Legacy MattersOne of my favorite writers, Theodore Darlrymple writes on The Pains of Memory
Most of my mother's suffering was unknown to me. Of course, there were people who suffered much worse than she: she never saw the inside of a concentration or extermination camp, for example. But yet, never to have seen her parents again, to have emigrated, friendless and penniless, to another country at the age of 17, and to have lost her fiancé killed in a war: that is enough for any human being.
She dealt with it by silence. When the Mayor of Berlin invited her back to Berlin towards the end of her life, she accepted, much to my surprise; and she pored over a map of the city, pointing out to me were she lived and where she went to school. When she got there, the streets were there, but she recognised nothing; bombs had razed everything to the ground.
I offered to go with her, but she went on her own. It is an unfashionable truth in these times of psychobabble and emotional intelligence, but a trouble shared is often a trouble doubled. She wanted all that she had seen, and all that she suffered, to go with her to the grave, for she was of the pessimistic view that man never learns, at least from the experience of others. I do not entirely agree, and wish she had said more; but she had earned the right to silence.
I've written Legacy Matters for several years now and I've never seen so many encomiums following a death of a great figure as I have read following the death of William F. Buckley.
The New York Times obituary by Douglas Martin, Sesquipedalian Spark of Right, tells the story of his remarkable life and achievements.
Mr. Buckley’s greatest achievement was making conservatism — not just electoral Republicanism but conservatism as a system of ideas — respectable in liberal post-World War II America. He mobilized the young enthusiasts who helped nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964 and saw his dreams fulfilled when Reagan and the Bushes captured the Oval Office.
President George W. Bush said Wednesday that Mr. Buckley “brought conservative thought into the political mainstream, and helped lay the intellectual foundation for America’s victory in the Cold War.”
In remarks at National Review’s 30th anniversary in 1985, President Reagan
You didn’t just part the Red Sea — you rolled it back, dried it up and left exposed, for all the world to see, the naked desert that is statism,” Mr. Reagan said.
“And then, as if that weren’t enough,” the president continued, “you gave the world something different, something in its weariness it desperately needed, the sound of laughter and the sight of the rich, green uplands of freedom.”
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“All great biblical stories begin with Genesis,” George Will wrote in National Review in 1980. “And before there was Ronald Reagan, there was Barry Goldwater, and before there was Barry Goldwater there was National Review, and before there was National Review there was Bill Buckley with a spark in his mind, and the spark in 1980 has become a conflagration.”
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At the age of 50, Mr. Buckley crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his sailboat and became a novelist. Eleven of his novels are spy tales starring Blackford Oakes, who fights for the American way and beds the Queen of England in the first book.
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Mr. Buckley’s spirit of fun was apparent in his 1965 campaign for mayor of New York on the ticket of the Conservative Party. When asked what he would do if he won, he answered, “Demand a recount.” He got 13.4 percent of the vote.
John Tierney on A Giant of Conservatism
Simply Superlative by George Nash focuses on his enormous productivity.
During his nearly 60 years in the public eye, William F. Buckley Jr. published 55 books (both fiction and nonfiction); dozens of book reviews; at least 56 introductions, prefaces, and forewords to other peoples’ books; more than 225 obituary essays; more than 800 editorials, articles, and remarks in National Review; several hundred articles in periodicals other than National Review; and approximately 5,600 newspaper columns. He gave hundreds of lectures around the world, hosted 1,429 separate Firing Line shows, and may well have composed more letters than any American who has ever lived.
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William F. Buckley Jr. was arguably the most important public intellectual in the United States in the past half century. For an entire generation he was the preeminent voice of American conservatism and its first great ecumenical figure. He changed minds, he changed lives, and he helped to change the direction of American politics.
But it is the personal memories that are the most telling of his incredible generosity of spirit. Nyron Magnet writes The Unbought Grace of Life
his whole being provided an answer to that ultimate question, How then should we live?
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I saw his character become ever more clearly the unmistakable, irreplaceable Buckley: witty, cultivated, playful, urbane, gracious, brave, zestful, life-affirming, tireless, and gallant—the incarnation of grace. He taught many not only how to think but also how to be.
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He did all this with singular flair and joie de vivre. Moreover, he did it with a welcoming spirit which earned the gratitude of those whose lives he touched.
While at college, David Brooks wrote a smart-aleck parody of WFB's book Overdrive and when Buckley came to the University of Chicago to deliver a lecture, he said
“David Brooks, if you’re in the audience, I’d like to offer you a job.”
That was the big break of my professional life.
