On the Threshold - Merging Energy, Transportation, Communications and High Tech in a Clean Economy

About two months ago I stood on the lawn by the old NCO club at the Presidio in San Francisco overlooking the work being done on the final stage of the Doyle Drive project at the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge.  We are hosting a policy event on clean transportation at this site next week, and as I stood there with two colleagues assessing the venue - a huge freighter moving under the towering and iconic Golden Gate Bridge, and the tunnel that will fold over what was once the unsightly (and seismically unsound) Doyle Drive onramp - I saw the near future.  I took in a deep breath, a luxury that was scarce for me just one year ago and a pleasure I savor each time I can draw clean, clear air deep into my weakened lungs.

A year from now the tunnel will be covered with greenery, blending into the natural environment of the Presidio, and if you look out from the floor to ceiling windows of the Presidio Outlook the remnants of years of construction (a public/private partnership that I was pleased to note involved my college classmate Mike Ghilotti's family-owned Marin based construction firm) will be relegated to still photographs on walls in offices and hallways joining the old black and whites commemorating the construction of the bridge itself.  I like to think ahead a year on clean transportation itself - and ten years on, envisioning this same venue.  We are on the threshold in California, and I think regionally and potentially globally, but I am proud that California is leading the way.  By merging planning and policy decisions across industry sectors to fold environmental policies over energy and transportation planning and by utilizing technological advancements that rival those of the late 19th century in the way they will revolutionize how we produce and use energy, how we fuel our vehicles and heavy equipment, how our cars and transit systems operate, how maritime transport is fueled, docked and how we move freight away from our ports - we are ready now to cleanse, improve, and advance all of the sectors together.

We have to bring the products to market now, utilize the intelligence housed in smart meters and smart grids, transport information to and from homes and offices and change behaviors to match the needs of our energy and transportation economies.  Two decades ago a revolution took hold in the communications sectors that less than a decade ago moved into the video/broadcast sectors.  Built upon a backbone network of copper and fiber optics on the traditional telecommunications side and co-axial and hybrid coax on the traditional cable/broadcast side - these networks merged out along with wireless technologies and today we can communicate, stream information and conduct commerce from tiny devices in all corners of the world.  We can port our lives, our business, the world to wherever we go in our 21st century version of what the comedian Eddie Izzard characterized as a 'cunning use of flags' by the tiny British nation that led to the worldwide British Empire.  We are conquering existing economic models with non-traditional conveyance, but we have to be as mindful of harmful ripple effects as if we were 'benevolent' occupiers.  Forge ahead, wisely.

And now, integrating communications platforms over how we've traditionally provided, transported and used energy and then further extending this out into the transportation sector, we can build the full scale working models and replicate and scale them to forge what is desperately needed by everyone on this planet - a clean energy economy.  A year from now there will be more cleanly idling medium and heavy duty vehicles double parked on city streets, loading and unloading, and you won't always have to breath through your mouth, and sparingly, when following a school or city bus down the street.  There will be significantly more electric and hybrid electric as well as other clean fueled vehicles on the road as well, and with better and cleaner public transit options we may begin to move away from the two cars in every garage ideal of success to thinking about how being situated next to a clean transportation hub, a community renewable energy generation/energy storage microgrid and in the smartest home or complex.

Throughout California today we have pilots going on of just these types of hubs and they are functioning well.  We still have large power plants, and we will likely continue to need these  for quite some time to come, but they are also cleaner and more efficient in general and the focus is that all new plants will be clean, smart and very efficient.  We're also learning with the various types of renewable power that is being generated, how to shape power generation and customer demand to ensure reliability and security of the grid.  Smart, electric vehicles don't just rely on electricity as a fuel, reducing or eliminating tail pipe emissions, but they are also increasingly part of the solution for storing energy so that we have to generate less.  The larger the vehicle - the greater the impact on reducing both onsite and ancillary emissions.

That is why it is so important to plan and integrate now.  To transition from traditional methods of generating power, fueling vehicles, and sourcing and routing an electric grid - the market has to respond and adapt and there have to be market signals in place to create the incentive to innovate.  Because we can now and because the costs of doing so are coming down more and more every day.  Entities we have traditionally thought of as monolithic - governments, utilities, etc., are learning how to tighten their turn radius and change course.  Down-sizing how we provide and consume are positives, not negatives, and they actually stimulate and grow the economy if we  succeed in moving them forward them across sectors and not one niche at a time.  California is where the modern highway system was not just born, but perfected.  It is the home of Silicon Valley.  It sits on the edge of the Pacific Ocean with easy trade access to Asia and serves as the gateway to the rest of the nation.  If we plan well here and execute policies decisively and cooperatively utilizing the abundance of intellectual and capital resources uniquely available here - we will literally move the nation's and the world's clean economy forward in our homes, our businesses, on our highways, our rail system, through our ports.

