The artwork of Karen Shiman, a retrospective art show at the Decatur Area Arts Council.

Jeff Williams:
Welcome to Community Voices, a production of NPR Illinois. I'm your co-host, Jeff Williams. I'm hoping that you're able to just find some inspiration in this and the way ideas sometimes unfold, even if they aren't apparent initially. An art show in Decatur, a son processing grief, the continuing love for a mother, construction of a coral reef, the Chicago Mercantile, and we all need all the remarkable people that we have around us. And here we go. Today in the studio, Brian Blasingame. Brian contacted me, and this is actually very interesting. I'm going to let him start to talk about this, and then I'll have some questions for him. And this is about his mother, Karen. So, Brian, would you like to tell us a little bit about your mother?
Brian Blasingame:
My mother lived an extraordinary life. Karen Shiman, S-H-I. It's sounds like it's an E, but it's spelled with an I. She made over 2,000 works of art and did it all in her spare time. She transcends every medium, from oil, acrylic, watercolor, sculptures, bird decoys, hundreds, hundreds of them in fact. She was a big explorer. She traveled the world scuba diving. She dove over 2,000 times. She seems to have something about that number. But that was before she stopped counting.
Jeff Williams:
Right, Wow, 2,000 dives, 2,000 works of art. Holy smokes.
Brian Blasingame:
And 2,000 dives is almost the equivalent of six years’ worth of the days of your life that she went diving on. But what's remarkable about that, those are the things that are visible, most visible elements, the artwork and her diving, and in her retirement… she built a coral reef by hand. It is visible by Google Earth.
Jeff Williams:
Where's that located?
Brian Blasingame:
On Bonaire, (Saint Eustatius and Saba). It's part of the Dutch Caribbean, the ABC Islands, about 40 miles north of Venezuela, Aruba, Bonaire, and Curacao. They're all part of the Dutch Islands and the Dutch Antilles. They started that in their retirement just by piling stones together, sort of akin to building a Flintstone house.
Jeff Williams:
Wow.
Brian Blasingame:
And now they're an Elkhorn coral reforestation site, and as I said, it's large enough that you can see it by satellite. It's really what she did with her time and how she managed to do that, because those things weren't the focus of her life. She had a full-time career in raising a family. So, this was all done in her spare time. She worked for a company called Salman Brothers (trading company). She started with them in the mid-70s as a secretary. and quickly became a vice president doing their trading for them, one of three people trading for them on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Salman Brothers was the first company to employ a woman as a trader on the New York Stock Exchange and had other famous employees like Michael Lewis, the author, he actually wrote a book about the entire culture of Salman Brothers called Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street (1989). Tells the story of that… in that era.
Jeff Williams:
Approximately what year was that?
Brian Blasingame:
It was 1972 or ‘73, she began working for them and then worked 40 years for the company. Full-time job. And it also, as Michael Bloomberg also worked for the company, he approached the partners and asked them if they wanted to go into computers and they all kind of shied away from it. He decided to go on and do it on his own and he did very well.
Jeff Williams:
Kind of like Kodak with digital cameras. No, we're going to pass on that. (sarcasm)
Brian Blasingame:
There's a great story she would tell about when they moved from the old Chicago Mercantile Exchange building in Chicago to the new one. And this was in the early 80s. This is how strange that is for women in the workplace and how singular her presence was. They were giving the tour and she had to point out to them three days before they opened that there was no women's restroom. So they had to scramble and put a sign on one of the men's rooms for (women) temporarily, but as she used to joke, there were actually where the urinal banks stayed in there for seven months while they tried to remodel that thing. And at that point, she was one of seven female traders amongst 6,000 men.
Jeff Williams:
That's just, that's unbelievable.
Brian Blasingame:
She just… she held her own. Very quietly and steadily.
Jeff Williams:
And she would have to in that, because that had to be, well, to kind of break that barrier and then to, obviously, thrive.
