Dear clients and friends,
First of all, I want to thank all of you for the incredible outpouring of support for me and my kids these last few weeks. As you know, we changed the name of the company three years ago to reflect our focus on helping our clients’ families. I had no idea that at the darkest time of my life that the BRAVE family of our clients and friends and my colleagues would be such a help to my family!
At the end of this letter are several examples of the love that my kids and I have been surrounded by which hopefully will also give you a sense of who Marion was for those of you who did not know her.
I have been giving thought as to what my future holds in the wake of what has happened and have decided that my priorities going forward are going to be 1.) my kids; 2.) my health; and 3.) BRAVE.
My kids have been extraordinarily mature and strong; however, the loss that they have endured is going to continue to affect them immensely. I will be spending a lot of time with them and the four of us will find opportunities to be together as a family. They all came home within hours of Marion being stricken and we were together for the subsequent two weeks. Jacqueline is still with me and will be returning to Florida tomorrow. I am travelling to Montana later this week to spend time with our son, Anthony, and will be in New York City later in the month to be with our daughter Alexandra. The four of us will be together in early May for Jacqueline’s college graduation. Marion and I were planning to take Jacqueline to Paris as a graduation present in May or June which I will be doing with my sister.
I am in reasonable physical shape, but that isn’t going to be good enough from now on. I am now a single parent and I have to do everything I can to make sure my kids do not become parent-less anytime in the next 20+ years. I will be exercising more and eating better and am working to get down to my ideal weight. I have a full-day executive physical scheduled this month which includes bloodwork and various scans to detect calcification in your arteries and cancers among a number of other tests.
BRAVE is an extremely important part of my life. I expect that will only be more so now. I am not emotionally ready to start regularly interacting with clients. I am working with the team to manage portfolios and I am going to fill quiet time with writing additional content for the website. I am hoping that as I move through April I will be able to ease back into my full role. I just don’t know at this time how things are going to go with the healing process. Please rest assured that I will eventually be spending even more time and energy on BRAVE than I did prior to 3/11 once things are more normal and am looking forward to that!
Finally, I urge all of you to not take your health for granted and make sure that you have an up-to-date estate plan in place. What happened to Marion was preventable had we and her doctors known what was her actual physical situation. The fact that she had a healthcare proxy and a living will made the management of her care smooth and took some of the burden off me and our kids when the extremely difficult end-of-life decision had to be made.
With warm regards,
Scott
Dear Clients and Friends,