Brenda Frese's Positive Thinking

When you are raising a family it is easy to get caught up in working too hard to provide for them.  Most people want to improve their family's quality of life and it's natural to want to give your family the material things in life that can bring excitement and joy to them.  But in the end, they are just things.  Things can't hold your hand, tell you they love you or bring you inner peace.

In the daily process of making a living, I try to put the brakes on myself and ask myself why I am working so hard.  Our families need the income we are providing but our families also need us.  Finding a balance between the two is key.  If we don't remind ourselves on our own, sometimes something else will.  In the midst of all that hard work and tight scheduling, something can happen to a member of your family that brings everything into focus; immediately strengthening your priorities.

This is what happened to Brenda Frese, the head coach for the University of Maryland's women's basketball team.  I don't read the sports section of the newspaper as much as I do other sections of the paper, but this time a story about Brenda Frese jumped out for me and I read it from beginning to end.  Frese has coached at Maryland for 10 years, won the Women's NCAA championship in 2006 and is married with two little boys.  In her 2008-2009 season at Maryland, Frese also won the ACC Championship-the women's first since 1989.

I found her family's story to be so inspirational and I hope you do to!!  Good luck Tyler and keep up the good fight!  The Frese/Thomas family is in our prayers.  This link will take you to the Washington Post story:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/colleges/marylands-brenda-frese-stays-positive-as-son-battles-leukemia/2012/02/20/gIQAXzsRVR_story.html

Ahhh-Choo!

Dear Readers,

Please send me your positive energy.  I need it bad.

February can be a tough month.  Thank goodness it is so short.  I have been spending the past couple of days coughing, sneezing and constantly blowing my nose, drinking tea and existing on soup.  I have to say that this morning I feel a little better but the cough is still there. 

We haven't had a severe winter; in fact it never really felt that winter settled in for any long period of time.  I know this winter was considered mild and while we had some flurries here and there, no real snowstorms ever developed.  I have a feeling that one of the reasons lots of people have colds and coughs is because it gets cold for a day or two and then it gets warm for a day or two.  No one knows what to wear for work or play and that reminds me of another thing I am really tired of: my winter clothes.

I'm done with the coat and the scarf and the boots and the gloves.  I just want to open the door and go outside without any layers of clothing. 

I heard on the news this morning that today's sunset is at 6 pm and I am taking this as a good sign that spring is on its way and winter may finally be coming to an end.  I can hardly wait for the warm weather!

Meryl Streep

When Hollywood hands out its little gold statuettes tomorrow night, we'll find out how The Academy voted on the nomination of Meryl Streep and her empathetic performance in the role of Margaret Thatcher as a politician and a wife.  The story is primarily about a British woman attaining so much power in the 1980's that she became Britian's first woman prime minister.

But the movie is also a love story and a reminder that no matter how high the government position you are elected to, no matter how much money you make, no matter how much privilege surrounds you, human beings are all the same when it comes to losing a loved one.  The same pain, confusion, and shock from a loss hits a Prime Minister as hard as it hits a painter.  Grief is a great equalizer.

Even Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of England and subject of the Oscar-nominated film, "The Iron Lady," searches for meaning in the midst of her grief.

Surprisingly, "The Iron Lady," shows us an elderly Margaret Thatcher preparing to eat breakfast with her husband, Denis.  She is talking to him about the usual things husbands and wives talk about in the morning.  The camera shows Margaret Thatcher talking about the price of milk as she starts to eat her soft boiled egg and then the camera shows Denis on the other side of the table folding his newspaper, conversing with his wife.  We think it's a routine scene about a husband and wife having breakfast but then Thatcher's assistant enters the kitchen and we see that Margaret Thatcher is sitting at the table alone and she has been talking out loud to herself.

There is a place set on the other side of the table where Denis would be sitting were he alive.  But for Margaret, Denis is still very much alive in her imagination and she "sees" him as she has every day of her married life.  That is when we bond with her as a human being, when the person of Margaret Thatcher is revealed. 

We feel the same jumble of emotions that anyone would feel were we in her position of adjusting to life without her loved one.  Her husband may be gone but she still talks to him because she feels his presence and it doesn't seem strange to her to talk to him even though he is no longer physically present.  Lots of people do this and it's perfectly normal.

"There should be no stigma...It's about life.  It's about the truth," Meryl Streep said in a television interview discussing the personal scenes where she depicts Thatcher as an 86-year-old widow.