Brian Blasingame:
She would joke about a lot of things that kind of relate to this, both her artwork and her career. And then my brother and I were both entrepreneurial in our business ventures and she was too (even when) younger. And even you could characterize her taking that job and going from secretary to heading up their trading on the floor as being entrepreneurial. And then another thing I think she really lived by was that idea that in order to become good at something, you have to be willing to be bad at it at first.
Jeff Williams:
Absolutely.
Brian Blasingame:
You have to embrace that, be comfortable with that. And there's a lot of people who don't.
Jeff Williams:
They don't, no.
Brian Blasingame:
Her creation of ducks and birds was kind of continuous throughout her entire life. One thing that was interesting, and I think there are hints of it, her last name, maiden name was Gahlon, G-A-H-L-O-N.
Jeff Williams:
What area?
Brian Blasingame:
She was born in Minnesota, not too far outside Minneapolis, but her family roots are in Red Wing, Minnesota.
Jeff Williams:
Yeah, Red Wing, yes.
Brian Blasingame:
And old farm, Swedish roots there. She was the eldest child of her generation. Her father was a lawyer, but literally nine days before she was born, he was appointed to be one of the first FBI agents, Senator J. Edgar Hoover. He gave her, at the age of six-year-old, gave her … her first paint set. And the feature on the website (I) created for her (is that) very first painting… she made (it), the day after she got the paint set.
Jeff Williams:
So when you mentioned the ducks and you mentioned wood, were the ducks, a lot of times, carved out of wood?
Brian Blasingame:
Actually, … even those… she jumped around in mediums. There are wood ducks, there are clay ducks, there are paper mache…. (some are) made of stone. Not that would float very well, but she saw them in everything. (laughter)
Jeff Williams:
Will those all be on display at this art show?
Brian Blasingame:
We're doing, for this exhibit at the Decatur Area Arts Council. It's going to be a retrospective of her work. It'll hold a whole spectrum throughout her lifetime. Oil works all the way to the end of her life on Bonaire. She did 120 paintings of Bonaire alone. So there will be carving sculptures, palette knife paintings, watercolors, just on and on. Paper mache gourds that she made. It's really kind of a nice, beautiful mix of what she made throughout it.
Jeff Williams:
Nice. And, it looked like there were going to be prints that were going to be on sale. Is that correct?
Brian Blasingame:
Well, that goes back to the whole charitable side of the projects. After she died, because of the volume of the work, I decided… and talking to her beforehand… is (to) do something positive and good with it. And the idea came to me to use her works in a charitable way. At first I thought kind of generically. I wasn't in the art world. I had very different career and I had no experience within the institutions of that world; so I had a generic idea of, well, that's kind of “garage sale off”… all of this in one fell swoop and I'll donate the proceeds. But I shortly realized how in telling and sharing her story with other people, both how her story resonated with people, but then the artwork impressed them because of the volume of what she did and the breadth of mediums that she worked in. And I realized, okay, if I put more time into this and sharing your story, and now it's grown into beyond a website and social media, I'm writing a book, working on the initial stages of documentary. And then it became a matter of, she has 2,000 works. And let me give you some examples. The Island of Bequia, this beautiful painting she did from one of her diving trips. And it's a 60 inch by 30 inch painting of Admiralty Bay in Port Elizabeth. It took me about a year and a half of corresponding with the government of the island to figure out how to donate a canvas print of the painting. And in doing so, we worked out that it's now it's hanging in their main civic building on the island in their customs and revenue offices. But that led to my connecting figure it all out with them. a group called Action Bequia that is one of the principal charities on the island. And so now I've licensed the digital use of that one image for them to print on cups and prints and t-shirts and sell things in the tour shop. And then 100% of the proceeds from it go directly to sport Action Bequia. That was the snowball going because I was like, that's one work of art. There's 2,000 works of art. On the island of Bonaire, we've begun working with Terra Mar Museum. She has about 120 paintings, as I said, and about 60 of those are of the people of the island that have no idea that she painted them. From photographs she captured at carnival or at kite contest on the island. Working with them, Terra Marr and Sombresa Gallery there on the island, what we're going to do is have an exhibit that's called Come Find Yourself in the Work of Karen Schiman. have those exhibits run for multiple times. It's going to take a long time. There's only 23,000 people on the island. So I'm confident with the reference photographs that we have in the artwork that a mother is going