When I come back to the Presidio next year and stand as I often do near the arc at Fort Point, my favorite place to gaze at the sky and the ocean going back to my earliest days working in San Francisco in the mid 1980s, I'll see some of this progress and I will certainly be able to breath it deeply into my lungs.  Ten years from now when I hope to have a grand child or two, or just to enjoy this spot with my three children, I expect to be able to breathe even deeper.  All of my adult life I have been caught up in technology, energy, transportation and I think sometimes the view from the outside is that all of these things we think of as progress and commerce are bad for the earth.  In reality we have evolved to the place where we know how to make all of them good for the earth, and it is time that we did so.  

Have a heart - what giving really means

I had a couple of bites of a muffin for breakfast and skipped lunch yesterday because I was really wrapped up in work and I suppose I imagined I was quite starving by the time I headed out of the office and toward home.  I decided to order take out from a restaurant and just pick it up on the way home rather than cook for my son and me, because it was getting late.  The restaurant had curbside service, so they came right to my car with our order when I got there, although I stayed in the car a few moments checking emails instead of driving off right away.  I still had my window down when a homeless man (I assume he was homeless because he appeared to be both unwashed and a little off kilter mentally - such are our prejudices) poked his head in my car window and asked for money, saying he was hungry.

I had ordered more than enough food for my son and me so I offered him the container of adorned flatbread I'd been given that was on the top of the stack in my bag.  He murmured something to himself, but he also smiled at me and said thanks, adding "it's nice of you to share your dinner".  I admit that I was also a little startled that he'd just stuck his head into my open window, an approach I am not usually responsive to with strangers.  I don't like to be followed to my car in the parking lot at Target by someone asking me for money (it happens a lot - usually the same person with a cart carrying small children - a woman I recognize who has panhandled near my neighborhood for about fifteen years).  I don't like to be approached while I am sitting at an outdoor table enjoying a meal or a beverage with a group of friends or colleagues.  Those things seem intrusive to me.  And as I was driving home last night I was thinking about why I choose to view them as intrusive, because people obviously have to be quite desperate to approach you in those situations.  Certainly they may be scammers, they may be lazy, they may be addicted to drugs or alcohol - but burdened by desperation nonetheless.  I could see that in the man who leaned his head in through my open car window yesterday.  He had no certainty about any of his meals, and the sort of hunger he was experiencing was very different from what I was experiencing just getting too wrapped up in my day to stop and eat.  I don't know why that's the case, how he had come to fall through the cracks as it appeared he had.  But judgment aside, it was apparent from the tint of his skin that he spent his days outdoors, from the depth of wear and soiling of his clothes and that deep down funk that results from baking in neglect day after day, that he had none of the certainties I begin my days with as a foundation.  To offer him some of the food I had was the most natural gesture, the one we have to harden ourselves against not to react upon in these situations.

It was an object lesson to me in humility and kinship.  At our core we are as close to the earth as every other human being and that is where humility arises, and we are all connected in a human family.  The eccentricities or things that may repel us in a stranger are no different than the scale of 'otherness' we experience in our own families.  The difference is, if we get this right, we embrace and console and try to heal within our families - we work to nurture and strengthen rather than cast out and neglect.  And who was that man yesterday other than a member of someone's family, and by extension my own - who was not being nurtured, strengthened, embraced. 

