The Rhythm of Grief

Chapter 1

The Beginning

Me, Him, Us and How Grief Began

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I hold it true, whate’er befall;

I feel it, when I sorrow most;

‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.

–Alfred Lord Tennyson

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George and I enjoyed sitting on our back porch swing most mornings. After twenty-three years of marriage, we still struggled to find the perfect rhythm. I would swing too slowly; he, too fast. But each day, we found a pace that suited us both.

We liked our coffee with so much sugar and cream that it barely resembled coffee at all. Teasing each other about it, we’d smile and take another sip. Sometimes we talked quietly or just listened to the sounds of the day waking up. There was no urgency.

We had routines like that, small, steady rituals that bound our lives together. Morning coffee. Afternoon cocktails. Quiet glances and grins that said more than words ever could. We were a team, practiced and comfortable in the shared language of a long marriage.

He called me Honey Bunny. I called him the same.

We had built a life that felt solid. It was shaped by an incredible amount of laughter, hard work, shared responsibility, and a deep, abiding respect for one another. It wasn’t perfect—but it was ours, and it was good.

I didn’t know then how much those ordinary moments would come to matter.

I didn’t realize how soon I would count time by breaths, heartbeats, or tensecond intervals. That I would search for him in quiet rooms and still talk to him long after his body was gone.

But this story does not begin with his death.

It begins with our life.

The life and love story I shared with George Fredrick Braun was anything but conventional.

We met later in our lives; not that we were old, but we were both wary following difficult first marriages. Our backgrounds and childhoods could not have been much more different.

Me

I was born in New Jersey, the fourth of five children in the early 1960s. As a family, we moved almost every seven years. No, I was not an Army brat; our family just moved around a lot.

My father worked outside the home, and for most of my childhood, my mother was a housewife–until the family finances collapsed around 1976.

I had a 1960s version of a traditional childhood: a mother, father, one brother, three sisters, and a family dog. It was well known that Danny, our German shorthaired pointer, belonged to Dad.

He fiercely protected, trained, and fed Danny. As a child, I sometimes wished I were Danny.

Dad’s version of affection toward his children was a rough pat on the head and the affectionate name “Meathead” was used for all six of us (five kids and the dog).

Corporal punishment was, for the most part, phased out after the first two children, Jim and Cindy. It was replaced with what we kids referred to as “the death stare” and accompanied by the mumbled threat, “You’ll be picking shoe leather out of your ass for the next week.”

He muttered this whenever we were doing something that bothered him, which happened to be quite often. It took time, but I came to understand that Dad loved us the only way he knew how.

Mom was our safe spot; she made us feel smart and loved. She deflected our hurt feelings from Dad’s stares and threats with humor and kind, uplifting words. We cherished spending time with her–playing games, telling jokes, and listening to her laugh.

When I think of my childhood, this is my memory lane: listening to the classic music of Three Dog Night and the Beatles. On television, we watched The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Flintstones. In the neighborhood, we caught lightning bugs, rode bicycles with banana seats, and played outside until we heard the family dinner bell.

We had a roof over our heads, but money was scarce, and our extended family sent us boxes of hand-me-down clothes each summer.

All of the children left home as soon as we could (except for Lori, the youngest–she stayed the longest).

It was late in my sophomore year of high school, and I was on track to graduate a year early. Jim, my big brother, and my older sisters, Cindy and Frances Ann, had already flown the coop. My departure came just as the

“seven-year itch” was knocking at my parents’ door again. It was spring 1980 when they decided to move across the state, and I simply refused to go. I was sixteen.

Had I moved with Mom, Dad, and Lori, none of my night-school classes would have been completed. I would have had to attend my senior year of high school in person and at a brand-new school.

Not long after I went out on my own, I made one of those decisions that altered the trajectory of my life, not in a good way. I married a man significantly older than me who had also been my high school algebra teacher.

By 1992 the marriage was failing and we were living about a hundred miles away from most of my family.

Late one afternoon, my sister Fran called to let me know that our mother was seriously ill. She was later diagnosed with lung and kidney cancer… two primary cancers, not metastatic.

Shortly after the news, I moved to live in the same town as my parents.

When my first husband refused to relocate with me, I began my divorce proceedings.

A little over a year later, my mother was holding her own through her cancer treatment. My divorce was final and I had met and married the man who intentionally became the love of my life.

I went from some of the lowest of low times to being absolutely high on life.

George Fredrick Braun–Childhood

George was born in 1951. His beginning was traumatic and chaotic. His fourteen-year-old uncle saved him from drowning in toilet water while his mother was hysterically screaming. George was actually born in the toilet of an old second-story apartment in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

George’s earliest memories were painful. He remembered being placed in an orphanage and told it was because his mother had been in a terrible automobile accident. George recalled looking out of the window at the orphanage driveway, waiting and hoping for his mother’s return.

He remembered receiving letters from his mother that the nuns would read to him. George treasured the letters and hid them under his bed mattress. At one point, a hurricane forced the orphanage to evacuate and the letters were lost. George remembered the frantic and uncontrollable crying that followed.

His mother eventually picked him up and took him to Miami. He spent his life from age three through high school in South Miami Beach, Florida. George never learned who his father was.

Before he was old enough for school, he and his mother moved frequently from place to place, usually in the middle of the night, to avoid confrontations with landlords when rent money was scarce.

Even with working two jobs, she struggled. They lived in boarding houses and George often went hungry. He learned to forage for recently discarded food in the garbage cans of nearby restaurants. George would search through furniture cushions for coins and try to keep a low profile.

Before leaving for work, his mother would call the boarding house office and leave the phone off the hook so George could speak into the receiver if he became frightened while she was gone.

Because of this instability, George had very few keepsakes or pictures from his childhood.

