Spirit Prevails

I have just returned from California, where it was warm and sunny, flowers blooming in abundance. What a change. What a delight.

As lovely as it was, however, the Freeway at rush hour--the time I arrived---made I 95 look like a back road in Nebraska. I have been told that the CA Freeway is “the most dangerous road in the country.” I am not hard-pressed to believe it.

Driving south through Malibu, the expensive houses are on the Pacific side of the Freeway. On the opposite side, smaller houses range upwards along steep, curving roads, which are carved into what looks like parched, unstable land: land of potential mud slide. Sun and flowers notwithstanding, California has some drawbacks that we do not share. And I haven’t even mentioned the regular earthquakes.

Nonetheless I was glad to be there, even in an unstable state—California and my own. I was both eager and anxious to visit my younger brother, Brandon, who has battled cancer for almost three years and whom I have not seen during the last two of these difficult years.

The sight of him wracked me. The disease has taken its toll. Nonetheless, to my joy, I found that the funny, lovable, creative brother whom I have cherished all of my life remains alive and well inside the body that chemotherapy and radiation have both saved and seriously damaged.

                   

      My brother lives.

The human spirit is awesome in the fullest sense of the word. Battered and weakened, my brother continues to paint breathtaking watercolors.

Together we sit on the couch and watch a movie that Brandon made years ago—Love Among the Ruins, starring Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier. Brandon mimics Olivier’s rapid speech patterns perfectly, and I wave and feather my hands like Hepburn, both of us smiling and praising the skill of those two extraordinary actors. 

The time was precious and too soon over, but the visit provided some wonderful memories. Enough to last for my lifetime? Perhaps. But I pray that will not be necessary.



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Thanks, Cecily