Then there is that moment in the movie when Margaret is being urged by others to get rid of Denis' clothes and his other belongings.  We expect that Margaret Thatcher, who appears to be ice cold and steely strong in her public life, will also handle the death of her beloved husband in the same stoic manner.  But we would be so wrong.

Denis's clothes are hanging in the closet, his pillow is right next to hers and his golf clubs are leaning against the bedroom wall as though he just came through the door and placed them there.  As Margaret goes through Denis' things, she relives the memories of the highs and lows of their life together.

"The decision to let go of your husband's things after he's gone is a very hard thing," said Meryl Streep in an interview with the Daily Mail.  "These decisions you make in your personal life are as profound as any decision about the Falklands.  Everything counts.  In a big ambitious life, everything counts."

Go Green Tea

I write today in support of tea power; specifically the healing power of green tea.

I usually start the day with two cups of regular hot tea (Red Rose, Lipton, Tetley) and then sometimes will have another in the afternoon at work.  I'm not a coffee drinker and haven't been since I stopped smoking decades ago.  I like the way coffee smells but it has to have a lot of hot milk and turn into a cappuccino before I will drink it.  Coffee ice cream is also very delicious but that's another post.

Earlier in the week, I wrote about a book I have been reading, "Anti-Cancer: A New Way of Life," by David Servan-Schreiber, MD, Ph.D., which has made me look at my diet differently and make small changes based on the medical and scientific information in this book.  One piece of information revealed in this book is that green tea contains antioxidants, which is great news, and if I drink two to three cups of green tea a day I will be boosting my immune system in a major and beneficial way.

Doctors have been saying for a long time that the single best way to stay healthy is to strengthen your immune system.  As I get older, I am trying to do what I can to stay as healthy as possible and a strong immune system aggressively fights diseases ranging from common colds to arthritis and cancer.

Enter the drinking of more green tea on a daily basis.  It's a small change but I feel it all contributes to a positive health picture because good nutrition affects all areas of your life. Until I read this book, I had no idea that green tea contains a substance that the whole pharmaceutical industry today is researching in order to manufacture it: catechins.  (This part is going to get a little scientific but if I don't include this information you might not be persuaded about the healthy effects of drinking green tea.) 

Basically, catechins go through your body searching for free radicals that can damage DNA and contribute to cancer and atherosclerosis.  One of these catechins, epigallocatechin gallate, or EGCG, is "one of the most powerful nutritional molecules against the formation of new blood vessels by cancerous cells," writes Servan-Schreiber.

After two or three cups of green tea, ECGC is in your blood and spreading through your body by using your capillary vessels.  According to Servan-Schreiber, "ECEG settles on the surface of each cell and blocks the switches (the "receptors") whose function is to set off the signal that allows the penetration of neighboring tissue by foreign cells, such as cancer cells"

Is that cool or what?

I don't expect that green tea is going to make up for the years of bad processed food that I used to eat without thinking of the health consequences but we all have to start from where we are and today's goal is to get strong and stay healthy.

Author Jeffrey Zaslow

Please read this story about author Jeffrey Zaslow that recently ran in the New York Times.  What an interesting and inspiring man!  He sounds like he had an incredible gift for living in the moment.

February 13, 2012, 5:37 pm

Life’s Frailty, and the Gestures That Go a Long Way

By TARA PARKER-POPE

   



Jeffrey Zaslow by Eden Zaslow



FATHER FIRST Much of Jeffrey Zaslow’s writing centered on the theme of love.

Several years ago, my friend Jeffrey Zaslow sent me a chapter from a book he was writing about lifelong friendships among a group of women from Ames, Iowa. It was a powerful story about love and loss that moved me to tears.

With the draft pages still in my hands, I sat down with my daughter, a second-grader at the time, to talk about the importance of friendship. We talked about her girlfriends, why occasional fights didn’t matter and why she should always treasure her friends. It was a sweet moment, and I was grateful to Jeff for inspiring the conversation through his writing.

Later, I called him to tell him how much that single chapter had meant to my daughter and me. How, I asked him, had he managed to inject himself into this circle of women he had only recently met and so accurately depict the power of female friendship?

“I have a wife and three daughters,” he said, laughing, without missing a beat. “I’m quite comfortable being outnumbered by women.”

I thought about our conversation this weekend when I learned the terrible news that Jeff had died in a car accident on snowy roads on his way to his Detroit-area home, returning from a book-signing event in northern Michigan. “The Girls From Ames” became a best seller, and remains my favorite among the books he wrote. But many people know Jeff as co-author of “The Last Lecture,” with the Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, who delivered that now famous lecture after learning he had pancreatic cancer.

