Back in 1999 I was asked to write an editorial for the American Journal of Psychiatry about a group of articles in the journal on Acute Stress Disorder (ASD). Prior versions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) had a PTSD, acute (less than one month) and chronic types. The DSM-IV dropped the acute type and added AS, which was like actue PTSD but with some dissociative symptoms (feeling out of your body, feeling like you are in a dream, and so on). The editorial introduced the concept of trauma-related disorders, and proposed taking posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) our of the category of the anxiety disorders and creating a new category of disorders related to trauma, that would include acute and chronic PTSD, with and without a dissociative subtype.

I further elaborated this idea in my book Does Stress Damage the Brain : Understanding Trauma-related Disorders from a Mind-Body Perspective (WW Norton, 2002) where on page 36 I introduce the term “Trauma Spectrum Disorders (TSD),” based on the concept that there are a group of disorders linked to trauma that have a great deal of overalp in terms of symptomatology, as well as in brain findings from imaging studies. These disorders include acute and chronic PTSD, Dissociative Identity Disorders (DID), borderline personality disorder (BPD), conversion disorder, traumatic grief (currently a “research” diagnosis in DSM-IV), and the adjustment disorders. I further pointed out that there is a subtype of depression that is linked to early childhood abuse, and that other disorders had a strong connection with trauma, including somatization disorders, alcohol and substance abuse, and eating disorders. Since then I have given a number of lectures on the imaging findings from our group and others (smaller hippocampal volume, depressed frontal lobe function) that characterize these disorders and suggest a common link, and we published a book chapter and an article with Trauma Spectrum Disorders as the title in 2006.

Trauma Spectrum Disorders

Others have had similar ideas. In 2002 Moreau and Zisook also wrote about a Posttraumatic Stress Spectrum Disorder, which looked similar to mine, and Bessel van der Kolk has long talked about complex PTSD, which is an extension of the more restrictive PTSD. It looks like the TSD tag has stuck, but interestingly the DOD and VA are now putting mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) into the mix. I don’t know if I agree with that, since TBI and psychiatric disorders are related to different traumas (one physical, the other psychological). I also get the feeling that the term has been passed around as being useful from a treatment and policy point of view, but that people may not know the background, which is why I wrote this post.

Today I got a call from a reporter who attended a conference on Trauma Spectrum Disorders last year conducted by the DOD, VA and NIH, so I guess the term and the ideas behind it have taken off over the years. He said there didn’t seem to be a clear idea of what disorders were included, so he was looking for clarification

I couldn’t believe it when I opened the New York Times this morning and read the rather shoddy article about the case of convicted Boston pedophile priest Paul R. Shanley, who was convicted after one of his victims had a recall of being abused by him after hearing about another case. Shanley is now appealing his conviction based on an argument against the validity of repressed memory. What gets me is that the chowder headed reporters on this article quoted a certain Harrison G. Pope, Jr, a professor of Psychiatry at Harvard, as saying “My impression is there continues to be a few scientists who honestly believe that it is actually possible for someone to be involved in a traumatic event and not be able to remember it at all. But you cannot argue that it is generally accepted” (which is the legal standard for admission of evidence).

Helloooo?

Other than one article which was cited in a chowder-headed review paper on PTSD which I previously picked apart here, Pope really hasn’t done much research on PTSD. My guess is that he has profited handsomely from working as an expert witness in PTSD cases, something which was not disclosed in the NYT article.

Pope was actually one of the signers of the “Bogus Letter to Remove Dissociative Disorders from DSM“, along with my friends the monacle, the evil leprachaun, and other pedophile apologists. Let’s watch them dance around the maypole “one more time” (this time with feeling).

From L to R: Numan Gharaibeh MD, August Piper MD, Pamela Freyd PhD, Joel Paris MD, Joanne Iurato PhD, Elizabeth Loftus PhD, Donna Pellerin MD (in front), Harold Merskey MD, Richard McNally PhD, James Hudson MD, Harrison Pope MD (in front), Paul McHugh MD (green hat) (not included in picture) Brian Boffi MD, Alexander Miano MD, Jennifer Ballew DO

There is no evidence presented that gaps in memory for traumatic events do not exist because, frankly, there is none. I have already extensively debunked arguments agains the validity of amnesia for traumatic events here, for those interested. Dissociative amnesia is a recognized diagnosis in the DSM, referring to gaps in memory not related to ordinary forgetfulness. It’s link to trauma is established by ample research studies which I reviewed in the prior post.

