The best unexpected pleasure has been finding those Facebook connections that work, and prove to be a very particular kind of connection.  And interestingly, they are not always the same of my friendships that work.  There are several folks with whom my acquaintanceship with has not had the opportunity to advance to a deeper friendship, probably for logistical reasons mostly.  They are on Facebook regularly and my fondness for them has grown as has their impact on my life.  I have read books by their favorite author, followed the comments on their status updates and gotten and received advice and parenting, running, cooking, etc.

Lets Keep it “Secret”

There was recently a rash of groups started and joined called “Secret X” with X being a city name. I admit that I initially joined Secret Oakland, thinking, “Great!  A place to find out what is going on off the beaten track.”  As Secret City groups continued popping up and more of my friends started joining them, I started to get a little annoyed.  Not that I wouldn’t want most of my friends to be a part of all of the secret things in my life… It is more that I would rather with those friends be invited to an event, find a restaurant or see a show that doesn’t have a psuedo-countercultural vibe all over it, while it is all over the internet at the same time. I went back and looked today and it did turn out that the group had turned into something that is not about secrets at all, but about the “Best place to…” which doesn’t seem any different than yelp or the East Bay Express.

This was shortly after the last of the many updated screen formats (which they still haven’t gotten right) and the first time that I started to question my intentions and use of facebook instead of just coasting and enjoying it. I started thinking about having some boundaries around how much I am on it and what I use it for. The simple time equation of the elusive Facebook time versus practicing guitar, exercising, spending time with friends and family is pretty convincing some days.  I have no clear answers yet, just still thinking.  I quickly dropped most of my fan pages, I am no longer a fan of “not being on fire” or “If 1m people join, girlfriend will let me turn our house into a pirate ship ” and I am also not imagining that Facebook groups are exerting any sort of political pressure.

Fuzzy boundaries

As I mention above, Facebook has become an internet hub for me. I love the idea of consolidating my goodreads account and my invitations with Facebook and seeing what people think about the movies that they are seeing.  I mean, why use 10 websites when you can use 1?  Well, for a couple of reasons.

The amount of time that it would take to follow all of these things for all of my friends is outrageous. Actually, the amount of time that I already spend online and on Facebook is pretty outrageous. And the more that I post or repost, the trickier things may get with the accuracy and privacy of my friends, as well.

As these things have begun appearing in my Facebook feed and I have been getting comments on them, I am not sure that I want to put myself out there so much.  Not only are my friendships an interrelated web, but I have varying levels of shared friends, intimacy, and comfort with these friends. These factors are not always related and they are always changing. Partly because I have such a range of friends and I do not want to have the same conversation about X movie with A that I do about Y movie with B.  So I have had odd feeling when seeing a comment from someone that I don’t know very well on my rating of a movie that I saw recently.

Virginia Heffernan writes on nytimes.com:

…Facebook undermined his whole notion of online friendship. “It’s easy to think of your circle of ‘Friends’ as a coherent circle, clear and moated, when in fact the splay of overlap/network makes drip/action painting a better (visual) analogy.” Something happened to this drip painting that he won’t discuss. He said, “Postings that seem private can scatter and slip unpredictably into a sort of semipublic status.”

Maybe most importantly, the defaults of Facebook are to share everything rather than nothing.  Unless you dig through the settings (which involves being somewhat computer savvy) you will have no privacy and every post from every person and every application will show up in your feed. Do I want to think everytime I rate a movie or mark a book “to read” whether I want all 420 of my friends to see this?  Do I want to be the person that is always nagging my friends with unwanted applications and feeds?  I have recently been spending a fair amount of my Facebook time removing myself from groups and pages and hiding unwanted feeds to reduce the stuff that I sift through. I am hiding friends that I am not close to and blocking the applications that I don’t like.  It will be less work and mess for my friends the more I trim what I am putting out to them.  Am I not networked with everyone (and duplicating the posts of mine that they see) that wants to be on goodreads anyways?

