has taught us to reach deep within to respond to challenges, and we are blessed to teach others how to convert adversities into opportunities.” –Barbara Warren
I attended a memorial tribute for my friend Barbara this evening. It was good. It was difficult. It was comforting. There were at least 500 people in this huge banquet room at a local San Diego hotel. There was so much love in the room. And despite the grief that I know we have, there was not this heaviness, or sadness necessarily, but rather simply the peace and beauty and presence of Barbara. I wept to see her smiling face once again, even if only on two enormous screens at the front of the room.
Her daughter read something she found in Barbara’s notes which I have to share as I think it will give those of you who were not fortunate enough/blessed to know or cross paths with Barbara an idea of this wonderful woman who was my friend, my mentor, my loving mother:
Barbara wrote: I spend my life mending people and when I see a heart that is broken, I ask God for the words. (Barbara was a psychologist.)
Another person, her adopted brother, Larry Pustinger, said she was a ‘magic mirror’ reflecting back to everyone she met the best that was in them.
There are people in your life who, when they leave, you realize you don’t know how to exist in a world where they don’t. Eventually, we find a way.
I miss her terribly.
Namaste Barbara.