Yesterday was May 6, a day after I received a number of emails and other online solicitations from friends and colleagues for the "Big Give" - an opportunity to open our wallets and give online all day.  It feels good to give a big donation.  And all of these were very worthy causes.  I was happy to open my wallet as wide as I could.  But I am glad that the very next day I got an up close and personal reminder about what giving really means.  There's an awful lot of giving along the way in time and love and thoughtfulness, and sometimes in a very tough form of love, that takes place, or in some cases doesn't, before any of us is confronted by a disheveled, dirty and confused person leaning into our comfortable cars and asking for money because he or she is hungry.  I think giving means doing a lot before that happens, and to keep on doing it after.  It's a marvelous thing to get your name on a plaque or an entire building or hospital or museum because you gave big, but giving is about having a heart and not being afraid to reach out and offer help even when it isn't solicited, and not making someone feel ashamed when they do ask.  You don't have to give money to everyone who asks, and often you probably shouldn't, but give acknowledgment, recognize the dignity in others.  In a world where we will video everyone else's misfortune or suffering, sometimes giving is doing as Chris Rock once directed and set the damn phone or camera down and step up to prevent a beating or a verbal tirade.  Sometimes giving is stopping when you see someone fall and helping them get up, making sure they are okay.  Sometimes giving is being the person in a group who silences derision with kindness.  Sometimes giving is reminding someone of how much we love them and how much value their existence holds even when we are incredibly frustrated with them or disappointed in them.  Generosity of spirit is in our nature.  It is us seeing the world and others in it and not clouding that out with the shadow of our own self-importance or immediate comfort.

The reality is every day is a big give if our hearts are open, and as I held my breath against the aroma of human indifference yesterday and went with my instincts to just share what I obviously was able to share with someone else, I was humbled and someone more important was uplifted for a moment.          

We only get so many breaths - What my baby sister taught me about human dignity

I grew up in a large family spread across generations alongside the children of my first cousins and toward the end of my immediate family, but chronologically almost in the middle.  My baby sister, the child of my parents’ midlife, was born into a very different family than the one I had grown up in to that point, and I, of course was born into a very different family than my two oldest sisters who’d arrived less than twelve months apart many years before me.  We had the ‘big’ girls, the ‘middle’ girls, the ‘little’ girls, and then after a long pause – the baby.  By the time my youngest sister was truly aware of the world and specific people around her some siblings were already grown and gone, but I imagine there was always this mass of chaos and noise of all of us huddled together in time as we were over a nine year span, and then her, almost a second family of just one child and so very many caregivers.  She taught me some important lessons very early in life that have carried me through some very difficult times. 

When she was about three years old, maybe four, she sat on the second or third step of the front stairs of our home, near the front door, and away from all of the activity that was going on at the back of the house to get a large dinner ready for an extended family meal.  My mother had rushed home from work and was making marinara sauce and preparing a lasagna while a famous family chocolate cake was baking in the oven.  Older sisters were scrambling about to set a table and clean up dishes during this prep.  And there the little one sat on the stairway with her chubby hands over her ears.

“Why are you covering your ears?”  I asked her, slowing down in my haste to get upstairs and change out of a tomato stained top before guests arrived.

“She’s talking too much.”  The baby said, her large dark eyes peering up at me.

“Who?”  As we were a house of mostly women and just my father to represent the male of the species, she was going to have to be more specific.

“Mommy.  She talks and talks when she gets home, and she runs around cleaning and cooking.  We only have so many breaths. (this she pronounced ‘breffs’)  She’s using all of hers up!”

I was probably eleven or twelve years old at the most, but I looked down at her sweet little face, those big innocent eyes and round cheeks all framed by her dark brown hair cut in a page boy style,  and I could see how serious she was, that she was frightened.  From the vantage point of my age today I could see how relatively young our mother was at that point in her late 40s, but as a child I understood our parents were a little older than many of the parents of my own friends, let alone of the baby’s little friends.  I wanted to reassure her that our mother was not using up all of her breaths and that she would be around to raise the baby.  We would both be pretty old ourselves before our mother stopped having breaths I was eager to assure her.  I believed that firmly at the time as I had little experience of death and loss, was only peripherally aware of the death of my older sister in infancy before I was born, and of my grandfather’s death when I was 8 – but he was in his late 80s and that seemed natural.  There was an order to the universe and I wanted to reassure my youngest sibling of this.  But I think in some ways she was born knowing things I either did not know or it was not in my nature to dwell upon, and so in the midst of an active day with everyone we loved all around us, I could mindlessly enjoying the moment, and she would sit down, cover her ears and become overwhelmed by the reality that she could not make things last as long as she needed them to last.

If I had the insight to see that then I don’t know what I would have said or done differently, or if I could really have offered her the comfort she needed in a world whose uncertainty we have to accept as a given.  I am glad that I slowed down and embraced her and made her smile, if only for a little while.  And I suppose in slowing down for a moment I was able to absorb from what she told me, from how apparent her unease and fear were to me, that the love we have right now, the breath we are blessed to take in this tiny moment, are gifts beyond measure.

