This is a letter I wrote to the 911 operator who courageously instructed me on how to perform CPR on my dying husband when he suffered sudden cardiac death in 1995. Together, we saved his life. Years later, her own husband, a fire fighter, died in his sleep -- a cruel twist of irony and one that I puzzle over from time to time.
Dear Linda,
Your life's work is helping people. As a dispatcher for the fire department, you are the person responsible for saving lives and property. Because of your experience, training, and calm, assured manner on the phone, 911 callers get the help they need. You and your colleagues are truly heroes of our society.
My husband and I are just two people who have benefited from your quick actions -- actions that once saved his life -- but I know there are thousands of other people like us, who have been aided by you, who haven't thanked you. You may remember that you were the 911 operator who answered my call for help. You instructed me over the phone on how to administer CPR to my dying husband after I found him in full cardiac arrest. The response team you summoned came within a few minutes, used a defibrillator on him, administered oxygen, and packed him off to the hospital. Although he narrowly escaped death, he fully recovered, and that one event changed us both. We are grateful for every day we have together.
We had the pleasure of meeting you several months later, when you and your colleagues were recognized for the quick actions that saved my husband's life. Although we only spent a short time together that day, I have often thought about the ceremony and tour of the dispatching center and fire station, and how impressed we were with your caring, kind, and self-effacing manner. We often think of you and of the team from our local fire station.
You and your colleagues perform heroic deeds as a matter of course in your work. And we, the protected citizens, have come to depend on the fact that you'll always be there for us if we need you. We forget that you are just like us -- a person with a life and a family, someone who experiences pain and necessity, someone who is human and sometimes even vulnerable. I was thinking along those lines when I recently read the newspaper article about a firefighter who died of heart failure. As I progressed through the article, I suddenly realized that this heroic firefighter I was reading about was your husband.
How ironic, how terribly perplexing life's twists and turns can be. My husband and I lingered silently over that article, wondering how we could possibly help. I wish I could have been there for you, like you were for me. I wish there was something I could say or do that would lessen your suffering. I wish I could give you comfort and relieve the pain you must be feeling, but I know that will come only with the passing of time.
We hope you'll continue on with good memories and the knowledge that your husband and you saved many lives and brought joy and relief to strangers in need. We want you to know that we are thinking of your husband's noteworthy, heroic life, and others like him, with grateful hearts. And we think of you. Your life and your wellbeing are important to us. We wish you, a hero in your own right, all good things.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
a life worth saving
In 2004, I agreed to help out in the university student affairs department about 10 hours a week during a search for a new director of admissions. Since I spent about five years in a major university's undergraduate admissions office between 1984-1989, the senior administration figured I could help hold down the fort while they busied themselves with a national search. And although 14 years had passed since I had worked in undergraduate admissions, it’s a little eerie how much I seemed to remember about the business of recruiting and enrolling incoming freshmen. After signing on for the interim role of “deputy director,” I made a point of going over to the office and introducing myself to the staff.
Marta was a young woman who worked in what we affectionately referred to as the back room of the admissions office. In the old building, where I worked many years ago, it really was the back room – a tiny niche in the rear portion of an old house that had been converted into office space. Although admissions subsequently occupied a much nicer (and bigger) facility, another, more accurate term for the same work space might be "sweat shop." It’s the place where the really tedious work of filing all applications and support materials is done – none of it automated, all of it by human grunt power.
In the height of the admissions season, working in the sweat shop can be a lot like working in a mine shaft: you come in to work in the dark, and you leave in the dark. During the “season,” which lasts October to May, you suffer hundreds of nasty paper cuts, breathe plenty of paper dust while manually opening thousands of envelopes, experience sore, aching muscles from lifting heavy stacks of loaded folders, and alphabetize so many transcripts and other support materials that you start wondering whether a comes before or after z.