to recognize. (for example a mother saying) “That's the carnival costume that I made for my child in 2005.) Or that's someone's going to recognize the photographs. And then the goal is to create a book from it and have the people photographed standing next to their artwork. One of the things that triggered this was because whenever I would show mom on the island, show mom's artwork to people on the island, they would inevitably tell me things like, there's a main city street… which is the center of town there on the island. The island has no traffic lights. That's the kind of, you know, simple casual place that (it) is. They would always point, “but there's a building there where this gap is in your mom's painting. Now there's a building there”. Or behind the kite contest series, you're like, “oh, you can't see the cemetery anymore because they built a wall there”. That made me realize the historical element and the photojournalistic character of many of her works of the island, especially the ones that involve the people. And because we're working with Terramar (Museum | Island of Bonaier) is the joint art and history museum of the island. So, the idea is to have, the book format would be to have a full-page photograph of the artwork on the left side, and then on the right side, the photograph of the individual or family member standing next to the work of art. We're going to give each one of those people a copy of the print of their, you know, the painting that was made of them, if it doesn't even notice. And then ask them to contribute a quote of whatever they want. It doesn't have to be pertaining to my mom or their impressions of the painting. It's (to) contribute to the story. The story of Bonaire. Then that book is to be called Drumi Duchy, The Angels of Bonaire, which means sweet dreams in Papiamento (primary language of Bonaire). That book will be 100% of the proceeds will go to support charitable causes on the island. And what we figured out is because there are so many, turtle conservation, the mangroves, the coral reforestation sites, all those kinds of places, that it would be better for us to let them use the book for a given year and all the proceeds rather than divvying up each year's sales. We're going to kind of move that book around. Okay, let them use it for their marketing, for their promotions, whatever kind of auction or raffles. But these things keep growing. It's all kind of there in the pieces of the parts that she put together. So it's like I'm mostly just trying to keep up with the ideas.
Jeff Williams:
So how did you connect with the Decatur (Area) Arts Council?
Brian Blasingame:
I (saw) that they're doing the exhibits they do … and reach out to them and they invited me to participate there. They've been a wonderful team. And It starts on April 7th and runs through the 23rd of April, but the opening night is from 5 to 7 (p.m.) on Friday, April 10th.
Jeff Williams:
Friday, April 10th is the opening? Okay.
Brian Blasingame:
Friday is from 5 to 7 p.m.
Jeff Williams:
Man, that is…
Brian Blasingame:
That was sort of an impetus to find a way to give back. So we're going to give 50% of all proceeds from print sales that have generated. But then we kind of opened that up even further because we didn't want it to just (be limited) to those days. So, any print order that's received… that relates, between April 1st and June 30th, so the entire quarter. All people have to do is if they place an order on the website, is they will get a confirmation e-mail. And all I need to do is return that confirmation e-mail with a reply saying, DAAC for Decatur Area Arts Council, and then immediately 50%. That helps me to distinguish an order on the website that's just an order coming in. there's two things that we're featuring there at the gallery. I don't offer on the website any canvas prints of her artwork because I wanted to reserve all the originals for gallery exhibitions.
Jeff Williams:
Absolutely. That's the next thing I was going to ask. A lot of those you do want to hold on to so it can move to other galleries and museums.
Brian Blasingame:
And there's only ever going to be 1 canvas print done, whereas you can get a paper print. And you can also choose as many dimensions as you, whatever dimensions that you want on it. Or there was a gentleman And there's a wonderful painting that she did. And it was a really important day for her. And it was on the island of Dominica. And her tour guide, Bobby, and my brother climbed to the top of the hot springs together. And my mom showed me pictures of it. And I have the painting, of course, but it was the day to her was this sense of, I really can do some things that I didn't expect that I could do. This was a really big physical thing to climb to the top of it. And so we ended up, similar to the other kind of works, we've reconnected. It took me much longer, about two years to find Bobby on the island of Dominica, and finally did. And we sent him the canvas print of the work. So gradually, we'll go through all the canvas prints, at least offering them. And I offer one on the website every month. But even that, when you calculate in how many she has, at one a month, it will take me 30 years to cycle through.