And now we are saying DSM does not represent consensus of opinion in the psychiatry field? Hey guys you are starting to sound a bit like me! But you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

This rather chowder-headed article (”PTSD has Unreliable Diagnostic Criteria“) by David Wilson and Peter Barglow has several weak points that I thought I would address. First of all the use of the term “Unreliable”. Reliability in science doesn’t refer to whether or not you can count on your brother-in-law to return the lawn mower he borrowed. It means whether two clinicians will come up with the same diagnosis (Inter-rater reliability) or whether the same diagnosis will come up when the person is assessed at two different time points (test-retest reliability). The authors use the term in neither of these senses, but rather just throw it out there and hope that it sticks to something.

Their first critique is that the diagnosis is based on human judgment and the criteria have changed several times in different versions of the DSM.

Like so what? And isn’t that true for other diagnoses?

The next set up the straw man that there is a high degree of overlap with other mental disorders in terms of symptomatology. As I have written in my book Does Stress Damage the Brain? it shouldn’t be surprising that mental disorders, including depression, borderline personality disorder, dissociative disorders, and depression, that have in common a link to psychological trauma, shouldn’t have overlapping symptomatology. That is why I call them trauma spectrum disorders.

The authors refer to a study of patients being treated with medication for depression where those with and without a history of trauma had similar rates of co-morbid PTSD at 78%. Given the overlap of symptoms between PTSD and depression and the strong link between depression and trauma this really isn’t all that surprising. They cite another study in which healthy college students were divided into those with a DSM defined trauma and those without. The ones in the group without trauma had higher levels of PTSD. A traumatic event is defined in DSM as a threat to self or or personal integrity, or the sudden death or injury of someone close to you, experienced with intense fear, horror or helplessness. Obviously an event like a death of a parent can be very traumatic for a child, even if it doesn’t happen suddenly. In fact, in this second study, 2/3 of the students noted death of a parent or someone close to them as a ‘non-congruent’ trauma. Furthermore the paper did not specify whether the required “fear, horror or helplessness” was assessed, so we have to assume that it wasn’t. These papers were in an issue of the Journal of Anxiety which ran a series of troll-ish articles which I have previously taken on here.

The authors go on to tackle some other non-issues, like the fact that a re-analysis of data from the Vietnam War showed lower rates of PTSD than previous estimates. So what? This was largely because DSMIII did not require functional disability for the diagnosis. There are still 236,000 veterans with PTSD, as we wrote in a letter to the Editor of Science in 2007.

The authors go on to set up the straw man that not all veterans with PTSD can be confirmed to have been in combat. So what? There are other possible traumatic events that occurred in Vietnam, and some may have experienced PTSD from other events. It stands to reason that this could happen in some instances.

The authors go on to claim that cases of PTSD are related to searching for financial gain. To state that all veterans are faking their symptoms to make money is ridiculous. If they don’t like psychiatry, why don’t they go work in a different field?

I have been following the death of Michael Jackson, and not only it [possibly] illustrates the death of another celebrity from prescription medications, but it also shows the importance of childhood abuse and neglect, and how the jerks who perpetuate it get off scott free.

Michael’s father, Joe Jackson, used to watch them rehearse and beat them with a belt if they did something wrong. He would trip them and push them into walls. One time he picked up Michael by one leg and beat him on the buttocks and legs. He took the proceeds of the Jackson 5 for himself. Just looking at Michael’s behavior as an adult it is obvious that he was a victim of childhood abuse.

But then, just in case you were unsure about this jerk, when interviewed by CNN after his son’s death, he said “we’re fine” and then went on to glibly promote his own new record company, taking advantage of the opportunity to be on the camera to promote his own business!

If this man doesn’t crawl under a rock, someone should suggest it to him strongly.

Joe Jackson is beyond redemption

Here is Joe Jackon with the Rev. Jesse Jackon (no relation?) after Michael’s death outside his home. I always thought that Rev Jackson was a twit. What is he a Reverend of anyway? The religion of his own ego?