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Buckley’s greatest talent was friendship. The historian George Nash once postulated that he wrote more personal letters than any other American, and that is entirely believable. He showered affection on his friends, and he had an endless stream of them, old and young.
Peggy Noonan writes May We Not Lose His Kind.
Buckley was a one-man refutation of Hollywood's idea of a conservative.... Bill Buckley's persona, as the first famous conservative of the modern media age, said no to all that. Conservatives are brilliant, capacious, full of delight at the world and full of mischief, too. That's what he was. He upended old clichés.
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With the loss of Bill Buckley we are, as a nation, losing not only a great man. When Jackie Onassis died, a friend of mine who knew her called me and said, with such woe, "Oh, we are losing her kind." He meant the elegant, the cultivated, the refined. I thought of this with Bill's passing, that we are losing his kind--people who were deeply, broadly educated in great universities when they taught deeply and broadly, who held deep views of life and the world and art and all the things that make life more delicious and more meaningful.
Larry Perelman, American born son of Russian Jewish refugees when 18 wrote to Buckley to thank him for emboldening Soviet Jews to come to this great nation and asked for the opportunity to express his gratitude by playing for him. Fourteen years later, he had The Last Supper with WFB on the last night of his life
it was just like any other Buckley dinner — i.e., it started with cocktails and ended with cognac.
He knew well that he was the most important person in my life after the two people who had actually given me life. I will cherish hundreds of memories of his boundless acts of generosity, which changed my life forever.
Christina Galbraith, daughter of Evan Galbraith, WFB's best friend, writes in Ember
He was a truly kind man, genuinely caring to anyone in his company. His kindness was not for show. It was discreet. He drove an hour every Sunday to take his house staff to Mass in Spanish; he opened his home to practicing musicians and supported innumerable young scholars.
Ed Capano, former publisher of the National Review, tells of his perfect charity
He practiced what I consider perfect charity: doing things for others that no one knew about. The Vietnam vet blinded in action who wrote to Bill asking if NR came out in Braille. NR didn't so Bill did the next best thing, he helped the vet get some of his eyesight restored by flying him to N.Y. and having a personal friend who happened to be one of the best ophthalmologists in N.Y. examine him and then successfully operate on him. Oh, and the vet married the nurse who took care of him. Or the time at a cover conference when I told him that a house I liked just came on the market and he asked me if I was going to buy it. I sheepishly told him that I couldn't afford the down payment. A few days later his secretary brought me a personal check from Bill for the down payment with a promissory note to pay him back whenever.
"The Sacred Elixir of Life" and Facing Death
Bill was philosophical — or better, religious — about death. His gleaming eyes, when I last saw him, seemed, at times, to look beyond you; it reminded me of what Robert E. Lee said of his own gaze in his last years: “My interest in Time and its concerns is daily fading away, and I am trying to keep my eyes and thoughts fixed on those eternal shores to which I am fast hastening.” Bill knew that he, too, was hastening towards those shores, as, of course, are we all. Not for him the megalomaniac egotism of Stalin, preposterously trying to bargain with the creator he had denied. Bill thought deeply about death; how else could he have achieved such a surpassing mastery of the obituary notice, that form which, in his hands, was not only a minor art, but also a means of understanding the value of life, even though it is lived in the shadow of death?
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Bill taught us much about what Auchincloss called “the sacred elixir of life.” In the last lines of his elegy of his wife, he taught us, too, something about how to die. He spoke then of the condolence he received from “a confirmed nonbeliever,” who for once would have liked to be mistaken, and hoped that, “for you, this is not goodbye, but hasta luego.” Bill said: “No alternative thought would make continuing in life, for me, tolerable.”
Charlie Rose's moving appreciation of William Buckley who talks about growing older and facing death.
A longer Rose tribute here where he realizes, "There is not always a tomorrow."
Andrew Malcolm at the LA Times gives us a private memory of WFB
And, Buckley recounted, instead of the outside scenery, he ended up that night in the dark cockpit watching instead his dying friend in admiration, still excited, still himself, exulting at the world's beauty as he came down slowly for a landing at the end of a long trip.
Then, Buckley looked at me and took a sip of his drink. "I hope at the end," he said, "I come in for my last landing the same way."
And so he did, after a last supper that started with cocktails and ended with cognac, he went to his desk to write and there he was found the next morning, that great generous spirit gone.
So spoke Pope Benedict XVI when he received participants at an international congress entitled: "Close by the Incurable Sick Person and the Dying: Scientific and Ethical Aspects."
