Sponsor-a-day

Today, Friday, June 13, 2025 is the 17th arrival anniversary of the Cle Elum Seven: Jamie, Missy, Annie, Burrito, Foxie, Jody, and Negra. They arrived at Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest on Friday, June 13, 2008.

That day in 2008 was the birth of their new lives, and we made the decision to celebrate Negra’s birthday from that day forward on June 13th. She was the eldest and we felt she needed a new beginning more than any other.

And now we also have Terry at our sanctuary, whose true date of birth is June 13th!

It’s a whole lot to celebrate, and the symbolism of the day is even more salient with the recent arrival of George.

It’s also a significant day, for a different reason, for Michail and Marya. Michail’s is the first of several sponsor-a-days that we will be sharing on this special day.

Some of you reading this will likely recognize the name Marya. She was a loyal follower and frequent commenter on this blog. Marya passed at the end of last year.

Marya was endlessly curious about the behavior of the chimpanzees and their personalities, and took obvious delight in learning more about them, asking questions on the blog, emailing me with supportive words, and sending donations whenever she could. I know Marya would be THRILLED to know that she helped get George to CSNW through her donations.

There’s so much about her that I didn’t know when she was alive, and I was glad to find out about through her husband, Michail, after she passed.

Below is his sponsor-a-day letter in memory of Marya, telling a bit of their story and their celebrations of Friday the 13ths.

You can scroll down to the end to read Michail’s summary message, which I placed in bold font, but you’ll probably want to go back to read his touching words about the love of his life. I imagine Marya might be embarrassed about this attention focused on her on the blog, I’m very glad we can recognize her in this way on a special Friday the 13th.

Jamie would approve, I just know it.

It is with great pleasure to have the opportunity to describe my first memory of being made aware of Chimpanzee Sanctuary Northwest by my Dearly Beloved, Marya Mendelson Barey. She was getting treatment infusions in a hospital bed, and that delightful memory was the playful sounds of chimps coming out of her iPhone video, that she had discovered and was watching, commingled with her uncontrollable giggling. It was the early days in our COVID-19 quarantine in a daunting stage 3 drug trial that lasted thirty-four 10-day cycles 4 weeks apart at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. And that joyful memory, for me, marked the beginning of a new love (for all things chimpanzees love) that immediately sustained a greater quickening level of compassion in Marya and I also am certain that by virtually hanging out with and financially supporting her chimps have added precious living years to her real life, not counting her relentless, medically challenging schedule.

When I asked to sponsor this special Friday the Thirteenth, it was to commemorate the 98^th anniversary of that first Friday the Thirteenth in October 1967.  That was a magical day. We were classmates who spent time together on a field trip in St. Petersburg in her first year at Florida Presbyterian College. I knew we were falling into love by sunset of that first day of our forever life together. She was 17 years old, and I was 19. It took us 6 months on Good Friday April 12, 1968, until our first kiss, standing on the seawall of our beach front campus, where we had walked so that I could share the news that my granddaddy had just died, where we found ourselves with tears streaming down both our cheeks, kissing. When we were married on the last day of January in 1970 and moved off campus, I was 21 and Marya was 19. The short story is I have a list of all those 98 celebrations of Friday the Thirteenths, including today which happens to be the only 13^th Friday in 2025.

After our 14.5 year honeymoon when we didn’t even have a fight or even spend a night apart, at one point we found our separate paths in schools, where she got a PhD in Psychology at the University of Missouri in Columbia, while I became a Licensed Unity Teacher at Unity School of Christianity in Unity Village (near Kansas City). Skip 56 years ahead to 2023 which was how long it took for that momentous 1967 calendar to be identical. We chose to renew our wedding vows on Friday the Thirteenth in October, 2023. And by then I’d gotten to hear about Jamie and her fashion statements. Marya even sent her a scarf, and it was an awesome moment when Marya saw Jamie wearing it on a video, not that Jamie was her favorite, but the scarf was not all that brought her to tears. There’s Burrito who had a near death experience taking a snakebite to guard his group, or the chimp who had spent decades in a laboratory and, when given a chance, she went straight up to top of a tree like she’d been doing it every day.