Obligation + Overcommitment = Burnout

I think the nature of being a young, active person in the Bay Area is having too many choices and a struggle with overscheduling ourselves. In this way, Facebook is actually the perfect venue because there are plenty of things that my friends or myself are participating in that have an open invitation to go along with it.  Before I was on Facebook,  I rarely got more than 1 evite per month, but now I get multiple invitations per week and sadly, I end up turning almost every single one down.

I do not like to let balls drop and I do not like to not follow up on correspondence with people, but on Facebook, I have found it nearly impossible to keep my standards of communication up while still being friends with all the people that I have interest in. And I still have the balls in the back of my mind most of the time, S-’s wall post that I never responded to, that message that I never returned, etc…

In 2008, Business Week predicted Facebook Fatigue:

Social network fatigue will set in as people tire of getting yet another invitation from so-called friends to join yet another social network. And, in the wake of Facebook’s fumbled social ads initiative, it will become even more apparent there’s no obvious way to pitch products on these sites without turning off members. Social features will wend their way into all kinds of Web services, from search to news, but the gold rush in social networks themselves will begin to wane.

I think they are a few years too early on this. I think that for most people that I have heard about leaving Facebook it is because they aren’t getting enough out of it or because they are pissed off about something.  I do not yet think that social networking, in general, has worn its welcome. And actually, I think it will probably just continue to evolve in ways that make it more appropriate, secure and manageable for people.  I think that a few key players including Google, Wordpress and Facebook are pioneers for the future of the internet, which will be more and more the way that we manage our lives in the future.

So, I am not signing off of Facebook, although I do not feel trapped, I do feel invested in the virtual world that I have there.  But the conversation is just beginning…

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When I got out of school, I remained broke.  When it was time to start paying off my student loans, I was still broke.

By that time, I had figured out that I was much less likely to spend by not using a bank account and by not using a credit card.  It was the first time that I chose paper over plastic.  Rather than depositing my money and removing it slowly with a debit card, I cashed my check every month and budgeted that way. I found (and still find) that I am much less likely to spend if I am handing over bills than if I use a debit or credit card AND that I was much less likely to stay on a budget if I had a physical stash that I was using to monitor myself.

This is not really a groundbreaking discovery, but instead something that has been understood for quite some time.  A 2008 NPR story reports that this is psychologically rooted in that there is a difference in feeling between actually spending the money versus agreeing to pay the money at a future time.  It notes that the average spending at McDonald’s goes up from $4.50 with cash to $7.00 with credit.

Using cash only also supports my aesthetic and political sensibilities. I appreciate the added benefits of keeping my money local and under the radar.

More recently, I had some experience with bartering. It was a great way to practice massage without simply giving bodywork away. Barter served to build up my reputation, client and referral base. But the more skilled and busy that I have become, I have been less willing to barter. Sometimes, it ended up feeling like an unequal trade andother times it has created scheduling or tracking difficulties and stress.  I also ended up consuming many more services than I would normally, getting my hair done frequently and receiving private pilates instruction (although I do miss these things, they are just more extravagant than my budget actually allows.  I am at the point, where it is worth it to pay people for their work and for me to get paid for mine.  I have my schedule clear for paying clients and I can schedule with any provider that I want without dealing with feelings of obligation or micro-managing the relationship. It was as if I rediscovered the idea of money. It was invented for sensible reasons, but I know all about where good intentions lead…

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J- and I were discussing a friend and her decision about how she will become a parent. We reflected on our own back and forth about whether we wanted to create a child.  The main draw was definitely the curiosity of what our kid would actually be like. Would it be dark, cute and outgoing like me, or would it be blue-eyed, super-brainy and quiet?  In the end, this kind of science experiment wasn’t really a good reason or enough of a reason to consider this.

Ultimately, I had laid down the law. Over a number of years, I had become certain that I did not want to have a baby, but that I did, indeed want to parent.  As a bodyworker that works on pregnant women, a friend that participated in a labor and a neighbor that has done a lot of babysitting, I decided that pregnancy, birth and infant care were all not for me.

