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Yolanda Marin Hartnett
July 7th 1928 - June 7th 2020
“You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. They are spent in institutions – nursing homes and intensive care units – where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life. Our reluctance to honestly examine the experience of aging and dying has increased the harm we inflict on people and denied them the basic comforts they most need. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to their very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by the imperatives of medicine, technology, and strangers.”
Being Mortal – Atul Gawande
Hay mujeres que luchan un día y son buenas. Hay otras que luchan un ano y son mejores. Hay quienes luchan muchos anos y son muy buenas. Pero hay las que luchan toda la vida, ellas son las imprescindibles.
Bertolt Brecht’s Hay Hombres
ON DEATH by Henry David Thoreau
How plain, that death is only the phenomenon of the individual or class. Nature does not recognize it, She finds her own again under new forms without loss. Yet death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident--It is as common as life. Men die in Tartary--in Ethiopia--in England--in Wisconsin. And after all what portion of this so serene and living nature can be said to be alive? Do this year’s grasses and foliage outnumber all the past?
Every blade in the field--every leaf in the forest--lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up. It is the pastime of a full quarter of the year. Dead trees—sere leaves—dried grass and herbs—are not these a good part of our life? And what is that pride of our autumnal scenery but the hectic flush—the sallow and cadaverous countenance of vegetation—its painted throes—with the November air for canvas—
When we look over the fields, we are not saddened because these particular flower or grasses will wither—for the law of their death is the law of new life. Will not the land be in good heart because the to bloom, and wither, and give place to a new.
So it is with the human plant. We are partial and selfish when we lament the death of the individual, unless our plaint be a paean to the departed soul, and we sigh as the wind sighs over the fields, which no shrub interprets into its private grief.
One might as well go into mourning for every sere leaf—but the more innocent and wiser soul will snuff a fragrance in the gales of autumn, and congratulate Nature upon her health.
After I have imagined thus much will not the Gods feel under obligation to make me realize something as good?
“Some shred of her still remains-a fragment of the women who is my mother. Yet what remains after memory has been mercilessly stripped away? What remains after the insidious disease called Alzheimer’s has done its work- like a cat burglar slipping inside the brain, cutting the wire, and setting to its silent task of robbing the house of its contents?”
BETSY MCCULLY COOPER on Her Mother, Eloise Simmons McCully (1918-1995)
DON’T GRIEVE
Rumi
Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open.
Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep
and changes shape. You might say, “Last night
I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,
a field of grapevines.” Then the phantasm goes away.
You’re back in the room.
I don’t want to make anyone fearful.
Hear what’s behind what I say.
Ta dum dum, taa dum, ta ta dum.
There’s the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I’m only talking about them,
as a town in the desert looks up
at stars on a clear night.
AFTER GREAT PAIN, A FORMAL FEELING COMES
By
Emily Dickinson
(1830-1886)
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
A Wooden way,
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—