Shortly after I settled into my office in the admissions suite, Marta ventured in to see me. Marta was friendly, albeit a bit shy and rather soft-spoken. I liked Marta’s quiet but straightforward manner. She and I chatted for a while – just about the mundane things people share when they are getting to know one another. She knew, like everyone else in that office, that I was there for only a short term. But she still wanted to get to know me as a person.
That was just before I unexpectedly ended up in the hospital for emergency surgery. I returned to the office briefly afterward – thinking I could carry on as I normally do. Marta was first in my office to welcome me back. She handed me a small diffenbachia plant, which was cradled in a wicker basket, as a token of her wish for me to heal quickly. She had bought it for me while I was recovering at home. I exclaimed over the plant, and told her how much I enjoyed having the greenery in an otherwise bare office. I put the plant in the window and admired its healthy, waxy, multicolored leaves. As it turned out, that was the only day in the space of about a month that I went back into that office. I suffered a relapse, and it was several weeks before I could return to a normal routine. In that space of time, I never once went into the office, and of course I forgot all about the diffenbachia. Meanwhile, it was quietly dying by inches, slowly drying up, turning brown, and ultimately wilting in its sunny place on the windowsill.
Marta knew the plant was there, silently screaming for water, behind my locked door. No one opened up my office for those weeks, and of course Marta didn’t have a key to my office, so she couldn’t rescue the plant. About the third week, she couldn’t bear it any longer, and timidly asked if she could get some help entering my office so she could water the plant. I wasn’t there, of course, but apparently several people became involved in trying to open the door.
Once inside (I don’t know who came up with the key), Marta found the plant where I had placed it. It was nearly dead. Apparently the others in the office did declare it dead. Marta, however, carefully pulled off its withered leaves. She gave it a much-needed watering, and set it back on my windowsill. It had one remaining green leaf – a short, spikey little shoot that hadn’t quite unfurled. But the plant was alive. And, when I arrived back at work the following week, Marta was there to point out that it was indeed alive, but should be tended more carefully in the future. It was a life worth saving.
Marta was a young woman who worked in what we affectionately referred to as the back room of the admissions office. In the old building, where I worked many years ago, it really was the back room – a tiny niche in the rear portion of an old house that had been converted into office space. Although admissions subsequently occupied a much nicer (and bigger) facility, another, more accurate term for the same work space might be "sweat shop." It’s the place where the really tedious work of filing all applications and support materials is done – none of it automated, all of it by human grunt power.
In the height of the admissions season, working in the sweat shop can be a lot like working in a mine shaft: you come in to work in the dark, and you leave in the dark. During the “season,” which lasts October to May, you suffer hundreds of nasty paper cuts, breathe plenty of paper dust while manually opening thousands of envelopes, experience sore, aching muscles from lifting heavy stacks of loaded folders, and alphabetize so many transcripts and other support materials that you start wondering whether a comes before or after z.
Shortly after I settled into my office in the admissions suite, Marta ventured in to see me. Marta was friendly, albeit a bit shy and rather soft-spoken. I liked Marta’s quiet but straightforward manner. She and I chatted for a while – just about the mundane things people share when they are getting to know one another. She knew, like everyone else in that office, that I was there for only a short term. But she still wanted to get to know me as a person.
That was just before I unexpectedly ended up in the hospital for emergency surgery. I returned to the office briefly afterward – thinking I could carry on as I normally do. Marta was first in my office to welcome me back. She handed me a small diffenbachia plant, which was cradled in a wicker basket, as a token of her wish for me to heal quickly. She had bought it for me while I was recovering at home. I exclaimed over the plant, and told her how much I enjoyed having the greenery in an otherwise bare office. I put the plant in the window and admired its healthy, waxy, multicolored leaves. As it turned out, that was the only day in the space of about a month that I went back into that office. I suffered a relapse, and it was several weeks before I could return to a normal routine. In that space of time, I never once went into the office, and of course I forgot all about the diffenbachia. Meanwhile, it was quietly dying by inches, slowly drying up, turning brown, and ultimately wilting in its sunny place on the windowsill.