Jessie Jackson and Joe Jackson (the father) laughing outside the home of Michael Jackson after his death.

There is an article in this week’s JAMA on the evidence that much of adult physical illness could be prevented through the elimination of childhood abuse. The article cites one I was a co-author on with Robert Anda MD (”The enduring effect of abuse and related adverse experiencess in childhood: A converging of evidence from neurobiology and epidemiology“) , whose career has been at the Centers for Disease and Control in Atlanta, GA.  (where he incidentally is almost unique in understanding the importance of abuse for health). He has been conducting the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study with Vince Felitti MD for many years, documenting the increased risk of smoking, heart disease, asthma, obesity, intravenous drug use, anxiety, depression, and other conditions with early abuse. Skonkoff and the authors of this week’s paper make the point that preventing abuse would go a long way toward improving health outcomes.

Probably will be more important than more more expensive imaging centers.

See other comment here.

Last week I was in Nashville and flew back on my birthday and reflected on that experience, and got some feedback from others. At the time I was reflecting on some memories from my childhood that weren’t that great, and at the time I simply allowed myself to feel sorry for myself and feel the feelings that were associated with the experiences I had had, as I perceived them. Now I am not going around blaming others or looking for a fight. I just think sometimes you should allow yourself to feel sorry for yourself. I mean if something bad happened to you, and you don’t allow yourself to be honest about it, then you aren’t practicing emotional integrity, are you?

A while back I started a cause on Facebook called “Virtual Fishtrap“. It refers to a place on Puget Sound in Washington State where myself and others lived before bad things started happening like people dying or getting divorced. Anyhoo the principles of our “cause” are:

• We believe in emotional integrity/honesty
• We like to walk on the beach
• We like sheep

Anyone is welcome to join.

We were thinking of making Fishtrap the site of the new University of Emotional Integrity.

Class will be on Fishtrap beach

Lolcat is ready to enroll.

Lolcat sports a lovely U. of Emotional Integrity shirt

 And we’ve already gotten going on Board of Trustees, which will be headed by Milvina Dean, last survivor of the Titanic, whom I mentioned in my lecture last week on the tendency of trauma survivors to want to gather together on the anniversary of the traumatic event they experienced in common.

Milvina Dean, last survivor of the Titanic, with her favorite cat.

She died a few weeks ago, but it doesn’t matter, since we’ll mostly be using primary process thinking at the University. And after all, time is relative, right?

See you at the U.

This week I am in Nashville TN for the Frontiers in Biomedical Imaging Sciences hosted by theVanderbilt Institute of Imaging Sciences in Nashville TN. We learned about how white matter in the brain gradually increases with age but that grey matter increase up until the teenage years and then decreases as a process of pruning of neurons up until the age of 25.

The conference is sponsored by John Gore PhD who was the former Director of MR Research at the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven CT where I was a faculty member up until 2000. I was at Vanderbilt two years ago and I felt like I was having a flashback when I rounded a corner in their MR imaging center and heard the British accents of the group that came from the original Yale MR research group.

There were a number of other former Yale Psychiatry at the conference including Brad Peterson and Anissa Abi-Dargham, as well as Jay Giedd from the NIMH. This was the first slide of my presentation “Neuroimaging in PTSD”:

She didn't go down with the ship

“This is the last survivor of the Titanic, who died last week. She was lowered in a mail sack off of the Titanic into a boat to her mother, but her father never got off the boat and died. It was said that because he was in the steerage class that the first class passengers got priority over him (as well as the women and children).

“Years later she was discovered as a survivor of the Titanic and was contacted. She started attending reunions of the survivors of the Titanic. As a researcher of trauma I have always been interested in the fact that survivors of traumas like to gather together and remember, like the survivors of the Oklahoma bombing.”

 And then the next slide was this.

And then the question to the audience was, “Does anyone know what this building is?”

No response.

“It is the Yale University School of Medicine. You might have noticed from the program that many of the speakers, as well as the sponsor of the conference, formerly came from the Yale University School of Medicine. Many of us spent over a decade in that awful place. I think this conference is an example of who survivors of a trauma like to come together to remember.”

(laughter from the audience).

Last night we heard some good music at The Station in “The Gulch” neighborhood of Nashville. I showed the guys a picture from my Treo of the piece of ground where my mother was buried along with 50 other anonymous urns in Tumwater WA.