All these long years later I am still very impacted by how my little sister saw things as a very small child.  She used to pretend sometimes that our oldest sister was her mother, and to this day they are extremely close.  I cherished time spent playing with the baby when she was little, as I grew up in a very large crowd, was toward the end of it and did not have the kind of lavish playsets nor the expansive collection of Barbies she enjoyed because she was born at the tail end of the family when my parents had more money, and maybe also because they had less energy and time and could surround her with her own insular village of playthings.  I was born into the security that a crowd provides, the natural companionability of a herd, where frolicking in the backyard and climbing a tree seems infinitely more entertaining that sitting inside and playing with toys.  The baby was born apart and was from a very young age aware of being a late in life child.  She seemed to instinctively understand and perhaps even fixate on something I never contemplated in childhood – that late in life meant closer to death.

Our father died while in his early 50s, and eerily perhaps in his last summer on earth when I was home for the break after my first year away at college, what I would hear at night as I settled into sleep in my bedroom above my parents’ room, was his struggle to breathe, the whirring of the machine that helped him get pure oxygen at night.  He had congestive heart failure, had survived two major heart attacks and it was suspected he’d had other smaller attacks that he simply ignored.  He had a pacemaker, but bypass surgery was out of the question, and although I could not conceptualize it and did not give it much thought as I lived my life from day to day, he was living on borrowed time.  That was actually the term he’d use with a smile from time to time, ‘borrowed time’, something gifted to him that didn’t actually belong to him by right.  He viewed it as a gift, understood that he could have just collapsed and died that day of the big heart attacks, when instead he got more time.   I expect there is also a shadow that comes along with the bright light that is more time to live, because the things we borrow we are really expected to give back, they are not ours to keep.  

Those nights I was home the last summer of his life I distinctly remember the comfort I derived from hearing that machine deliver oxygen to him.  He had to sleep slightly elevated, and he really struggled to take any kind of a deep breath.  But at night he slipped the mask over his mouth and nose, reclined the hospital bed that had been placed in my parents’ bedroom, and he could rest.  I would hear my mother tending to him during the night, fretting over him, probably waking him up sometimes.  Without any drama in his voice at all, he had once described to me that he imagined when the end came it would be like drowning, that he carried a lot of fluid in his chest already and it was very constricting.  “But today,” he said, “today is great.”  And he seemed great.  Not physically, of course.  He was a man who carried the weight of the world effortlessly on his back year after year to support a family of 9, teaching and inspiring junior high school students day in and day out – year after year, working a second job always at his ‘cigar store’ downtown to ensure that ends always met – especially when he had as many as three children in college at a time.  I know he was racked with fear at times in that final year, over death, over the security of his large family, his obligations and all he would leave behind and all he would miss going forward – but he didn’t ever let on and he didn’t let them overwhelm him in any way.

The last time I saw him alive he and my mother visited my older sister and me at college.  The elevator in my dorm was broken and I lived on the third floor.  He struggled into my room gasping audibly four or five minutes after my mother had arrived.  She look tired too, and perhaps more shadowed by his situation than he was as she would be the one to go on with all of those obligations and responsibilities, and without him.  She fussed at him though over how long it took him to get up here especially since we were just going to have to head back down to go out to lunch, a ritual she adhered to on all visits with us.  He chuckled, sat on the end of my narrow dorm room bed and through his deep gasps reminded her that he now had only three speeds – ‘slow, slower and slowest’.  When I left them that afternoon before they drove off to head back home, I leaned into each of their windows to kiss them goodbye.  Mom was driving and she had placed her hand over his on the console between them.  He slipped me a fifty dollar bill to cover my own and my sister’s phone bills (which would not have come to half that amount) and sternly shook his head at me when I tried to refuse it.  I felt his kiss against my left cheek as his right palm patted my right cheek twice.  I moved my head slowly out of the open car window and could not have understood that the warm breath I felt as I pulled away from him would be one of his last.  We only have so many breaths, the baby had advised me – foreshadowing her own lifelong struggle with loss –and how I would come to understand that last moment with my father.

