Rebecca Brown challenges our American discomfort with death by sharing experiences from her work with hospitalized adolescents and young adults who are suffe…“Death has a away of accelerating love and intimacy.”
I did a photostory on Rebecca Brown last year for the first photostory of my life but sadly my computer crashed last year and my photostory was lost. Nevertheless this woman deserves to be recognized for her work. She is the most inspiring person I have ever met.
I sat on her couch in her countryside home and weeped at her words. She brought me to tears and I had to stop recording audio because of my consistent blubbering. They were not tears of sadness but tears of pure unadulterated admiration.The way she spoke on that stage was the same way she spoke to me on her couch. She didn’t put on a facade- she really speaks and thinks that way everyday of her life!
She took me through her woods admiring each branch,
“Ill walk by two young trees one completely consumed by caterpillars and diseased the other untouched.”
She took me to her bench where she goes to think about life and death and her friends that have passed, she introduced me to her dog Charlie. She took me through her home and let me look at the special place she keeps her mementos from all of her friends that have passed.She showed me her framed photo of Martin Luther Kind Jr. I watched her interact with Streetlight volunteers and the respect they had for her was unimaginable. I went to a Streetlight camp fire and watched as all of the Streetlight volunteers drank Rebecca’s famous cider and told stories about their friends who have passed.
I went to April’s (the girl featured in the video) birthday party. April ordered a cosmopolitan. I sat along a huge table with April in front of me and Rebecca on one side of me and my sister on the other.
To be able to document her amazing and wonderful story and see life through someone’s eyes as wise and passionate as hers even for just a couple of days- that is beauty of photojournalism.
finally getting around to watching this.
yowza.
someone i knew died recently. this person had lost their identity to their illness, unfortunately. their illness was of the mental kind. i wonder where her struggles would fall in the discussion of death that Brown engages in.
anyhow, i am glad i watched this. very inspirational, touching and i’m glad i watched it now, as death has been on my mind lately.