In keeping with the teaching of the Church for centuries, the Pope Strongly Condemned all Forms of Euthanasia.
Death", said the Pope, "concludes the experience of earthly life, but through death there opens for each of us, beyond time, the full and definitive life. ... For the community of believers, this encounter between the dying person and the Source of Life and Love represents a gift that has a universal value, that enriches the communion of the faithful". In this context, he highlighted how all the community should participate alongside close relatives in the last moments of a person's life. "No believer", he said, "should die alone and abandoned".
The Holy Father called for time off so that relatives could care for the terminally ill.
"A greater respect for individual human life inevitably comes through the concrete solidarity of each and all, and constitutes one of the most pressing challenges of our times".
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"The synergetic efforts of civil society and of the community of believers must ensure not only that everyone is able to live in a dignified and responsible way, but also that they can face moments of trial and of death in the finest condition of fraternity and solidarity, even where death comes in a poor family or a hospital bed".
Does the promise of eternal life deny the reality of death and help us escape from grief? Is faith an evasion, a psycho-social narcotic developed to avoid the pain of loss?
The Tears of Abraham by R.R. Reno in First Things .
If we turn to the Bible, then we will be surprised to discover that, in the primal history of humanity, death seems to evoke no strong emotional responses.
But something odd happens. With Abraham comes the promise: land, prosperity, and the immortality of countless descendants. ...for the very first time in the Bible, we find a scene of mourning. Abraham enters her tent and weeps over his dead wife (Gen. 23:2).
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Thus the psychological paradox of faith: a belief in God’s promises heightens rather than softens the existential pain of death.
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Faith blocks this easy deliverance from the afflictions of loss. But with hope comes more than heightened affliction; it also stiffens our resistance to the power of death. Abraham does not weep forever. The pain of loss has brought him low, but he “rose up from before his dead” (23:3). Stricken by the power of death—what could be more powerful we often wonder?—he straightens and prepares himself for action. He goes to the local chieftains. He wants a burial place for Sarah, a place to put her “out of my sight” (23:4)
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“Out of my sight!” It is a shocking thing to say about the body of a loved one, but it is a sentiment repeated in the Bible. Jesus chastises one who would follow him but wishes to delay on order to bury his father. “Let the dead bury their dead,” he says (Matt. 8:22, KJV). The principle is not general, as if Christ came to abolish the law (both natural and revealed) that compels children to mourn for, bury, and remember their parents. Rather, like Abraham who rises from his distress, those who follow Christ must recognize that even as death continues to crush life, it cannot control the future. “O death, where is thy victory?” asks St. Paul with haughty confidence in the power of life. “O death, where is thy sting?” (1 Cor. 15:55).
As of 7:45am this morning she is still breathing and pulsing but is passing peacefully.”
— Maia Lazar, her daughter on Cathy's blog.
Almost 600 comments and counting. If you read her and loved her writing as I did, please add your own
Sissy calls it a Blogospheric Irish Wake for a beloved free spirit and, stopped short by the news of Cathy's impending death, spent the day reading tributes "which were like a river at flood tide".
I wrote about her in The Upside of Cancer in 2005. The upside?
One is that you can put the fear of God into people with hardly any effort at all,
and The other advantage is people reveal themselves to you as they really are – it’s almost like a solution for invisible ink.
I met her only once at the Pajamas Media inaugural in NYC. She was small, thin, blond, with a glass of wine, greeting one blogger journalist after another with warm smiles and big hugs and still kind and welcoming to me, who didn't make the first cut, but was just another groovy blogger
Mary Madigan quotes from her Normblog profile
Norm: What would you call your autobiography?
Cathy: For many years as a journalist who spent a lot of time interviewing people, I imagined writing a book or column called What About ME and MY Feelings?!?. But now that I have a blog, that's handled.
Norm: What would be your most important piece of advice about life?
Cathy: I've always been a big believer in the importance of kicking your own ass. That is, forcing yourself to do what you don't necessarily feel like doing at the time.
She wore discount and offended fashion editors in the "bitch pits" on both coasts, called a young women a "girl" thereby shocking the panelists and audience at a Times Book Festival, thought that health insurance should be unbundled from employment so people could take responsibility for themselves as she herself did with the government providing only a safety net, pointed out that Mean Old Republicans Care, skewered the media for its self-important pompous moments, wondered why in California child molesters and sex offenders were a protected class , pricked the Hip Hypocrites who claim to support free speech unless they disagree with it, defended C.S. Lewis against those who called Narnia, sexist, racist and intolerant, all while battling lung cancer and she never smoked!
