Nantucket Snapshot: An Innocent Off-Islander Snoops Around a Storied Island.

The message to me was unmistakeable: disappear.

It came from my wife Barbara and her sister Janet who was visiting for several days. They wanted to do what two women want to do. A guy – in this case, me -- is simply in the way.

So I disappeared – to Nantucket. Here I'm on the boat approaching Nantucket. Between you and me, I went willingly. I'm not wild about being redundant. And it was okay with me if I missed out on such things as shopping and four-hour conversations.

On the storied island, I filled gaps: about Nantucket; about a longtime friend, Bill Murray, who lives on the island year-round and with whom I hung out; and, a little surprising, about myself. Bill is also known as Surfer Bill, a story in itself, and henceforth referred to as such for reasons that will become clear.

I had been to Nantucket several times before, but this time was different. Now I didn't troop mindlessly around gawking and snapping the usual pictures. I wanted to understand better what makes modern Nantucket, located 30 miles off Cape Cod, so one-of-a-kind.

The island is shown here in a NASA satellite image. Nantucket means “faraway island” in the language of early Indian residents. It is surely that, at least in my infantile measurement of distance. But what else, exactly, is Nantucket?

It apparently is John Luttman, shown here. Surfer Bill and I met him one morning in the Bean, a downtown expresso coffee shop and hangout. He was sitting there in a corner playing a word game and we struck up a conversation.

“I never saw a guy with two ponytails, one in front and one in back,” I said.

He stroked his front ponytail. “It works. Did you hear the one about ....?” And he proceeded to tell a joke too bad to repeat, one of several he reeled off. After chatting a while, we left. I came back about about 3:30 and found him still there in the same spot, this time playing his word game with a young man.

“Shouldn't you be working?” I asked.

John had told us earlier that he was a handyman who did “everything.” Surfer Bill said that he sees him all the time around the island painting houses.

“Who says I have to work?” he said, without looking up from the game board. “Hey, I have a joke for you, but I have to tell you outside. It's too dirty for in here.”

I begged off.

Outside, I asked Surfer Bill if it was okay with the owners for somebody to sit there all day playing games. “I guess so. I see him in here all the time and nobody ever bothers him.” Pretty easygoing owners, I would say. But then again, John Luttman certainly adds color to the place.

Now my friend Surfer Bill. He's 63 and started coming to Nantucket summers as a teen with his Connecticut parents, who rented a place. He embraced the Nantucket summer lifestyle, especially the surfing. At 17, he tooled around the island in a extended 1950 Cadillac ambulance. And when he was sure there were no police around, he used the ambulance siren to clear the road. Outta the way for Surfer Bill!

Today Surfer Bill is a year-round resident and homeowner on Nantucket. He lives with his wife Tracy and two young-adult children, Margaret and Tyler. He's a maker of fine furniture and an all-around skilled craftsman. He did much of the extensive renovation on his home.

I've known Surfer Bill for well over 20 years, ever since his wife Tracy, with whom I worked at a publishing company in Middletown, CT, introduced us. “You know,” she said to me one day, “I think you and my husband would hit it off. You have a similar sense of humor.” By that she meant, I'm sure, humor that is offbeat and not always appreciated in genteel company.

Anyway, Tracy deftly palmed me off on her poor husband. For many years now, Surfer Bill and I have been co-conspiritors in staving off full adulthood. He is a closet beach bum. I am ... well, this is not about me. He was and is a dedicated surfer. He recently returned from a Panama surfing vacation with Margaret.

What I did not know was that he was famous for his surfing – well known enough around the island to earn the nickname Surfer Bill. This was news to me. He has always been just plain Bill to me. I found out the truth purely by accident.

We were at the Whaling Museum when he ran into an admirer from 1963. “Surfer Bill,” the man exclaimed excitedly. While the two talked old times, I took in some of Nantucket's whaling past.

Afterwards, I said, “I didn't know they called you Surfer Bill.” I implied that he has not been fully honest with me about his past. So to remind him of the cover-up, I now call him “Surfer Bill.”

At the Whaling Museum, we got a great look at Nantucket's glorious past as the world's whaling titan of the seas in the 1840's. In the main hall is the skeleton of a 46-foot sperm whale along with a whaling boat with harpoons and gear used in hunting down these giants of the sea.

Nantucket had some 80 rigs sailing the far seas, sometimes for years at a time, hunting sperm whales for their oil and spermacetti (head matter used in the making of candles). The whalers brought back oil enough to jumpstart Nantucket from an isolated sheep-farming nowhere into a dazzingly prosperous island with worldwide economic power.


As Herman Melville wrote in Moby Dick:

“And thus have these naked Nantucketers, issuing from their antihill in the sea, overrun and conquered the watery world like so many Alexanders.” Melville wrote that Nantucketers ruled “two-thirds of this terraqueous globe,” and that “the sea is his; he owns it, as Emperors own empires.”

At the Whaling Museum, which was originally a candle factory, Surfer Bill and I heard a narrator tell the bleak story of the Essex. It was a Nantucket whaling ship that was repeatedly rammmed and sunk by an enraged sperm whale that the whalers had harpooned. After 94 days drifting in three small boats, after unspeakable suffering and horrors – including cannibalism -- there were only a few survivors. One of them told the Essex's story to Herman Melville and it became the inspiration for his classic novel, Moby Dick.

The storyteller told us afterwards that he has lived on Nantucket for 27 years, but was not a native. “I'm a wash-ashore,” he said. In the Nantucket heritage hierarchy, native-borns are the highest. Next highest are year-round wash-ashores. Then come summer resident wash-ashores. At the bottom are off-islanders like me. I remind Surfer Bill that, though a member of the permanent residentiariat, he is still “only” a wash-ashore.

At the height of Nantucket's whaling supremacy, the island boomed. The torrents of money that flowed into Nantucket, mostly from England, spawned island merchants. Soon the island had five wharves, dozens of candle factories, bustling shipyards, and shops catering to the lastest decorating and fashion whims of prominent island ladies.

Fortunes were made. Grand homes rose along the the cobbled streets of Nantucket town. Many of these stately homes still stand and number about 800, according to the Nantucket Historical Association. A walk around Nantucket town is to stroll through history, with home after home displaying names and stories of original owners.

But Nantucket's whole economy was built on one thing: whaling. With the invention of kerosene and the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania, demand for whale oil and candle power dried up almost overnight. On top of that, came the Great fire of 1846, which destroyed a third of the town. Then the California Gold rush siphoned off hordes of young men, as did the Civil War.

By 1870, Nantucket barely cast a shadow of its former self. As people fled the island, the population plunged to a third of what it was. There were lots of widows and fatherless children. Grand homes sunk into disrepair and sank in value. With income cut to near nothing, no taxes could be collected. Nantucket sank into debt. The decline was swift and thorough. This photo from 1870 captured a Nantucket street scene when the island was at a low point.

It was not until the 1880's that a replacement for the whaling industry began to emerge: tourism. Tourism is to Nantucket today what whaling was in its heyday. The population of Nantucket is about 10,000, or about that of a small town. But during the summer tourist season, the population swells to up to 50,000.

The fine shops are back, but this time instead of catering to the ladies of whaling fortunes, they cater to the new elite: free-spending women tourists. The photo shows the wares offered at a typical Centre Street shop, not exactly appealing to the male of the species.

I said to Surfer Bill, “You know, walking down Centre Street, I see nothing but shop after shop catering to women. As a man, I definitely feel underappreciated. Is this my imagination?”

His reply was of classic simplicity: “They're the ones spending the money.”

I did a little research. I found out that Centre Street used to be called “Petticoat Row” because of the many women who owned and operated the shops that lined the street. In other words, today's Centre Street has simply reverted back to what it was in the old days: run by and for women.

Nantucket is a feminine paradise. A good case could be made that it is also a feminist one. According to the official 2009 Nantucket Official Guide, “women traditionally ran the town of Nantucket, as their husbands traveled the seas for years at a time.” It seem that they still do.

I went up to a women sweeping the sidewalk in one of the Centre Street Shops. “Hi. I'm writing about Nantucket. Is it my imagination or is my masculinity at risk on this street. Every shop is about women.”

She giggled. “Well, I can't speak for your masculinity, but I will tell you that these three shops are all owned by men.”

“Really?”

She paused. “And they're not gay. They're straight.”

In other words, according to her, it may look like women are in charge, but men call the shots behind the scenes.

You can spend a fortune eating in Nantucket and not get much for your money. But I ate well in Nantucket, really well, mostly at Surfer Bill's. One night he prepared out-of-this-world Nantucket cod. Yummy. Another night, Tracy, after working all day, came home and whipped up a delicious Mexican meal.

For lunch, we went to “the best place to eat in town,” according to Surfer Bill: The Centre Street Bistro. For breakfast, we went to the “best bakery in town” to read The New York Times and munch on fresh-baked scones: Daily Bread. Prices at both are very reasonable.

Nantucket's history and traditions are rigorously protected. The entire island has been declared a National Historic Landmark. Building and zoning restrictions are among the nation's strictest. Though he believes the restrictions are necessary, Surfer Bill rolls his eyes when he recounts all the time-consuming hurdles he had to jump in renovating his home.

There was a recent hue and cry about the bricks being placed in some downtown area. They weren't completely faithful to traditional Nantucket bricks. And construction on a downtown open public area has been halted because the Zoning Commission was not competely happy with some of the materials being used. Here the right kind of bricks are being laid.

Lately, with the recession and fewer tourists, Nantucket shops are feeling it. Mitchell's Book Corner which has been a Main Street fixture for decades would have closed except for a financial savior stepping up. It was Wendy Schmidt, wife of the co-founder of Google. The Schmidts have a home on Nantucket. Thanks to Google money, a refurbished Mitchell's Book Corner has recently reopened for business.(Mitchell's honors the memory of Maria Mitchell, a native of Nantucket and America's first female professional astronomer. She discovered a comet and was a professor of astronomy at Vassar.)