Jeff Williams:
That sounds like a super interesting opening. I want to get over there for either the opening or at least to get over there. I get to indicate her a pretty good amount. So to see this show, because that sounds very.
Brian Blasingame:
It's been really, really warmly received. I'm very excited. I'm really warm, you know, and again, it goes back to what I was saying before, that my mother's artwork is very beautiful and the diversity is very interesting. But I think what's most striking to people is how she used her spare time.
Jeff Williams:
Yeah, that's unbelievable that she's able to do that and that nobody really saw her works for the most part before this, right?
Brian Blasingame:
It hung all over the walls of our houses, with homes that we lived in throughout my life. It was always a huge logistical undertaking to move. And so it was never hidden. But it would always be that reaction when people would come over to the house, they're like, oh, this is really amazing. This is really interesting. Your mom collects art.
Jeff Williams:
And then you go, no, this is her.
Brian Blasingame:
She makes it, wait, she makes all of these, all of these. And then they'd see the variety. And they go, oh, she collects the birds and ducks and decoys. No, she makes those two. And that would be about when their jaw would drop from it. It would be a lot for them to process. But so even with the variety, even the birds, for example, one thing I'm striking and prepared about that is there's not a single decoy duplicate. Some will be a duck that has incredibly realistic feathers and another one's more stylized. Even that, she wasn't about duplication. She saw art because it wasn't about recognition or reward for her. It was an opportunity to grow. or to the experience of making the art or to keep learning. She did not ever wait for there to be time to do something. She took advantage of the time she had to create or to explore or to contribute.
Jeff Williams:
Well, there's a lot of prolific artists that don't have 2,000 pieces, And that's their full time. I've been speaking with Brian Blasengame about his mother, Karen Sheman, who will be having a retrospective art show at the Decatur Area Arts Council.
Brian Blasingame:
The exhibit's opening night is on Friday, April 10th from 5:30 to 7 p.m. The exhibit will be up for display for people to view between April 7th and April 23rd.
Jeff Williams:
You've been listening to Community Voices on NPR Illinois. Community voices, and here's more from Brian Blasingame speaking on his mother, Karen Shiman, who will be having a retrospective art show at the Decatur Area Arts Council.
Brian Blasingame:
The exhibit's opening night is on Friday, April 10th from 5:30 to 7 p.m.
Jeff Williams:
Oh, your website, you mentioned the website.
Brian Blasingame:
Yeah, it's under her name, Karen Schiman. It's K-A-R-E-N S-H-I-M-A-N, karenscheman.com.
Jeff Williams:
Okay.
Brian Blasingame:
And that is very different than even the book that I'm writing. The book is also titled, like the gallery is, The Spare Time, the Life and Work of One Woman. And it's very different. It's not a traditional structure of, you know, maybe an art biography. It's based on different principles of her life. life, one of her favorite adages in life. And I discovered it late because my mother was never one to pronounce her philosophy. Like she'd tell you a joke, tulips should always be red. And I used to work in flowers and events. And so I thought, okay, men's not always get a red tulips. And she meant two lips should always be red. She didn't care to tell you the joke, but you didn't write. And the same was true of her life's philosophy. You know, I had grown up I had, when I was young, a friend of mine had been with the same Maharaja in India that Ram Dass lived with. And I had kind of discovered that after high school, and I'd gone to a Jesuit high school in Chicago. And I remember talking to my mom about that, about be here now and all this. And my mom was just kind of quiet. And I thought to myself in my youthful ignorance, oh, my mom just doesn't get this.
Jeff Williams:
Right.
Brian Blasingame:
Whereas she was kind of a walking monk. She was so far ahead of it, but she didn't need to pronounce it. was enough. It was enough that she lingered and saw things. It was enough that she relished in making that art, that she relished in scuba diving and that experience.
