13.1

On November 13, 2022, Sami ran the Monterey Bay Half Marathon - her second time running the race. She’d trained for it through the summer and fall of that year. One of my favorite photos of her is from that day - shivering in the pre-dawn chill near the start-line next to Fishermen’s Wharf. When her group crossed the starting mat, I went for a walk of my own - I walked 6 miles, and had time to grab a cup of coffee, in the time it took Sami to complete 13.1 miles. I watched her finish.

We had a wonderful trip to Monterey for the race. We drove down Saturday morning, picked up her race packet, and enjoyed dinner at one of our favorite seafood restaurants. I’ve visited Monterey and Pacific Grove since I was a kid (they were among my parents’ favorite places); Sami and I picked out her engagement and wedding rings at a jewelry store in Monterey in 1990. On this trip, we sat on the beach near Lover’s Point after dinner and watched the tide come in.

Sami’s race didn’t go as well as she’d hoped. As I recall, she wanted to finish in just over two hours - averaging just under a 10-minute mile. And she was on pace to do it (again, my recollection is a little hazy, but I remember checking the race app and seeing her on pace). But somewhere after mile 9, she slowed down. She didn’t know why her pace slowed, but she was very disappointed. At the finish area, she had a bowl of soup, and I enjoyed her complimentary post-race beer. We went back to our motel, showered, had lunch at another favorite restaurant, and headed home. She slept most of the way back to Auburn.

Seventy-six days later, on January 28, 2023, Sami had the first of what ended up being two craniotomies. She’d probably had at least two seizures earlier in the month; she had other symptoms on our trip to Las Cruces, NM. And just 273 days after she ran a half marathon, she passed away from glioblastoma.

When she got sick, Sami had been training for another half marathon in Sacramento on St. Patrick’s Day. At some point in early January, she’d fallen during a training run. She told us, “I don’t know what happened - I just ended up on the ground.” As all of us began to wonder about early symptoms we’d missed, this episode stood out.

The speed at which all of this happened still boggles my mind. That my incredibly beautiful, active, and intelligent wife could go from distance runner to cancer patient to deceased in exactly nine months seems impossible. And yet it happened. Nine months to the day, which I only realized as I wrote this essay.

In two weeks, I will walk/run the Monterey Bay Half Marathon, along with our daughters, my sister and her oldest daughter, and a friend. This will be the first race I’ve “competed” in since high school track - and the first distance “race” I’ve run since the Jamestown Run 10K when I was 12 or 13. At some point after Sami died, I decided that I wanted (needed!) to put in the training time to allow me to complete 13.1 miles - to participate in a race that was so special for Sami, in a place that was so special to both of us.

During a summer and fall of training, I’ve realized that I want to finish this race in the allowable time of 3 hours and 30 minutes. This means I’ll need to average 16-minute miles. Since I’ve been training at 2600 feet above sea level, on hills, I’m feeling reasonably confident that I’ll be able to do this - this morning, I walked 9 miles averaging just under 15:30 per mile. And I’ve also been able to jog a bit - I’m hopeful that at sea level, I’ll be able to finish 13.1 miles in just over three hours. We’ll see.

The race itself is important to me - I want to prove to myself that I’m almost as strong as Sami was. But the fact that we’re doing this together - as a family - is even more important. I know that crossing the finish line will be emotional for all of us. I know that I will want to get in the ocean after we complete the race - Sami’s ashes were spread in the ocean, and I will need to feel her “embrace.” I know I will cry.

But the process has also been helpful. Doing something as a group has been enjoyable. Having a goal - one that improves my physical fitness - has been wonderful. I’ve been a walker for quite some time; having something to shoot for has made me more dedicated. Maybe I’ll keep entering these kinds of events! And doing something contemplative - for me, walking is a bit of a meditation - has helped me examine my memories of Sami. And not just the hard things that happened between her last race and her last breath. Training for this 13.1 miles has helped me recall other important parts of our 34 years together.

Getting to Know a Place

For some time, I’ve thought a great deal about how long someone needs to really know a place. To know its geography, for sure, but also to know its moods. Its seasons. Its variety. To know how to get from Point A to Point B - and to know what I’m likely to see along the way, according to the time of year. And the type of year.

