kids and I were lucky that we were able to spend a good amount of time with Tammy. Can you picture the five of us all sitting around Tammy’s bed, each of us touching her somewhere? We had been there for a while and I thought we needed a little break so I asked each of them to tell a corny joke and we would pick a winner.  The winner was Kylee with, “What do Romans use to cut their Pizza?”  Answer:  “Little Caesars.”  We all had a good chuckle.  Throughout our conversations I have been telling them that it is ok to be sad, it is ok to be mad, but it is also ok to be happy.  After a while I asked each of them to tell me their favorite thing about Mom.  Tanner said that she never gives up on anyone.  Kylee said she loves her strength. Morgan said her good attitude.  Tucker said just being her.  Mine was her big heart, she always had room for everyone.  My response to them was then go be that.  If mom never gives up on anyone then believe in everyone.  If you love how strong mom was, then go be strong.  If you loved her attitude then always have a good attitude.  If her heart was big enough for everyone then open yours.  Tucker’s was a summation of all of them.  If you loved who your mom was, then go be like her.

My message to all of you is the same.  On this very tough day, it is ok to cry.  It is ok to be mad, but also it is ok to be happy and celebrate Tammy’s life.  I will also ask you the same question.  What did you love about Tammy?  Then I will tell you that the way to keep Tammy alive in all of us, the way to keep her in our heart, is to take everything that we love about her and give it to someone else in our lives.  Give her to the world and let her live though eternity.

Tammy passed away at 10:13 last night.  She is somewhere better.  Thank you for all of the thoughts and prayers.

The sound it makes as it flows so fast past your ear, the whistle,  the whisper, the roar not of how fast it is moving but the sound as it is slowed down, so slow you can’t understand what it means, what it is trying to tell you, the boom, so low and slow that it is just vibrations rattling though your soul.  It is the whisper that providence is in motion.  Time is an illusion.  It is what it is, not what aught to be.

I want to thank you all for you patients as you have waited for me to tell you what is going on.  It has been a roller coaster of ups and downs, back and forths,  and side to sides.  It seems forever ago that I told you that we were heading to MD Andersen.  Blood clots, pneumonia, hoping for a plane ride.  As it turned out we found what would keep Tammy from going.  In usual Tammy fashion she now had a goal.  It was a plane sitting on a runway to get her to Houston.  The doctors were finally getting the pain tolerable and she was getting more movement in her leg.  She was winding up her engine that says I will not be beat.  I will get there.

Tuesday morning as she was trying to move up in bed she heard a loud pop.  After an x-ray it was determined that she had a pathological fracture of he left humorous.  She was in a lot of pain.  Once again the doctor set out to get her pain under control.  At that point we had to start with the hard decisions.  Are we going to MD?

After some very big questions had to be asked and answered she decided that she was not going to try and get to Houston.  Pain management went in a different direction.  A pain pump was brought in and as her bone started to heal what it could, and the pain medicine started to work better, she slowly started to come back to us.

Sunday her comment was that this is the best I have felt in a month.  Tammy can attract a crowd and she spent all day Sunday with friends and family.  We can always tell when she is feeling better.  We all chuckle as drillmaster/coach Mom starts to take charge.  We all went to sleep with a positive thoughts.

Early Monday morning the tide changed.  She woke up with a big headache, nausea, and vomiting.  The nurses were able to get her settled down after a time and she has been sleeping all day.  No one knows what is actually going on.  Speculation is that there is a tumor in her brain that is causing problems.  At this point surgery is out of the question because of the risks for everyone involved.  She is resting comfortably and as much as we can tell her pain is tolerable.

I have a few thoughts that keep flashing through my head as I try to get through this update.  The first is miracles, the second is gratitude, and the third is sunshine.

No matter what happens Tammy is a miracle.  Six and a half years ago no one would bet a penny that I could kiss her on the forehead last night.  I did kiss her on the forehead and I am grateful that I could.

I am grateful for everyone around me.  Which is a very big circle that includes all of you.  The last two weeks has been chocked full of really, really hard decisions.  I have had to lean on some very special people to get through them all.  I am humbled by their generosity, caring, and love.

As I close this I want you to have sunshine on your brain.  I want your thoughts to be about Tammy snapping her fingers to know which way was right and which way was left because she could only snap one of them.  I want you to remember her stomping her foot in the coaches box because that is what good coaches do.  I want you to remember that day that no one else believed in you, but Tammy did.  I want you to remember that day that she touched you with her ray of sunshine,

and then I want you to go out into your day and touch some else with it.