Jeff Williams:
She understood herself, her security in herself. Wow.
Brian Blasingame:
Even the brief. When I had, she in 19, in 2015, she started to, she had Parkinson's, she was diagnosed with Parkinson's. A horrible month for her. My stepfather, her husband, and diving partner of 40 years died of lung cancer. She was diagnosed with Parkinson's, and she had a titanium implant on her spine, on her L4 and L5. Horrible month. When I'd come back into her life to help her there, she had a sign that I hadn't seen. I hadn't been to her house in quite a while, and she had a plaque that she'd made inside the house, and it read, Vivier Bien Es La Mejor Venganza. And now I had just starting at that point to learn about their life in Bonaire and the reef that she'd built. But as she said, we piled some stones. That's all she said, we just piled some stones. Whereas I got there the first time that I was snorkeling above it, literally tears in my snorkel mask because of the scale of it and the humbleness of it. But the quote translates to living well is the best revenge. So when I first came back, came to be her care partner, I thought, of course, you lived on the island in Bonaire and it's against your naysayers and detractors. And I come to understand with talking to her and moving forward that living well was the best revenge against its ultimate measure, death.
Jeff Williams:
Exactly.
Brian Blasingame:
And it was very simple. And so, we structured the website, right? I structured the website around all those kinds of principles and found the ways that her art integrated into those things, you know? Even her organization. But another phrase that comes to mind with this is a Spanish quote that says, the lazy man does things twice. And her incredible organization gave her the most important thing of all. Well, and borrowing a term from her trading years, the most important commodity. And it was more important than the futures and the, you know, foreign currencies and that kind of commodity. Most important commodity to her was her time. And that's really become the underlying message of the whole project, because I realized beyond my sharing the beauty of my mom's art, what I can really help is share the other thing that she left, because she didn't just leave 2,000 works of art. She didn't just leave photographs of every island that she left and all these wonderful memories and experiences and the reef. She left an example. She left an example of how to squeeze the most out of life. And that's as much a part of the story of the book and the project and even the exhibit, it's that I hope that's what they come away with.
Jeff Williams:
Well, hopefully everybody in the listening area who hears this can get over to this show because it sounds like it's going to be incredible to see. You will be at the opening then? Yeah, absolutely. Is there a title for the exhibit?
Brian Blasingame:
It is. It's again, Spare Time, the Life and Work of One Woman. The region that the family, both sides of my mother's family came from in Sweden, (Smaland), the reason they picked Red Wing was because similarity in farmland. That's what I've heard. And the most defining characteristic of the farmland there was that they had to remove stones. And so, this ancestral element of moving stones from the soil in Sweden, carrying through to the stones moved out of the soil in Red Wing to my mother building a reef out of stones underwater on the island of Bonaire in the Dutch Caribbean. It's given myself a sense of not to worry about things because there is this plan. Like in the book that I'm writing, there was a chapter I've been working on. sharing how my brother… my mother married the dean of students of Loyal Academy. And in short, if my brother, and this comes to, you know, how he look at a pointless painting, if you were right up against the pointless painting, you'd see a black spot and you'd think that was off and wrong, that it takes backing up in the distance to understand its importance and its perspective. And I've come to understand that's true of the negative and hard days in our life. The bad things that happen are also integral to the parts of who we are and who they make us. And using that same lens of both her artwork and her story and the circumstance, if my brother had not been truant in high school in Loyola Academy, and it forced my mother to leave her job at the Salman Brothers in the city of Chicago and come out to the suburbs, a huge inconvenience to leave the trading floor, to discuss his truancy with the dean of students, with whom she fell in love with and married shortly thereafter, there would not be a wreath in Bonaire.
Jeff Williams:
Right. Yeah.
Brian Blasingame:
You know, I just go, you know, just relax about the things in your life because there's a reason for those things. Even my place in writing this story or putting this artwork together, I've realized I'm just another one of her works. Yeah.
