Richard W. Brown

Stream of Consciousness!

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

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Jan, I'm Going to Make It!

Jan, I’m Going to Make It!

Celebrate JanEvery day, I remind myself that “no matter how hard it is, or how hard it gets, I will make it.”

It is not so much that I have real fears of not making it, but grief has left me without Jan, who believed in me.

Hours can go by when I have no contact with anyone. In those dark moments, doubts arise faster than rising seas.

My internal monologue with Jan asks her for words of wisdom to remind me that our love will never die; it will only grow stronger every day.

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Jan's Smile is Still With Me!

Jan’s Smile is Still With Me!

Jan LilienJan and I always believed that smiling is essential, even in the darkest moments.

I have seen thousands of Jan’s smiles, but I remember one more than others.

Six months before her lymphoma diagnosis, I was ending my full-time work career.

I always introduced Jan and thanked her for her love and support.

If you are honoring me, I only deserve it because of the love and support of my wife, Jan!

The photo is now my Zoom background. Jan was smiling at me as I smiled at her.

Love never dies; it only grows stronger every day!

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Jan Lilien

Jan Lilien Bookmarks

Jan Lilien BookmarkToday, I picked up the Jan Lilien Bookmarks from TC Graphics. They were designed with love by my sister-in-law Linda Brown.

Do I love them? Yes, very much. Click here for a larger image.

Each of the bookmarks looks great feels solid like a bookmark should, and when I look at them, I weep.

These will be distributed to those who attend in person or virtually Celebrate Jan Day.

They will also be given out at HPC’s Jan Lilien Education Fund plans a series of events and programs to address sustainability and environmental awareness.

Please register today to attend in-person or virtually on April 24th

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Green Donuts

Green Donuts for Nick

Celebrate Jan“Grandpa, when you pick me up next Wednesday, make you stop by the farm and get green donuts,” said my grandchild as I picked her up from school.

Of course, I said yes. However, I never was able to get the donuts. Within forty-eight hours, our world shut down due to COVID.

We all expected the shutdown would be a few weeks, not two years. Almost one million lives have been lost.

I no longer do school pickups.

At the time, I never thought Jan would not be with me today. Our love will never die, but green donuts have grown stale.

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Reading with the Soul Sisters

Reading with the Soul Sisters

Celebrate JanYesterday, I walked in Hanson Park as I often do. Because of the mild weather, I decided to read my current book, The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow.

Of the two benches honoring Jan Lilien, I had nicknamed the book and coffee bench when we first walked thru the park. The plaque now identifies it as the Soul Sisters bench.

I do not drink coffee, but I have always respected what her soul sisters did to support Jan during her battle with lymphoma.

Reading with soul sisters was like reading with Jan, as she is always with me.

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Jan and Nick

March Issue of Sharing Jan’s Love Newsletter

Celebrate JanSharing Jan’s Love Newsletter March Issue is Online!

This issue includes articles on:

I have reviews of recent books I have read:

  1. The Secrets We Left Behind,
  2. Scarlet Carnation,
  3. Home and
  4. What’s Mine and Yours.

Please share and subscribe!

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Brunch Group

Busy 23-hour Day

Take Me OutIn March, daylight savings time gives us a 23-hour day. Usually, a short Sunday can get consumed with household chores.

This year, I had brunch in the morning with seven widows who have become friends and critical parts of my support group.

In the evening, I went to see Take Me Out on Broadway. On the surface, it is about baseball, but it is about long-term prejudices and the meaning of traditions, loyalty, and the price of victory.

Two years after the COVID lockdowns, it was good to reengage in the world.

Jan was with me as she always is.

Celebrate Jan

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The Jan Lilien Education Fund!

Jan, I'm Going to Make It!
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Jan's Smile is Still With Me!
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Jan Lilien
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Green Donuts
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Reading with the Soul Sisters
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Jan and Nick
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Brunch Group
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Study for Obedience

Read: August 2023

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Study for Obedience

by Sarah Bernstein

Today I began reading “Study for Obedience” by Sarah Bernstein. With a robust and lyrical voice, Bernstein thoughtfully examines themes of complicity, power, displacement, and inheritance. “Study for Obedience” is a finely-tuned and unsettling novel that establishes Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

A woman moves to her forebears’ remote northern home to be a housekeeper for her brother, whose wife left him. After arriving, strange events occur bovine hysteria, a ewe’s death, a dog’s phantom pregnancy, and potato blight. Suspicion towards newcomers seems directed at her, and she feels threatened. The hostility grows, and she fears what might happen.


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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Do You Remember Being Born?: A Novel

Read: September 2023

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Do You Remember Being Born?

by Sean Michaels

I started reading “Do You Remember Being Born?” by Sean Michaels, a writer who won the Scotiabank Giller Prize. The novel is about an aging poet named Marian Ffarmer, a legend in the world of poetry. However, despite her success, she struggles with financial issues and her son’s inability to buy a house. Marian has sacrificed her personal relationships and happiness to pursue her career but questions whether it is worth it.

One day, she receives an invitation from a Tech Company to travel to California and work with their poetry AI, Charlotte. The company wants her to co-author a poem with their bot in a historic partnership, which clashes with Marian’s beliefs about the individual pursuit of art. However, she decides to take this opportunity, even though it makes her feel like a sell-out and a skeptic. The encounter in California changes her life, work, and understanding of kinship.