I think that we also felt that our genetics just weren’t all that worth preserving, they are nothing special, really.  With a history of mental illness, chronic pain, cancer and heart problems in my family and neurotic behavior, sunburns and long necks in J-’s (okay, even I know this is reaching to call it bad genetics, his are probably actually pretty good), ours was not necessarily a torch to be carried.   We do like our families, so I really hope this doesn’t slight anyone.  We both just felt that we could like and love kids just as much that weren’t of our combined genetic makeup.

I kind of hate admitting this, but the affection that I feel towards my dogs was one of the things that convinced me.  I really love my dogs and I realized if I could have such strong attachments to an animal that aren’t even in my own species, that I could definitely build greater ones  for kids.

I do consider the fact that Jeff and I are pretty dystopic-minded people. We think that the world has gone wrong and that it probably isn’t going to get any better.   So, why keep the life-chain going if it is only going to get more miserable? This raise questions of hope, continuing on the nihilistic theme, Nietzche said something like “[Hope] is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment.”

But, okay, while this may be a part of our though process in choosing not to have kids, there is also clearly a danger in having this attitude while trying to raise healthy children. It is not so much a question of hope, in general, because it has been proven better to live without hope than live with potentially false hope.  It is more a question of being able to have purpose and that with this kind of attitude, it is kind of hard to have a strong sense of belonging.  I suppose that it is about hope for one’s life and lifetime.

In the end, I think that all hope is contextual; sometimes it is healthy and sometimes it is not. Of course the irony is that our children have had more life challenges than we are used to and we will probably learn more about hope from our kids that we could ever predict.

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I wonder if people in other states ask people where they are from all the time.  If you live in Illinois or Alabama, is it just assumed that you are from there?  Of course, here in California, most people are NOT from here, so that is a common conversation topic to get to know a new person.  That being said, I am often asked if I am from “here”, I think I must have enough of a California aura that people have a feeling.  I never quite know how to answer, in part because I am not sure exactly what it means to be from anywhere…and what does “here” mean to people?

So generally, I say “basically” then launch in to an explanation of what I mean.   “I was born in Santa Cruz, but mostly grew up in Sacramento.  I came to Berkeley for college in 1991 and have lived in the East Bay ever since.  I’ve lived in my current neighborhood since 1994.  My father and his mother were born in Pacific Grove, CA near Monterey. My father’s father was born in the Fresno area.  My mother was born in San Francisco and grew up on Sunnyvale, CA.”  My explanation is actually just many layers of demonstration that pretty much by anybody’s definition (except for the fact that I wasn’t born in Oakland), yes…I am from here.

I have never really known that much about my family.  We have a lot of fallen out parent-child relationships , bastard children, half-siblings and divorces.  My mother didn’t even know who her father was until a few years ago, shortly after he had died.  My paternal grandparents’ mobile home was destroyed in a flood in Soquel, CA in 1979, just after grandma had finished a family tree.  Family lore said that she had lost everything.

Apparently not all was lost. A few weeks ago, my brothers and I went down to Watsonville to go through the possessions that my father left behind.  There were a number of old photos and newspaper articles that we had no idea were in the family. Those remnants, along with all of the current technology has made reconstructing the tree my new obsession.  Some of the family lines are easy to follow, especially the paternal lines where there aren’t a lot of name changes.  In several places, I have been able to trace ancestors back to their arrival on the East Cost in the 1700’s.  This is helped by the fact that other people have done family trees on ancestry.com that I can glean information from.  Other lines, I am stuck at just a few generations back due to recent immigration or the presence of spotty records and multiple names.

Google has also supported my quest to get more information about my family, which is where I found the most exciting surprises. My great-grandfather (by birth, which is not my namesake), Andrew “Burt” Cudney had lived about 6 miles (as the crow flies) from where I live today.  I knew that he had been a ferry operator based on his clothing in a photo that I have of him. With a few google searches with variations of his name, I got several hits that panned out.

One was a San Francisco Call article where he is begging for a divorce from my great-grandmother, who was apparently crazy, like most women in my family.  He argued that she threw things at him and had cost him several jobs.  I found a patent for an automatic flash lamp attachment (he was a photographer) based in San Francisco in 1918.   Finally, I found a number of photos that he had taken that are now owned by the Oakland Museum.

