12/22/2025
This is Marilou Chanrasmi. I just got off a team call with my beautiful colleagues Anna Kucera and Shahar Fearing. Together we make up the leadership circle for Four Winds Connections. On this call Shahar invited us to bring our own voices and stories to Four Winds Connections. I have never felt so loved and supported than by these two beautiful women who allow me to BE my authentic self and whose values align so deeply with mine. We each have our own stories of how we came together -- what brought us here, what created Four Winds Connections, what guides us, what inspires us, and what matters deeply to us. On my personal page I share honestly and openly ... Anna and Shahar have always allowed me to bring my whole self to Four Winds Connections. And today, an invitation was made to consider bringing whatever parts of my "personal" journey and story to Four Winds. The truth is, I believe everything is connected. So today, I will share a post I wrote on my personal page on December 20th.
At the age of 4 I lost my Papa. I believe he sent me my first dog when I was 22 years old. As I reflect on what I want to share for this first post where I will begin bringing parts of my story to this page, I choose a story I feel most of us can connect with on some level: grief, trauma, survival and healing/joy through the love of a 4-legged being. My Papa knew that it would take a 4-legged furry being to help me begin my healing. This year I also celebrated 37 years of sobriety. Splat came into my life when she was 8 weeks old, and she is the reason I got sober.
"Today December 20, 2025 marks the 57th anniversary of the passing of my beloved Papa. This day every year i reflect on the many ways he has been in my life guiding me, protecting me, carrying me and sending me angels on days and nights when i felt i couldn’t go on … this day etched into my DNA are the memories of Little Drummer Boy playing over the hospital intercom as code blue went off at Barnes hospital in St. Louis and my mother’s cries as hospital staff pulled her collapsed and shattered body and heart from the now lifeless body of my Papa. I don’t know anymore what are real memories, what are the stories my mother finally told me just years before she passed as her struggle with dementia opened up her once protected heart after she lost “the love of her life” and “the best and shortest 7 years of her life”. It has taken me decades of healing after sinking into the darkest places in my teens and early twenties to arrive at a place where this day is now one I embrace and cherish in my heart. I envision my Papa and Mama together now. Papa sent me my first dog Splat who got me sober. Splat also was a bridge connecting me to Mama where love could be expressed in ways where words could not … and an allowing of our own hearts opening up to each other through our shared love for Splat. One of my sweetest memories is how she was cooking up a feast for one of her many large Filipina dinner parties … she made my favorite cake - mocha cake. She was not a dog person as she had been bitten as a kid and when I would visit her Splat would wait in my car and I would just go in and out to spend time with her. Finally one day she said “why don’t you bring Splat in” first it was just the kitchen then within weeks Splat had free reign of the house :) Mama had spent the entire day cooking and baking and made a mocha cake as she knew it was my favorite. I was relaxing in the living room when my brother screams at me “your dog is on the table!!!” I run into the kitchen and Splat is on the table where my mom had left the mocha cake and Splat’s head was immersed in the cake. I yelled “Splat!!!” She lifted her head filled with buttery mocha icing :) and a look of “what mom???l” I was panicked for a moment as I looked at the cake my mom had made with a elliptical area missing icing … icing now on Splat’s happy face I thought my mother would be mad! Instead, she looked at me as she walked over to a bowl with extra mocha icing and said “darling, I have more icing. We will just put more icing over it. No one will know” and she proceeded to cover up the spot on the cake where Splat’s face and tongue had enjoyed my mom’s cake with pure delight And we never told the guests :)
Well Papa … today on the 57th anniversary of the day you transitioned into a form I could no longer touch or see … and a form you have taught me to learn to listen and feel and sense you in a ways much, much deeper and beyond this earthly existence … I feel you .. I “see” you. I sense you. And today, may you, Mama and Splat enjoy mocha cake ❤️❤️❤️
[Note: I named my first dog Splat because at that time I was playing a lot of competitive racquetball and my favorite racquet ball shot was Splat ... Splat was a beautiful little black cocker spaniel]
