Pine Melody

 

Swerving to avoid a deer on a dark Wisconsin highway in early summer, 22-year-old Gabe lost control of the car. His 29-year-old brother Jonah, singing along as Gabe drove, absorbed the full impact with an oncoming pick-up truck driven by the Chief of First Nation traveling in the opposite lane. The crash left Jonah with severe traumatic brain injury, Gabe with a broken femur, and soil samples, meticulously gathered for Jonah’s graduate research project on agroforestry, strewn across the highway.

As general counsel for Jefferson Hospitals in Philadelphia, I was competent to interact with my sons’ care teams, but lost my guise of professionalism when neither my legal expertise, search for a medical miracle nor tenacious love was able to bring benefit to Jonah. He died in a hospice after three months in neuro-intensive care units. I was left to find a way to carry on for the sake of Jonah’s brothers, while managing my own grief and helplessness.

Immersing myself in Jonah’s journals and memories of his extraordinary spirit-filled life, guideposts emerged for me–yoga, meditation, sailing and prayer. With Jonah as my guide through the bardo of grief, I navigated pathways between beauty and terror. Pine Melody is a step along the way on my continuing grief  journey.

Pine Melody is available through Amazon, or your local bookstore can order it through Ingram Spark. Proceeds benefit the Jonah Meadows Adels Memorial Scholarship at the Yale School of the Environment. 

 

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