I saw that brief video where the chimps were gathered saying their goodbyes to Jody and was brought to tears when the one elder, who I call Grandmother Shaman, stretched out her arm and scooped up to heaven the spirit of one who was, as Marya said, “Called Back”) and all the countless chimps’ names who were written on the back of the inside of Marya’s heart, who touched her heart truly and deeply (as other human way showers: Hildegard of Bingen, Mother Teresa, Matthew Fox, Richard Rohr, David Whyte, Robert Bly, Mirabai Starr), that she kept prayer vigil with in silent unity, in that fierce and tender love that inhabits the soul, to hold safe and protect from harm, centered, from the heart of compassion for all sentient beings.

At this point, I can hear Marya, as she has so many times over the 5 decades we’ve been swapping stories, saying something gentle like: “That’s enough context already, you’d best be getting to your point.” Mostly always, I’d keep going for a bit, knowing it was risky because my “chipmonk” ways might take a wrong turn and I’d drive a Hertz truck dead-end into a cornfield (like when we were on the Blue Ridge Parkway moving to Princeton Theological Seminary), but not wanting her to lose patience, I will pick up the pace (especially since I am writing) before I hear the final stern suggestion, “Just spit it out, I already know what you’re going to say.” Truth be told, today is not about the miracle journey, daily now moment to moment walk with my left foot named gratitude and my right step called answered prayer (that’d be a chapter book anyway), it’s really all about Jamie’s group and synchronicity.

We made it to Fred Hutch Cancer Care fifth floor on time for blood and platelets infusions the morning of December 10, 2024. Marya’s blood pressure dropped while already holding hands with her nurses she trusted the most before the emergency response team came, and she took the first ambulance ride of her life to UW Medical Center, got a room for the night which we all agreed she might not make it through, but we had a six hour bubble, after the machines were turned off, when we were able to say everything we needed to say that was on our hearts and then some.

Two things: We knew this was a 13^th Friday month, and she said, “You have to call Diana at the Sanctuary.”

And the next day, she waited for me, conscious, peaceful, radiant, and when I arrived to say, “I’m here. I love you. Never in my whole life have I seen you so beautiful,” she couldn’t see or speak, but she gave me a smirk, that meant she let me have the last word. You see, Marya’s courage was a great soul of forgiveness and grace, when it came down to letting go, such a one who laid her body down four or five breaths after that last word, beautiful, that she left me, quietly at 6:44p, with my heart full of a joy unspeakable, eventually, in a month or so, a turtle named sorrow waltzed in to inhabit my heart also, and a comfortable time after that, a loneliness, I’d never known the likes of before in my whole life, evolved into a peaceful solitary freedom.

Skip to New Year’s Day morning when Diana returned my call on her day off. It was a long call because she had only seen Marya once on a zoom and she had no idea (and wanted to hear about it all) that Marya was an ovarian cancer survivor since 2003, that chemo knocked out the second recurrence that had reached stage four in 2017, or that it was MDS a blood cancer that slowly turned into leukemia when the drug trial ended.

Near the end of our call, I was describing the significance of Friday the Thirteenths, she paused the call, came back and said, “Just wanted to make sure I was right, and that the arrival of Jamie’s group at the Sanctuary was Friday, June 13, 2008. We’ve had one 6^th Anniversary in 2014, and we’re planning a 17th Anniversary this year in June.”

Of course, Marya never mentioned our lifelong 13^th Friday celebrations to Diana, but Marya would’ve dearly loved to have known this serendipity of Jamie’s group intake. So today it has been a distinct honor to share in Marya’s Chimpanzee Sanctuary Legacy, to connect some of the dots for you to know why I just had to request to sponsor this special day, on so many levels.

What this day is all about, for Marya and me, is how we never know how connected or related we are as a family, beyond our births and our deaths, or another way to say it, that we may mostly always know who touches our heart, but we will usually never know how many hearts our one heart has touched, or the difference we make to everyone who’s path coincides with our own in the living years.