Jeff Williams:
It reminds me, I'll make this quick, I do a lot of artwork, and some of it kind of sounds strange or niche, but bicycle-related things, but kind of the beauty, the craftsmanship of older bicycles, paintings of close-up images. I've been invited out to this Philadelphia Bike Expo to show some of my art, because I've done a lot of their promotional posters. So, I saw this little kid getting on a bicycle outside of where the event was happening, took a quick picture, used it as a reference to make a painting. Somebody in the area here bought that painting. They're just like, oh, I just like that. I want to buy that. Usually that would have been the end of it. And I was just like, you know, I think I want to paint another one of those. I never paint a second of anything. I painted a second one. I took it out to this to Philadelphia. And I was out there, had a lot of my artwork, people are running around. Most of them are interested in the bicycles out there, but every now and then they're, oh, bicycle art, neat, okay. And all of a sudden I heard this one guy just like scream from (further) away. He's (exclaims), “That's my son!” And I was like, oh, he sounds upset, you know, and he came over and he's kind of this big burly guy. He (says), “That's my son right there!” And I (responded), “Oh, sorry, I took a picture of him at last year's event! I just thought I'd make this painting. And I thought that bike he was starting to get on was kind of neat. And he had this like Tigger hoodie on, so he couldn't see his face or anything really.” And it turned into the most emotional… It was just this beautiful thing. He was so unbelievable, so grateful to see this, just spotted it. And here again, like you say, it's these… connections, these things that happen as you just let them unfold, because I felt a little bit of frustration when I was making the second painting. I was like, why am I even doing this for a minute? But then it's like, as life unfolds later on, it all, the things that maybe can frustrate you or you feel like, why is this happening? It all unfolds later sometimes.
Brian Blasingame:
The statistical number of details that had to line up for that to happen for you. are just unfathomable. They're just unfathomable. I had this very similar experience. Well, before I say that, I just remember, I have to show you one for bicycle paintings. And it's from Carnival. But because of that Swedish research that I was doing and sort of the humbleness and not, work and be quiet, that kind of ethic that they had, I've always kind of wrestled with their, the, am I doing something promotional with her story, right? But that's not the truth. It's an element of charity and it's also an element of not wanting to let her story die and not letting the work just disappear from the world, the contribution and all those things. But I was talking with a friend about it and they had reminded me that many artists that we know of are actually, we know of their art because of the people that came after them, that promoted their legacy and shared their story. And I did a little research on that and I discovered, which was, this is the kind of connecting back to what you're saying. I'll have to preface this by saying that That moment I described as swimming over the reef for the first time, that was the deepest emotional experience of grace I ever had in my life. And then in working on the beginning parts of the book back in 2022 when she died, I just started doing some name research. My mother's name is Karen Johanna Gallone Scheman. Johanna translates in Swedish and in biblical terms to grace. And she always looks, she looks kind of like Grace Kelly. So I always had that, the Grace Kelly in my head, Johanna meant grace. So it was a very touching, kind of keep going thing. And then when I was researching this about who, what artists kind of were promoted, you know, and One of the things, the first ones that came up in my research was Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. And I thought that was so funny, like aside from it, because my mom and I, that was just, Georgia was one of our joint communicative favorites, right? And then the second artist that came up was Vincent Van Gogh. And what I was reading about him was that during his lifetime, it was his brother that was his benefactor. And that he kept, you know, his kind of life going. But it was after his death, his brother's wife is the one that really was his promoter, really was the one that shared it with the world. And her name was Johanna Van Gogh. So here I was in this kind of emotional, mental state of, am I kind of doing something contradictory to her quiet and humble way of doing all of these things? But I realized the good that can come from it, from the charity, from even the sharing of her story, trumps those fears or concerns. And that’s also kind of what I was made for in this project. To be able to, there isn't really anybody else that can tell the stories behind her paintings or tell the story of how she lived or that, you know, even the birds were sort of a quiet talisman for her, reminder, her organization, ducks in a row. Or when she started scuba diving in 1978, she would joke that I'm sort of a duck in the ocean. or even the way she kind of worked in both her career and her life. She never rushed through anything. She had the grace of a swan. So this literally the symbolism that's in her bird work, for example. Again, those kind of quiet reminders to me. And so it's kind of, it's become my life mission is to spend the rest of my life elevating her story so that by the time I die, her artwork has become a complete charity-fueling, self-fueling engine. And what we're already doing with several works of the art, or what we'll do with the bonaire pieces, it's just me trying to keep up with it.
