Cell 2 Soul: The Humane Health Care Blog

Snaphots

Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,     
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;   
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile     
The short and simple annals of the poor.   
                                                                   Thomas Gray

In a year's end section, The NY Times has collected  over 260 pictures with short blurbs honoring common people who died in 2011.  It is hauntingly touching.  We can each think of someone to add.  If any of you are moved to do so, send a photo and a vignette to C2S.  Better yet, why not also honor living common people who do uncommon things?  We encounter them every day.

See: The Lives They Lived

Dorothy Loney
My mother passed away on August 21st. She had only a short few years to her enjoy her only grandchild, Madeleine. The picture captures the one walk they ever took together.
Submitted by Matthew Loney

On Being the Kaddish

"The Kaddish is a prayer that is recited at every Jewish service to honor the memory of those who died. I was curious about what it would mean to 'Be the Kaddish.' I wondered: How does a person become a prayer?"

This short essay is Rabbi Hannah Orden reflections on Death and Mourning.  All of us will gain valued insight.  Download Memory is a Blessing

Rabbi Hannah Orden is the spiritual leader of Temple B’Nai Israel in Laconia, New Hampshire.  You may learn more about her from her website.

The Good Death: What Matters?

by Sue Mayfield Geiger

“If I could give one night back to you,” she asked, “which one would it be?”
“Are you my wife?” he replied.
“Yes,” she stated. “I'm Louise.”
“Then it would have to be that night in 1938 when I was stationed at Ft. Crockett in Galveston. The night at Mennard Park where we had all those dances."

For full story: Download TheGoodDeath

Bio:Sue Mayfield Geiger writes and edits for regional and national publications, and lives on the Texas Gulf Coast. Her first book of prose and verse (with photos) is now available. www.gibbonsstreet.com.  You can email comments to her at:  SMG

A Grisly Narrative of Love

"Nobody asks [us] dragon parents for advice; we’re too scary. Our grief is primal and unwieldy and embarrassing. The certainties that most parents face are irrelevant to us, and frankly, kind of silly. Our narratives are grisly, the stakes impossibly high."  So writes, Emily Rapp in an Opinion piece about her child with Tay-Sacks disease.

Wilh all the fanfare about Tiger Moms -- Ms. Rapp's essay is an important glimpse of reality, far from the ivied halls of the Academe.

See Notes from a Dragon Mom.

Two Death Poems and Three Death Haiki

Death Has A Sound
By Marla Lukofsky

Death is the deepest of silence.
It's a quiet unlike any other.
Do you hear that?
Be still and listen.
There it is.
A quiet unlike any other.

See "The Hospice Flute."

GENTLY INTO THE NIGHT
By Sue Mayfield Geiger

I watch carefully as the hospice team changes his hospital gown and rolls him over.

The I.V., catheter, and oxygen are removed. Deep breaths heave in and out of his body.

I stroke his forehead and thank him for being a wonderful father.  I go home.

The phone rings early the next morning, and I know.

 

Comment:  Writing death haiku was a tradition in Japan.  The three greatest haiki poets, Basho, Buson and Issa's Death Poems follow.

Basho
    Sick on a journey,
my dreams wander
    the withered fields.

Buson
    Winter warbler --
Long ago in Wang Wei's
    Hedge also.

Issa
    A bath when you're born.
A bath when you die.
    How stupid.

Death Music: Our Sweetest Songs

Waking or asleep,     
Thou of death must deem     
Things more true and deep     
Than we mortals dream,     
Or how could thy notes flow in such a crystal stream?     
 
We look before and after,     
And pine for what is not:     
Our sincerest laughter     
With some pain is fraught;     
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

            Percy Bysshe Shelley.  To a Skylark.  Poets knew it.

On May 24, 2011,  we posted an article, The Hospice Flute, about Elaine Whitman who plays the ancient Indian flute for dying hospice patients.

