About Me….

I’ve had to write quite a few “about me’s” in my day but never did I think I would be writing this for a website I created to document my grief journey after my brother took his life. But here we are so let’s get aquatinted…

I like to tease that I am pretty much the quintessential “soccer mom”. I am married to the most glorious beard you’ve ever seen, we met when we both worked in the beer business, I was a marketing manager for a beer magazine and he was in sales for a local, craft brewery. He’s 6 ft tall, has a deep voice with a southern drawl and of course, that glorious beard I mentioned. He also has the patience of a saint and loves me beyond words.

We built our dream home in suburbia and closed as the world locked down for COVID. Honestly, I was in heaven. Our son was 3 at the time, The Beard didn’t have to travel and we got to settle into our brand new piece of heaven in peace. Time slowed down and I will always look back on that time as my favorite.

Anyway, we have our soon to be 7 year old, almost 2nd grader son, our 3 year old gorgeous hunk of Lab, Thor, who lives up to his name and breed 100 percent, I of course drive a white SUV with 3 rows and we live a pretty much drama free life. I am so fortunate to walk our son to and from school every day, mostly work from home with flexible hours, volunteer at school and a few other non-profits and sit around trying to think of ways to make the world a better place for the next generation. Pretty normal stuff.

I am 46, the oldest of 3 kids - myself, Christopher, 41 and December, 34. We are from Cambridge, WI, right outside of Madison. We had a fairly normal, midwest, middle class upbringing. We had to do chores, get jobs, eat dinner with the family and got to go on family vacations.

I am the typical oldest child, I have always been a mama bear, even before I had my cub, it’s just my nature. I am one of the annoying people that truly loves her life and everything my husband and I have built together. I still think he is the most attractive man I have ever laid eyes on and I continue to fall in love with him more and more every day. Watching him as a father makes melt, it was a role he was made for (he’s also the oldest). Don’t get me wrong, we don’t have a perfect life but we work together perfectly and that always seems to make everything fall into place. I respect him and he respects me, we have a true partnership. It took us both a lot of inner reflection and work on ourselves to get to the point in our lives where we could appreciate the kind of partnership we have. Thankfully in our mid 30s, we had both sewn enough wild oats to figure out we needed to take care of the special ones we had been given in each other.

So there we were, enjoying our normal, boring life when my sister alerted me to our brother’s cryptic behavior the evening of May 29th. I was not immediately concerned as Chris has always had a bit of a flair for drama…must be a middle child thing. But then I got a call from his 15 year old (step) daughter that she was concerned she had not heard from Chris or her mom all day and Chris had just sent her some odd texts that scared her. For the rest of the story on what happened the night of May 29th, continue to “That Day”. Thank you for checking out my website and being a part of my journey. I know my thoughts are scattered and sometimes nonsensical, but I share them as I have them and I have been told that grief is different for everyone and does not follow a pattern.