We have since put a tombstone over the site but we of course don’t know exactly where she is in that 4 x 10 or so square foot space.

I have been overwhelmed with the many responses I have gotten to my prior posts “Brief History of My Mom” which I wrote in three parts since I wrote it last month. I wouldn’t be able to reproduce all of the stories here even if I thought that people were willing to make them public. This adds to the stories I gleaned from the children of my mother’s friends after I contacted them for the first time last year (I was cut off from all contact with my mother’s friends and family after she died).

I cried a lot last year after I found my mom and went through the process of grieving for her that I was denied when I was a child.

I have always had trouble remembering birthdays and I think I never liked my own birthday that much. Today I found myself feeling sad and on reflection remembered that it was my birthday. My father married my step mother three months after the death of my mother, on June 4, 1966, one day before my birthday (which is today) and on my sister Anne’s birthday.

As kids we never had real birthdays. Some years we got a cake with a line through the middle and my sister’s name on one side and my name on the other. We got to have parties only every other year since my step mother said she didn’t have time to do back to back parties. And then we had to organize our own parties anyway. I remember one year I had my much awaited party and put out clues in the yard for a treasure hunt but then the wind came up and blew away all the clues and ruined my party

Of course my parents focusing on their anniversary detracted from our birthdays. I think some years they must have gone away for the weekend but I don’t really remember.

I sent flowers to my sister on her birthday this year. First time ever. I figure after all this time she should get some recognition without having to compete with others.

Have a good day and happy birthday to myself. And in honor of my birthday I give permission to all of you who were left as a sack of bones for curbside pickup to give yourself a break and stop trying to cover up for those who hurt or oppressed you and let yourself feel your own feelings (they are yours, even if “negative”). Oh and I am growing a beard now in protest against those who ask how you are but don’t want to know the answer. And thanks to those who said happy birthday to me on FB. Bye ya’ll.

…according to a recent study. Well, maybe not. But if I said that there was a study to show that, you’d probably believe me, right? The fact is that I don’t have any idea how many Americans have an internal feeling of emptiness, but whatever the true number is, it sure as hell is not going to make the front page of the papers, unlike an article like “Bacon Found to Increase Risk of Colon Cancer by 30%”, which for a number of reasons that I won’t go into here conveys little of value to the average reader.

I have been reading a website called “Guide to Psychology” by Raymond Lloyd Richmond, Ph.D., as well books like Shame and Guilt, Masters of Disguise, and it occurs to me that there are not hundreds of emotions, only a few really, like shame, guilt, anger, fear and love, and that “my shame” is not really all that different from yours. And Dr. Richmond says that most of his clients complain of feeling like “mush” inside, which is typically the result of an inability to be honest about their feelings. And those who have feelings that they have trouble being honest about? Usually have to do with childhood and various failures of parenting, and the development of illusions that were necessary to survive in childhood but which now cause a psychic drag.

A story that has been coming out recently by dribs and drabs is the role that psychiatrists and psychologists have played a role in the development of torture techniques by the U.S. military. Now right away this raises a red flag as physicians are trained to help people and have taken the Hippocratic Oath to above all do now harm. Developing torture techniques is in no way consistent with the mission of the healing professions, which is why the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have come out against the involvement of professionals in the development of torture. The American Psychological Association (APA), however, has been more sanguine. In a May, 2007 statement, the APA said having psychologists consult with interrogation teams helps keep the interrogations “safe and ethical.”

It is consistent with the APA Code of Ethics for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation- or information-gathering processes for national security-related purposes. While engaging in such consultative and advisory roles entails a delicate balance of ethical considerations, doing so puts psychologists in a unique position to assist in ensuring that such processes are safe and ethical for all participants

Bolding is mine. “Safe and ethical”?? How can torture ever be ethical? Perhaps because the did not take the Hippocratic Oath, the military has found psychologists to be more malleable than psychiatrists. And the APA still has not come out in opposition to the involvement of psychologists in the development of torture.