Life's not fair and she will be missed. The only comfort is the imminence of her arrival at the pearly gates will be heralded by the ululation by all the bloggers acutely conscious of her last moments on this side, her transitus, her passing over.
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Each of us would do well the cultivate an awareness of the death so as to do those necessary things to make the future lives of our children and easier and to live our lives more fully and gratefully. While we should do this, not enough of us do.
The people who do so on a regular basis are those men and women in our military service..
Here's what J.B. Smith wrote, A Soldier's Thoughts
I went to Iraq prepared to die. A former soldier called out of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), I was a supporter of the war and ready and willing to do my part. I got into decent physical shape, signed my medical waivers, and volunteered for the job of training Iraqi Troops and taking them into combat. I had no illusions as to the potential price I, or my wife and 2-year-old daughter might have to pay. I made my burial wishes known and wrote about 50 letters to my daughter, dated and spaced to guide her through the challenges which I knew would come in life. I made peace with the plausibility of my death, content in my knowledge that our mission was critical for the ultimate stability of the world and the best course available for American security.
When my daughter was 26, she would finally receive the letter explaining my attitudes towards the war and how I felt about my death. This is the phrase which I believe best captured it:
"In order to secure the American people, democracy had to be spread to the region because democratic governments are far less prone to going to war and they are far less prone to internal strife and violence. The process couldn't help but be messy, but it was necessary. Obviously, I don't know how this experiment works out, but you do. If Iraq is a democratic nation now, or if Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi, Kuwait, or one of the others has become democratic, then the war was worth it. However, if we pulled out because we lost too many soldiers and got out in an act of political expediency, then I did die in vain."
The time allotted to us is analogous to the shutter of a camera; it opens with our birth, allowing in the small amount of light we must work with before it closes and the universe vanishes. With that light we must enter our "dark room" and develop our conception of existence--what we are, why we are here, and what is our relationship to the whole. There are pneumagraphs laying around that others have left behind--scripture, books, images and institutions. Some of them were successful in capturing the Light, others only darkness visible." --
One Cosmos: Salvolution History
I was feeling so yucky after the last post, that I fell upon In a Holy Time like a long, cool drink after being in a desert.
Genelle Fadness has suffered 13 yeas with multiple myeloma, a progressive cancer of the blood, and is reaching the end.
So what's to laugh about?
Life, she said. "I live in the abundance of God's love, and this has been a long, rich journey."
Cancer "has made life and faith more immediate and vivid," she said.
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A sense of the sacred enriches her days: Living in the shadow of death, "you stand on holy ground," she said.
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"Life is rich no matter what "
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Even on her most vulnerable days, she prays, meditates, writes poetry and reaches out to others. She also has become a mentor to others facing cancer, helping them through the sorrow and anger that she says can cripple the understanding of their experience as profound, even holy.
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What matters is how we spend our time caring for one another.
When I was a young girl, I eagerly waited for the new Life magazine to come out when I could become entranced with the photographs, falling deep into their mystery.
Gordon Parks was one reason why. His death at 93 leaves behind a Great Legacy of photographs from around the world.
He helped me understand the spirit of the civil rights movement .
From the Washington Post obituary by Wil Haygood, "A Conscience with a Lens"
in 1942 he aimed his camera at a woman no one had heard of by the name of Ella Watson. She was a cleaning lady with a thin, haunted face. She was poor as nickels. Parks once said the photograph said as much as a picture of a cross burning.
From the NY Times obituary by Andy Grundberg, "A Master of the Camera."
Mr. Parks's years as a contributor to Life, the largest-circulation picture magazine of its day, lasted from 1948 to 1972, and it cemented his reputation as a humanitarian photojournalist and as an artist with an eye for elegance.
Elegant and cool, he took fashion images and portraits of the famous, wrote his memoirs and directed movies. Richard Roundtree, the star of "Shaft" said "There's no one cooler than Gordon Parks".
His obituary from the Associated Pres by Polly Anderson quotes some of his wisest words.
"I think most people can do a whole awful lot more if they just try," Parks told The Associated Press in 2000. "They just don't have the confidence that they can write a novel or they can write poetry or they can take pictures or paint or whatever, and so they don't do it, and they leave the planet dissatisfied with themselves."
Largely self-taught, Gordon Parks tried everything and we are the beneficiaries of his work.
When asked why he undertook so many professions, Parks told Black Enterprise "At first I wasn't sure that I had the talent, but I did know I had a fear of failure, and that fear compelled me to fight off anything that might abet it. I suffered evils, but without allowing them to rob me of the freedom to expand
He gave some 227 photographs to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. He donated the rest of his archives and memorabilia to the Library of Congress. "I wanted it all stored under one roof and a roof I could respect."