This thought first came to me as I was studying livestock guardian dog behavior on Forest Service sheep range north of Truckee, CA. My project involved placing trail cameras in a systematic grid over the thousands of acres of the Kyburz and Boca Allotments, and then checking them regularly. As part of the project, I also needed to find where the herder was camped, and where the sheep were grazing. The herder always knew where he was and where he would be next; I needed about three years to learn the country.

But that’s not to say I actually knew the place. Part of being curious, at least for me, is being open to new observations. Being open to the delight of seeing a new plant or animal, or a familiar plant or animal in a new place or new season. My innate curiosity is part of why I love what I do!

One morning this week, I realized that I’ve been in my new place in Mountain Ranch for a year. I’ve experienced all four seasons now. This realization came when I entered this October’s weather observations in my weather journal (a habit I brought with me from Auburn). Last October, at least during the first week, it was hotter than hell here - in the mid 90s. This year, the first two weeks of October have truly felt like fall - on Sunday, it froze hard enough to kill my summer garden. Last year, we didn’t get a germinating rain (a big deal, even to a recovering sheep rancher like me) until mid-November. This year, we’ve had enough rain to start the grass as of this week.

Looking at my weather journal, I realized that I’ve also tried to pay attention to the climate, the flora and fauna, the “mood” of my new place. I remember noticing that all of the ponderosa pines on my new place dropped lots of needles last fall and early winter. I see their needles turning brown now and know what to expect. Last fall, the deer that frequented my property disappeared as hunting season started (including some of the biggest foothill bucks I’ve ever seen). This year, the deer are equally attuned to the calendar. I haven’t seen any on my place for at least 10 days.

Living just upslope from Jesus Maria Creek, I’ve enjoyed the diurnal winds that come with living in the higher foothills - and I’ve been nervous when these winds coincide with low humidity in the summer months. As a lifelong Sierra foothills resident, I’ve always paid attention to sirens and fire planes during fire season; seeing smoke or low-flying planes has taken on new significance now that I’m not surrounded by green lawns and irrigated pastures. My community observed the 10th anniversary of the Butte Fire last month. Many of the residential lots on the other side of the county road from my place remain empty.

My new place is about 1200 feet higher in elevation than our home in Auburn, and about 60 miles south - which means I’m in an entirely different plant community. I recognize most of the grasses, but I’ve enjoyed seeing new wildflowers - lupine and mule’s ears. Coyote mint and naked buckwheat. I miss seeing the brodea and blue dicks that graced our lambing pastures in Placer County, but I enjoy the black oaks, ponderosa pines and incense cedars at my new place. I also think naked buckwheat and blue dicks are among the funniest plant names I know!

This year, I bought feeder lambs to help reduce the fuel load on my six acres. I tried to wait until I thought the grass was ready, and I tried to buy enough lambs to feed off the grass by mid-June. I discovered that I bought them too late (mid April) and I bought too few (I purchased 12 - I should have had twice that many). Next year, I plan to have 25 sheep on the place by late March. If I ever get back into the breeding sheep business here, I think I’ll try to lamb a little later than we lambed in Auburn, simply because the cold weather hangs on slightly longer here - and the spring flush of grass growth is several weeks later.

But even though I’ve learned a great deal about my new little place on the planet, I know that I don’t know everything. I’ve not experienced drought here yet. I’ve not experienced an extremely wet or cold winter, or an extremely hot summer. I’ve had some fire scares, but I’ve not had to worry about evacuating. I’ve grown one garden, and learned a bit about what grows well - for me - here. More experimentation will be needed!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I don’t know how long it takes to know a place. Probably a lifetime. Maybe longer.

Here are some photos from my first year in Mountain Ranch! Not in any particular order, but through the entire last 12 months plus!

In Defense of Wood Heat

 

Or, I might have a firewood problem…

Tonight, my new woodshed is full of firewood - a combination of white oak from my neighbor’s property, long-dead black oak from my own property, tamarack pine and incense cedar from the Stanislaus National Forest, and Ponderosa Pine from my sawmill. About four cords, in all. A full woodshed, for me, is the equivalent of a barn full of hay going into winter.