Psychologists were involved in the development of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training at Fort Bragg Army Base in North Carolina and Fairchild Air Force Base Survival Training School in Spokane, WA. SERE training was developed as a way to train military personnel to resist capture or withstand interrogation if captured by foreign armies that did not follow Geneva Convention rules regarding torture. SERE training is hard enough to justify on its own, with no proven efficacy, it is a sadistic and humiliating practice that involves, waterboarding, prolonged isolation, psychological abuse, sexual humiliation, and exploitation of phobias.

Sound familiar?

If so that is probably because these techniques were “reverse engineered” to be used at Guantanamo Bay and later in Iraq.

In July 2005 an article in The New Yorker and more recently an article in the Washington Post described how the military used SERE psychiatrists and psychologists for advice on how to interrogate terrorists in the aftermath of 9/11. They were non-treating clinicians called Behavioral Science Consulting Teams, or BISCUITS. They were using their knowledge of psychology to not treat people with mental conditions, but to coerce prisoners. 

An article in the Spokane WA newspaper The Spokesman Review outlines how local Spokane area psychologists James E. Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen were key developers of the interrogation program used by the military. A local blog in the Spokane area describes in detail the history of how psychologists from the Behavioral Sciences Consulting Team (BSCT) of the military became involved in developing torture techniques like waterboarding (see a video of the technique here if you aren’t sure that is torture for use by the military. Later they trained military personnel in these techniques and even participated in interrogations in Iraq. Military psychologists also drafted memos stating that the SERE techniques which were being applied to prisoner interrogations did not cause physical or emotional harm, in spite of a well documented literature showing that SERE training is asssociated with extreme stress responses. This was while lawyers were drafting memos stating that it wasn’t illegal because, I guess, the prisoners weren’t human or something.

In case it isn’t clear, here is the United Nations Convention on Torture’s definition of torture:

torture means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind

The U.S. was a signatory on the UN Convention and the Geneva Accords. These state that individuals should be prosecuted in their countries for committing torture, even if their own country said that it was A-OK.

Another area I have been uncomfortable with is the use of psychological research to promote resilience. Some psychiatrists and psychologists (including a former spammer on my post “DSM Shadow Team Strikes Back in PTSD Wars“) have conducted research to measure biological correlates of what confers resilience to the abusive techniques at SERE, ostensibly with the goal of helping the military make their soldiers more resilient. The last time I saw that particular researcher, I… didn’t see him. He was supposed to be at a conference we both were speaking in and he never showed up, or called, or anything.

In the first and second parts of this multi-part posting, I described the effects of my mother’s death when I was four and a half years old on my life. After I had found my mother’s biological relatives and my wife and I went to meet them, I felt there was something still missing. I spent the next year thinking alot about my Mom and trying to remember as many things as I could from the time before she died. I found out who her friends were (after she died and my father remarried we moved away and I never had contact with her friends or family or anyone who knew her).

I had previously written the History of the Bremner Family, but from my perspective there was one half missing, which was my mother. And so I wrote a website where I put up her history that I was learning from her friends and family. One fortunate discovery was that someone had a typed copy of a transcript of the memorial service at her Unitarian Fellowship after she died. I also started to read more about the effects of parental loss on kids, books like Never Too Young to Know: Death in Children’s Lives, by Phyllis R. Silverman. In it I learned that going to the cemetery, attending the funeral (I learned by reading the transcript that I wasn’t there), and having momentos can help children with their grief.

I learned that many of her friends had been members of the Olympia Unitarian Church, and that at that time it was not officially a church but a fellowship, since they did not have a minister. The individual members of the congretation would take turns talking about a particular topic of interest. I think back then the topics were as often about Vietnam as Jesus, but I see no problem with that. I contacted her still living friends and the children of her friends, many of whom had experiences they shared with me. Like one whose father died when he was two and he imagined that he “lived” in an electrical transformer outside his room, or another whose both husband died when he was 42. Since he was wasting with cancer in his bedroom and his son never saw him leave and since noone ever talked to him about it he thought that his father “lived” under the bed in his room after he died. That son also died at the age of 42, but his mother is still alive.

I could go on, but in our society obsessed with happiness and America’s top model, or idol, we ignore or look away from pain and suffering to our own detriment, to the sacrifice of our souls, and the abandonment of our emotional beings. I think we should take a page from Sicily, where the women traditionally wore black for a year after someone died.