I think I am drawn towards knowing more about him because he lived so close, although he is certainly the most controversial figure in that side of our family, which is intriguing, as well.  I have found nothing to sustain this, but rumor has it that Cudney died as a result of injuries sustained when taking a photo of one of the first cross-country flights landing.  Yes, he was hit by the plane.

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This blog is how I decided to replace that energy in my life. I have long wanted to write more and get back to my zine. I have always considered blogging a great method (if done well)–certainly to keep up a regular writing practice and keep the volume that I am writing high.  On the other hand, there is a lot that is off-putting to me about my political involvement in the world being rooted in words and the internet versus daily real-world interactions.

So, in turn, I have been thinking quite a bit about virtual space and the ways that I do and do not want to participate in it. I think that my whole concept of geography has been shifting. Overall, more and more of our cultures interactions are taking place virtually. This may be more or less true for certain subcultures, but as a whole…this is absolutely the case.  So although, it is not physical; this space does have geographic value.  In part, because the web adds so much to the equation of how things happen over space, which I consider to be a question of utmost importance.

What does this mean for the future of the internet? For the future of our social lives? For the physical space that we move through when we leave our computers? For our bodies and emotions?

 I often think about all of the things in my life that I wouldn’t have (or would be more difficult) without the internet, but I often forget to ask, what am I missing in my life because of the internet?  I am shocked to think of how long it has been since I have been to a library, for example.  I now drive more, work from home and use the internet more than I ever have and I randomly run into people much less than I ever have.  I also meet fewer people, and many of the contacts that I do have have moved away over the years.

I do not consider virtual interactions qualitatively equal to actual ones.  I do know people that feel more comfortable dealing with other people online and their complete social networks are built and maintained that way.  I think that it is aesthetically, I just can’t give that my rubber stamp…it seems wrong.  Yah, you pegged me….I was born before 1980, lol.

I often hear people making judgements about the internet, like “I think that geocaching is a great use of the internet,” or “I’ve decided that blogging is a complete waste of time.”  But, isn’t that like saying that your underwear is better than anothers or that sports are something that no kid should do.  Kinda arbitrary…

There seem to be two distinct areas of social networking–building and maintaining. To my parents, building a social network on the internet is off-putting. They don’t like the idea of internet dating, for example. This is the primary way that many couples that I know have met each other!

Many people that I know find maintaining social networks through the internet to be off-putting. It is one thing to have your social network facilitated by the internet, for example getting notices about upcoming shows or make plans by email. It is another to use the internet for all of ones social interaction. These are extremes, but I do know someone whose primary social network is composed of people that he has never actually met. Of course, there is also the phenomenon of people spending most of their time (and even having actual financial transactions) through virtual communities and games.

 I feel lucky that my social network is actually fairly wide. I do spend a great deal of my time on-line supporting this network. I do try to see the people that I know regularly, but I have come to realize over the last few years, that it would actually be impossible to see everyone that I want to see regularly without compromising some of the intimacy and regularity of my other relationships.  With some awareness that it was happening, I started following a rule around my friends; the closer they live, the more I see them.  This actually has been working for me very well.

I have always taken “non-intentional” community very seriously, even while I have been working on “intentional” communities and cooperatives.  I have always considered being place-based to be the primary consideration for happiness and sustainability.  The thing about the internet, though is that you can “see” folks that aren’t neighbors more regularly and the shape of space is morphed and becomes more a question of presence.

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Learning more about the People’s Temple piqued my interest in revisiting a group that I used to belong to that had a reputation as a cult and was targeted by the Cult Awareness Network. The leader of this buddhism-based meditation group was Dr. Frederick Lenz, aka Rama. I did some web searching and found Take Me For a Ride.

I was never deeply into this group, like the author. The most intense manipulations concerns only people in the “inner circle” would experience (or at least people much more involved than I). I only even was in the same room with Rama 2-3 times. My meditation group did listen to his music, talk about his philosophies and some people altered their lifestyles based on his ideas.