Earlier this week, my sister asked me what I was doing this weekend. “Finishing filling my woodshed,” I told her. “Impressive,” she texted back. I realized that I’m becoming a bit like the Norwegian bachelor farmers of Garrison Keillor’s stories - a loner with practical obsessions. A full woodshed, a full pantry, and a full freezer make me happy!

In late September, I received an email from my propane supplier - over a 12-month period, I hadn’t used enough propane to justify regular deliveries. I would now be on “will-call” - I’d need to check my tank and call them when I was getting low. Since my furnace is the only thing I run on propane, I took this as an accomplishment! I mostly heated my house last winter with a new Lopi woodstove. And firewood I cut myself.

Enough bragging, though - a little personal history is in order. Sami and I started heating our home with wood as soon as we bought our own place in Penryn, in 1994. In the early years of our marriage, we cut firewood at the ranches of our friends (I remember splitting huge valley oak rounds at Marden Wilber’s ranch in Clements, with his homemade splitter). For softwood kindling, I cut what was available - mostly foothill grey pine (what I grew up calling bull pine). And I split it by hand. I was much stronger and more persistent in my younger days!

When we bought our home in Auburn, the sellers had replaced their woodstove with a natural gas “woodstove” - probably a selling point for most prospective buyers. We immediately replaced it with a new woodstove. Eventually, our natural gas furnace fell into such disrepair through lack of use that we heated entirely with wood. The house was so poorly insulated that if we were gone more than two days during the winter, the inside temperature would dip into the low 40s by the time we returned.

One of the first improvements I made to my new place in Mountain Ranch last year was the installation of a new woodstove - the lack of wood heat was one of the few things I didn’t like about the house when I first saw it. And even though this place has a furnace, I mostly heated it with the wood I cut last fall and winter. I will admit, though, that leaving the furnace set at 57F when I traveled last winter felt like a welcome luxury!

Yesterday, I had a chimney sweep out to make sure I was ready for the coming winter. He found very little creosote in my stovepipe! The combination of seasoned oak and dry cedar and tamarack seemed to be perfect. I’m interested to see what the addition of pitchier pine from my sawmill waste will do, but I think my new stove works pretty well. I’m hopeful that its state-of-the-art combustion technology means it doesn’t put out much in the way of particulate matter.

A brief digression. Another of my favorite autumn activities is deer hunting. I’ve been heating my home with wood far longer than I’ve hunted; I didn’t get my first deer until I was in my forties. Maybe that’s the reason, but I have to admit I’d sooner give up my deer rifle (and learn to bow-hunt) than give up my woodstove! Modern wood stoves seem to be very clean burning.

The old idiom that wood heat heats you twice is accurate. Even with my fossil-fuel powered chainsaw and wood splitter, making firewood is physical work! But people heated with wood long before 2-stroke and 4-stroke engines were a thing - I’d need to be in much better shape, but I know I could heat my place with wood even without gasoline!

My two favorite authors have written far more eloquently than I about the benefits of wood heat. Montanan Ivan Doig wrote that a woodstove was the only way to heat the rivets of your Levi’s. I think of this every time I come in from a cold day’s work and stand in front of my woodstove. A floor vent just doesn’t perform in the same way. And Kentuckian Wendell Berry wrote that he’d rather know how to build a fire than know how a thermostat works. This thought sustains me whenever I come home to a cold winter house.

And so in this second autumn in my new place, I’m finding that I thoroughly enjoy cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood. Still - even in my late fifties. I’m finding that having a woodshed that is sized (I hope!) to contain a winter’s worth of firewood gives me a measure of enjoyment. And a goal. And I’m looking forward to starting my winter mornings with a trip outside to gather wood from the wood box on my porch. To coming in from chores and heating my backside in front of the woodstove. To turning of the lights in the living room and falling asleep to the glow of my woodstove.

And knowing that I had something to do with making it all possible.

I Fired My Doctor

I fired my doctor today. Actually, he was a nurse practitioner. But he’s fired nonetheless. And, if I can help it, I’ll never go to a Sutter hospital or doctor again.

When I moved from Auburn, I debated about keeping the primary care physician I had there - I liked him, and our daughters had played soccer together. But I decided that a two hour drive was a bit much, considering there were other options closer to home. So I opted for a practice in Jackson. For the first time in more than a decade, I had to establish a new relationship with a medical professional.