There are no fast-food joints, not a single one. The only brand-name chain is a Stop&Shop supermarket. I did notice, however, that the name “Murray” appeared several times around Nantucket town. There was a Murray's clothing store, a Murray's liquor store and a Murray's sign, shown here, that may be wine-related.


Pointing this out to Surfer Bill, I said, “What's this? First I find out that your real name is Surfer Bill. Now are you going to tell me that you are also a closet mogul?”

“The stores were named after me.”

When that instantly bombed, he said, “Actually, it's a Portuguese family that owns all those places. They changed their name to Murray.” They apparently thought Murray would have more appeal than a Portuguese name.

Nantucket has a dress code. Tourists are told in no uncertain terms that appropriate dress is required downtown. They are instructed to reserve swimwear and flip-flops to “the beach where they belong.”

If you live on Nantucket, you don't spend much time in a car. Distances are short. Bill gets to wherever he has to go within minutes. His wife Tracy often rides her bike to her job at the Whaling Museum. Except for during the tourist season, there is no sitting in traffic in your car. And you don't have to lock your car. No one's going to break into it or steal it. How do you get a stolen car off the island?

For a tiny island, 14 miles long and 3.5 miles wide, Nantucket has an awful lot of open space. People here do not live on top of each other and this is true not just with the estates but throughout the island. There are no high-risers, period.

Within minutes of leaving downtown Nantucket, you are in the country. Fully 45% of Nantucket is preserved in its natural state where indiginous plants and animals thrive. It has vast open spaces, hidden forests, 55 miles of beaches, miles of hiking and biking trails. This is truly a little island with a great outdoors.


We went out to Bartlett's Farm, Nantucket's oldest and largest family farm, pictured here.The Bartlett family has been farming the same land for nearly 200 years, from the early 1800's. All it's fruits and vegetables are home-grown. The farm is especially known for its corn and tomatoes. Eighty percent of the farm's energy needs come from wind power.
One evening just before dusk, Surfer Bill, Tracy, Tyler, and I went out to Steps Beach to see if we could see the famous Nantucket Green Flash. This is the instantaneous explosion of green created at the moment the setting sun meets the water.

We waited. We waited. The sun descended. It descended. It met the water. “I saw it,” Tracy said excitedly. “I saw it.”

“I didn't see anything,” Surfer Bill said.


"I didn't see anything,” Tyler said.

“I didn't see anything,” I said.

“I saw it,” Tracy repeated.

That's the thing about the Nantucket Green Flash. Some see it and some do not. This time, Tracy was the annointed one.

Finally, something else I found out about the slippery Surfer Bill. We decided that I would join him for his 6 a.m.swim at the Nantucket High School pool. I've always been a strong swimmer. I toyed with the idea of challenging him to a race. My thought was that he should experience getting beat by a septuagenarian. And of course, I would be gracious in victory.

At the last minute, being a good guy, I decided not to humiliate him. We would just have a casual, friendly swim at our own pace. But as soon as we dove in, it was clear that something was terribly wrong. He began churning through the water like a human speedboat.

Thump! Thump! Thump! His arms slammed into the water like propellers and, as I did a very respectable breast-stroke, he left me in his wake. In no time at all, he was at the other end and back and was passing me like I was treading water!

What the hell is this? I knew Surfer Bill was a swimmer. We used to swim together in his pond at his Killingworth, CT home, but we did so like a couple of normal human beings. But this .. this was extreme swimming.

He kept this furious pace up for fifty minutes. He did 80 laps without letting up. You read that right, 80 laps. I did 15 or 20 and, having had enough, I stopped after 25 minutes. I took this photo of Surfer Bill right after he finished his extreme swim.

Then we went to the best bakery in town, Daily Bread, and Surfer Bill proceeded to complete The New York Times puzzle. As he was doing it, he asked me questions and I didn't know a single answer. He finally did it entirely on his own.

First the physical(swimming);then the mental (NYT puzzle); and I come in a poor second in both. “I'm not taking this sitting down, Surfer Bill,” I told him.

So long and keep moving.

For more on everyday Nantucket life, check out Nantucket Washashore Journal. http://nantucketwashashorejournal.blogspot.com/

P.S. Surfer Bill: I must have made quite an impression in Nantucket. A boat has been named after me. Don't believe it? Have a look.

How long have you lived in Nantucket without having a boat named for you?

Remembering Body Donors and Families: Thank You, Thank You, Thank You in Poetry, Music, Food, Photos, and Song

It's hard to believe that medical students could find the time and energy – and would care enough – to do this: plan and carry out a first-class, emotionally powerful Memorial to body donors and their families.

But UMass Medical School students, class of 2012, did it. This was a Memorial that deserves the capital M. My wife Barbara and I attended the Memorial held at the UMMS Worcester Foundation Campus in Shrewsbury, MA.

It was Saturday, May 2, my 71st birthday. Since I am a future donor, we went to the Memorial more out of obligation than anything else. Knowing how busy medical students are, our expectations were, to say the least, modest. It was to be a drive-by nod on our way to celebrate my birthday with lunch and then on to a party at our daughter Misha's in Connecticut.

Well, the Memorial turned out to be the main event of my birthday (especially since two of our nine grandkids, Mia (7) and Max (2) were also celebrating birthdays, and completely upstaged me. Me! The patriarch! )

The large auditorium was filled to overflowing with the families of people who had donated their bodies. With every seat filled, people stood in back and along side walls. I thought: How can everybody in town know that this was the in place to be today except for me, the birthday boy!

The students demolished the first-year-medical-student stereotype of emotionless sleep-walkers exhausted from a year of “ingestion and expurgation” of medical facts. Their empathy for the donors whose bodies they had learned from was on full display in music, song, original poetry, and personal reflection.

The Memorial started with music, Sara Barmettler on the violin and Elizabeth Herrup on the cello, playing “Twelve Duets for Violin and Cello,” by Mozart. Next, Megan Furnari welcomed the packed auditorium, saying that we were there “celebrating the memories of people no longer with us.”

The Memorial was in two parts. In the first, medical students reflected on their experiences with the donors, what they learned from them, and how they thought it would help make them better doctors. In the second part, donor family members shared memories.

Megan Furnari told how the death of her brother allowed her to see grace and, after profound sadness, find peace. “Those no longer with you in body, leave us many gifts,” she said. In his poem, “Firefly,” Joel Bradley said that “we see it best with eyes closed.”

Joel Bradlee thanked UMass Medical School for encouraging medical students to “think about the lives of donors.” He said that “not all schools do.” He read his poem, “A Mistake,” speaking to a woman whose body he is about to dissect. He marvels at “what these hands have to teach me.” He sees her as so alive that he “cannot but wonder if there was a mistake and your eyes suddenly snap open.”

Kara Keating-Bench spoke of appreciating relationships and how the “white lady” she dissected reminded her of her grandmother. She said that in anatomy lab, shared memories of her grandmother became all mixed up with cranial nerves and her white lady. She could not separate the two.

Then the lights were dimmed for a candle-lighting ceremony. While Staci Edelstein read off the names of donors, 77 in all, a candle was lit for each while their likenesses appeared on the auditorium's giant screen. 28 medical students, each holding a lit candle formed a solemn procession as Karen Billmers performed her own composition, “Slow Air.”

Next came remembrances of donor family members. Elizabeth remembered her dad, Edward, saying that “he broke the mold for the things he said and did.” She read a poem she had written in honor of her father, “In Memory of Edward.”

Tina said, “My mother was a pisser,” using a colorful expression that brought Barbara's hand to her mouth in shock but which mostly brought understanding smiles. “She was 89 and still getting her nails done, lime-green,” Tina said. “I hope you had fun with the old bird with the lime-green fingernails.”

Dana spoke of her father, a family-practice physician who had donated his body. “He was an old-fashioned country doctor that everybody called 'Doc,'” she said. “He came to the office after hours. He made house calls at all hours of the night. He shared all the heartbreak and grief with patients.” 'Doc' was the author of “Where Does It Hurt? Life of a New England Country Doctor.” She said that of all that her dad achieved, “he was most proud of his final gift.”

The closing song was the sweet “Seasons of Love,” directed by Kristy Webster and sung by a chorus of 12 medical students and with Eben Lichtman on piano. Like everything that had come before, it was beautiful, heartfelt, and music befitting a moving Memorial with a capital M.

“That was just beautiful,” I said afterwards to Dianne Person, Director of the Anatomical Gift Program. “It was like watching a professional production. I can't believe you were able to pull this off.”

“The medical students did it all themselves,” she said, firmly declining to take any credit.

After the Memorial, we were all invited into an adjoining large reception hall for “refreshments.” I expected coffee and a few donuts and pastries that I would prefer to do without. Instead, I found a banquet fit for the Queen of England – and fitting tribute to the donors whose photos and bios were displayed along one whole wall.

The buffet took up another whole wall of the vast reception hall -- a long color-splashed display of salads, fruits, sandwiches, veggies, dips and baked goods. It was a work of culinary art. All of the food was donated by large and small businesses alike in the Shrewsbury and Worcester area.

Dianne Person and Mike Doyle, the manager of the anatomy lab, remembered that it was my birthday. They presented me with a nice UMass Medical School tee-shirt. Dianne
took this picture of Barbara and me showing off my gift. Thank you, Dianne and Mike!

The banquet was also a time for donor family members and medical students to mingle. However, this was no surfacy social. People eyed each other intently. They asked pointed questions. Everybody was on a free-for-all quest for answers to questions they could not, as human beings, help having.

