Dr. Jacquelin Perry, a physician and researcher who shed light on the complexities of walking, and was a leader in treating polio victims in the 1950s and again in the 1980s when the symptoms of some returned, died on March 11 at her home in Downey, Calif. She was 94.
Click here to read the NY Times Obit.
Virginia Tanji sent us this a couple of months back and she and her husband, Andy, graciously allowed us to publish it.
My brother-in-law Ed, the youngest of four brothers, passed
away in home hospice care in early September and we were there. He was cadaverous when we arrived, but
amazingly lucid. He would sit up for
about an hour at a time three to four times a day working on his columns,
reading, checking email, etc. We arrived on Labor Day, but by the weekend he
was considerably weaker...he was taking very little by mouth...his wife, an
amazing woman and a retired nurse, administered drugs from the hospice
"comfort care" box. It was a
privilege to be there to see the loving care that he got from his wife, son,
and two daughters. Another brother and his wife also came. Andy and I ran the kitchen...Andy cooked, I
helped with the shopping, menu planning, and was one of the willing scullery maids.
Edwin had throat cancer, and even with treatment it continued to metastasize.
He left letters for his seven grandchildren, instructions for his services, and a couple of final columns. He was a retired journalist and was beloved by the Maui community he covered so well.
It was quite a beautiful experience, and I told his wife that it was really a privilege to be allowed to stay and be there for his final days on this earth.
I thought you might enjoy the last Haku Mo'olelo column he wrote for the Maui News.*
Author: Virginia Tanji has been a membver of Cell 2 Soul for eons. You can reach her at V. Tanji.
*The link to the Maui News column gives you access to Edwin Tanji's final "Haku Mo'olelo" column. It is the parting words of a writer contemplating his own death. Ed Tanji was a former city editor of The Maui News. "Haku Mo'olelo," "writing stories," is about stories that are being written or have been written. Ron Youngblood, Ed's colleague at the Maui News, wrote this moving obituary. Lucky too live and maki on Maui!
We all have friends for whom where they or their kids went to college is the gold standard of success. Harvard, Princeton, Williams, Stanford. WTF!
In Elegy in a Country
Churchyard, Thomas Gray counters with:
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.
In last week's NY Times there was a moving obituary. "Larry Selman weighed three pounds when he was born on April
2, 1942, and was not expected to survive the day. He rallied, though, grew to
become a friendly, husky boy and attended public school until he was about 16,
when a teacher explained to him that he would probably never earn a high school
diploma because, by all measures, Larry was — in the parlance of the 1950s —
mentally retarded...."
[Mr. Selman led} an eventful and in some ways remarkable life, filled with the daily struggles of a man whose I.Q. was said to be 62 but who was determined to live independently. He managed to achieve his goal, in a sense, by taking responsibility for other people: those more vulnerable than himself.
This moving obituary is a source of inspiration and enlightenment. You may be moved to see the 2002 documentary about him, “The Collector of Bedford Street” (trailor).
Here are some excerpts from a fascinating obituary of an important man that appeared in the NY Times on January 6, 2013..
"Alexander Leaf, a versatile physician and research scientist who was an early advocate of diet and exercise to prevent heart disease, and who traveled the world to make important discoveries about increasing human longevity and to help scientifically establish the dangers global warming poses to the human species, died on Dec. 24 in Boston. He was 92.
He was born in Japan in 1920 to parents fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution and went on to become chief of medical services at Massachusetts General from 1966 to 1981 where he established one of the first programs in the country for primary-care medical residents and set up a network of free clinics in poor neighborhoods around Boston.
Leaf was a founding member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, which was formed in 1961 to oppose nuclear proliferation and later added environmental and social problems to its portfolio. He led Harvard’s department of preventive medicine from 1981 to 1990.
There was a moving obituary in the NY Times about Louis Simpson, a Pulitzer
Prize-winning poet who told characteristically American tales of common people
and often cast a skeptical eye on the American dream.
Simpson was born in Jamaica of a Russian-Jewish mother and an aristocratic white father who hid is African ancestry. He moved to New York as a teenager and left Columbia College, as so many other young med did, to serve in World War II. His life storyy is tailor made for a spell-binding book.
I had never heard of him. My loss. You can access his obit here.
Written in the early 1960s. his cynical poem “In the Suburbs” seems apt for today.
You were born to waste your life.
You were born to this middleclass life
As others before you
Were born to walk in procession
To the temple, singing.
The work Dr. Breslow will be most remembered for is the Alameda County California study that [is purported to have] rocked the public health world, because it proved with numbers that behavior indisputably affects longevity. Its seven recommendations are: do not smoke; drink in moderation; sleep seven to eight hours; exercise at least moderately; eat regular meals; maintain a moderate weight; eat breakfast. Full "Lester Breslow Obituary."
Strangely, this is very similar to what William Osler espoused in the 19th century: "‘the desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals... Of one thing I [am certain] that that a little more exercise, a little less food, and a little less tobacco and alcohol, may possibly meet the indications of the case."
Of course, our grandmothers told us the same thing. Yet, it took men of of science many years to corroborate their proscriptions.
For more information see this article about The Alameda 7.
Al Ross, whose droll cartoons featuring married couples, bar habitués, anthropomorphic animals, philosophizing prisoners, art and publishing world denizens, anachronistic mythological figures and loyal Mets fans appeared in The New Yorker for more than 60 years, died on Thursday in the Bronx. He was 100.
Link to Full Obit
Frisner Augustin, a Haitian vodou master drummer whose deep knowledge of traditional rhythms and leadership of the Brooklyn-based Troupe Makandal made him a major force in preserving and popularizing his Afro-Haitian heritage, died on Feb. 28 in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He was 63. NY Times Obit.
Eve Arnold who fell in love with photography after a boyfriend gave her a camera and came to be regarded as a grande dame of postwar photojournalism for her bold, revealing images of subjects as diverse as Marilyn Monroe and migratory potato pickers, died on Wednesday, January 4, 2012 in London. She was 99.
Born, Eve Cohen in Philadelphia on April 21, 1912, she was one of nine children of immigrants from Ukraine. Her father was a rabbi. At 28, she abandoned ambitions of becoming a doctor to move to New York because “That’s where the boys are,” she said.
NY Times Obit NY Times Multi-Media
At a brothel in Havana, circa 1954