I don’t think my father died fretting over the struggle to breathe.  Quite to the contrary, he was laughing robustly, enjoying a very good time.  He had taken my oldest sister and the baby with him, along with his oldest grandson – who grew up more like a brother to the baby than a nephew – to the birthday party of my father’s lifelong friend.  The party was in his friend’s pizza parlor.  It was almost a year to the day after the heart attacks had felled him, and my father was enjoying a cold beer, a luxury on his restricted diet, a slice of pepperoni, and a good joke with one of his oldest friends.  He was seated at the bar as it was related to me, and he leaned toward my oldest sister and said, “this has been a really great day.”  And then the collapsed.

While losing your father is traumatic on some level for everyone, for my oldest sister, there was some peace in the way it happened.  She was able to look back on it after the initial trauma, the attempts to revive him, the hopeless seventy-two hour hospitalization on life support with his brain already gone as we all assembled to say goodbye – and she had that moment, that twinkle in his eye, that smile on his face to remember.  Not so for the baby.  She was still a child, and she lived at home and had tried to go about her normal life in an emptying nest with all of the older siblings away at school or grown and gone.  I don’t think a lot of people would call age 54 late in life, but it was late in life to my dad as he never got past that age, and the baby spent the rest of her growing up years alone with our mother, counting her breaths.   

It was my baby sister I thought of years later when my husband and I stood beside our oldest son’s hospital bed keeping our vigil, hoping he would get better and be able to come home.  On the evening when we were told things were very grave and we’d have to speak with the doctor in the morning about next steps, my husband leaned down to kiss our baby and he placed two of his fingers over our son’s chest, pressing very gently.  He whispered, like a prayer, “you have to breathe.”  It hadn’t seemed possible to me that this sweet little baby might have a very limited number of breaths in his life.  I wasn’t even at a point where I could think about whether or not that was fair, it just hadn’t seemed in the realm of possible.

During the night I thought about my sister’s concern that my mother was using up her breaths – that the fuss of always having to take care of so many people, and wanting everything to be done right, over-reacting at times as we sometimes do under stress – was needlessly using up our breaths.  I thought about my son, about hearing his first, robust cry, watching with awe as he wailed and choked in huge breaths the way newborn babies do when released from the womb.  Mostly he was peaceful though, not sucking in big breaths, not squandering his share of the world’s oxygen.  I fell asleep briefly, just thinking about him being, trying to will him forward.  Hours later when we held him for the last time, as he moved gently from this world into the next, I didn’t hear his last breath.  It wasn’t a gasp and it wasn’t audible, but I knew it had occurred.  What I did hear, and feel, was my husband and I both suddenly becoming breathless, gasping as our chests felt emptied out.  The oxygen was everywhere, more than either of us would ever need, but no more for this little boy - and there wasn’t time to think about fairness.  It was just the way things were – we hadn’t used ours up yet and we would have to go on. 

Now I am at a place much later in my own life but just a blip in the overall continuum.  I have endured loss and illness and uncertainty and wonder and lightness and profound joy.  I’ve raised a family and made deals with God along the way when things looked uncertain to give me a little more time here and there so I could see those children growing up, and He has been very generous not just with the increments along the way – but with the fullness of every moment.  I don’t worry about leaving things unfinished so much as I used to, because I understand my life is both unique and inconsequential at the same time.  I’ve seen the order of the universe turned on its head for no apparent rhyme or reason and understand that to ascribe greater value to one life than to another is worse than folly or vanity.  We all share a right to human dignity and we all have the capacity to live well and fully if that is what unfolds for us.  I can see that now.  I’m at what is for many a familiar vantage point at this stage in my own life, sandwiched between caring for an aging parent and still trying to get my own children safely into adulthood for their lives to take shape.  I am reminded of those acrobats I used to see at the circus not just standing on the wire but riding a bicycle across it while juggling - how you’d think they were so daring, crazy almost to be challenging themselves on so many levels at once especially since they would not really know about the soundness of their net until they actually fell.   Life is so much like that - whether you walk slowly and timidly or dare to ride the bike while juggling.  We don’t know what we are or aren’t capable of, and we don’t know when we will fall or how that will feel.          