Mr. Zaslow was also co-author of memoirs with Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman from Arizona who was recovering from a gunshot wound to the head, and Chesley B. Sullenberger III, the pilot who safely ditched a damaged airliner on the Hudson River in 2009. Despite the disparate subject matter, Mr. Zaslow noted that much of his writing centered on the theme of love, commitment and living in the moment.

“We don’t know what moment in our lives we’re going to be judged on; that’s true for all of us,” he said at a TED talk last year, explaining what he had learned from Captain Sullenberger. “We’ve got to be honorable, be moral; we’ve got to work our hardest.”

Despite his success as a memoir co-author, Jeff’s true labor of love was his latest book, “The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters.” Dedicated to his daughters, the book focused on a bridal shop in Fowler, Mich., as a way to tell a story of parents’ hopes and dreams.

Mr. Zaslow’s role as a father was a common theme in his work, one he loved to talk about. Once when a boy canceled plans to take his daughter to a homecoming dance, Mr. Zaslow said he thought to himself, “What can I do for my sad daughter?” He decided to embarrass the boy in front of millions by writing a Wall Street Journal column about the lessons parents should be teaching their sons.

“The lesson of the story — and of that night — is to teach your sons to be chivalrous, and your daughters not to take it,” he said in a 2009 interview. “My daughter was not thrilled. And the boy was not thrilled. But you know what? The next time you want to take my daughter to the dance, follow through.”

Jeff often said he honed his skills for listening and offering advice during a stint as an advice columnist, a role he won in a contest to replace Ann Landers. During his many public talks, Jeff told the story of a favorite letter from a man who wanted his girlfriend, Julie, to undergo breast augmentation.

“Julie deserves someone who loves her for who she is, not how she looks in a sweater,” Jeff wrote in his reply. “If you can’t do that for her, she won’t need implants anyway because she will already have a big boob in her life. You.”

In every conversation I had with Jeff and in much of his writing, he talked about how much he had learned about the frailty of life and the importance of never leaving important words unsaid.

At his TED talk last November, Jeff told the audience about a column of his that focused on the words “I love you.” It appeared two days before Valentine’s Day in 2004, and led with the story of a judge in Maywood, Ill., who often told his children that he loved them. One day in 1995, as his 18-year-old daughter was leaving the house, the judge called out to his daughter. “Kristin, remember I love you,” he said.

“I love you too, Dad,” the girl replied. That day, Kristin was killed in a car accident. It was a story that resonated with Jeff, and one he took to heart, always saying “I love you” to his wife and daughters before saying goodbye or hanging up the phone.

“All of us should say ‘I love you’ to the people we care about,” Jeff said. “We should do it because you never know. I got about 1,000 e-mails from readers saying they were going to tell their children they loved them.

“What I like about my job is sometimes I’m just writing about the obvious. By doing that, you can touch a lot of people and tell them things that will change their lives, even if it’s something simple.”

Ash Wednesday

I hope everyone had a blast yesterday at whatever Mardi Gras event you might have attended for today is Ash Wednesday.  You might have let the good times roll too much and are feeling  some pain and discomfort today from too much alcohol, food or lack of sleep but the good news is that you can offer it up as your lenten penance.

OMG, doesn't that sound like something a Catholic school nun would have told you?

For those of you who are not Catholic, today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, a season of fasting and self-denial.  You'll be able to tell who the Catholics are today because we are the ones walking around looking like we might have been playing around in an ashtray and mistakenly put the ashes on our foreheads.  We have ashes pressed on our foreheads in the sign of the cross by a priest at the beginning of Lent to remind us that eventually we will all die and turn into ashes -- ashes to ashes, dust to dust -- and Jesus is our salvation.

Lent is a time of reflection and penance in preparation for Christ's Resurrection on Easter Sunday.  Usually people give up something they really like a lot for Lent but you can also choose to work on something about yourself that needs improvement.  In my case, the list of things that could be improved is endless!

Over this past weekend, I was visiting my son in New York and he was talking about either giving up chocolate for Lent or doing something that would require personal improvement.  I, of course, hadn't thought about Lent at all and I was surprised he was even thinking of Lent.  Or maybe he brought it up to let me think he was doing something for Lent.  Anyway, he said wasn't sure what he was going to do and asked me what I had planned.

I told him that when I was in school I always gave up candy.  The idea of going 40 days without anything sweet always seemed impossible.  But then some relative told me that there was some new Catholic rule and on the Sundays in Lent we were now allowed to do or eat the thing that we had committed to as a Lenten goal and that kindof blew the lid off Lent for me.  Lent didn't seem so dark and punishing when I knew I only had to go from Sunday to Sunday.

