Richard W. shared a stream on February 21, 2023

The Rent is Due Everyday!

Estimated reading time: 1 minute, 35 seconds

Jan and Richard

Jan is Holding an Award for her Work!

“You have been very generous, Mr. Brown, but I am calling today to see if you can help with a matching grant.”

The woman’s voice sounded sincere, and her request was pulling at my heartstrings.

Since the love of my life died, my charitable contributions have increased dramatically.

I responded. “I am not generous; I am trying to pay the rent I owe for living in a broken world. How would my donation be used?

She explained the initiative, how much they needed to implement it, and the benefits of the matching donation.

“That sounds good, but give me a day or two to think about how I might be able to help.”

It was not the response she wanted or that I would typically have given.

I have given more in the last three years than we contributed over a decade.

For the first time since 1974, I am filing my federal income taxes as a single person. All of my itemized deductions are for charitable donations.

Of course, I also volunteer and encourage non-profit leaders with new ideas.

I will not stop paying my rent every day, but my goal for 2023 is to focus on fewer charities so I can have a greater impact.

It is one of the crucial lessons that Jan taught me.

Each gift I make is one I know she would support.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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Charity for All

Charity for All

One of the end-of-year tasks that Jan and I would do together would be to make our final charitable contributions.

Although most donations are made monthly, there is always a list at the end of the year.

Two years ago, Jan was in the emergency room, and I had to do them with her consultation.

It was a frantic effort as the clock ticked rapidly toward midnight, but we completed the task.

Richard W. Brown December 30, 2021

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My random thoughts on love, grief, life and all things considered.

My Big Climb to Conquer Cancer on April 25, 2026
Please join me in making a difference! No matter the amount, your contribution can have a meaningful impact. As I do every year, I will match every donation made. Thank you! […]
50th Wedding Anniversary
All we ever needed was love—true love! It's the most powerful force in the world—a force that can heal, uplift, and give us our only hope for salvation. […]
The Infamous Walker Limps Home
My Apple Fitness app shows that I’ve averaged four miles daily over an unpredictable month, which might be my new normal. As long as I can walk every day, my streak will continue. Today marked 1,555 days and counting. […]
Living and Grieving
I am believed and seen. I believe in others and recognize their true selves. Though I may reside in my home, I live, grieve, and thrive within my community. […]
The Triad of Love
I focus on being good, rather than feeling good, and living a life my wife would be proud of, rather than letting sorrow overshadow my remaining days. […]

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Western Lane: A Novel

Read: March 2023

Western Lane: A Novel

by Chetna Maroo

Western Lane: A Novel by Chetna Maroo is a taut, enthralling first novel about grief, sisterhood, and a young athlete’s struggle to transcend herself. Western Lane is about three sisters who have lost their mother. Their father is encouraged to provide structure in raising his daughters. Gopi, the narrator, is a squash player, and her father imposes a brutal training regimen. I highly recommend this novel!

The following passage explains the importance of squash to Gopi and how she views the world.

In the court, your mind is not only on the shot you’re about to play and the shot with which your opponent might reply, but on the shots that will follow two, three, four moves ahead. You’re watching your opponent’s position and the game he or she is playing, making calculations. This is how you choose which way to go. Though your mind is following several paths at once, it’s not a splitting but expansion forwards and backward in time, and it happens so quickly that it feels like instinct. Sometimes, you don’t even know you are thinking.

In the first few pages, I wondered what I would have done if I had been a single parent when my sons were young. I do not believe I would have imposed on my sons what Gopi’s father did to her. However, I have found reading and art to be powerful tools to help me cope with grief. I have focused on rituals, structure, and purpose.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot, and its echo.

But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.

An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we know ourselves and each other.

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.

Anxious People

Read: June 2022

Anxious People

by Fredrik Backman

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman, a poignant comedy about a crime that never occurred. A would-be bank robber disappears into thin air, and eight highly anxious strangers find they have more in common than they ever imagined. Anxious People is a novel that Jan and I would have both enjoyed reading. It jumped off the e-book shelf while looking for a new book to read.

Although Anxious People is a humorous comedy, it is really about the enduring power of friendship, forgiveness and hope, which are the key to our survival as individuals, couples and communities. It is the core of what made the love that Jan and I shared special and unique, but it is also what I gain from my participation in my various grief groups as well as Friday night Shabbat services.

I highly recommend this book.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview.

Viewing an apartment usually doesn’t turn into a life-or-death situation. Still, this particular open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes everyone in the apartment hostage. As the pressure mounts, the eight strangers slowly open up to one another and reveal long-hidden truths.

First is Zara, a wealthy bank director who has been too busy to care about anyone else until tragedy changed her life. Now, she’s obsessed with visiting open houses to see how ordinary people live—perhaps, setting an old wrong to the right. Then there’s Roger and Anna-Lena, an Ikea-addicted retired couple who are on a never-ending hunt for fixer-uppers to hide the fact that they don’t know how to fix their failing marriage. Julia and Ro are a young lesbian couple and soon-to-be parents who are nervous about their chances for a successful life together since they can’t agree on anything. And there’s Estelle, an eighty-year-old woman who has lived long enough to be unimpressed by a masked bank robber waving a gun. And despite the story she tells them all, Estelle hasn’t come to the apartment to view it for her daughter, and her husband isn’t outside parking the car.

As police surround the premises and television channels broadcast the hostage situation live, the tension mounts, and even deeper secrets are slowly revealed. Before long, the robber must decide which is the terrifying prospect: going out to face the police or staying in the apartment with this group of impossible people.

Rich with Fredrik Backman’s “pitch-perfect dialogue and an unparalleled understanding of human nature” (Shelf Awareness), Anxious People’s whimsical plot serves up unforgettable insights into the human condition and a gentle reminder to be compassionate to all the anxious people we encounter every day.

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Flight: A Novel

Read: January 2023

Flight: A Novel

by Lynn Steger Strong

Flight: A Novel by Lynn Steger Strong is a novel about family, ambition, precarity, art, and desire, forming a decisive next step from a brilliant chronicler of our time. The book has been on my to-read list for a few months. A New Yorker Best Books of 2022, it seemed like a good start on my 2023 Goodreads Reading challenge. Flight is the first book I read in 2023. Last year I read seventy-four books, and each helped me with my grief journey.

I recommend this novel as it is a page-turner highlighting the difficulty families experience after a loss. As a culture, we are experiencing declining social connections, including within families. Flight is an excellent effort to define the crisis.

Although several possible resolutions to the conflict became clear by the middle of the novel, Ms. Strong told the story so that until the end, it was unclear how or if it would be resolved. In addition, enough unresolved issues remained so that.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

It’s December twenty-second and siblings Henry, Kate, and Martin have converged with their spouses on Henry’s house in upstate New York. This is the first Christmas the siblings are without their mother, the first not at their mother’s Florida house. Over the course of the next three days, old resentments and instabilities arise as the siblings, with a gaggle of children afoot, attempt to perform familiar rituals, while also trying to decide what to do with their mother’s house, their sole inheritance. As tensions rise, the whole group is forced to come together unexpectedly when a local mother and daughter need help.

With the urgency and artfulness that cemented her previous novel Want as “a defining novel of our age” (Vulture), Strong once again turns her attention to the structural and systemic failings that are haunting Americans, but also to the ways in which family, friends, and strangers can support each other through the gaps

The Jan Lilien Education Fund sponsors ongoing sustainability and environmental awareness programs. Gifts made this month; I will match dollar-for-dollar. All donations are tax-deductible.

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I receive a commission when you buy a book or product using a link on this page. Thank you for supporting Sharing Jan’s Love blog.