Although my involvement was only peripheral and some years later, the descriptions were all familiar. I was surprised at how little things had changed. All that he said was completely consistent (although it extended beyond) my experience.

I hadn’t only vaguely understood why there was so much concern about this group and Rama. I was certainly skeptical of Rama’s claims to enlightenment, but I saw young people around me improving their lives and reading wonderful texts. I learned so much about Buddhism and meditation that it was easy for me to take the positives.

I actually learned about the fact that it was considered a cult from within the group itself. I learned about it’s cultness by the defenses…we WERE free to go…we DID get more from Rama that we gave. I wonder now if this was part of the “honeymoon” period, that they were careful about when to bring the “big guns” out.

Towards the end of my involvement, there was more of a push-comes-to-shove feeling. Rama asked for applications from people like me and ultimately asked for people to move to NYC (I do know some people that did). Since I was never very committed to the group or Rama and was mainly committed to the learning process of Buddhism, this process happened around me. I had a lot going on besides the group and the slightest pressure turned me off.

I was grateful to find this book. It was great to have an insider’s perspective to give some context to my experience. It is really well written, I couldn’t put it down. I think it was partly fascinating because it had touched my life, but t is also just a generally intersting story and a great little thread of modern history.

The author approaches his story from a great balance of historical/autobiographical and emotional perspectives. He did a great job of being honest and vulnerable and managing to hold compassion for everyone involved. He has a wise, but unintimidating voice and isn’t afraid to leave things without answers as questions.

Ultimately, Rama drown after a drug overdose. There are claims that it was part of a suicide pact. The book was written before Rama’s death, but to me seemed to hold his death. To me, Rama seemed to only be a shadow in the end. Maybe it is because I know that Rama had died. Maybe the author was spot on with recognizing Rama’s downward spiral from sanity, which seemed to inevitably end in tragedy. Maybe the author had to kill him metaphorically in order to move on.

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It just seems ridiculous to me to think that participating in something so basic to our nature could be considered bad. What, we are above it because we’re civilized? It seems to me that we should honor it even more as something that makes us human; human and animal. Many people that adopt already have kids, so I have not heard a very convincing argument that having kids is a negative thing. I really respect my friends choices to have kids and I also believe that children are our future (and yes, it is cheezy, but that song makes me mist up), for better or worse.

I guess that the one piece of the anti-breeding argument that I resonate with is that things in our culture are pretty screwed up. I have definitely had doubts about the futility of all of our lives at times.  I have also thought that the Bay Area specifically is a pretty difficult place to have kids.

For some time, I didn’t know whether I wanted to be a parent, at all. I was pretty indifferent to most kids…didn’t like ‘em, didn’t hate ‘em. I wasn’t sure if I could handle the lifestyle shift or that I was willing to give up my freedoms. I am still concerned about this, on the other hand, I have already given a lot of my freedoms up because of my dogs. When traveling with them, I have noticed how much the world is set up to travel with kids (and not dogs). Since I have been married, bought a house, got dogs and become self- employed (jeez, how crazy does that all sound), I am pretty happy just being here. When I do travel, it is not very far or for very long.

At some point, someone said to me that parenting was one of the best things that one can do with there life. I am sure a bunch of people had said this to me before, but for some reason, it started to stick…I was ready to hear it. I realized that I am the kind of person that wants to try everything in life. I could imagine that someday, I may regret not parenting, I could never imagine regretting being a parent.

J- and I went through several years where one of us was considering having a baby. First, I wanted one. So, I immersed myself in the world of babies and moms. I babysat weekly for an infant that I lived with. I followed the actual labors and birth stories of my friends. I read books and watched these kids and parents as the kids grew up. By that point, I had gotten J- interested in having a baby and he wanted one. I think that we flip-flopped back and forth about it. Finally, I had decided that I had really decided…I was firm…no pregnancy, no baby.

I decided to begin altering my lifestyle to see how it goes. When J- had his sabbatical, we bought a car and isolated ourselves in a little cabin in the North Cascade mountains. It was the first time since I had left for college that I had moved. Leaving my work and community gave me the opportunity to focus on my family in ways that I hadn’t before. I really enjoyed this time and appreciated how well Jeff and I did together. This cinched it…I wanted a family.