Lent also brings back lots of childhood memories.  If you went to Catholic school then you will probably also remember how you thought that the weekly Stations of the Cross would go on forever in a hot church filled with children and teachers, the smell of tuna and egg salad sandwiches in your classroom told you it was Friday since meat was not allowed to be eaten on that day, fasting and saying the rosary for hours on numb knees and "might" boxes to save money for the poor.

I have no idea what my son decided to do for Lent but I know for me it's harder to work on a personal flaw than give something up.  During this year's Lent I will be working on patience.  This year's flaws were a toss up between not cursing and patience and patience won.  If you think that sounds easy then you should try driving in the DC metropolitan area during morning or evening rush hour.  Patience is totally a virtue that is not found in any driver.

But I'm hoping for the best and wishing everyone good luck in whatever they decide to do for Lent!

Vulnerability

Photo by Lee Gant

Four people I know very well are bravely fighting cancer.  Currently, each person has a different kind of cancer and each person is in a different stage of treatment.  Through them, I have become more intimately aware of fighting this horrendous disease and I have learned a tremendous amount about developing resilience from them.  

Two of the four people recommended a book to me, "Anti-Cancer A New Way of Life," by David Servan-Schreiber, MD, PhD.  Servan-Schreiber is a scientist and a doctor who was diagnosed with brain cancer seventeen years ago and is currently in remission.  Before I opened the book, I was grabbed by the following fact printed on the book's cover: "All of us have cancer cells in our bodies.  But not all of us will develop cancer."  It blew me away to think that we are all walking around with cancer cells inside of us that could be waiting for some sort of a trigger.  Talk about refocusing your health priorities!

I am not a cancer patient but I don't need to be diagnosed to restructure my diet or pursue smarter ways of managing stress and achieving a more relaxed approach to life.  Servan-Schreiber's book is empowering.  It is chock full of nutritional and medical information and I have started incorporating small changes in an effort to be preventative.  Not that every meal has to be a series of conscious health choices but knowing that sugar contributes to cancer sometimes helps to make chocolate less appealing to me.  Notice I said sometimes.

The best parts of the book to me are Servan-Schreiber's intimate insights into himself, the power of friendship and the "music of life."  Feelings of helplessness and isolation can delay healing and block our immune systems from becoming stronger; a network of close friends or family can motivate us to fight and survive an illness.  I believe we are here to help each other but there is no getting around those times of crystal clear clarity when you know it's you and you alone left to face a disease or a loss.  That's when trust and mental toughness kick in.

Forced to confront an initial diagnosis of cancer and then a relapse, here is Servan-Schreiber revealing his vulnerability:

"I remember having one of those fleeting incidents, the kind that lead us to sense the frailty of life and the miracle of our connection to our fellow mortals.  It was a tiny thing -- a brief encounter in a parking lot on the eve of my first operation.  From the outside it would seem trifling, but to me it took on a particular significance.

Anna and I had driven to New York, and I'd parked in the hospital lot.  I was standing there, breathing the fresh air during those final few minutes of freedom before admission, tests, and the operating room.  I noticed an elderly woman who was obviously on her way home after a hospital stay.  She was alone, carrying a bag and walking with crutches.  Unaided, she couldn't manage to get into her car.  I stared at her, surprised that they had let her leave in that state.  She noticed me, and I saw in her look that she wasn't expecting anything of me.  Nothing.  We were in New York, after all, where it's everyone for himself.  I felt drawn toward her by a surprising momentum that sprang from my situation as a fellow patient.

This wasn't compassion, it was a gut feeling of fraternity.  I felt close to this woman, made of the same fabric as this person who needed help and wasn't asking for any.  I put her bag in the trunk, backed her car out of its space, then helped her while she settled into the driver's seat.  I shut her door with a smile.  For those few minutes, she hadn't been alone.  I was happy to perform this tiny service.  In fact, she was the one who did me a favor by needing me exactly at that instant. 

It gave me a chance to feel that we were part of the same human condition.  We made that gift to each other.  I can still see her eyes, in which I had awakened a sort of confidence in others, a sense that life could be trusted if it put in her path -- as it just had -- the help she needed when she needed it.  We hardly spoke to each other, but I am sure she shared with me the sense of a precious connection.  That encounter warmed my heart.  We, the vulnerable, could help each other and smile. 

I went into surgery in peace."