The Hate U Give

March 26, 2018 Sally5 Comments

The paper fluttered out of my Bible one morning.

I had written the following quote on it:

You may choose to look the other way, but you can never say again that you did not know.

William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce spoke those words to Parliament in 1789 as he told of the horrors of the slave trade.

The quote fit perfectly with the book I was reading, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. My friend Shannon had recommended it, and midway through she asked what I thought of it.

“It’s a brutal view into a world that I don’t know,” I told her.

And it is.

I grew up in a white town, attended a white school, had white friends. There’s nothing intentionally racist about that; it’s just a fact. Small upstate New York towns were predominantly white in the 60s and 70s.

At my father’s birthday party, a woman, while looking at one of his old yearbooks, said to me, “This is fascinating.”

“What?” I asked.

“His high school had two choirs — one white, one black,” she said.

I looked at the yearbook — the 1947 Cobbonian from Morristown High School. One page did feature two choirs: the Spiritual Choir and the Madrigal Choir.

The reverse side of the page featured the A Cappella Choir and the Training Choir, both of which were integrated — just barely — with less than a handful of people of color participating in either one.

“We’ve come a long way, haven’t we,” I said to the woman looking at the yearbook. She smiled and nodded.

But we still have a long way to go.

For the breadth of Angie Thomas’s book, I was allowed to stand in the shoes of a 16 year-old African-American girl, who grew up in the projects, who saw two friends gunned down, and who ultimately learned that her voice is her most powerful weapon.

I thought about the book this weekend when I saw the news coverage of students across the country participating in March for Our Lives Rallies against gun violence. They used words — and silence (after reading the names of the 17 students who died at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, student Emma Gonzalez stood in silence on the stage for 6 minutes and 20 seconds, the amount of time it took the gunman to kill them).

I’ve read solutions to the gun problem that range from arming teachers, to supplying buckets of rocks in classrooms, to having therapy dogs in schools. Some sound disastrous; others seems inefficient and ridiculous; still others might work. I don’t know what the answer is —

But I do know it begins with talking and listening.

It begins with standing in the other person’s shoes, no matter what the issue is, if only for a moment.

After that, I can choose to look the other way.

But I can’t say I didn’t know.

I’m glad I read The Hate U Give.

Book Review

Let Me Listen To Your Heart

March 23, 2017 Sally1 Comment

Every time I see a copy of this book, Let Me Listen To Your Heart, in the thrift store or yard sale, I grab it so I can send it to someone who might appreciate it. This book of short writings by medical students in Cooperstown is poetic, poignant, and beautiful.

Some short excerpts* —

“So how are you today?”

What a stupid, stupid question. I know how you are — sick of freshmen like me practically giddy from my expensive education. You’ve seen me before….

Oh, yes, I have seen you before and put up the walls you describe your essay. But the young doctor goes on to describe finally connecting with the patient.

It’s a theme in the book. Listening. Moving beyond a list of memorized symptoms and linear diagnosis, to seeing a person. To hearing a person.

In another essay** the woman writer describes an ER patient being admitted for an overdose on a cold and rainy night. He had been referred to as a “scumbag”, which conjured up all sorts of images, before she actually met him.

[He was a]… scrawny little guy, with half-an-inch thick glasses and pretty bad acne…. I liked him immediately, almost instinctively — kind of the way you would like puppy that’s smaller and weaker than the others and has a really tough time getting its share of food.

We have so many preconceived ideas of what a patient should look like. She listened to his story, and concluded her essay with this:

The “scumbag” has long since drifted away, and I’m left sitting with a sad and lonely child. It’s raining again.

Another touching essay*** is about by a medical student who loves woodworking. By talking about curly maple, dowel joints, and cabinet-making, he finds a common bond with an otherwise obtuse patient. He ends his essay with this:

I was filled with the feeling that I had done something useful by finding the patient within the illness. And there to prove it, on the seat next to me, in the form of a hand plane, lay my first, unsolicited, fee.

My father came home with many such “fees” — fresh eggs, small paintings, handmade dolls for me and my sister.

When a doctor connects with his patient by seeing him or her as a flesh-and-blood person with history and future, who has a family, and work, and feelings, it can make all the difference.

I’m grateful that Bassett compiled this book back in 2002.

If you should see it somewhere, I suggest you grab it.

*”Getting Through” by Corey Magnell

**”Overdose” by Kristen Kalissaar Hunt

***”Fee” by Andrew Thomas

The Benefits of Rust

January 4, 2017 Sally3 Comments

Remember when I said I would be rusty trying to write again? I was feeling that rust this morning as it seized up my writing gears.

Today I wrote a whole post, deleted half of it, wrote a little more, made a meme, considered dropping the whole thing in the trash, and then decided to just stick it in a draft folder. Here’s the meme, though —

Then I looked back to see what else I had written on this day in history.

Five years ago, I had written a book-review-ish post for a fellow blogger, Christine Grote. We had started blogging about the same time and visited each other’s blogs fairly often. Each of us was dealing with Alzheimer’s — me with my mother and her with her father.

We cross paths with so many people, especially in the blogging world. When I visited her blog today, I felt like I was visiting a long-lost friend.

Here’s part of what I published 5 years ago —

Dancing in Heaven — a sister’s memoir is a tender story of growing up with a severely handicapped family member. Christine’s sister, Annie, was so developmentally handicapped that doctors predicted she wouldn’t live past the age of eight. Through the love, devotion and tireless care from the whole family, Annie lived to be 51.

Christine weaves into the story the onset of her father’s Alzheimer’s. That’s what I had been following on her blog. Before Alzheimer’s, however, she had interviewed her parents about life with Annie. When she asked her father if he had any regrets, he said,

“The biggest regret I’ve got of the whole thing is that she cannot speak. Everything else I can deal with pretty much as it comes along.”

As I read that part, I felt a catch in my throat. His Alzheimer’s has taken away his ability to speak.

Alzheimer’s seems to affect people in very different ways. Some symptoms are universal — the loss of memory, for example. But my mother has not lost her ability to verbally communicate. She can be sharp-tongued and nasty. She can definitely communicate.

2017 note: My mother did eventually lose the ability to communicate. She rarely spoke near the end, and when she did, it made little sense.

Christine’s father has fallen into a silent world. He doesn’t speak often. As I read his quote about regrets in Dancing in Heaven, I remembered one of Christine’s posts about a communication break-through they had experienced using a whiteboard, Resolving a Quandary. How much more meaningful that post became knowing how precious that ability to communicate was to him!

Thank you, Christine, for your beautiful memoir. It is sweet, gentle, and encouraging.

In the intervening five years, Christine’s father passed away as has my mother. Today, when I visited her site, I saw that she had completed her book about her father, Where Memories Meet.

I guess rust can sometimes be a good part of the adventure. It made me slow down and help me reconnect.

I can’t wait to read her book.