NURTURE NATURE PROJECT
The Nurture Nature Project is dedicated to my brother John.
Sometimes life treats you well. Sometimes life is harsh. And sometimes life rips your heart out, stomps on it with soccer cleats, and leaves it there bleeding on the ground and you realize you know almost nothing.
When I was 22 my younger half-brother, who was 19 at the time, developed adult onset schizophrenia. I was scared for him and devastated. I thought these kinds of things only happened in movies. I did not want to accept it. My way of pushing off acceptance was to go back to school and study schizophrenia. While my brother was learning to accept his illness, it took me years of more than slightly obsessive research before I could accept. For my brother there are drugs that can help ease the symptoms but there is no cure. Feeling helpless and angry I refocused my efforts/studies on prevention. Unfortunately, while many exciting advances are being made in the field, scientists still do not fully understand the factors and mechanisms leading to the disorganized neuronal development of schizophrenia and how to prevent it from occurring.
At the same time that I saw my brother’s suffering and faced some of the harshest realities of life with and through him, I also was given the ongoing-gift of meeting people with the most beautiful hearts; those who reached out to my mother, those who treat my brother with kindness and respect, those who have helped him through some of his most difficult times, those who also suffer from a brain illness who have become my brother’s friend and are consistently loving and loyal, the grocery check-out person who is kind and patient, and many more. And while I pulled away from many of my friends during the hardest period, there were those friends and outer family members that understood and let me know that they were there for me no matter what. What matters more than this? Nothing. Truly nothing.
While we have few solutions yet for my brother’s illness, I take heart from and am encouraged by the many illnesses and disabilities that CAN be prevented NOW, TODAY. It is an amazing and wonderful thing that we are able to do so much to protect our loved ones from potentially harmful chemical exposures. Why would we possibly not take this opportunity?
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