Marta knew the plant was there, silently screaming for water, behind my locked door. No one opened up my office for those weeks, and of course Marta didn’t have a key to my office, so she couldn’t rescue the plant. About the third week, she couldn’t bear it any longer, and timidly asked if she could get some help entering my office so she could water the plant. I wasn’t there, of course, but apparently several people became involved in trying to open the door.
Once inside (I don’t know who came up with the key), Marta found the plant where I had placed it. It was nearly dead. Apparently the others in the office did declare it dead. Marta, however, carefully pulled off its withered leaves. She gave it a much-needed watering, and set it back on my windowsill. It had one remaining green leaf – a short, spikey little shoot that hadn’t quite unfurled. But the plant was alive. And, when I arrived back at work the following week, Marta was there to point out that it was indeed alive, but should be tended more carefully in the future. It was a life worth saving.
the fourth dimension
We are in our own universe
Whether or not we dwell in the same space.
Evolving, we write our story
With no introduction
With no final chapter
We continue on to a distant, curved horizon
Beyond which nothing is known.
...the author
I think we develop stories during our lives to help us make sense of what occurs. Sometimes, the stories explain the seemingly unfair. Sometimes, the stories end happily, with an unexpected favorable turn. Other times, the stories culminate with a predictably painful outcome. Rarely, a miracle happens, and what was evil is turned to good.
Our stories are told with meaning in mind. Over the eons, brain evolution gave rise to the conscious state, and we now reason through our meager lifespan. “This thing has meaning.” “We are here for a purpose.” “You have a divine destiny.” “This thing was pre-ordained.” These most often refer to some higher power, some entity that micromanages our every moment.
Do I believe those kinds of stories? Not really, although I was brought up in a religious home, and taught to believe. Believe in God, believe in the Son of God, believe in the Holy Spirit, believe in the Devil and his awful Demons. Believe in Temptation and Sin and perhaps, Forgiveness of Those Sins.
I saved a scrap of paper I tore out of a newspaper some fifteen years ago. I rarely do that – tear up a publication – somehow, it goes against my grain. But I remember how the letter to an editor, titled “Religion” and that I eagerly snipped, rang so true. I remember stopping, pondering. I remember being rooted to my chair as I read it over and over. I still agree with it to this day.
…a great example of human failing is insisting on knowing what nobody really knows, i.e., is there or isn’t there something known as ‘God,’ or ‘gods’? For thousands of years countless societies from the most ancient to the contemporary have tried to credit – or blame – mythical, unprovable beings known as ‘gods’ for the creation and operation of all that is in the universe. Each group arrogantly insists that its myth is the theologically correct myth and all others are false. Millions of people have killed and tortured each other in the name of their various ‘faiths.’ (‘Faith means ‘I believe what I believe because I believe it. No proof or logic is needed.’) ‘Homo sapiens’ we call our species – it means ‘wise men.’ If we really were, we would allow the ‘answer to it all’ to remain a beautiful mystery and thankfully and peacefully enjoy it.Comfort arises from belief systems that promise an endless existence. For many years I have knowingly avoided the question of death and the possibility of an afterlife. Mostly because I like too many people who believe in an afterlife, and I didn’t want to offend or hurt them. But even though it’s true that no tangible proof exists to support an afterlife, whether it be as invisible entities or as reincarnated creatures, millions of people still cling to the notion that individuals are transformed at death and their lives are continued in some other state: Life Goes On.--Walt Hopmans, Santa Barbara resident and writer of poetry, plays, television scripts, and other works, and author of Some Poems and Some Pictures (1989) and Some Zen Zingers (2001).
But does it? And more importantly, does my belief that it does – or doesn’t – change whether it does? As Mr. Hopmans so eloquently put it, I choose to let the answer to that question remain a beautiful mystery, and instead thankfully and peacefully enjoy it.
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