Medical students looked for their donors among the photos and for their families in the reception hall. Donor families looked for the medical students. Donor families wanted to reach closure for loss and medical students wanted to satisfy stubborn curiosity about the donors as people.

“That's her,” a female medical student said excitedly, pointing to a donor photo. “That's her. I know it's her. I can tell by her hair.”

And she soon hooked up with her donor's family. This happened frequently as medical students and donor families met, shared lunch, and spoke of their dramatic common bond. There were many hugs and not a few tears. Other family members preferred to remain anonymous.

A gentleman at my table looked vaguely familiar. I kept looking at him but couldn't place him. When we both got up from the table, I went over to him and said, “Do we know each other?”

“George?”

“Skip, from the Worcester Tennis Club?”

“Yes.”

“I didn't recognize you with a suit on.”

“I didn't recognize you with a suit on.”


Either we(you too, Skip) are losing it or context is everything.

Anyway, it was Skip Hall whom I see regularly at the Worcester Tennis Club. Skip was at the Memorial in honor of his sister Evelyn who had donated her body to UMass Medical School. He led me over to her photo and bio where he is pictured in the photo here. We started talking about Evelyn, her life, and why she became a donor. I was surprised to learn that she had been a teacher in Kenya for four years, 1970-74. I was also a teacher in Kenya, (1963-65). I found this to be an almost eerie coincidence.

My curiosity about Evelyn was piqued and I pelted poor Skip with questions. After a while, he said, “Tell you what. Let me put you in touch with my niece Elizabeth. She knows more than I do. I'm sure she will answer your questions.”

He did and she did. It so happens that Elizabeth Pollak, the niece of Skip Hall and daughter of Evelyn Josephine Hall Russell is a physician and pathologist. Except for the similarity of her name to mine, Dr. Pollak would seem qualified to answer my questions about her mom.

Dr. Pollak, who prefers that I call her Betsy, first dissected a donated body as a medical student in 1972. As a pathologist, she has done many autopsies and supervised residents doing autopsies for many years. She said she was very disappointed that she was unable to attend the Memorial for her mother and other donors. “I would have loved to meet the medical students and give them an old-timer's perspective, and hear what it is like for them to encounter the stories about the people they dissected and their families.”

Evelyn Josephine Hall Russell was born in Philadelphia, PA, on December 21, 1917 and grew up in Worcester, MA. She graduated from Mt. Holyoke College in 1940 with a B.S.in Zoology. In 1941, she married Sargent Russell and they lived on farms producing all of their own meat, milk, poultry, and vegetables while raising seven children. In 1957, while pregnant with her seventh child, she received a Masters in Natural Sciences. The couple divorced in 1961.

Evelyn lived most of her adult life in Amherst, MA, where she worked as a research assistant at the Amherst College biology department for five years and as a foreign student advisor at the University of Massachusetts for six years. From there she went to Kenya, first under the auspices of the Bahai faith and then as a member of the U.S. Peace Corps. In her four years in Kenya, she was headmistress of a secondary school.

During the Vietnam War, which she vehemently opposed, she refused to pay taxes that would support the war. But when her tax protest got her in “serious trouble” with federal authorities, Dr. Pollak said, her mom went into “voluntary poverty.” She decided that she “just wouldn't earn enough money to pay taxes.”

Toward the end of her life, Evelyn lived in Orange and Greenfield, MA. She passed away of natural causes on February 8, 2008 at the age of 91. Since then, her body has been at the anatomy lab of the UMass Medical School.

An obituary, prepared by her children, summed up their mother this way:

“For her whole life, Evelyn loved all live creatures great and small. As a child she collected insects and butterflies, frogs and salamanders and hamsters and guinea pigs. She was an avid Girl Scout both as a member and later as counselor and leader. She enjoyed traveling anywhere, sitting by the ocean, fixing up used furniture salvaged from the dump, eating lobster, and visiting with her family both recent and remote. She was an avid genealogist and gathered reams of information about the family ancesters. Most of all, she loved music, and she continued to share her talents singing and playing her harmonica wherever she went.

“Evelyn lived by her adventure motto, accepting adversity with grace, energy, a chuckle and a song. She sacrificed physical comfort and material goods to be true to her goal to minimize her personal use of the earth's resources, and shared what little she had with those less fortunate than she with the rare generosity of one who gives until it hurts. There was integrity throughout her life of service to others, compassion for the underprivileged and a vigorous opposition to discrimination, hatred, and war. She always walked her talk, demonstrating for civil rights, going door-to-door fighting for housing rights, campaigning for peace candidates, and working with international peace efforts. She was a kind woman who had a goal, who lived for it and left the world a better place than she found it.”


Evelyn's adventure motto was: "An adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.” In keeping with her motto, she up and went to Kenya to teach and do good. In the photo, she is shown in Kenya with a friend. No doubt Africa was inconvenient. Yet an eye-opening experience of a lifetime would seem to make her going to Africa “rightly considered.” (I can vouch for that. For how Africa changed my thinking and my life, click here.)

Following are some of my questions and Dr. Pollak's answers:

What kind of person was your mother?

“Fiercely independent, to a fault actually but as with many faults and good qualities, they are merely the flip side of each other. She lived her life the way she wanted to, which could be challenging for her children, especially near the end when she resisted assistance until she had been rescued by the fire department three times and they refused to go out again.”

Why did she donate her body?

“Well, I think number one, she had a drive to be useful in life and wanted to extend that to her death. Number two, she didn't want to be a burden on any of her family and that was a way to take care of the funeral/burial expenses quite expeditiously. Number three, going along with her independence, it was a way of staying IN CONTROL. My mother was a bit of a control freak. This way, there would be no discussion about burial vs. cremation or where to spread the ashes or whatever. SHE DECIDED!! And we decided to honor her wishes down to the last piece of dust. We are looking forward to attending the memorial at the burial site in October.”

How did her family react to her decision to donate her body?

“She told us ahead of time by several years of her decision, and gave us a chance to react, but not really object. I think most of us were extremely proud of her decision, and yes grateful because it did make things simple for us. We think it is entirely in keeping with who she is, and the fact that her name will be on a granite slab as a donee for all eternity ... well, that's pretty cool.... As a physician myself, I was especially proud of her, grateful and actually exhilarated by the idea of the gift going full circle kind of thing. My mother taught me dissection before anyone else did; she gave me the gift of the love of biology, living creatures, what's inside. I could think of no more fitting end for my mother's remains, and if her soul was nearby during the process, she would have guided the fingers and scalpels of her dissectors, and whispered the answers in their ears during their practicum.”

Evelyn was very close to her grandmother, Mary Cora Davis Winship. So special was their relationship that she kept words written by her grandmother close to her heart all of her life. The words that were a lifelong inspiration and guiding light for Evelyn Josephine Hall Russell, are as follows:

We should all endeavor to live so that when dead there will be something left to tell that we lived. How much unhappiness and degradation arise from idleness and want of a fixed purpose, God only knows. Why do we not, arousing the power which is slumbering within, fix our minds upon some object, then work earnestly and cheerfully for it. We should not think lightly of small beginnings, for they often lead to great ends. Flake by flake, this vast continent was covered with a mantle of beautiful snow. With stone upon stone, the pyramids, those monuments of ancient art were built. Thousands of examples come to us through the long ages of the past, bidding us to live for something. How much there is for us to do. How immense our fields of action, as we cannot even live without influencing others. Let that influence be elevating and beneficial. Tiny acts of kindness, attention to the wants of others will bring their own reward.

Let us be up and doing.

With a heart for any fate.

Still achieving, still pursuing.

Learn to labor and to wait.



Shhh, do you hear something? I do.
I may be hearing things...
but that sure sounds like a harmonica to me. Evelyn?

The "Mayor" of Taunton, MA: With Newspapers Dying, How Can Tommy Clark of Park News Be All Smiles?

On Broadway in the heart of downtown Taunton, MA, Tommy Clark, owner and operator of Park News,shown here with his wife Anna, hears of the latest price increase by The New York Times from an unlikely source: me, a walk-in stranger he has never laid eyes on – but whom he greets with a warm smile nonetheless.

"What do you think of the Sunday Times going to six bucks and the weekday paper going to two bucks?" I ask him on the first day of my week-long, grandchild-sitting visit to the Taunton area. I am at Park News to get my daily New York Times fix.

"Price increase? Another one?," Tommy says, obviously taken by surprise. "Six bucks for Sunday's? No, I haven't heard anything."

"Well, that's what I heard, " I said. I heard about the increase from the guy who puts the Sunday Times together at a White Hen convenience store in the Tatnuck section of Worcester. "I'm in a state of shock," I told Tommy Clark. "That's a fifty percent increase for the Sunday Times in less than two years and a hundred percent more for the weekday Times."

Seeing that he cannot easily escape, I continue my rant. "The Times is catching up with The Wall Street Journal, which has doubled since Rupert Murdock took it over a year ago." I'm angry at the Wall Street Journal, too, another habit of mine.

The name Rupert Murdock, the Australian Press magnate, does not ring a bell with Tommy. As I learn later, he does not read newspapers; he just sells them. He is 77. He has owned and operated Park News for 59 years, since he was 18.

18? "My dad helped me," Tommy said. "He knew everybody in town and everybody knew him. Plus I got a lot of support from the rest of the family. I have always done this and I never wanted to do anything else."

In the photo, he is shown at the nerve center of Park News with his wife of 51 years, Anna. The two have been selling newspapers together since they got married. "Actually, "Anna said. "I do the work and he talks to the customers, just like what he is doing now."


As she says this, she is waiting on a customer while Tommy combs his hair to get looking his best for the photograph. Previously, he had good-naturedly waved off my request to take a picture of him. This photo of the two of them came about only because Anna stepped in.