My appointment in late July was fine. The NP was a nice enough guy, although looking back at our appointment, I realize now that listening was not his strong suit. He went through my medical history, asked me questions about my answers to the online pre-appointment questionnaire I’d filled out, and asked me if I had any questions. I did.

I asked about some chronic pain I’d been experiencing in my right Achilles tendon. I asked about the upper respiratory congestion I experienced most mornings. I asked about whether I should get a regular skin cancer screening. And I asked about getting bloodwork before my next appointment.

He answered all of my questions. To some degree. He said I probably had arthritis or bone spurs in my ankle, and suggested treating it with heat. He said my congestion was likely due to allergies, and suggested that I change over-the-counter medication. He said I should definitely have a skin cancer screening every year, and looked at a couple of spots on my hands (that he said were not a problem). And he said he’d order bloodwork.

Imagine my surprise when I learned that I had more than $800 in out-of-pocket charges on the bill I received in late August. Charges that involved diagnoses of my ankle and my congestion. Charges that included titers for childhood diseases that I told him I’d been vaccinated for. Charges for answering questions that I assumed were normal inquiries that I could ask during my annual wellness visit.

I immediately contacted Accolade, which is supposed to be my “patient advocate” with doctors and my insurance company (Anthem Blue Cross). I had tried to get Accolade to help us during Sami’s illness and got absolutely no response. This time, at least, they responded, but the results were similar. They basically told me there was nothing they could do.

I reached out directly to Sutter Health and to the NP’s office (which is not easy to do - when you call the local number for the NP’s office, the call is answered by a call center that is nowhere near Jackson). They agreed to revisit the bill - and I found out yesterday that they were able to save me $200. So finding out I should put heat on my ankle, that I should take allergy medicine, that I should get regular skin cancer screenings, and that I had in fact had my childhood vaccines, only cost me $600 and change.

This lengthy diatribe, I guess, is partly a result of my pent-up frustration and anger with the healthcare system generally, and with Sutter Health specifically. Our experience with Sutter during Sami’s illness was horrible. Her first neurosurgeon failed to follow the standard of care for post-surgery imaging - he didn’t order an MRI after her first craniotomy, so Sami couldn't start cancer treatments when we’d hoped. When she ended up back in the hospital two weeks after her first brain surgery, the second surgeon couldn’t tell us whether her tumor had regrown, or whether the first doctor had missed part of it - all because the first doctor had failed to order any imaging. Later, her medical oncologist basically threw up his hands when we questioned him about whether Sami’s anti-seizure medications where interfering with the other drugs she was taking - telling us, “You’ll need to ask another doctor.” At the time, I wrote a detailed letter to Sutter’s office of quality care. More than two years later, I’ve yet to get a response.

The trauma of our interactions with the medical system continue to cause me stress. Since Sami died, whenever I go to the doctor, my blood pressure is initially higher than it typically has been. It comes down when they check it a second time, and the nurses usually tell me that it’s “white coat syndrome” - elevated blood pressure caused by the stress associated with seeing a doctor. I’m sure that’s true, but it would be nice if a medical professional actually showed some empathy for the reasons I might feel stressed.

My family’s intense experience with the dysfunction of the medical-insurance complex is not unusual, I know. I also know that I risk letting my anger and frustration impact my own health. Stress itself can be unhealthy, but my dissatisfaction with this new provider shouldn’t keep me from getting regular check-ups. Once again, every actual person I talk to about my current situation agrees that the system is broken. But none of us seem to have the ability to fix it.

Home Alone

Periodically, I go back through my writing from the last three years. I marvel at how easy the life that was reflected in my blog posts before late January 2023 appears to me today. I was worried about things like lambing season and drought (which seemed monumental at the time, but seem trivial now). I relive bits of what our family went through during Sami’s illness. I transport myself back to the profound sadness of the immediate aftermath of her passing, to the doubt I experienced in deciding to move, to the adjustment of figuring out this new chapter in my life. But this evening, I re-read a blog post titled Little Reminders, written less than a month after Sami died. I wrote that I was “adjusting to being alone at home for the first time in 34 years.” And I realized that the statement was incorrect. Until Sami died, I’d never been truly “alone” in the place I called home. In my life. Until now.