Still, he did recall a few fun memories: attending Our Lady of the Hills summer camp for boys in North Carolina and visiting the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City.

***

Excerpt from Lexi’s (George’s oldest daughter) memorial words at George’s Celebration of Life:

“You see, my grandma did the best she could, but my dad didn’t grow up in a family where he knew he was loved, that he was welcome, that he was safe, much less having fun. So he spent his entire life making sure everyone around him knew that they were important, they were loved, they were safe, and that they had fun.”

***

The seed for George becoming a firefighter was planted during those formative years in South Miami.

One day, he saw a fire engine screaming down the road on the way to a fire call, with the firefighters hanging off the tailboard pulling on their bunker gear.

George was playing outside, and as the engine drew closer and slowed for a turn, a fire helmet fell off the truck and rolled to the side of the street. He ran over to the helmet, scooped it up, and immediately went home to hide it.

That helmet remains hanging in my home today.

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Together

December 6, 1993, I met George Braun at a celebration for the municipal fire department’s combat-challenge team, where my sister Cindy was being honored.

Our initial meeting, to downplay it, was electric. Later the following week, I met his two children (Lexi and Bailey) and subsequently fell in love with all three of them.

We purchased a house in July 1994 and were married in October 1994, just ten months after meeting.

Then, in 2002, with support from my family, I changed my nearly sixteenyear career in education and teaching to one in firefighting.

After ten years of trying to create a child together, George and I adopted our little girl, Emma Jean, in 2005. We could not have been happier.

As our family grew, as we developed our individual careers, and as the years passed, we navigated life’s many trials and triumphs together. We were happy. Truly happy.

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George’s Passion and Professional Life

Honey Bunny was our nickname for each other from about the third week we started dating.

It was something we decided on so that we wouldn’t accidentally slip and call each other by an ex-spouse’s name. It was our private little joke.

The more I got to know George, the more he amazed me. I admired his professional drive, determination, humor, deep love, compassion, and empathy. Shortly after we met, he was promoted to lieutenant within the fire department.

Many career firefighters, due to the typical type “A” personality and the shift schedule, have a second job. In that respect, George was no different. His second career was teaching fire suppression, Hazardous Materials, and fire leadership classes across the state of Florida.

Firefighters throughout the country have, for decades, brandished the remnants of working fires: melted shields and the smell of smoke-stained bunker gear as badges of honor. The dirtier the gear, the tougher and more accomplished the firefighter was thought to be.

Exposure to smoke and soot was accepted as part of the job, never imagining the long-term health consequences that would later be linked to cancer and other life-altering illnesses.

George was ahead of his time. From the moment he joined the fire service in 1980, he began researching new, improved, and safer methods of firefighting. It was his innate driving force to find more accurate or more efficient ways to do any task.

Long before the dangers of smoke and soot were widely acknowledged, George understood that protecting firefighters meant protecting their future. He was teased by his co-workers because he kept his helmet shiny and his bunker gear free of soot and smoke remnants. Nonetheless, he continued to read the research and encouraged his co-workers and firefighters statewide to pay attention and do the same.

In 2007, George retired from firefighting as a lieutenant with 27 years of service to the community.

Although he decided to retire from the department, he did not “feel done” with the fire service. George continued teaching professional firefighting classes and began applying to other departments at a higher rank that would authorize him to help make changes within the fire service.

It took five years, but he found his dream job. He applied to and was hired by Reedy Creek Improvement District (Reedy Creek). Reedy Creek serves Disney World and the immediate surrounding properties providing firefighting, emergency medical, and fire prevention services.

His new job was to build a training program from the ground up. Reedy Creek gave him the authority and budget to fulfill this mission, and he did. He was proud of his work, and I remain proud of him and all he accomplished.

***

Excerpt from Cindy’s (my big sister) memorial words at George’s Celebration of Life:

“George was kind, caring, loving, creative, and imaginative; no wonder he loved Disney so much. Everything he did, he tried to make it better, more fun, and more interesting.”

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Our Life During His Dream Job

His dream job came with a steep price: travel away from home. Each Monday George drove from Gainesville to Orlando and returned home on the weekends.

His promise to me was that this would be a temporary situation. In a few years, he would “really retire,” and we would be able to spend more time together doing what we loved… thinking up house projects, completing them together, and teasing our youngest as she helped.

By then, George’s older children, Lexi and Bailey, were busy building their own lives, so the three of us, George, Emma Jean and I, were inseparable from Friday night until Monday morning, when George had to drive back to Orlando.

Even with the distance, we stayed connected. We spoke on the phone every night. We wrote each other postcards. And when the weekends arrived, we guarded our time together with a vengeance.

The Beginning of the End…The Diagnosis

On April 14, 2016, George came home early from Orlando, explaining that Reedy Creek Health Services sent him home after his annual physical because he was in “A-Fib.” Atrial Fibrillation is a disorganized heart rhythm that can cause one to feel tired with little to no exertion.

George came straight to my fire station, where I was working as a fire lieutenant and a paramedic. I performed a 12-lead electrocardiogram on him. Sure enough, not only was he in A-Fib, he was also simultaneously in Atrial Flutter, another type of disorganized heart rhythm.

He spent the night in the hospital emergency department.

In May 2016, while shaving, George felt a lump on the left side of his neck. Two weeks later, the lump was still there.

After a round of antibiotics, an ultrasound, and a CT scan, he had a biopsy. The diagnosis was delivered July 3, 2016. George had squamous cell carcinoma. The point of origin was never found.

After the physician explained the diagnosis, we walked to the car hand-inhand.

We sat in our seats, buckled up–literally and figuratively–and began the heartbreaking conversation about how we were going to tell our children that our lives had just forever changed.

Nothing would ever be the same.

Not ever again.