Family, Death, etc.

I subscribe to Sitemeter.com, which sends you email periodically to tell you how many people have visited your blog. If I go to their page, I can click on 'details', then any visitor, to see where they're located and how they got there.
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One person searched on Starfish1951, which is my long-time Yahoo name, as well as my eBay name. Now I thought that was odd. I wonder why...
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Sometimes I wonder if one of my long-lost family members, my oldest brother Art, for instance, has checked out my blog...not that this one is likely to be that; if for any reason he wanted to do that, he'd probably search on my name. I haven't heard from him in ages. I think he decided when I told him I was looking into both paganism and herbalism that I was a flake.
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No offense, Art, but this is a guy who, if I remember correctly, spent $4,000 on a giant dragon for his living room. Just how does one define flake?
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Hell, you are one fantastic photographer.
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My brother Jim, who is a sweetheart and a teddy bear, told him about my primary cancer diagnosis, over two years ago, and about the metastases last spring. I haven't heard from him. Art has always tried to separate himself from his roots in poverty. I have never cared enough about money to bother.
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My brother Mike, on the other hand, probably cares, but he's scared to death of death. Why? I'm not thrilled with the idea--at least not yet--but that's mostly because it's so damn permanent. I guess I'm not supposed to believe that, since a quasi-dogma of paganism is a belief in reincarnation. I certainly believe in a continuation of energy, but usually I think of it in Whitman's terms:
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I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
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You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.
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Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.
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This weekend, John and I found some people who stopped in a graveyard in East Haddam, below one of the myriad Nathan Hale schoolhouses that seem to populate Connecticut. John took some pictures of the gravestones. The pictures in the post following this one are three of the most interesting, the first being of a gravestone with a finger pointing up, to heaven I presume. When I first saw it, I thought that Llewellyn's wife was flipping me the bird. The second is of Joel, "a black man" with no last name, who earned his freedom at age 26 by his "industry, fidelity, and faithfulness", and lived for "14 years in the full injoyment of the priviledges of a free man" (sic). The last photo is of a gravestone sacred to the memory of one Amasa Brainard, who was about to enter church one fine Sunday in 1798, when he was brained by the clapper of the church bell, "in the 20th year of his age". There was no OSHA in those days.

I don't suppose they're suffering now.