In the four-plus years I went to college at UC Davis, I always had at least one roommate. I was fortunate to count all of my roommates as friends (and most of them have remained in contact). Upon graduation, I moved back to Sonora to work for my family’s auction business - and moved into an apartment I’d rented with Sami (we were engaged by this time). After we were married, Sami started vet school, and we lived in a series of rentals in Plymouth, Woodland, and finally Dixon. In her last year of school, we purchased a home in Penryn. Seven years later, we bought our place in Auburn.

I don’t mean to suggest that Sami and I were together 24/7. She had her own business, life, interests, and friends. As did I. I traveled for work, and I took care of the household chores on my own when she traveled. But we always checked in even when we were apart. We usually shared the little triumphs and frustrations of daily life, even when we were sleeping in separate places. To be honest, those frustrations were occasionally with each other!

As I write this tonight, I’m sitting on the back deck of MY “new” home (I’ve been here a year) in Calaveras County. MY “new” dog, Ky, is acting goofy, while OUR old dog, Mae, is looking at her with a mix of amusement and disgust. I just fed OUR mules. Two of the four remaining sheep were born before Sami died - in that sense, they’re OURS, as is Bodie the livestock guardian dog. But the two feeder lambs I bought last spring are MINE.

I realized tonight that my decision to move, to sell OUR home in Auburn, and to move to a new place closer to my parents, was the first significant decision I’ve made on my own since I decided where to go to college. The college decision, and the decision to move last year, were made after consultation with family and friends. But ultimately, both were my decisions. I hadn’t considered the weight of this until tonight. I realize that I miss sharing the responsibility for - and consequences of - major life choices.

That said, I have retained some of the habits that our joint decision-making helped me build. Sami was great about saying, “Let’s sleep on it,” and so I’ve tried to do that. Sami was also good about not second guessing once a decision was made. This is a work in progress for me.

Living alone has had practical implications, as well. I’ve had to figure out how to cook for one. I hate to waste food, and I have tried to avoid processed foods - and I enjoy cooking generally. But trying to figure out how to cook healthy meals with leftovers that don’t go bad in the fridge has been challenging. In Auburn, I’d also try to order out every week or two; these options are limited in Mountain Ranch! 

I’ve also had to figure out how to do things that used to take more than one pair of hands - building my woodshed was a good example. I had lots of help for the critical parts of this project, but I also figured out how to get posts plumb and beams level by myself. I became a better (though definitely still amateur) carpenter in the process.

I’m fortunate to live a life that gives me time outdoors doing physical work. My extension research and teaching activities often give me the opportunity to work outside, sometimes by myself. Similarly, my lifestyle and my hobbies largely require outdoor activities - gardening, hunting, fishing and hiking. Wood cutting, reducing the fuel-load on my property, managing the sheep. Running my sawmill. I find myself thinking about whether I need to let someone know where I’ll be and what I’ll be doing. My daughters and my sister are probably tired of getting text messages that say, “Hey - I’m headed up Highway 4 to cut firewood today,” or “I’m going to get on the roof to clean the gutters and blow off the pine needles.” Or, “I’ll be collecting forage samples in a place without cell service today - I’ll text you when I’m home.” But as I get older, I feel like I need to let somebody know if I’m doing something that is potentially dangerous. And I appreciate knowing that someone is glad when they know I’m home safe and sound.

My realization this week that the last 24 months have represented my first experience at living alone hasn’t made me sad, necessarily. The feeling of observing my life and my thought process from outside myself isn’t new, either. I find it interesting to think about my emotions, my fatigue, and my need for introspection in light of this recognition that I’ve never truly lived alone. So I think I'll go inside, heat up a can of lentil soup and slice some home grown tomatoes, and get ready for bed!

My new woodshed!

Hard Traveling

As I was driving to work this morning, I realized traveling (both for work and for fun) has been mentally difficult for me since Sami passed away. Over the last two years, I’ve told myself - and others - that leaving home is more difficult now logistically. I need to find someone to care for my animals and water my garden. This time of year, I worry about being gone if a fire starts close to home. In the winter time, I worry about winter weather. But this morning, I realized that all of those things were true when Sami was alive. Yes, she could take care of chores when I traveled for work. And yes, she typically arranged for a pet sitter when we traveled together. But I mostly looked forward to traveling then - and I didn’t worry so much about being away from home. So what has changed?