In 1998, when an exhibit of his work began traveling around the U.S. called Half Past Autumn, he told Phil Ponce from the NewsHour on PBS.
I feel at 85, I really feel that I'm just ready to start. There's another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it, and someone else will take it further on, you know. You discover it. Somebody else takes it on. But I do feel a little teeny right now that I'm just about ready to start, and winter is entering. Half past autumn has arrived.
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The unseen realm or how science is making room for near-death experiences beyond this world.
Jennifer Hammargren was told by doctors that she had only six months to live. As a patient facing death, much of the knowledge she acquired preparing to be a hospital administrator seemed less important than preparing spiritually for her future.
Given what she calls a "reprieve," Hammargren not only didn't die, but she uses what she learned through the process of preparing for her own death to help those who are in the last stages of life. As a local chaplain for VistaCare hospice services, she's watched thousands of people make the transition from life to death.
She sees a definable pattern of behavior in patients who are dying, much of it involving a "life review" that includes making amends with family and friends and a process called "faith questioning." As patients examine their religious beliefs, or the lack of, they come to define what "spiritual" means for them — whether specific beliefs or simply the love of nature or laughter. Hammargren believes those personality traits are part of each person's spirituality.
Once patients come to a deeper spiritual understanding, they often begin to "see" people in the room whom they don't know, sometimes children who "visit" and may not speak. Some describe people they are not related to but who they think they may have known when they were young, she said. Others describe relatives they don't know personally but have heard stories about. Still others describe visits by favorite pets.
Life changes fast.
Life changes in the instant.
You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.
"The Year of Magical Thinking" (Joan Didion)
No one writes with more clarity about the country of grief than Joan Didion.
On magical thinking.
I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome. In my case, this disordered thinking had been covert, noticed I think by no one else, hidden even from me, but it had also been, in retrospect, both urgent and constant.
How could he come back, she asks, if she gave away his organs, his shoes?
"Bring him back" had been through thoes months my hidden focus, a magic trick. By late summer I was beginning to see this clearly. "Seeing it clearly" did not yet allow me to give away the clothes he would need.
She explores attitudes towards grief, quoting first Philippe Aries who noted that about 1930 there was an revolution in accepted attitudes toward death. He wrote
Death, so omnipresent in the past that it was familiar, would be effaced, would disappear. It would become shameful and forbidden.
Then the English social anthropologist, Geoffrey Gorer who observed the contemporary trend "to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened."
Thankfully, Didion had Emily Post whose 1922 etiquette book
turned out to be as acute in its apprehension of this other way of death, and as prescriptive in its treatment of grief, as anything else I read. I will not forget the instinctive wisdom of the friend who, every day for those first few weeks, brought me a quart container of scallion-and-ginger congee from Chinatown. Congee I could eat. Congee was all I could eat.
I am a huge fan of Brother David Steindl-Rast, having listened to his audio tapes of his lectures on Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer. Still a monk who lives at the Mount Saviour Monastery in New York, he's co-founder of the Network for Grateful Living.
In a very apropos interview this week of Thanksgiving in the San Francisco Chronicle, Brother David shared his story.
Tell me a bit about your personal story. Why did you become a monk? Have you always felt that calling?
When I lived as a teenager in Austria under Nazi occupation, I never expected to reach the age of 20. Friends and schoolmates a few years older were drafted, and a year later they were dead. The draft age was set lower and lower, and I was coming closer and closer to it. But then the war was over, and life stretched out before me like a mountain meadow full of flowers.
Just as I was having a great time with a girlfriend, music, dancing, hiking and even a little more food than is necessary to survive, a realization suddenly hit me. It hinged on a passage from the Rule of St. Benedict, a sixth century classic. It simply said, "To have death at all times before one's eyes."
I had been living like this for years -- with death before my eyes -- and now, in a flash, I realized that this was the reason why my life had been a happy one in spite of all dangers and hardships: Against the background of death, I had clearly seen life as the gift it was.
It was clear to me now that things could only go downhill from here unless I continued to live with death before my eyes. Since I had come across the idea in a book that inspired 1,500 years of monastic life in the West, I concluded that I would have to become a monk to be truly happy.
After more than half a century as a Benedictine monk, I'm glad to say that I was right. My intuition was also correct: Having death at all times before your eyes is central to the life of monks -- not only in the West but also in the East, as later I found out. Having death before our eyes never allows us to take life for granted. And so you could say that the essence of monastic life, of spiritual life in general, is gratefulness.