The book explores the nature of language, art, labor, capital, family, and community. It’s a response to some of the most disquieting questions of our time. The author, Sean Michaels, is a winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and his book is a love letter to and interrogation of the creative legacy. It’s a joyful recognition that belonging to one’s art must mean belonging to the world to survive meaningfully.


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.



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Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy

Read: November 2022

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Civil War by Other Means

by Jeremi Suri

Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri is the perfect book to help us understand our failures at creating a multi-racial democracy in the nineteenth century and how this has weakened and divided our nation. Jeremi Suri chronicles the events after the civil war, from Lincoln’s assassination to Garfield’s, and how they were a continuation of the war by other means.

I purchased a signed copy and watched a video presentation by Dr. Suri due to my membership at One Day University. Civil War by Other Means is a vivid and unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. 

I highly recommend Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy by Jeremi Suri.

In addition, the documentary, on Apple TV+, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power is a companion piece that illustrates the continued failure to create a multi-racial democracy. Jeremi Suri makes a convincing case that the eternal struggle for democracy continues in our time.

The Goodreads summary provides an overview,

In 1865, the Confederacy was comprehensively defeated, its economy shattered, its leaders in exile or in jail. Yet in the years that followed, Lincoln’s vision of a genuinely united country never took root. Apart from a few brief months, when the presence of the Union army in the South proved liberating for newly freed Black Americans, the military victory was squandered. Old white supremacist efforts returned, more ferocious than before.

In Civil War by Other Means, Jeremi Suri shows how resistance to a more equal Union began immediately. From the first postwar riots to the return of Confederate exiles, to the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, to the highly contested and consequential election of 1876, Suri explores the conflicts and questions Americans wrestled with as competing visions of democracy, race, and freedom came to a vicious breaking point.

What emerges is a vivid and, at times, unsettling portrait of a country striving to rebuild itself but unable to compromise on or adhere to the most basic democratic tenets. What should have been a moment of national renewal was ultimately wasted, with reverberations still felt today. The recent shocks to American democracy are rooted in this forgotten, urgent history.


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.



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The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War

Read: March 2019

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The Field of Blood

by Joanne B. Freeman

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War by Joanne B. Freeman, Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, is a must-read in our hyper-partisan times. The partisanship and divisiveness of the period before the Civil War have many parallels to our time, and the difference is the violence of the Civil War era. Professor Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the U.S. Congress.

She can do this by first source materials from Benjamin Brown French. He was never elected to office but was an acquaintance of twelve consecutive presidents, from Andrew Jackson to Ulysses S. Grant. In addition, he maintained a diary for forty years that highlighted the violence and his and the nation’s political transformation.

During much of this period, he was the Clerk in the House.  His diary documents the violence that did not get covered by the press. Legislative sessions included mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, members of Congress drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery.

The Field of Blood is one of four books I purchased after my first One Day University class.

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Tell Me Everything: A Novel

Read: January 2025

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Tell Me Everything: A Novel

by Elizabeth Strout

Today, I dived into “Tell Me Everything: A Novel” by Elizabeth Strout, and I’m already captivated. This book made it onto NPR’s best books list for 2024 and caught the eye of Oprah’s Book Club—no small feat! Strout writes with such empathy and emotional depth that it reflects her incredible talent. Lucy beautifully captures this sentiment by stating, “Love comes in many different forms, but it is always love.”

With her profound understanding of the human condition and silences that convey deep emotions, Elizabeth Strout returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, reuniting with her beloved characters—Lucy Barton, Olive Kitteridge, Bob Burgess, and others—as they confront a shocking crime, navigate love while choosing to remain apart, and ponder the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?”

It’s autumn in Maine, and the town lawyer, Bob Burgess, finds himself entangled in a murder investigation, defending a lonely, isolated man accused of killing his mother. He has also developed a deep and abiding friendship with the acclaimed writer Lucy Barton, who lives nearby in a house by the sea with her ex-husband, William.

Lucy and Bob take walks and discuss their lives, fears, regrets, and what could have been. Meanwhile, Lucy is finally introduced to the iconic Olive Kitteridge, who now resides in a retirement community on the outskirts of town. They spend afternoons in Olive’s apartment, sharing stories about people they have known—what Olive calls “unrecorded lives,” which reanimate their experiences and imbue their lives with meaning.



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The Searcher: A Novel

Read: March 2024

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The Searcher: A Novel

by Tana French

Today, I started reading Tana French‘s The Searcher: A Novel. Last week, I read The Hunter by the same author. I should have read The Searcher first, as it is the prequel to The Hunter, but reading in reverse order helped my enjoyment. Despite knowing some of the suspenseful twists and turns the story would take, I found it a page-turner.

The story follows Cal Hooper, a retired Chicago police officer who seeks a fresh start in a tranquil Irish village. However, when a local boy approaches him to investigate his missing brother, Cal discovers that the town has its share of dark secrets. The book raises thought-provoking questions about distinguishing right from wrong in a complicated world and what we risk when making that decision.

Tana French is a highly acclaimed crime novelist who skillfully creates a captivating and suspenseful atmosphere throughout the book.

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