Some days, I wonder if I got rid of my two mules, my four sheep, and my livestock guardian dog, if traveling would be easier. If I could just pick up my border collies and go! But I suspect my concern for caring for the animals is a crutch, that there’s some mental or emotional block. Similarly, wildfire is a serious threat in my community. But I’ve worked at preparing my property to survive a fire - there’s always more I can do, but I feel like my efforts at creating defensible space and hardening my home have helped reduce the danger.

So what is it? Why am I so reluctant? Why do I plan multiday trips like the one I’ve planned for this weekend and then back out as the departure date grows closer? Why am I afraid to leave home?

Reflecting on Sami’s illness, I suspect part of my reluctance stems from the after-effects of feeling like I needed to be on call around the clock to care for Sami. Of remembering the feeling when I left the house in July 2023 to go grocery shopping and came home to an ambulance in the driveway after Sami’s final seizure.

This residual feeling has carried forward during this summer of helping to care for my folks. I have felt like I’m taking a risk every time I travel overnight - what if something happens? What if they need me? What if there’s a crisis?

But I suspect my hesitation is also related to my grieving process. Sometimes I feel as though I shouldn’t be having fun. Other times, I feel like I can’t bear to be around other people. My introversion and introspection sometimes keep me from going out into the world - especially because my work often requires extroversion. Sometimes being home - doing chores, running my sawmill, stacking my firewood - feels more therapeutic than being out in the world. But maybe this is a crutch, too?

These thoughts lead me to conclude that perhaps part of my hesitancy is that I’m still adjusting to going places by myself. More accurately, I suppose, since I traveled alone before Sami died, I’m adjusting to coming home by myself. Coming home to an empty house.

Some days, I think I should simply force myself to get out and travel more. I would like to see both girls this fall. I’d like to spend some time in the mountains. I’m looking forward to our trip to Monterey for the half marathon in November (mostly because I’ll be there with family and friends). But today, as I contemplate heading north to see friends and celebrate the life of a colleague who passed away this summer, I’m struggling with whether I want to go.

Perspectives

I’m not a professional herding dog trainer - not even close. But I have trained the last several border collies I’ve used in my sheep business, and I have worked at understanding livestock handling and behavior - especially with sheep. One of the things I’ve observed with starting a young dog on sheep is that at first, most of my dogs want to work much too closely to the sheep. As a result, the dog can only see a very small part of the flock. Part of my job as the trainer, then, is to help the dog back off - to help the dog realize that he or she has more control over the entire flock if they work from further away. In other words, with greater distance comes more perspective.

Distance can be physical or temporal - measured in space or time. The further back my dog can work and still exert control over the sheep, the more effective he’ll be. The further away I get from the traumatic events of 2023, the more I see them with clarity. I don’t know if I understand what happened any more definitively than I did 25 months ago, but I am able to think about some of these events in a new light.

Before delving into several of the ways my perspective has evolved, I should say that I’ve come to realize that one does not “graduate” from the grieving process. There is no “certificate of completion” - as I’ve written before, my relationship with grief continues to evolve. But grief is not something I’ll move past. Indeed, my grief is not something I want to move past. Moving forward with my grief seems to make more sense. And so I suspect my perspective on Sami’s illness and death will always be evolving.

Over these last two years, I’ve found that reading about grief and loss has mostly been beneficial. Of particular help have been A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis, No Death, No Fear by Thich Nhat Hanh, and most recently, This Ordinary Stardust by Alan Townsend.

Dr. Townsend is the Dean of the Franke College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana. As I was blogging in real time about Sami’s glioblastoma diagnosis and treatment in the spring of 2023, he reached out to me to share that he had lost his wife Diana (who was also a scientist) to the same disease several years before. His book is an account of her illness and the aftermath of her passing. I won’t attempt to summarize his writing, but I highly recommend it.

The book came out last spring, and when I received my copy, I found that I wasn’t ready yet to read about someone else’s experience with losing a partner. About ten days ago, I finally picked it up - and I finished reading it one evening this week. In many ways, Alan and Diana’s experience was very similar to mine and Sami’s - and so I found much of it difficult to read. I found myself reliving our experience. I frequently found myself crying and putting the book down. But as I reflected on the book after I finished it Wednesday evening, I realized that Alan’s story helped me gain some important perspective on our own journey with brain cancer. I’m sure more revelations will come.