I still felt pretty strongly that I didn’t want a baby.  Recently, I have been around a lot of moms that have had both an easy and a very hard time of it.  Although being in on the difficulties of it certainly has not made it compelling.  But, ultimately, it is not just a question about how hard it is, but what I am best suited for.

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I drove down to Watsonville in a horrific storm, hydroplaning on highway 17, going about 40 mph most of the way. It was intense. My husband and brother were with me. We were going down to meet dad’s wife C-, and to meet my other brother, who was on his way.

What I found there was nearly a week long reunion with my dad, who was almost completely unresponsive to what was happening around him. My brothers had been much closer to him over the last decade and my oldest brother, in particular really helped me understand the positives about my father. I reclaimed the ways that I am like him, which are many. It is not that I had been in denial of it before, but I really just hadn’t focused on it in years.

I was also able to discover the positives of my father’s new life. His wife, C- is great. She is someone that I have a lot in common with. She is also the first old lady in my family that hasn’t been crazy. The more I talked to her, the more I realized that it was just like talking to anyone else. You could believe what she said and trust her to understand what you are saying, too. All of the elder women in my family have been nuts in some way or another, so it was really nice to see C- as a model for aging more gracefully.

I experienced a relief that I was so sad and emotional. I think that I had been afraid that my dad was dying and I wouldn’t feel anything, so all of the emotion that I did have was welcome and was the beginning of making up for lost time of being without my dad.

I was able to forgive him, to tell him that I loved him and to thank him for all that he gave me. Initially, I felt like this was the easy way out of actually dealing with my relationship with him. I never had to really process with him why I couldn’t be around him. I never had to confront him with my issues, but here I was experiencing all of this resolution and closure. I mean, that isn’t very fair to him…he didn’t have the peace of knowing that I loved him and was thankful for him. Could he hear me when I told him this as he lay in the hospital?

My friend B- said to me about the passing of her mother. “I was never able to forgive her when she was living, it wasn’t until she died that I was able to form a relationship with her that worked for me.” Although I know that B’s situation was very different than mine, I absolutely related to her words. There were just certain things that couldn’t be done in my father’s life and I am grateful that I can have them in his death.

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She called 911 immediately and they directed her to check for signs of life. She could not find breath or a pulse, so she proceeded to perform CPR under the guidance of 911. This could not have been easy. C- is a small 79 year old woman. My father was 73 and weighed over 250 lbs. Obviously the moments were very emotional for her, but she probably had a lot of adrenaline keeping her going.

My father was taken to the emergency room in an ambulance, by the time he arrived at the hospital, he had a pulse and was initiating his own breathing, but could only breathe with the help of a machine.

My father and she had talked about what they would want in a situation like this. They had agreed that he would want a chance to live, but would not want to be KEPT alive by use of machines. In this situation, it became clear that the amount of brain damage that he had would have him living a life that he would not choose to stay in.

My husband J- and i have had many talks about life support as well. I think it was during the Terry Schiavo case we started talking about it. J- was on one extreme with wanting almost no medical intervention. Now that I have some actual experience with this, I see that this is easier said than done. Many times situations like these aren’t really as black and white as they seem.

While J- would prefer to have no intervention, it is hard to imagine doing anything other than what C- did. Of course I would want to try and save my husbands life. On the other hand, if my father had just died the first time, it would have saved a very difficult 4 days and a lot of medical expenses.

My father was not in good health to begin with. His heart and lungs were okay, but he was very heavy and had diabetes that he hadn’t taken care of for about 20 years. He wasn’t really getting around anymore. During the first few days, it wasn’t really clear what would happen. His prognosis was never good, but everyone said there was some hope; that sometimes people surprised them and that they were amazed that he was doing as well as he was. He had a steady pulse and was initiating his own breathing. The whole time, the threat of infection loomed, it seems that dad had gotten fluid in his lungs and probably had pneumonia. He was suffering from myoclonus, which are tremors caused by brain misfunction, which became longer and closer together.