I used to be ashamed of my grief, but I am not anymore. Too much of psychiatry has become about giving medications to people when their primary problem is grief. I think that unresolved grief is to blame for much of the woes of American society, and medicating it with psychotropics is not the answer. I know, I lived with unresolved grief for 43 years.

Anyhoo back to my story. As I was reading and thinking I started to wonder… where was my Mom? I mean at first I thought I was on a spiritual journey, that I was finding her biological family because that’s what she would have wanted, or because there was some answer to a riddle that would be revealed, or maybe they would fill a missing piece. I also felt that she was driving me to do these things. She was showing up in my dreams when I had hardly thought about her at since my college years. Then it occurred to me that maybe she didn’t want me to find her spiritually, but…

physically…

I started to wonder what had happened to her physical remains. I had this idea from my childhood that her ashes had been spread over Lake Chelan in Washington State, and one of my sister’s thought there were no physical remains from her cremation. So I got her death certificate and looked up on it the name of the funeral home and gave me a call. They informed me that it isn’t possible to completely get rid of remains (!).

Somebody forgot to pick up Mom from the funeral home!

They said that she was in the “community crypt” or something like that and they would have to get back to me. I didn’t really understand what that meant (this scenario was starting to feel familiar!). But when I called back the next day it became clear that when noone picked her up (after twenty years) her urn was buried with other unclaimed remains.

Grave site of Laurnell Bremner, August 2008

I asked them to dig up the site to identify her urn, but the names were too worn so they recovered the site (you can see the grass is just starting to grow back).

They said my mother always had an affinity for the poor. I guess she was keeping them company!

So that put me in the odd situation of arranging for a funeral for my own mother who died when I was 4 1/2 years old.

Although I was a super competent doctor with dozens of publications, I had no clue what to do. I started searching around on the internet. I found a place that advertised selling granite headstones. When I drove out there it was a small white house that looked like it had been closed for a couple of years. I found another place that was way on the other side of town. With four million people in the city of Atlanta shouldn’t there be some place where you can buy an f-ing tombstone?

I finally found a place, got a design which I sent out to my siblings, and, amazingly, they all chipped in (and paid up!) for the tombstone and flowers. We had a ceremony for her on October 4, 2008, where all her children came as well as several grandchildren and her adoptive sister, and we placed the tombstone over the resting place of my mother and her “friends”.

Headstone of Laurnell Bremner, Tumwater WA

Here are her flowers her children bought for her:

gladiolas, birds of paradise, roses, lianthius

Afterwards we had a nice party out on Steamboat Island Road in Olympia.

View from Steamboat Island Road, Olympia WA

After the ceremony someone wrote to me to tell me that a local psychic had commented on her after her death, a story I told in “Doctors of different disciplines put their heads together for an interesting case.” He also told me that an 800 mile long spaceship was scheduled to arrive over Alabama on October 14, 2008, which I wrote about in “We Come In Peas”. I thought maybe they would bring my mom back. Alas…

This spaceship didn't bring my mom back

Oh well. Maybe she’s having too good a time whereever she is.

In one of the many examples of synchronicity involved in this story, the day I was in an evening art class I took with my wife painting the dream of seeing my mother which I described in Part 1 of this series, they were playing the same song (”Caring is creep” by Cold Play) I heard when I first decided that I had been beaten around enough and that I was going to find my mom no matter what it took and not worry about who got pissed off about it.

I also felt an urge to see the house where we lived. An old friend of hers and neighbor told me that he felt that her astral shell was in the house. Whether it was this or her spirit driving me on, I got a hold of the owner of the house who said she was planning some remodelling (the house hadn’t been changed since I left 43 years ago, and I had never been back even to the general area) and she had just asked her architect if it was possible to disturb spirits with remodelling, as she had heard that a woman had died there many years ago. Anyhoo as I described in Part 1 of this series I went back to the old house and had several memories come back. I also discovered that there were sheep (!) living on the property (as I wrote back then in this post) amidst a nice apple orchard with grape vines (!). Since my mom was a Buddhist I wondered if maybe one of the sheep was a reincarnation of my mom! The owner gave me some yarn from the sheep and my wife made me a nice scarf! Not the same as the little bear my mom made that she didn’t have time to put in the eyes, but… somehow similar…

See a response to this series here.