At some point between Sami’s first and second craniotomy in February 2023, she told me that if she decided she didn’t want any more treatment, I needed to let her make that decision. I agreed, but she also said something about taking her own life. Since she was a large animal veterinarian with access to powerful euthanasia drugs, I knew she had the ability to act on that idea. We secured the drugs (and I bought a gun safe to replace the locked cabinet where I stored my hunting rifles), but I found the thought of Sami ending her own life terribly upsetting at the time. Later, when she was in the hospital at UCSF, she said something to a nurse or a resident about these thoughts. That evening, we had to have an observer in the room with us all night, just in case. The next day, a therapist interviewed her and determined that she wasn’t going to act on the idea - she simply wanted some control over what was happening to her. Looking back now, I realize that Sami was fearless in the face of certain death (there is, after all, no cure for glioblastoma), but the process of dying - of losing her physical and intellectual capacity - was terrifying. I realize now that she wanted some say in how long she’d need to live with the tumors in her brain, and the debilitating symptoms they caused.

I also realize now that she began the process of dying when she had the first major seizure in late May 2023. A week after that seizure, we were in San Francisco, where her medical team determined she was having ongoing subclinical seizures - seizures we couldn’t see, but episodes that were further eroding her ability to walk and speak. Episodes that increased her brain fog. I suspect I knew at the time that her physical and mental toughness were masking the severity of her symptoms - that while we knew how sick she was, her medical team had no frame of reference. They couldn’t really comprehend what a badass she was - and that she knew better than anyone what was happening to her.

The last two weeks of her life, I think, represent the most difficult stretch of my life, too - at least so far. In many ways, the two weeks she spent in hospice care are still a blur - I can still remember specific images and experiences, but mostly I remember my own exhaustion. And my fear that Sami would linger - that I wouldn’t have enough stamina or fortitude to take care of her. In this regard, I am so grateful to our daughters for sharing these difficult days with me. After reading Alan’s book, I was able to see those last two weeks differently. Today, they don’t seem any less difficult, but I do think now that Sami wanted to live until her whole family could be with her (and knowing Sami, so we could be with each other once she’d left us). Wednesday evening, as I finished Alan’s book, I remembered the afternoon of August 10 or 11, when Sami and I were sitting side-by-side on her bed. By that time, both of our daughters were with us, as was Sami’s sister and my own sister and brother-in-law. I put my arm around her, and she rested her head on my shoulder - it was the last time we embraced each other. Early in the morning of August 13, 2023, she slipped away, in our bedroom, with all of us around her. I can’t bring myself to say it was beautiful, but today, I’m grateful that we were there for her. That we were there together. For each other.

Finally, in the winter after Sami passed, I participated in several virtual workshops associated with a social science research project I’d been collaborating on with a colleague from Idaho. One of the sheep producers who participated had young children, and we talked about the realities of livestock production. Like my daughters, her children had participated in the realities of ranch life. The fact that we raise animals for meat (which requires death) while caring deeply for the animals in our care. I couldn’t help it. I asked if she thought ranching gave us a different perspective on life (and death). She answered, “Yes. I think caring for our animals - knowing that their lives sustain ours - prepares our hearts for harder things.” As a veterinarian, Sami had sat with friends who had to make difficult end-of-life decisions. As a rancher, I’d had to make some of those decisions myself. Those decisions are never easy; but my direct participation in them helped prepare me for the biological and existential realities of what our family experienced.

During these last 25 months, gaining this perspective hasn’t been a linear process. I’ve tried some online group grief therapy, which hasn’t been terribly helpful. I’ve tried some one-on-one counseling (both in person and virtual) - some of which has been enormously beneficial, some of which was not. For me, I’m realizing, reading, quiet contemplation, and vulnerability (through my writing and through conversations with friends) have been the most helpful ways for me to understand my grief. I have also realized that there is no single path through grief - that while grief may be the most universal of human emotions, we each experience it - and cope with it - differently. Distance, at least for me, has provided perspective.