When I told her he wouldn't let me take a picture, she turned to him and said, "Why not? Let him take a picture of you for crying out loud. What do you care?" Tommy promptly did what he was told.

Tommy says that marrying Anna was "the best thing I ever did." He met her in Park News. "She went to high school down the street and would come into the store every day and buy some candy." Then he went away to the service for two years. When he came back, Anna came into the store and said, "You're not married?"

He said, "No."

"Six months later, we were married," Tommy said.

That was in 1948, before the advent of television, when newspapers were king. People came to Park News for news, to get the latest on what was happening. Since then, while raising five children and being blessed with eleven grandchildren, Tommy and Anna Clark have sold a lot of newspapers.

But, gradually as people got more news from TV and, more recently, as a full-blown Internet age has taken hold offering news 24/7 with a couple of mouse clicks – and much of it for free – Park News has been selling fewer and fewer newspapers.

Readers are turning instead to news "aggregators" like Google and Yahoo and to thousands of bloggers and webzines like Huffington News. The newspaper section at Park News has shrunk to a small section at the front of the store. Tommy gets only a few of copies of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, which are bought by newspaper dead-enders like me.

"What I make from the newspapers, it's not worth turning the cash register on," Tommy said.


Park News' best-selling paper is the Boston Globe and the local newspaper, The Taunton Daily Gazette, but the sales of both are way down from earlier years. The New York Times owns the Globe but is itself fighting for financial survival. Faced with $1.1 billion in debt, the Times raised $225 million on a lend-lease of its building. It borrowed $250 million -- accepting stiff terms -- from one of the richest men in the world, Carlos Slim Helu of Mexico. Pushing the financial misery down the line, the New York Times has threatened to shut down the Boston Globe unless it comes up with $20 million in cost reductions.

Lois Souza, a waitress at Jimmy's restaurant a couple of doors away is a throwback newspaper junkie who reads three newspapers a day (Taunton Daily Gazette, Boston Globe, and the New York Post). She has a dim few of the future of the Taunton Daily Gazette."The only thing selling the Gazette are the obituaries," she said. But Tommy Clark says that he gets a much better cut from each copy of the Gazette sold than he does from either The New York times or the Wall Street Journal.

After three or four visits to Park News to pick up my New York Times and Wall Street Journal, Tommy begins treating me like one of his regulars. Taking advantage, I ask nosy questions such as: Exactly how much money do you make on newspapers? If it's as little as you say, how do you stay in business?

One day when I come in, Tommy decides to provide some answers. Picking up the phone, he said, "I'm going to find out about that price increase. I'm going to check on exactly what I'm going to make on The New York times and The Wall Street Journal." He gets the distributor on the phone and takes down notes as they talk.

Hanging up, he said, "Yes, you're right, prices for The New York Times are going up, effective June 1st. The Sunday Times is going to six bucks. It will cost me five fifty-three.

I'll make forty-seven cents. The weekday Times goes from a buck fifty to two bucks. I'll make thirteen cents. I make a dime on the Wall Street Journal."

He explains that in the old days, and for many years, he made a steady 20% on the Times and the Journal. "Not any more," he said. "What's my percentage now? Less than half that?"

For the Sunday New York Times, Tommy's forty-seven-cent cut comes to 7.9%. For the daily Times, his thirteen cents is 6.9% of the new $2.00 selling price or perhaps .65 for the three or four copies of the daily Times that he sells. He continues to get about 20% on sales of the Taunton Gazette.

For the six copies of the Times I bought from him during my week in Taunton, Tommy made a whopping .78. I would say that is cheap enough, considering that if deprived of my Times for a week, I would be dead.

Tommy Clark makes next to nothing selling The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. He gets a much better cut from each copy of the Taunton Daily Gazette sold, but the local paper's sales continue to slide. So how does Tommy Clark stay in business?

"Cigars," he says. And sure enough, hanging out at Park News, I see a steady stream of customers, all men, buying cigars. But I must hasten to add that customers also buy a lot of cigarettes, lottery tickets, and magazines.

Customers are on a first-name and nick-name basis, so much so that I get little looks that say: Who the hell are you? Friendly joshing and wise-cracking is non-stop. Many customers have obviously grown up together and have been coming to Park News all their lives.

With Park News' name a mere leftover from a once great and dominating newspaper era, with its future now on a day-by-day basis -- the money coming in is enough to pay the bills, at least for now -- Tommy Clark's place remains stubbornly vibrant. It is a Taunton social center where people stop by for a cigar, to see old friends, to catch up on gossip, to skewer dumb politicians, and to flip a buck or two to the "mayor" of Taunton.

Presiding over it all, is the ever smiling and happy Tommy Clark. A typical longtime customer stands outside on Broadway watching Tommy schmoozing a bunch of customers. "Look at him," he said, " the mayor is working the crowd like a big-time politician. He knows everybody and everybody know him. He ought to run for mayor. He's a better politician than that guy across the street."

"Who is that?"

"Barney Frank. That's his office right over there," he said, pointing.

"Really?"

"Yeah, but he's never there. He spends all his time in Washington living the high life on our tax money. Tommy should run against him. He could get elected."

Tommy has two things about him that absolutely do not go together. The first is that ever-present smile. It was the first thing I noticed and it doesn't go away. The second is that he has multiple sclerosis, which is evident when he steps out from behind the counter.

In the characteristic MS way, his body is twisted and he drags a leg as he moves with difficulty around the store waiting on customers. Yet in the several times that I talked to Tommy Clark, he never once mentioned his MS and I saw no reason to ask him about it.

MS is not important enough for either one of us to mention, not even in passing. Though Tommy's MS is in plain sight for all to see and doesn't go away, it does diminish into nothingness before your eyes. Somehow, some way, Tommy Clark has managed to render MS irrelevant in his life.

I ask him if he has any plans to retire. "Retire," he replies. "Why would I retire? I love doing this. I've been on Broadway longer than Mickey Rooney. I want to die right here on the floor."

Note to medical researchers: find out how Tommy Clark does it – and bottle it.

So long and keep moving.

Postscript: This blog was supposed to be about how and why the newspaper that I know and love is dying a slow death – but Tommy Clark killed that idea just by being himself. Because of him, I didn't cite facts and figures, such as the number of journalism jobs that have disappeared last year; or describe iconic newspapers that have folded (such as the centenarian-plus Rocky Mountain News); or explain how Craigslist has eviscerated local newspapers by ripping away their advertising guts: the classifieds; or show how investigative journalism is slowly but surely becoming enfeebled; or document how news and journalism itself is now in a mad, headlong, desperate dash for the Internet, hoping to somehow survive in digital form.

Just as well, because, unless you live in an underground bunker, we all know all of this. However, for a good discussion of the financial issues facing the New York Times and the Boston Globe -- and, by extension, the Taunton Gazette and other newspapers, click here.

But there is one thing I must and will say. Newspapers like The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal will not survive in paper form and both know it. Both are powerful national brands that have already established strong electronic editions, though the WSJ has been far more successful at monetization than has the NYT. I have already resigned myself to getting a notebook computer on which to read the NYT and the WSJ in the morning with my coffee. The notebook will be my new "blankee" – as my son Greg calls my New York Times that I carry with me at all times. On it I will be able to read at all times "all the news fit to digitize." If Tommy Clark can adapt, keep smiling, and be happy so can I, dammit!

A Pancake's Debut: A Mad Scientist's New Gluten-free Pancake is Put to a Taste Test.

The big moment has come. After months of recipe experimentation, Ellen Allard, a self-described Mad Pancake Scientist, is ready to unveil her audaciously creative new gluten-free pancake -- with a no-holds-barred taste test. In this picture,Ellen is in the center, her husband Peter is on the right, and my wife Barbara is on the left.

The taste-testers are myself and Barbara. We don't eat pancakes. We don't really like pancakes. Ellen could not have chosen two more resistant creatures to test her pancakes on.

We associate pancakes with artery-clogging, belly fat, and premature death. We were looking forward to a breakfast visit with Ellen and her husband Peter in their Worcester, MA. home; we weren't exactly looking forward to the pancakes.

When Ellen invited us to do the taste test, I put a stern face in hers and said, "And afterwards when I tell you that the pancakes are awful, how are you going to feel"?

She forced a smile. "That's what I'm looking for," she said weakly, "feedback. We all need feedback."

"Well, you're going to get it," I said.

With known skeptics as taste-testers, Ellen understandably opts for full transparency. She knows that if we walk in the door and she serves us already prepared pancakes, and if they actually taste good, we'll wonder what's in them that we should know about.

So, while we chat, she starts from scratch. One by one, she shows and explains every ingredient, where it comes from, and why it is healthier than what we get from pancake mixes and in restaurants.

When she excitedly spoons silken tofu up and down for us to see, I cannot help but feel a little loss of appetite. Same with the soy yogurt, oganic rice milk, and flax seed. I wonder how I'm going to get through this. My tummy stirs. It wants no part of whatever is now in the air.

Meanwhile, this Mad Scientist of pancake land is scurrying around with a huge smile, measuring, whisking, blending, checking and rechecking the recipe that she has worked so hard perfecting. "I just love it," she says, oblivious to the mounting kitchen mess and the steep upill climb her pancakes face in this taste test.

Ellen's gluten-free life is out of necessity. About four years ago, she was diagnosed with celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder of the small intestine caused by reaction to the gluten protein found in wheat (and related species such as barley and rye.)

The only known cure for celiac disease is a gluten-free diet. But after seeing how the diet has markedly improved her energy levels and overall health, living gluten-free has become a passion for Ellen.

Peter also follows a gluten-free diet, though he does not have celiac disease or food allergies. "With the way I was eating," he said, "I used to have an upset stomach all the time. It was so bad that I carried Tums around with me."