By Wednesday morning, his temperature was up to over 103, even with an ice cold blanket on him and he was shaking constantly. We had an eeg the evening before. Unfortunately, it is not a very good test. What it did tell us (which we had already figured out, really) is that any brain response that my father did have was inconsistent and slow, he would probably never regain consciousness. My concern was that he did have SOME brain response to pain. It wasn’t clear what the response was, but C- and I began to feel as though we were torturing him by keeping him on life support.

So the question calls me, what is the “right” thing to do. Looking back, what could have been done differently and what would have been the best scenario for all involved.

Talking about what would have been best for my dad is complicated. He did have some choice in the matter and it is C-’s belief that this is the path that he chose for himself. Of course, there is a possibility that the decision to take him off life support came later than it ought to have. We do not know about any suffering that he may have been experiencing, there is certainly a chance that letting him stay dead the first time would have really been the best for him, it was fast and relatively painless.

For the family, it was a very stressful situation to be simply waiting to see what happened. In a way, it is lucky that my father’s body began to fail him even on life support, so that our decision was very clear. It would have been much more difficult to take him off of life support if it weren’t clear that he weren’t going to die anyways. On the other hand, it was a really positive experience to come together as a family and work as a team, to say goodbye to my father, and to have a week-long process to absorb the reality of his death. Taking him off life support was a very clear climax to this experience, where my strongest emotions came out. His death ended up being somewhat elating and beautiful, in a way.

So, my answer to the question is that there is no right and wrong about it. There is no way to know what the “right” way to die for my dad was. The ability to bring people back to life and keep them alive is complicated in ways that I hadn’t previously understood. This power comes with a great deal of risk and responsibilities, along with the obvious potential.

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I have been appreciating the roller coaster of emotions that I have gone through over the last few days while I have been with him. I have gotten to know his wife much better and have had a lot of really sweet reflections on the gifts he has given me and the ways that we are alike. We haven’t been close for a long time, so the fact that his has hit me hard is a relief and gift.

I consider my father as somewhat of a Renaissance man, and I am grateful that I have learned this quality from him. His interests were always broad ranging.

• He enjoyed entertainment: to read and watch movies
• He was artistic and creative, he painted took photographs, played the violin and sang.
• He loved nature and camped in Yosemite, Lassen, the Grand Canyon and of course, the Santa Cruz mountains.
• He loved his family and worked very hard to support us and spend time with us.
• He was also always very spiritually driven involving himself in Christianity and new age practices in various times of his life.

One of my earliest memories was waking up in the middle of the night and visiting my father in our home photo lab. He was developing photographs for his side business at moss landing. He would sit me up on this towering stool (to a 3-year-old’s body) and I would keep him company while I watched him at work.

When I was in kindergarten, he wowed my classmates by climbing a telephone pole and brought two large bags of wire which we afterwards wove and braided into jewelry

As I got older, my father and I continued camping when our other family members had lost interest. I remember him accompanying me on school trips to Dillon’s Beach near Tomales and a trip to Loon Lake off of highway 50. He encouraged my interest in geology and we learned about John Muir together.

My father became very interested in thinking outside the box. He practiced self-hypnosis and meditation and eventually assisted the phone company in pioneering new ways of managing with a New Age Thinking class that he taught. I got to participate in the class where the students examined complex situations and how perspective may change things.

I cannot idealize my father. While he himself had a very idealistic worldview, he struggled with demons of rage and depression throughout his youth and his first two marriages. He had difficulty making close, lifelong friends and had a difficult life. But, he was resourceful in trying to deal with these vices and improved himself over the years. I am grateful to Carla, who offered him what he needed to experience the happiest years of his life.

Ultimately, when I think of what my father has given me and why he was a good father, what stands out is that I have always believed that I could do anything that I set my mind to. Not only did I believe it, but I knew that my father would support my choices unconditionally. My father lived with a spirit of adventure and acceptance and sharing my experiences or plans never failed to bring an excited and maybe mischievous grin to his face.

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