realize how amazing of a father and friend you have been to me over the years, and have always given me a perfect example of how a man and a husband is to treat a woman and his wife. my gosh. i m thinking my god is this the last thing i hear from my son, you know? and it s that. yes. saturday morning, more than 24 hours since they d had any communication from their son. by 8:30, we still hadn t heard anything, and still woke up to more, even more horrible images, and then even had time to think about the death toll. the death toll. and all that. it was just compounding and compounding and compounding. and then? about the moment all seemed lost? another e-mail arrived, not from zach. it was from kenji, that volunteer mentor in japan, just a few words. and they meant everything. brandon-san survived.
brandon-san survived. basically that was all it said. what was that like? of course we wanted more detail. it was relief. zach was alive, all they needed to know for now, but georgia? still no word. well, his parents worried about him at home, zach was riding out the chaos in kuji. i wasn t really sure what was going on at first. after the shaking stopped, zach and his co-workers moved up to the top floor of the kuji city hall, a sort of crow s nest, with a view of the whole city and the coastline. so if something is going to happen, this is where you d see it. yes. and then he saw it, something about the rivers that split the city and normally flow out to the sea. the river was beginning to flow in the opposite direction. the water began to change color