A rose amidst the ashes. A beautiful story of the family of a 13 year old Palestinian boy who had been shot dead by IDF soldiers who mistook his toy gun for a real one.
The parents decided to donate the organs "for the sake of peace between the two people". Ariel Sharon invited the father to meet with him and accept his apology and his gratitude.
Ahmed's heart has been transplanted into the body of a 12 year old girl.
Ahmed's liver was donated to a six month old baby and a 66 year old woman.
Ahmed's lungs will be donated to a 14 year old Cystic Fibrosis patient.
Ahmed's kidneys will be donated to a 5 year old boy and 4 girl.
An exceptional deed indeed and a Great Legacy. Many people are blessing Ahmed and his family today. You too will be blessed if you ...Donate Life. Hat Tip, Charles Johnson at LGF
Finding a skull and partial remains in Frombork Cathedral in north-eastern Poland, someone had a hunch.
The remains were taken to specialists at the central crime laboratory in Warsaw for computer-generated reconstruction.
Putting together all the clues - age, reconstruction, known portraits and place where found, scientists are convinced they have found the body of Nicolaus Copernicus, father of modern astronomy, who died in 1543 aged 70.
Detroit Free Press.
When Rosa Parks refused to get up, an entire race of people began to stand up for their rights as human beings.
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This gentle giant, whose quietness belied her toughness, became the catalyst for a movement that broke the back of legalized segregation in the United States, gave rise to the astounding leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and inspired fighters for freedom and justice throughout the world.
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People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day.- O No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in."
The New York Times
For her act of defiance, Mrs. Parks was arrested, convicted of violating the segregation laws and fined $10, plus $4 in court fees. In response, blacks in Montgomery boycotted the buses for nearly 13 months while mounting a successful Supreme Court challenge to the Jim Crow law that enforced their second-class status on the public bus system.
Dave Weinberger says
I was five when she refused to move out of the whites-only seats at the front of the bus. I was told that she was a humble Black woman who, after a hard day of work, was too tired to get up. In fact, she was a committed civil rights worker, a secretary in the Montgomery office of the NAACP where she recorded reports of racial discrimination and interviewed African-Americans with legal complaints. (I in fact was taught she was a white family's maid. Did those telling the story just assume that that's what black women do?)
It's a better story the first way, but why?
The mythic version is so powerful because of what it doesn't say. Obviously, the point wasn't that she was tired, that she collapsed in the seat and was physically unable to stand up. Presumably she was tired every day. The point of the myth is exactly that this day was like every other except for what happened in Rosa Parks' heart. On that day like any other, a woman like any other rose above the accepted condition. Like the first photo of the whole earth seen from space, Parks' refusal to change seats transformed our perspective
Rosa didn't have children but LaShawn Barber says
I suppose those she inspired to stand up to injustice were her offspring. Once people understand the power they have in a free country, the moral authority to demand justice, watch out.
She was given the Medal of Honor, the highest award that the U.S. government bestows, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award. More than 40 colleges and universities gave her honorary doctorates, and her name is cited in virtually every U.S. history book that addresses the civil rights movement.
In 1988 Rosa Parks said, ""I am leaving this legacy to all of you ... to bring peace, justice, equality, love and a fulfillment of what our lives should be. Without vision, the people will perish, and without courage and inspiration, dreams will die - the dream of freedom and peace."
Truly, a Great Legacy.
I'm one voice in a group of talented people each with a distinctive voice, experience and expertise: Connie Goldman, Jacqueline Marcell, Jed Diamond, Lisa Haneberg, Rinatte Paries, Ronni Bennett, Sharon Whiteley, Susan Anderson, Susan Mitchell, Tom Blake and Yvonne Divita.
I write about many of the same things I do on Business of Life and Legacy Matters but often in a more personal way.
Until I can get me on of those doohickies that signifies a new post on another blog, I'm just going to periodically round-up a group of posts and link them here in reverse chronological order.
Rules of Life
Responding to Suffering
Make Haste for a Neighborhood Barbecue
Lessons of Katrina
Afraid to Get Prepared?
Intensely Alive While Dying
Why Can't We Talk About the Important Things?
A Gift of Stories
Good enough is good enough
Learning from Life
From the American Digest, reposted, a personal memory of September 11 from Brooklyn Heights, seeing it all in real time and real space. Gerard Van Der Leun, The Wind in the Heights
In time, everyone had passed by as well and the street was empty except for the settling smoke. I looked outside the window where a small maple grew and noticed that its leaves were covered with small yellow flecks. I looked down at the sill outside the windows and saw the yellow flecks there as well.