Peter admits to having a sweet tooth that extends, God forbid, to a yearning for an occasional donut. "But since I have been living gluten-free," he said, " I haven't had any stomach problems at all. Physically, I feel great. It keeps the weight off, too."

Ellen holds up a big bottle of vodka. "I put the vanilla beans in this bottle and age them. That's how I make the vanilla extract."

"You make the vanilla abstract yourself?" I ask.

"Yes. All natural and pure." She offers me a sniff from a little bottle of her vanilla creation. "Here, take a smell."

I put my nose to it. Hmmmmm. Not bad. I feel an involuntary something in my belly, not unpleasant. I figure that, after I have viewed all those yucky, gooey ingredients, my stomach is finally settling down.

To make a point, Ellen holds up the vodka bottle beside the little bottle of her vanilla extract. If she were to buy the little bottle, she says it would cost four or five times the cost of the big vodka-
bottle-sized vanilla extract that she makes.

Now Ellen moves operations to the stove where she carefully drips batter onto the medium-heated cast-iron stovetop griddle. Soon she has a plated stack of fresh, hot pancakes that she places on the counter for us to admire. She adds powdered sugar. She tops it off with pure maple syrup.

Done. At the very least, it is a work of culinary art.

It is a beautiful, enticing sight, I must admit. Ellen takes out her camera and takes the picture, shown here. "I'm getting so I don't take pictures of people any more," she said. "I just want to take pictures of food."

So we have a stack of beautiful pancakes and a beautiful photograph of them. Now the question is: Given all those unappetizing-looking ingredients and all that recipe-juggling, are Ellen Allard's new pancakes edible?

Barbara ventures the first taste. She takes a forkful, puts it in her mouth, chews, and swallows. The three of us -- Ellen, Peter, and I – stare, looking for a sign. For the first time since we arrived, Ellen does not have a smile on her face. Peter fidgets.

"You know... you know..." Barbara says. We all lean foward. It is the moment of truth. Barbara breaks into a big smile. "You know," she says, her voice rising, "these are good. They are REALLY good!"

Ellen's smile returns, bigger than ever. Peter is calm again. It is my turn. I think: Ellen is looking for feedback and she should get it. How can her pancakes get to taste decently without constructive criticism? Aren't dissenting views healthy?

One bite is all it takes. The pancake is thin, light, airy, crispy at the edges, and sweet but not too sweet. It tastes even better than it looks, if that is possible. Quickly my stack of Ellen Allard's gluten-free pancakes vanish. I ask for seconds, which I also quickly devour.

I think about asking for thirds, but don't. I don't want to make a pig of myself.

Ellen, you aced the taste test. Congratulations.

So long and keep moving.


P.S. For Ellen's gluten-free pancake recipe and more information about what a gluten-free diet is all about, check Ellen's website, iamglutenfree.blogspot.com. Her website also has information about Wild Willys, a Worcester, MA. restaurant that has just introduced a gluten-free menu. Remarkably, Ellen and Peter also have a whole other life as professional musicians specializing in music for children. As entertainers, they are pros who perform throughout the country. It is how they make their living. Learn more at peterandellen.com.

P.P.S. Full disclosure: I put up all the money for the Mad Pancake Scientist's research and development and I expect to make a fortune on her gluten-free pancake.*

*NOT! Lest somebody, somewhere out there believes this. Nor were Barbara and I paid for taking part in the taste test. We're still not crazy about pancakes, except for one kind. What kind might that be? Give you one guess.

Body Donation: Pausing from Medical Studies and Patient Care to ... Reflect.

It's unheard of.

Two second-year medical students, Kristin Burke(center) and Jeremy Robbins(right), and a first-year resident in family practice, Dr. Stephanie Carter(left), sit in the lobby at the UMass Medical School in Worcester, MA and, despite murderous schedules ... talk.

Kristin and Jeremy do not have their faces in thick medical tomes and voluminous lecture notes, even though big year-end exams are coming up fast. Dr. Carter is not making rounds and rushing around trying to do what cannot humanly be done. She did, however, rush in late reciting a list of all she had to do and offering apologies.

It is neigh impossible to yank three people like this off brutal, sleep-depriving, and anxiety-riven medical and study treadmills. Yet Dianne Person, Manager of the Anatomical Gift Program managed to do it – with a flurry of back-and-forth, never-say-die e-mails.

Why? So that these three can discuss their experiences and feelings about dissecting the human body and, as it turned out, much more. In the process, they also satisfy the idle curiosity of a cadaver-in-waiting, me, under the supervision of my wife, Barbara.

I am there as a donor to the Anatomical Gift Program. Donated bodies make it possible for medical students like Kristen and Jeremy to learn about the human body, inside and out, and to fulfill their dreams of becoming doctors. They make doctors like Dr. Carter better doctors.

Voluntary donation is a big improvement over the old days when medical schools and freelance anatomists often paid ruffians, so-called “resurrectionists,” to rob graves. My body, nearly 71 (more than a zombie, less than a fully functioning human), walked in on its own without too much decay and with no graveyard dirt or clinging crawlies.

Kristin, 24, appears first, right on time at the appointed hour of 6:30 on a Wednesday evening. Looking around, steps tentative, she seems a little lost in the huge lobby, as if just released into the outside world from some confined place. Typically, she is in class from 8 to 4 p.m., with a break for lunch. In the evening, she studies until midnight, taking time out for a quick run and dinner.

Extending a hand to Barbara and me, she greets us in a soft voice and with a shy smile. It's hard to believe that such young, girlish eyes have fixed on dead bodies for hours a day over months. Yet she has done so. So have Jeremy and Stephanie. And, at the end of their anatomy course, all have taken and passed mind-numbing written and practical tests. Both tests are often given on the same day.

Medical students learn some 10,000 new words in their first year alone and many thousands more in each of the next three years. Kristin arrives with a brain crammed with medical terms and anatomical facts and functions. She has had to learn terms like neural tube, paraxial mesoderm, notochord, endoderm, intermediate mesoderm, and the difference between somatic and automatic fibers.

Making small talk with her until the others arrive, I mention the PBS/Nova TV program, “Doctors' Diaries” that I had watched the night before. It has filmed interviews with seven Harvard Medical School students from their first year in 1988, through graduation, and follows up with them 20 years later in 2008.

“It's fascinating,” I said. “You should check it out.”

“Television, what's that?” she said.

“Of course, you don't have time for television.”

She shakes her head, but not regretfully. She does so in a way that says: TV is a distraction. What I am doing now, I must give my all to.

She is a medical student. By definition, she does not -- cannot -- lead a normal life. I don't mention “Doctors' Diaries” again.

Jeremy Robbins arrives. A fine young male specimen of 26, he greets Barbara and me with a smile that is real and believable. It's the kind that politicians try for, but rarely pull off. His eye contact locks on; it would make anybody feel special. He would be great in a TV reality series about medical interns. Oops. Strike that. As with Kristin, TV is out for Jeremy. He's a medical student.

His eyes are kind. Already, even before learning more about him, I begin to see him as a future compassionate doctor.

Dr. Stephanie Carter, already a doctor finishing up her first year of residency, has had her usual rough, time-crunched day. Though laying eyes on the four of us for the first time, and after quick introductions, she plops right down and animatedly joins the conversation.

To Kristin and Jeremy, she is what they are working toward. At the ripe old age of 28, Dr. Carter is an instant mentor and our two second-year medical students hang on her every word.

Stephanie (we quickly dispense with titles here) brims with dedication and resolve. “Don't tell me I can't do it,” she said.

When she first applied to UMass Medical School, she was turned down. She went out and got a master's degree in molecular biology and applied again. Asked by an admissions officer what she would do if she were turned down again, she replied, “I'll be back next year.”

She was accepted.

During her years as a medical student, Stephanie kept her rejection notice from UMass Medical and notices from other medical schools that she had failed to get into. After she received her medical degree from UMass last year, she delightfully threw the rejection notices in the rubbish where, in her unshaken opinion, they always belonged.

Even as a little girl in Providence, Rhode Island, Stephanie believed in herself and was curious about everything. She recalls that at the age of seven, she wondered what it would be like to walk on crutches. To find out, she took a couple of
tubes, put them under her arms, and started walking down stairs.

She fell, hitting her head hard on the concrete landing. She fractured her skull and broke her jaw. Her parents rushed her to the ER. When a pediatrician was alone with her, he told her that she was a bad, irresponsible girl who should know better than to do such a silly thing.

Right then and there at the age of seven, Stephanie recalled, “I decided that I could talk to kids better than this pediatrician.” She knew what “pediatrician” meant, too -- taking care of babies and little kids. She felt that this was something she would be good at.

In high school, Stephanie was a “candy-striper” at a local hospital, a volunteer who helped out as needed. The name came from the distinctive wide pink stripes on the slip-ons volunteers wore as they would they fetch magazines, deliver mail, and bring juice and water. It was as a candy-striper that Stephanie had the first inkling of her eventual calling.

However, Stephanie grew up wanting to be an archaeologist. At the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, she majored in science and minored in anthropology.. “Anthropology is all about discovery,” she said. In life and in medicine, Stephanie is primed to ask two things: Where do we come from? What came before?

In her third year at UMass Medical, Stephanie had a vocational epiphany. By that time, she thought she wanted to be a pediatrician. “But then I realized that I didn't want to deliver the baby and then hand the baby over to somebody else.” She wanted to be there for the baby as he or she grew up. She decided to specialize in family practice.

Kristin grew up in Mansfield, MA in an archtypal American family. Her Dad worked for Polaroid and her Mom was an interior decorator. Like Stephanie, she was a self-described “science geek.” Dreaming of some day becoming an astronaut, she studied biology at Wake Forest College in North Carolina.