I go most every Saturday and Sunday to visit my mother in the assisted living facility where she lives.  Alongside my younger sister, not the baby, who has been my mother’s rock and her primary caregiver over the last fifteen years as Alzheimer’s disease has consumed my mother’s former life, I help feed mom her lunch.  We used to do that together in the main gathering room in the Alzheimer’s section where all of the residents meet for meals.  Mom would sit in her chair or a wheelchair away from the main tables and my sister and I would visit with her and feed her patiently.  We knew all of the other residents, at least as they are now, and we talked to them or they to us.  They became an extended family of sorts as our own mother has been largely silent in the two years now that she’s been there.  She has curled up and become smaller even than she was just a year ago.  She retreats into a place we cannot venture and we gently cajole her out.  She returns our smiles, looks as though she has something to say from time to time, and then slips back again to where she was.

Most recently our mother has been confined to her room most of the time, and for all of her meals.  There is already an isolation going on in her mind, in her ability to emerge and communicate or even connect with the world and people around her – and it is exacerbated by the confinement.  The walls of her room that face her are populated with large photos of her children and grandchildren and great grandchildren- mostly as babies and toddlers.  They are suspended in time just as she is – little round faces caught in mid-smile for the duration.  Years ago she used to talk to those pictures in her home, coo to them.   Now when a photo catches her eye she does smile – but more often it is the way light dapples in from the blinds and dances across the wall that seems to captivate her.  Often she seems to be looking at some place just beyond my sister and me, and she seems so compelled to whoever or whatever it is, and we both wonder out loud if it is someone we know, if they are calling to her.

She struggles to chew and swallow now.  Drinking, even from a straw, is something she has to be reminded of how to do over and over again in a single sitting.  I want to pick her up and cradle her the way she used to cradle me, but she is frail and I also worry it will frighten her.  She is certainly light enough that I could do it, but I understand there are boundaries now and that would not be acceptable.  She appears old and small and shrunken into herself and at the very same time she seems just like my mother.  She had a birthday in March, turned 88, and has now lived longer than her parents or any of her brothers or sisters.  She was the baby of her family too, like my little sister, the child born into her parents’ midlife.  When she sleeps sometimes I lean in close to hear and feel her breathing, and I can see both the child she once was and the woman wearied by time and loss and the ravages of a disease that has claimed her precious memories.   Despite it all, she seems happy, welcoming, at peace.  I don’t know what the coming weeks or months may hold for her, but I know once she can’t eat and drink the road begins to narrow markedly.

When I was a teenager and a young adult my mom often slept out in our living room, in a reclining chair.  It started because she was waiting up for children to come home on the weekends, and then maybe because there were so many children and so many weekends, it just seemed like more often than not that was where she fell asleep – not down the hall in her room.  She sometimes had very vivid bad dreams in that chair.  Sometimes she woke up gasping for air as she’d forgotten to breathe in her sleep for a moment.  There was one night she was talking aloud in her sleep and we could hear from upstairs and were terrified.    In her dream my father had already been overpowered by an intruder and the intruder was now coming after our mother.  Four of us were upstairs and two were already calling 911, thinking this was real, by the time one of my sisters made it down the stairs (my younger sister, mom’s protector) and mom awakened and we realized it was just a dream, no one had come to take our parents in the night.

Her life right now is not like one of those vivid, frightening dreams.  Death, loss, always terrified my mother. The thought of separation and loss so overwhelmed her at times that she could not fully enjoy the moment she was in, the love that was surrounding her.  Now it is different.  I think the love she is surrounded by is what is most present for her.  She may not know our names or what day it is, but she can feel the presence of love and comfort.  It is a blessing that in a world so constricted by a disease that wipes away memory, feelings remain and that child with no experience yet of loss, unafraid to love and reach out emerges. 

It is a challenge and a struggle when some of the things that pass from memory are the basics, like chewing and swallowing, and eventually breathing, but a blessing alongside it is that pain is erased, uncertainty, mourning – there is just this moment until there are no more moments.  I know my mother knows and feels love, and where there is love there is dignity, in every moment that she has.   

If I could go back to that evening on the front stairs of our house when my sister was just a very small child, our baby, covering her ears in distress, worrying over our mother using up all of her breaths and being gone, I would have the wisdom to give the only comfort that there really is.  We can’t count how many breaths we’ll get – a week, a month, fifty-four years’ worth, eighty-eight.  We can’t fret over breaths we’ve already squandered or whether we’ll be robbed of any.  We just take them one at a time and we fill them with as much love and purpose as we can.  Life is going to hurt, sometimes it will be excruciating – but mostly it is good, exquisite, vivid, and as painful as loss is - who we had and what we cherished is what endures.  So we just have to be and be not afraid.