At some point in the next few minutes it dawned on me that there would be no bodies to speak of found in the incinerating rubble across the river. I knew then -- as certainly as I have even known anything -- that all those who had still been in the towers had gone into the smoke and that, in some way, the gleaming bits of yellow ash were their tokens, were what they had become.
And I knew that all they had become had fallen upon us as we ran in the smoke; that we had breathed them in when the wind reached us; that they were covering the houses and the sills and the cars and the sidewalks and the benches and the shrubs and the trees all about us.
What they had become was what the wind without a storm had left behind. Now that it had passed everything was, again, silent and calm with the blue sky above the houses on Pierrepont Street in Brooklyn Heights beginning to emerge from the fading smoke as the breeze of the harbor shifted the plume away from us and moved it uptown, into Manhattan, leaving the Heights again as an elite enclave, above and to the side of New York City.
The yellow flecks stayed like small stars on the surface of everything in the Heights for three days until the first rains came on a late afternoon to wash them away. I walked out into that rain and back down Pierrepont to the Promenade where for months the fires would burn across the river. The rain came straight down and there was no wind. As I walked down the sidewalk I noticed the rainwater running off the trees and the buildings and moving down the gutter to the drains that would take it to the harbor and the sea. And that water was, for only a minute or so before it ran clear, the color of gold.
Don't miss this story by Gerard Van der Leun the namesake of an uncle he never knew. The Name in the Stone
Cut into the stone amongst a tally of the dead.
If you have an unusual name, there's nothing that prepares you for seeing it in a list of the dead on a summer Sunday afternoon in Battery Park in 1975. I don't really remember the feeling except to know that, for many long moments, I became suddenly chilled.
When that passed, I knew why my name was in the stone. I'd always known why, but I'd never known about the stone or the names cut into it.
"Gerard Van der Leun" was, of course, not me. He was someone else entirely. Someone who had been born, lived, and died before I was even conceived. He was my father's middle brother. He was what my family had given to stop Fascism, Totalitarianism and genocide in the Second World War. He was one of their three sons. He was dead before he was 22 years old. His body never recovered, the exact time and place of his death over the Atlantic, unknown.
Patti watched her stepfather die of lung cancer just 37 days after being diagnosed.
The timeframe of 37 days made an impression on me. We act as if we have all the time in the world - that's not a new understanding. But the definite-ness of 37 days struck me. So short a time, as if all the regrets of a life would barely have time to register before time was up.
And so, as always when awful things happen, I tried to figure out how to reconcile in my mind the fact that it was happening and the fact that the only thing I could do was try to make some good out of it. What emerged was a renewed commitment to ask myself this question every morning: 'what would I be doing today if I only had 37 days to live?'
It's a hard question some days.
But here's how I answered it: Write like hell, leave as much of myself behind for my two daughters as I could, let them know me and see me as a real person, not just a mother, leave with them for safe-keeping my thoughts and memories, fears and dreams, the histories of what I am and who my people are. Leave behind my thoughts about living the life, that "one wild and precious life" that poet Mary Oliver speaks of. That's what I'd do with my 37 days. So, I'm beginning here.
Her blog 37 days is a fine one. Patti shows how richly you can live when you keep the horizon line in sight. And how much fun you can have.
Every week she writes a new essay with a Do It Now Challenge Burn those jeans, always rent the red convertible, live an irresistible obituary, know the point of your life, find your own saxophone, and stand on your own rock
She's terrific, smart and wise and funny to boot, all while pondering the big questions. Don't miss her.
Dierdre Sullivan says her father's greatest gift to her and her family was how he ushered them through the process of his death.
In a wise and moving piece on NPR she says,
I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.
The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. "Dee," he said, "you're going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family."
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Sounds simple -- when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.
"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.
In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity.
On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I've ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.
I write about death so much not just because I think it's one of life's greatest mysteries, but also because keeping the thought of death near the top of your mind is the best way to live your life in the fullest, richest way doing only what you think are the most important things.
I've quoted Steve Jobs earlier in Life's Change Agent.
For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Evelyn Rodriguez quotes Jobs too and also Geshe Michael Roche who wrote what she thinks may be the best business book ever, "The Diamond Cutter : The Buddha on Managing Your Business and Your Life" which I'm definitely going to read.