The hardest part about these updates it how to get started.  After six and a half years of doing these I still wonder, do you start with the good news, then the bad.  Maybe warm up with how the weather has been with a little family stuff mixed in.  A funny story, a sad one, I don’t know so I just started writing my thoughts.  My thoughts are on Tammy so I will start there.

About three weeks ago Tammy’s oncologist decided that the chemo she was on was not working good enough for her.  We knew this was coming.  Everyone was trying to milk every last bit of goodness out of it before we gave up on it.  It really hasn’t been stopping anything but we had some evidence that it was slowing it down.  Every one agreed that it was time to get serious about looking for a clinical trial.  We found out that MD Anderson had something that Tammy could possibly get in so we scheduled appointments and made flight arrangements to head down there today (Saturday).  In the meantime Tammy would continue with a couple more radiation treatments to her spine to try to help with the pain that is still radiating down her left leg.  This past Monday Tammy was not feeling well and having trouble breathing.  She went in and they did an x-ray of her chest and it was determined that she had pneumonia in there.  She was placed on full-time oxygen along with breathing treatments and antibiotics.  Tuesday she was going to go ahead and try to have her radiation, but her left leg was hurting pretty bad.  The doctor examined the leg and decided that she needed a sonogram done which revealed that she has a nice blood clot in her left leg, and most likely some of it has traveled to her lungs and settled there.

Needless to say on Thursday I went scrambling to try to change Houston appointment, flights and hotels as a trip this week probably wasn’t going to happen.  Tammy stayed in bed Thursday and Friday.  Here pain in her left leg was getting worse.  They say that blood clots are very painful,  after the last two days I tend to agree with them.  This morning Tammy had enough.  She was breaking through all of the pain meds that she is already on.  So instead of an update from Houston that I was hoping to hold out for, we are at the Salina twenty-four hour spa and hospital, trying to find a way to control her pain so that we can get down to Houston next weekend to try to get into a phase 1 trial.  The staff here has been working all day trying different things to make it manageable.  We are trying to stay with things that she can travel with, so that rules out pumps and stuff like that.   It will be a big plus if they can get her off of her oxygen.  Her leg hurts enough that she hasn’t been walking.  So we were trying to figure out how I was going to push her through the airport while dragging her oxygen.  We will get all of the semantics worked out.  Our goal right now is that she is fit to travel next Friday.  If I know Tammy there will probably not be a whole lot that will stop her as long as her pain is under control.

I don’t pretend to be a relationship guru.  I feel that I am just a scribe that the universe has picked.  It has allowed me to feel its energy and find meaning where there seems to be none.  Tammy is the teacher and I am merely a willing student.  I have learned so much from her the last six years.  Life looks and feels different.  If you have ever read, “The Five Love Languages,” you know that touch is one of the languages.  It happens to be mine.  I get up every morning with energy burning at my fingertips.  My purpose for the day is to give all of my energy away.  I do this by touching, my motto is to never let a good hug go to waste, and I have always given most of it to Tammy.  Tammy knows this and has always been a good sport about it.  I could give her a back rub for hours and I love her bald head.  She has given me a hard time about rubbing every last hair off her head because I could rub up there  for hours and not get tired of it.  So for the last year and a half I have been in a quandary.  If I touch her it hurts and so here we are, when it hurts too much to hug. Tammy knows I want and need to touch her, so she lets me hug her anyway.  No matter how much it hurts her, she lets me touch her.  Over time we have both modified how we touch.  She braces for impact and I just hover close.  Letting my heat and energy envelop her while I gently touch her cheek with mine.  Most of the time that is not enough for me, so when I lay down next to her in bed I gently hold her arm or hand until all of my energy is gone and I slowly fall asleep.

I am sure that was a touching story but that was the background for a much larger thought.  Sometimes the most important thing is not the story, it is the metaphor that it opens up to us.  Before a year and a half ago, “when it hurts too much to hug,” would have a totally different meaning.  I am sure it would have included ego, pride, and selfishness.  So what she taught me this time was that no matter how much it’s going to hurt,  we have to let each other in.  We have to let the energy flow.  We have to set our ego aside,  we have to swallow our pride, and most important we have to hug them, not because it is not painful for us, but because it is what they need.   We have to keep loving through the pain.

She keeps loving me everyday, I can’t ask for anymore than that.

I hope you all have a wonderful and love filled Easter.  Fill your baskets with the sweetness of love and give them to everyone you come into contact with.  Love you all!