Jeff Williams:
Right, yeah, What a gift.
Brian Blasingame:
What a gift of life.
Jeff Williams:
Well, once again, we're in the studio with Brian Blasingame. in discussing his mother, Karen Scheman's art exhibit that will be happening in Decatur at the Decatur Area Arts Council. Decatur Area Arts Council. And let's give those dates again then.
Brian Blasingame:
The exhibit's opening night is on Friday, April 10th from 5:30 to 7 p.m. But the exhibit will be up for display for people to view between April 7th and April 23rd.
Jeff Williams:
All right. Well, Brian, thanks again A lot. That's a beautiful story. How specifically was Decatur one of the first, I mean, how did you come in contact with them?
Brian Blasingame:
After my mother died, I lived in Chicago for about a year and a half, two years. I was already living up in Chicago. I had lived many places in the country, but it moved back to be my mom's caretaker during her Parkinson's battle, which I'll just add one note about that. My mom met Parkinson's with the same resilience that she applied to everything else. From the day she was diagnosed at 74 until the day she died at 82, she exercised 3 hours a day because exercise is the only thing to stave off the progression of the disease. And after she died, it was an abrupt shock for me because she died of a massive brain hemorrhage and we had just actually gone back to the island. to because of a water back to our everything happens for a reason. A washing machine valve had eroded and flooded her condo. And so we went back down there and it was actually first trip and while there she came out of her shell kind of and wanted to go out drinking with family and friends and people that were down on the island. And so I was like, what have we been doing in Chicago for the last seven years? I should have had her down here in her place on the island. And so we went back to Chicago to prepare to come back to start remodeling the island. And we scheduled A 26-day trip. And we got there the first night. This was in 2022. We had a phenomenal dinner at the restaurant right there on the beach where they made the reef, right in that, because we had to stay in one of the villas and not in the condo because of the water damage. And at 3 o'clock in the morning, I was walking here from the bathroom to the bedroom. She looks out to the veranda and she says, there's Dick, waiting for me, my stepfather, who died back in 2015. And then she laid down in bed and she had a massive brain hemorrhage and died. And for her, how wonderful. What A romantic end to go and swim for the rest of eternity with my stepfather there above the reef that she made. For me, it was a shock because for people who care for people with Parkinson's, you tend to have a progression into dementia. For me, it was just completely abrupt. So, it took me a while to kind of get my footing afterwards, but I knew all along I wanted to do the project. And then I realized I just had to get out of the city. And a friend of mine lives in Decatur and works for Macon Resources. And so I came down and moved down here. But that was the kind of the way for me to get away from the city, start working on the books, start working on the website. Because before I had all the pieces together, but I kept thinking about it from the end point, the fingertips. I had this idea of the end game, but I realized, the irony was I realized I have to do this one stone at a time.
Jeff Williams:
Right.
Brian Blasingame:
And in that same currency (as) with her … of how she lived her life, it wasn't, like I said, she wasn't waiting for a big window of opportunity to do these things. She took advantage of the little moments of her time. And you have to do that incrementally. You have to build your life in that way. And that's a huge part of the message of her story and her work.
Jeff Williams:
Right. Beautiful. Wow. Brian, thanks so much for coming in.
Brian Blasingame:
Entirely my pleasure.
Jeff Williams:
Love it for sure.
Brian Blasingame:
She did all the work.
Jeff Williams:
Yeah. And once again, in here with Brian Blazingame and his mother, Karen Shiman's artwork can be seen at the.
Brian Blasingame:
Decatur Area Hearts Council.
Jeff Williams:
All right, thanks a lot.
Brian Blasingame:
Thank you very much.