If you were really going to die tonight, would you sit and read through the whole Sunday paper, or most of the magazines you subscribe to? Would you really surf around the TV looking desperately for anything of even minor interest? Would you still go out and spend an hour or two at lunch or dinner, gossiping about the other managers. Decide then: If not on the day I die, then not now either. Because, frankly, it may really be today. -
In If Not On The Day I Die, Then Not Today, Evelyn writes about the Death Meditation.
To put it simply, you just wake up in the morning and stay there in bed, lying down, without opening your eyes. And you say to yourself: "I'm going to die tonight. What would be the best thing to do with the rest of my time?"
Maureen Dowd pens a wonderful tribute to her mother who passed away last week.
MY mom always wanted to be a writer. In 1926, when she was 18, she applied for a job at The Washington Post. An editor there told her that the characters she'd meet as a reporter were far too shady for a nice young lady.
But someone who wants to write will find a way to write. And someone who wants to change the world can do it without a big platform or high-profile byline.
Just an ordinary life made extraordinary when closing examined.
Mom was not famous, but she was remarkable. Her library included Oscar Wilde, Civil War chronicles, Irish history and poetry books, as well as "Writing to the Point: Six Basic Steps," and the 1979 "Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Satisfactions of Housewifery and Motherhood in the Age of Do-Your-Own-Thing.'"
She touches on small things.
Without ever mentioning it to anyone, she constantly wrote out a stream of very small checks from her police widow's pension for children who were sick and poor.
She didn't limit her charity to poor kids. When 6-year-old Al Gore III was struck by a car in 1989, she sent him a get-well card and a crisp dollar bill. "Children like getting a little treat when they're not feeling well," she explained.
She traces the arc of a life that spanned much of the nation's history.
As a child she saw the last of the Civil War veterans marching in Memorial Day parades, and as the wife of a D.C. police inspector she made friends with her neighbor, Pop Seymour, the last person alive who saw Lincoln shot at Ford's Theater. (He was 5 and saw the president slump in his box.)
She tells stories.
One of her big thrills came in 1990 when she went to the White House Christmas party with me and President Bush gave her a kiss. On the way home, she said to me in a steely voice, "I don't ever want you to be mean to that man again."
Stories that paint a picture.
As my mom lay in pain, at 97 her organs finally shutting down, my sister asked her if she would like a highball. Over the last six years, Mom had managed to get through going into a wheelchair and losing her sight, all without painkillers or antidepressants - just her usual evening glass of bourbon and soda.
Her sense of taste was gone, and she could no longer speak, but she nodded, game as ever, just to show us you can have life even in death. We flavored her spoonful of ice chips with bourbon, soon followed by a morphine chaser.
And tell life lessons.
I just know that I will follow the advice she gave me in a letter while I was in college, after I didn't get asked to a Valentine's Day dance. She sent me a check for $15 and told me to always buy something red if you're blue - a lipstick, a dress.
"It will be your 'Red Badge of Courage,' " she wrote. And courage was a subject the lady knew something about.
If you want to write about your parents, Dowd's tribute is a great example of how to do it.
Born on June 27, 1880, soon to become deaf and blind, Helen Keller became a role model for millions. Today is her 125th birthday and the American Foundation for the Blind is celebrating the life and legacy of this remarkable woman.
No Pasaran has gathered some Keller quotes that begin to show why this woman is and was so universally admired and so many of her life lessons taken to heart.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.
Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.
We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world.
Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.
All the world is full of suffering. It is also full of overcoming.
As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision.
Death is no more than passing from one room into another. But there's a difference for me, you know. Because in that other room I shall be able to see.
The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched — they must be felt with the heart.
When one door of happiness closes, another one opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.
Evelyn Rodriguez, one of my very favorite bloggers and a fabulous writer, in a post about her father says in a line I will never forget
"The stuff of life is not stuff."
The stuff of life is not stuff. Not the bigger house or the BMW or closing the next sales commission or jetting to the next overseas meeting. The stuff of life is in the precise unfolding moments with the people in front of you and the relationships themselves - the family that will play in that house or the son who will drive the car, the customer you'll share a drink with at the pub, or the taxi driver taking you to the convention in London. It's Father's Day.
I'm not saying to quit your job and run off to Varadero Beach. I'm saying don't postpone joy until the perfect fill-in-the blank - it's there right in front of you in every moment wherever whatever you are doing. If you wait to live, as Thoreau points out, the risk is that fire in you has long been snuffed out - unaccustomed to joy and thus unable to enjoy the fruits of your efforts - by the time you get there.
Don't postpone joy, it's right there in front of you. Wise words from a wise woman.