While at Wake Forest, she volunteered at a hospice – and the experience changed her life. “I saw how much care these patients required and I said to myself, 'I can do that',” she said. That “can” soon turned to “want.”

Like Stephanie, Kristin was also a candy-striper. As with Stephanie, it was as a candy-striper that she first imagined herself as a doctor. What attracted her most was the interaction with people. Her desire to take care of patients was born and, since then, has only grown.

Kristin is far from one-dimensional, however. She has another great passion: music. At the age of four, she played the piano. At age eight, she took up the cello. By the time she was 16 and in high school she was teaching piano to 36 students aged 5 to 50.

“You got paid for it?” I asked.

“Yes, very well.”


“But now you don't have time to play the piano.”

“No.” She says she still has her old baby grand, but hardly ever sits down at it. “I played a little when my mother was visiting and she said my playing was not so good,” she said.

Clearly, both medicine and music are firmly in Kristin's future. She said, “I feel like the hard part of these pre-clinical years of medical school is that I always feel like there is more that I can be studying. ... I know that I will come back to piano some day, but now it is more important for me to gain a solid foundation in medicine.”

Jeremy grew up in the greater Boston area, in Swampscott and Jamaica Plain. His father was a social worker in private practice and his mother was a teacher. Although you would never guess it today, he was physically “reckless” when he was younger.

“Put it this way, “ he said. “The ER knew me.” But he survived to study science and physics at Colby College in Maine and to graduate from there.

What influenced him to become a doctor? Jeremy goes back to his days in the Swampscott public school system where his class was the first to have Down's Syndrome children mainstreamed. He took two of them, both boys, “under wing,”not to please anyone but because it was the “right thing to do.” He says they taught him the importance of “being kind, sensitive, and respectful.”

He credits a “loving, caring, supportive” family for giving him the values and opportunity for college that led him to medicine. He is “especially close” to his parents and “would not be anywhere without them.”

His grandfather was an important role model. “He was a truly great man,” Jeremy said. He was an orphan who was abandoned by his father after his mother died giving birth to him. Growing up during the Great Depression and without family, he “came from nowhere” and worked his way up to become a pathologist. Jeremy describes him as “humble, loving, compassionate,” and as a “father figure” in the lives of many, many people.

His grandfather's real claim to fame, Jeremy says, was as a “master” teacher at BU Medical School. He mentions something else in passing: “writing the big-deal book.”

Stephanie snapped to. “Robbins Pathology?” she asked excitedly.

“Yes,” Jeremy admitted somewhat reluctantly. “Pathological Basis of Disease.”

“By Stanley Robbins?” Stephanie asked, now on the edge of her seat.”

“Yes.”

“Pathological Basis of Disease” by Stanley Robbins, Jeremy's grandfather, is a well-known and widely used medical text. But Stephanie must pull this distinguished heritage out of Jeremy, who evidently has inherited his grandfather's humility.

Jeremy may not yet know his speciality, but he definitely knows the kind of doctor he wants to be. As Dr. Jeremy Robbins, he will earn the “intimate trust of the patient, doing whatever it takes to ensure the health and well-being of my patients, always doing the right thing.”

In addition to medicine and patient care, Jeremy has other loves: his parents who “have so much to do with who I am as a person and where I am today”; watching a Red Sox game with good friends or “going for a hike with my wonderful girlfriend, Aimee”; and “my Italian grandmother's meat sauce.”

There is a very special place in Jeremy's heart for the cadavers he and Kristin dissected in Anatomy Lab as first-year medical students. He and Kristin worked with the Director of the Anatomy Gift Program, Dianne Person, to coordinate the annual May memorial to donors and their families.

Now this future cadaver wants to know something. “The only thing that bothers me about being in the Anatomy Lab,” I said, “is losing my identity. I don't like being nameless when all my life I have been a person with a name, personality, and individuality. When I donate my body, why do I suddenly have to be a nobody?”

I explain that it is different in some other countries and cite Thailand as an example. “In Thailand, “ I said, “they honor the cadavers in the anatomy lab by displaying their photos with names, bios, and life achievements. They refer to the cadaver as 'my great teacher.' Why shouldn't it be the same way in this country?”

While not sure about going so far as the Thailand model, Kristin and Jeremy are both open to medical students knowing more about the cadaver/patients. However, many medical students, who work in groups, prefer not to know details of cadaver/patients' personal lives.

Jeremy recalls his experience in Anatomy Lab:

“The feeling of trepidation while making our first incision (our group of four all put one hand on the scalpel) is something I'll never forget. How much things changed when I peeled back the cloth covering our patient's face and finally had an identity to go with her body. I felt much more at peace (for lack of a better word) after seeing her face; it gave me a sense of wholeness that evaded me previously. I guess after spending days in the anatomy lab, I had begun to become a little detached from the patient, and seeing her face really reopened my eyes to seeing her as I would any other human being.”

Kristin remembers Anatomy Lab this way:

“At first, the task seemed emotionally draining. I had never spent time around a dead body before, and in the first few weeks of lab, I felt a reverence for my cadaver that was almost inhibitory to my learning. I was tentative in my dissections, taking note of every detail that I could appreciate in his body. Shortly thereafter,... I became more in touch with and more curious about what he was like in life. My lab partners and I gave him a name, Hank, so that we could feel more connected with him. We wanted to know about his hobbies, his family. How did he get the scar on his knee? Who held his strong hands? When lab was over at the end of the semester, I went to say goodbye to Hank, and felt like I was saying goodbye to an old friend. By donating his body, he offered me the most selfless gift that I had ever received. I learned through him, not only a lot about the human body, but about my own respect for the importance of the many facets of a person’s life. I hope to carry this knowledge and understanding with me in all of my future relationships as a physician.”

I push a self-serving agenda: “To be honest, what I would really like is for medical students to be required to see the video of my 70th birthday party before they dissect me. I want them to see me in on the deck of my home on a beautiful May day laughing and enjoying life with my wife Barbara, four grown children, nine grandchildren, and a pack of friends.”

“The video could be on a big screen taking up the whole wall,” Kristin said.

“You know, Kristin,” I said. “You are definitely getting with the program.”

I voice another concern: the virtual banning of humor in Anatomy Lab. “I just think that the atmosphere doesn't have to be so heavy,” I said, “and a little humor might be a good way to give medical students some relief from the emotional burden of dissection.”

“You could write a joke on your arm,” Jeremy said, smiling.

I give him a thumbs up. I do not say that I am thinking about what I might write on my arm to coax a smile from stressed-out medical students.

But now the mentor, Stephanie, weighs in. “The reality is that when Anatomy Lab begins, everybody there is a stranger. You don't joke around with people you don't know. So much humor depends on people knowing and feeling comfortable with each other. And now add cadavers and nobody wanting to disrespect them and you have another huge reason to keep things serious and professional.”

I instantly rethink humor in the Anatomy Lab.

Perhaps there could be some lightness toward the end of the Lab when students know each other better and the inevitable initial emotional turmoil has subsided somewhat. So, as a cadaver, I'm thinking I'll save any comedy routine for toward the end when students may appreciate it more.

Stephanie, Kristin, and Jeremy all strongly believe that there is no substitute for human dissection. For all of them, intimacy with the deceased human body is necessary to prepare doctors for intimacy with the bodies of living human beings. Human dissection, all three agree, is essential for future doctors.

Dr. Christine Montross, author of "Body of Work" and a resident in psychiatry at Brown University, describes the value of human dissection this way in a recent New York Times article:

“We learn to heal the living by first dismantling the dead. The dissection of cadavers also gives young doctors an appreciation for the wonders of the human body in a way that no virtual image can match. It is awe-inspiring to hold a human heart in one's hands, to appreciate its fragility, intricacy, and strength.”

In his study of medical students in anatomy class, sociologist Frederick Hafferty sees them divided into two basic groups. One group looks upon the cadavers as purely biological specimens, like cats, frogs, and earthworms dissected in other classes. The other group views the cadavers as formerly living human beings.

The two groups have very different mindsets. A student from the first group, quoted by Hafferty, said: “To me the cadaver is a complete nonperson. You really don't think of it as being your body or somebody else's. It's just like a rubber model. When somebody says that a cadaver died of something, it sounds pretty strange. You don't think of it that way. I think it's pretty stupid to be squeamish with cadavers.”

Now listen to a student from the second group, also quoted by Hafferty: “There are people working in lab with me who never express their emotions. If they don't have that emotional sensitivity now, they'll be doing the same thing later on. There are going to be a lot of patients you are going to have to care for that will be physically, or whatever, unable to react to you, just like a cadaver, and you've got to be able to make yourself aware of the patient's feelings, his pain or discomfort ... something you must have if you're going to be a good doctor.”

Hafferty would undoubtedly place Kristin and Jeremy in the second group, and so would I. With their great empathy and respect, they can hold my no-longer-beating heart in their hands any old time. They are everything that any cadaver candidate could hope for.

But what if my precious bod ends up with students from the other group, who see me as a big frog and treat me like one? No problem: feelings don't matter when you don't have any. They are still young people there to learn. And my body is there to be their great teacher.

Of course, there is a chance that some students in the “froggies”group will acquire a habit of depersonalization. Without realizing it, they can easily and seamlessly transfer this mindset to their treatment of live patients. It happens.

But let's not be too quick to damn the “froggies” and praise the “weepies.” Mindset as a medical student does not a doctor's destiny make. Some students in the weepies group may well get too emotionally involved to focus properly and get the job done. Not learning is just as bad as too much depersonalization, perhaps even worse.

As a cadaver, I will do my part to the best of my inability.

So long and keep moving.

