howeird | Horrible news (Reply)

This morning I received this email message:

Friends,

Today is a very hard and sad day. My brother is in ICU at Stanford Hospital with no chance of survival. He is braindead. I have to let him go soon but maybe not until tomorrow as they are preparing him for organ donation. He fell in a store and hit his head. However, the exact cause of the tremendous amount of bleeding in the brain is not known. He never woke up.

Steve didn't want to be on life support and he didn't want a service. I will arrange for cremation.

There's not much more to say.

Thanks for being my friends.

Love, Janice

It's a huge shock, and I'm very sad. Steve has always been a vibrant, alive person, with a smile for everyone he met. Janice and I met through ba.singles about 15 years ago, and I met Steve very soon after that, since you had to pass his condo to get to hers, and he was part of an annual Fourth of July at Shoreline Amphitheater get-together Janice organized. Steve and I are in the same line of work, and a couple of times we submitted each other's resumes. I'm not sure how old Steve is, but I'm guessing less than 50. Janice is in her early 60's.

To make this an even bigger shock, Janice and Steve lost their parents a couple of years ago to a horrible head-on collision as their mom and dad were returning home to the southwest from a visit to their children. Steve is Janice's only sibling.

Janice has been my bicycling partner for many years, going out on Sundays to Shoreline Park, riding the 5 miles over the levees to Palo Alto and Ming's, where we would have dim sum lunch before riding back - 10-mile round trip. We were supposed to have our first ride of the summer this Sunday.