This week, a similar article appeared in the NY Times. Relaxing, Touching the Memory, Music Helps With the Final Transition supplements Ms. Whitman's post. One wonders for how many millennia music has been a balm to the dying.  In Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams we see a flute fashioned from a bird's thigh bone that dates back 32,000 years.  The language of music has been with us far longer than any language now spoken on this blue dot.

Marginal Notes: A still small voice

 
Pink Lady's Slipper ©2011 by Brian T. Maurer

I listen to the recent spate of voice mail messages on the home answering machine, methodically deleting all but two:  the one from Eleanor informing my wife that her open heart surgery would be postponed, and the other from Eleanor’s niece the morning after Eleanor’s surgery.  I tap the play button and listen to both voices again, one right after the other, even though a week has elapsed between the two.  more»

 

Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatrics as a Physician Assistant for thirty years.  His "Marginal Notes" column appears periodically in the Cell2Soul Blog. The title "Marginal Notes" is taken from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "I love a broad margin to my life."

The Hospice Flute

by Elaine Whitman

"The sign in the Salt Lake City Public Library read "Make Your Own Native American Flute: One-Week Class by Master Flute-Maker Bill Hughes." I was intrigued. I had been playing the NAF for six years, and loved the easy free-form improvisation of the instrument; so different from the classical silver flute I had studied so seriously when I was in my teens. I registered for the class"... Read on: Download NAF

You can contact Ms. Whitman at EW Email.

Listen to Ms. Whitman's NAF: Download DecemberSnow

Author Bio:  Elaine Whitman started to play the classical flute when she was nine years old and studied with virtuoso Julius Baker when she was in high school. When she got to Boston University, Elaine took a new direction in life that led to becoming a professional educator –– first as an elementary school teacher and then as a consultant to business and industry. This was followed by using her talents as as writer and speaker in the field of domestic violence awareness. She began playing the Native American Flute in 1998. In her so-called retirement years, she expresses herself creatively with music and photography. She brings her music into hospice and poetry recitals with her husband, Neal, who took up poetry in his retirement. Together they create haiga – her photographs combined with his haiku poems. Elaine and Neal met getting their Doctor of Education degrees at Columbia University's Teachers College and, on May 20, 2011, celebrated their 33rd wedding anniversary.

Marginal Notes: Night Landing

 
Sunset Flight © by Barry H. Penchansky, M.D.

Night Landing

Above her toes, from where she lay
Reclining at bed’s edge,
She glimpsed a light pass through the night
Above the window ledge.

The plane began its last approach,
A beacon locked it in—
The landing gear would next descend
And brace against the wind.

Blue lights would then come rushing up—
The runway in the night
Would suddenly materialize
Within the captain’s sight.

The plane would drop down at the last,
Wheels screech against the earth;
Air brakes up, flaps hold fast,
Into its final berth.

She wondered how the end would come—
She prayed she would take flight
As wheels against the tarmac run:
A knock, a lurch—then light.

Copyright 2011 © by Brian T. Maurer

 

Brian T. Maurer has practiced pediatrics as a Physician Assistant for thirty years.  His "Marginal Notes" column appears periodically in the Cell2Soul Blog. The title "Marginal Notes" is taken from a quote by Henry David Thoreau: "I love a broad margin to my life."

To a Twelve Year Old Killed Riding His Bike

Unlike the 16 year old the paramedics had fished
out of a stream earlier that year, drunk -
the town wise guy it seems -
his face stove in, geography awry...

Unlike the 10 year old face
raining blood from every spout
'til red life life overflowed
and rained no more ...

Unlike all the other hit-and-runs,
you looked peacefully dead
the reason unknown -
the secret your body's,
and the car's.

No tell-tale limbs askew
No obvious rent
a clue to vehicular damage.

It wasn't until the surgeon tried to look into your ear
and your head slid off
that we knew the source of hurt.

Your linchpin -
The driver had sheared off your linchpin.
As in chariot fights in days of old -
a heroic scene from the Iliad, perhaps -
your combatant had unfairly undone your axis,
letting your life suddenly wheel off,
the centrifugal spin of a broken neck.


Richard M. Ratzan
January 16, 2011

PDF version:  Download To a Twelve Year Old