Postscript: For historical perspective, see an excellent account in the journal Academic Medicine of how human dissection in medical education has evolved over 500 years. Published in 2000 by George S.M. Dyer and Mary E.L. Thorndike when they were third-year medical students at Harvard Medical School,the account remains valuable today. It credits the University of Massachusetts Medical School for being "in the vanguard for incorporating emotional lessons into its learning objectives for gross anatomy" and for asking medical students to "confront and develop their attitudes toward death and dying, and also to discuss them with their instructors."

A Final Gift: My Body For Medical Science -- and Humanity.

When Dianne M. Person, Administrator of the Anatomical Gift Program at the UMass Medical School in Worcester, Mass., shown here, speaks of her donors and their families, sometimes her eyes moist up and her voice breaks.

Her donors are people who make a “final gift” ... donating their bodies after death to the UMass Medical School to help future doctors learn the human body close up. Ms. Person is nothing if not appreciative and protective of these donors. And that is fine with me, since I am one of them.

Way back in 2,000, when Ms.Person had been on the job for only five months, and after discussing it with my wife Barbara, I trooped down to the UMass Medical School and signed up to be a donor. I had Barbara's full support.

When I die, she will place a call to Dianne Person, who will set in motion and oversee the pickup of my body and tend to Barbara's emotions. She will walk hand in hand with her through the Anatomical Gift Program. And the body of the late George Francis Pollock III will become available for anatomical studies for from one to two years.

But that will be then. Now, still alive and kicking, I recently met with Ms. Person one morning at the Medical School to talk about the Anatomical Gift Program. I wanted more of an idea of what was ahead for my precious bod. Excuse me while I give it a little kiss on the shoulder.

Ms. Person greeted me with a warm smile at the ground-floor canteen of the UMass Medical School and immediately offered to buy me breakfast. I settled for black coffee and so did she. “Great,” she said, “we can sit right down with our coffee and talk.” An hour and a half later, our coffees were cold and largely untouched.

Almost the first thing she said was that I would not be able to go into the anatomy lab. “I'm sorry,” she said, “but there are donors there and we have to be respectful of them.”

“I understand completely,” I said.

The anatomy lab -- that is the mysterious place in the basement behind forbidding black doors with the sign saying “Absolutely No Admittance.” First-year medical students pass through these doors the first time scared and unsure of how they are going to feel dissecting a human body.

This is the realm of Dianne Person's partner of five years, Mike Doyle, shown here with Dianne. While she takes care of donors and their families, Mike is the manager of the anatomy lab and works with medical students, residents, and physicians. As partners, Dianne and Mike are a matched pair. They like and respect each other, as I saw firsthand.

I wasn't looking forward to meeting Mike. He's an embalmer, after all. He works with dead bodies. He spends most working hours in the dreaded, secretive, public-not-allowed chamber where medical students dissect human bodies. I expected him to be suspicious, slightly weird, maybe a little ghoulish, and certainly close-mouthed. And I thought: This guy is never going to allow me to take his picture.

Instead, what I find is a genuinely nice young guy, only 36, who is friendly, laughs at my jokes, and is easy to talk with. He is the proud father of three adorable little girls, the youngest of which is eight months old. He shows off photos of them. There is nothing weird about him.

As for my taking his picture, the photo of a smiling Mike speaks for itself. He seems to enjoy having his picture taken. Far from being close-mouthed, he is quite happy to talk about his work. What gives him the most satisfaction is helping people. Mike, I had you all wrong. I apologize to you and all embalmers.

Mike is just as passionate as Dianne -- we're now on a first-name basis -- about protecting the dignity and privacy of donors. Once donors arrive at his anatomy lab, they become “patients,” following the example of Dr. Sandy C. Marks, founder of the Anatomical Gift Program. For the first-year medical students introduced to a cadaver for the first time, it is their “first patient.”

Mike tells the future doctors that these patients deserve the best possible treatment. How they treat this first patient is a good predictor of how they will treat patients later when they are doctors, Mike says.

I never intended to ask to go into the anatomy lab. The truth is, I have no desire to do so. I don't think I belong in there, at least not yet. I think the patients there have a right to not be stared at by a stranger with a notebook and a camera slung over his shoulder.

As for taking a picture of them, not that Dianne or Mike would ever allow it, I could never do it. It feels so good knowing that when I am in the anatomy lab, my body won't be an object of curiosity for sightseers.

In describing myself here as a donor, however, I make a presumption I have no right to make. I have no assurance that I will be accepted as a donor. Dianne offhandedly refers to me as a “potential donor.” What she is saying is that I may be accepted as a donor if my body is found to be suitable.

It could be disqualified by infectious disease, such as AIDS, TB, MRSA, and Hepatitis which would put medical students at risk. A morbidly obese body may be declined as too difficult for medical students to work with. Extensive trauma at the time of death and advanced decomposition may also render a body unsuitable.

One of Dianne's most painful duties is telling a family that its deceased loved one cannot be accepted as a donor. She is acutely sensitive to the fact that she must deliver this news to people already devastated by losing a family member.

As she says this, her voice falters and her eyes well up. She pauses to regain her composure. Dabbing her eyes, she said, “Sorry, you see that I get emotional about this.”

“Yes, I see.”

Her emotional reaction to donors and their families, though complex, arises from a simple truth. She gets to know them. And, over the years, she has gotten to know many of them. She has shared their losses, fears, hopes and intimate family lore. With Dianne, these powerful memories, and the emotions they recall, are never far from the surface.

I ask her how she ever ended up in such a job. “Well, I didn't plan it, that's for sure,” she said. In college, she studied art and business administration. “Actually, it's an interesting story. I was working in Worcester as an account rep for a company providing employees' assistance programs for other companies. If an employee had a behavioral problem such as drinking or drugs, we would step in and help. Well, our company got bought out by a conglomerate and one day they got 17 of us in a conference room and told us we were laid off. I remember saying to myself, 'Wow, I need a job.'”

Shortly after, Dianne saw an ad in the Worcester Telegram and Gazette for an administrative position in the Cell Biology Department of the UMass Medical School. She applied and went for an interview. She thought the interview went well, but three weeks passed and she didn't hear back. She later learned that the executive who had to decide about her was out sick, with pneumonia.

Feeling she had to keep looking, she saw an ad by a temp agency for another UMass opening. She interviewed for it with the temp agency. Then, through a stroke of good luck, the temp agency sent her to the first job she had interviewed for. She immediately hit it off with her new colleagues in the Cell Biology Department-- and was hired.

Dr. Sandra Bertman, a medical humanities professor in the department, told Dianne that it was “meant to be.” That was nine years ago this January. To get up to speed fast, Dianne took a graduate course on death and dying taught by Dr. Bertman. “May I humbly say that I aced it,” Ms. Person said.

Unlike Dianne, Mike always knew what he wanted to do. At 19 he went to work at a family-owned funeral home in the Boston area where he became a fully qualified embalmer. He found the work satisfying, he says, because he regularly got to see how it made families feel so much better.

Mike was really worried about leaving to come to UMass Medical. He was afraid he would not find the same sense of satisfaction. He has and then some. “Here I work with the medical students and residents as a team for common goals,” he said. “We all bond with each other and with the patients.”

He says it's like family, with everybody working together, being close, and caring about each other. “I tell the students that they are going to miss me,” Mike said. After a few months back peering into a microscope and learning mostly alone, he says the students come back and say, “You were right. We miss you.”

Dianne and Mike continue the tradition of a legendary figure, Dr.Sandy C. Marks, Jr., who joined UMass Medical School at its inception in 1970. A professor of cell biology, radiology, and surgery, Dr. Marks was the first faculty member of the anatomy department and founded the Anatomical Gifts Program. He also established the annual spring memorial service at which medical students honor donors and their families.

Dianne speaks of him with awe. In addition to everything else, she said, he had a periodontal practice two days a week, was a radiologist, and did research in bone disorders. We called him the “osteoclast expert,” she said, “a name given to him by his lab manager and dear friend, Carole.”

He donated his services to a free dental clinic in Worcester. He published hundreds of research papers and articles in medical journals on such subjects as bone cell biology, anatomy, biochemistry, radiology, and death and dying with dignity.

The son of Presbyterian missionaries to Africa, Dr. Marks graduated from high school in the former Belgian Congo and eventually received a Ph.D. from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dianne says he was an amazing, caring person and she feels privileged to have worked with him. Dr. Marks died suddenly of a heart attack in November of 2002 at age 65.

“The call came from our mutual friend, Carole,” Dianne said. “All I could say was 'Oh no'. I just stood there holding the phone in disbelief.” Dr. Marks was registered as a donor at an unnamed medical school. “He was thinking of us,” she said. “He did not want to put us through the stress of having him as a donor.”

For Dianne, intense emotional stress goes with the job. It is never routine and always just a phone call away. She is on call 24/7. She can get a call any time day or night to hear that a human being has died. And a family member on the other end of the line may be sobbing or even hysterical and desperately needing solace.

“How do you do it?”

Dianne lowers her eyes and reflects. Seconds pass. Then she looks up and says, almost in a whisper, “I do ... I do what has to be done.”

She is warm, open, unpretentious, and an active listener. So we get to chatting. We talk about family. She tells me how proud she is of her daughter, Jessica Ann, 29, who as we talk is in Beijing, China. Her first venture abroad, she is in China on a cultural exchange explaining young American women to young Chinese women.

Jessica Ann, single and an aspiring actress, will be back home in Los Angeles in a few days and Dianne is looking forward to going out there to spend some time with her. “We are so close,” she said. “Nothing could come between us.”

I tell her that my wife Barbara and I have taken our second marriages and built a truly blended family of four adult children – two each – and nine grandchildren. “We love them all,” I said. I tell her how I teach the grandchildren how to ice skate and how I play monster with them. I describe how the other day our 2-year-old granddaughter, Riley, was chasing me around the house poking a toy dinosaur at me and growling.

“All those grandchildren,” Dianne said, sighing. “You're so lucky.”

We are both thinking the same thing. “Of course, I want grandchildren,”she said, "but they can't come according to Mom's schedule.”

Dianne walks me out, showing me a shortcut that she uses when she goes to visit her mother at the adjacent Beaumont Rehabilitation Center. She says her Mom, who has breast cancer and is not able to leave the Center on her own, is “happy and having a ball. The people there are wonderful and caring.”

She points out the granite memorial put up by the UMass Medical School in honor of Dr. Marks, Clare Small, and “those who donated their bodies to our learning.” Clare Small was one of the earliest donors. Students of the UMass Medical School class of 2008 were so impressed with her poetry that they wanted her name on the memorial along with that of Dr. Marks.

The memorial has the following words from Clare Small:
“...May that life force that ran in me shine forth once more and pass to you the knowledge and power that help sustain the miracle of life.”

Trees lining the road from the memorial have all been planted by successive classes of medical students in honor of the donors. I never would have guessed. Now when I pass them, I look at them differently. Now they mean something important to me.

I said to Dianne: “From now on, I'll be thinking of you taking this walk, across the street and up the path alongside the brook, to visit your Mom.” And on every visit to her Mom, Dianne walks by the monument and the trees planted by medical students.

Now to the heart of the Anatomical Gift Program: the human body. The Umass Medical School needs bodies for medical students to learn from. In the training of future doctors, there is no substitution for human cadavers. Dissection is required to become a doctor.

For donors, the issue is deeply personal. The first step is memento mori, or contemplation of one's death. Most of us would much prefer to put it out of our minds altogether, or even pretend that it does not exist.

Even as a potential donor -- and I do hope my body makes the grade -- I do not dream about a selfless post-life career as a cadaver. I do not like thinking about giving up the body that I've lived with for so long, which I know from head to toe, and which, to be honest, I love.

That precious bod. How we pamper it, adorn it, diet it, exercise it, medicate it, and adore it. It is an object of true love. Excuse me while I give my shoulder another little kiss. It gets our rapt attention in the mirror. Out in the street, we catch fleeting glimpses of it in store windows, and it's like suddenly meeting up with our oldest and best friend.

The body may not be perfect. It may, in fact, seriously fall short of anybody's idea of physical perfection. Yet, yet ... c'est moi. It is me! No two human beings are exactly alike. One of a kind of anything is cause for wonder.

Dr. Marks once told the Boston Globe that there are “incredible variations in the way we are put together and that each of our bodies has something special to teach.” He said that none of us looks exactly like Grant's Atlas of Anatomy.

You may well have your mother's nose or your father's ears or have a passing resemblance to others; but no one in the world puts a nose, ears, eyes, mouth, shape of head, hair, limbs, hands, and all the other many human parts together in quite the way that you do. Or I do.

So this body of ours, this one-of-a-kind biochemical masterpiece, our home for our entire lives, is something rightfully precious to us. We should not lightly hand over this most prized possession to a medical school as a teaching aid. It is worth thinking long and hard about. I've done that. After this good life comes to an end, I will be a donor -- if my body meets requirements, that is.

I don't plan on dying soon, but then few of us do. John Lennon said that life is what happens while you are busy making other plans. He was making other plans when he was shot him to death outside his New York City apartment.

He loved living in the city, even though he knew there were dangers, especially so for a celebrity. Relishing the freedom to come and go, he ignored security. On the day he died, on December 8, 1980, he had just returned to his Dakota apartment building with his wife Yoko Ono from a recording session.

He could have been driven safely down the driveway. Instead, he had his car stopped so he could get out and greet fans on the sidewalk waiting for him. There an assassin ended his life. He was 40.

Death comes on its own timetable, not ours.

I'll soon be 71. Many of the departed in the daily obits are younger. This machine of mine, and it IS a machine, may already have more miles on it than it was built for. Machines break down. My personal machine is going strong – singles tennis, ice-skating, swimming, extreme wall-building – but sooner or later its wheels are going to fall off.

And when that happens, my wife Barbara will give Dianne Person a call.

Looking back, this call to Dianne started with what I do not want after my death:

I do not want a traditional funeral mass. Spirituality is only one part of who I am. I don't want standard words spoken over a casket with me in it. A casket gives me the creeps. I'm a touch claustrophobic.

I do not want a wake where I am dressed in my Sunday best and looking pink-cheeked and peacefully sleeping. I'd rather that my family and friends remember me alive and enjoying life.

I do not want a ride in a long black hearse at the head of a solemn procession. I seem to run into long, slow-moving funeral processions when I'm in a big hurry. When I'm dead, I don't want to tie up traffic for busy people needing to get places.

I do not want to be in a casket lowered into the ground, there to slowly revert to dust and with a granite gravestone marking the spot. To me, this is taking up valuable ground and is unnecessary waste. The gravesite and stone also makes family feel guilty if they don't visit. I say: hold the guilt.

Now I have the deepest respect for these traditional practices. Barbara and I recently lost a dear friend who chose all these options, and we were respectfully there for all of them. But we watched her grief-stricken partner, Larry Behr, 84, suffer through the wake and funeral and at graveside.

I don't want to put Barbara and my family through all that stress. If my body can help medical students learn, why not? It is only going to be cremated anyway. And the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of making a contribution -- and a valuable one -- to medical science and humanity.

So, after my demise, there won't be ceremonies with a deathly pall and downcast faces. What there will be is a big party at our home. There will be lots of good food, stories, and looking through photos and memorablilia. I want everybody to have a great time. Dianne and Mike, you're both certainly invited. And bring along a few first-year medical students. Everybody will feel better, I promise.

When I told Larry Behr about my party, he loved the idea. He said he was going to call his lawyer and change his will to provide for a party. He later did so. “It will be great,” I said. “The only downer will be me telling people how you really were.” He laughed.

I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “Now, Larry, don't misunderstand me, but I'm really looking forward to your party.” He laughed, louder.

I sincerely regret that I will not be able to be at my party. I will miss seeing everybody. Barbara will offer my regrets and explain that something suddenly came up that made it impossible for me to attend. In other words, life happened while I was busy making other plans and my body must be at UMass Medical within 24 hours. But I will certainly be there in spirit. To the partygoers, I say this: eat up and enjoy!

While the party goes on, Dianne Person and Mike Doyle will be overseeing preparations for my body's post-life service. Now I'll be mostly in Mike's hands. Having talked with Mike, and laughed with him, and seen how proud he is of his three beautiful young daughters, and how deeply he cares about treating his patients in the anatomy lab with respect at all times, I know I will be in good hands. I trust him completely.

But there is one thing I won't have in the anatomy lab that I already miss in advance. And that's my identity. Mike may know my name-- George Francis Pollock III -- and who I am, but to protect the privacy of donors, my body will be nameless to the medical students. But medical students pick names for their patients anyway. They say this one looks like a Bill or a Shirley or a Peter and give them that name.

One woman patient who still had her nail polish on was thought to look like a Dolly and so that was the name given to her. “I could have taken the nail polish off,” Mike said, “but I didn't. I wanted to keep that personal connection.”

So, Mike, in other words this nameless thing might be negotiable. Maybe you could help me out here. You could point to me and say, “You know, he looks like a George Francis Pollock III.” Just kidding. But why couldn't you say, Hey, he looks like a George? Or, better yet, Georgie, the name I had in high school.

I wonder if the students will be spooked when they see my face. Mike said not as much as my hands. The hands have held loved ones, done work, and express personality more so than the face, Mike said. “The way it works is the body is always covered,” he said, “except for the part that is being worked on.” Hands get worked on sooner than the head, which is dissected toward the end of the anatomy course.

Sixty percent of the first-year medical students are female. I'd like my hands not to frighten these young women or, for that matter, the young men. Let me now talk directly to the medical students and see if I can make them feel better about what they are about to do with Georgie:


Hi. Listen, I know you're scared and nervous. You've probably never been up this close to a dead body. But maybe I can help you relax and feel better about what you are about to do.

First, don't feel bad for me. I have had a great long life. You know how old I am and may you live as long. My body is here in the anatomy lab because I want it to be here. It is my free gift to you.

Please, be my guest and learn. This is a learning opportunity of a lifetime, a chance to get up close and hands on with the marvelous complexity of the human body. Make the most of it. It will make you a more skilled and caring doctor.

Now, sneak a hold of my hand. It is nothing to be afraid of. It is just a harmless appendage with bony fingers, palm, and thumb. It's not me. I'm out of here. But this hand is a brilliantly constructed, nimble, and efficient tool.

A human hand can make a fist and pound a table or somebody's face; it can be a tweezer, deftly plucking a single hair off your coat; and its tender, loving touch can express the deepest of human emotions. How? Why?

Check out my two artificial knees. One was implanted in 2002 and the other five months later in 2003. I played singles tennis on them for years, running around the court like a crazy man. The knees never let me down. Study the tissue around them. How does it differ from tissue around natural knees?

Note the spine. There's spinal stenosis, a narrowing that can cause older folk to walk bent over. But the condition never seriously bothered me or affected my quality of life. Why? I fought it. I made a point of walking chin up, shoulders back, abs tightened. I sat up straight, always. Although the stenosis and gravity worked hard against me, they lost. I never walked stooped over.

Observe the pelvis and how it is aligned with the body's frame. In August of 2005, I was wracked with so much back pain that I had to be hospitalized. For a whole week, doctors could not figure out what was wrong with me. They suspected cancer. They ran all kinds of tests, but remained stumped.

Finally a young physical therapist solved the mystery. She did so by getting up on my hospital bed , sitting on me, grabbing my pelvis with both hands, and moving it here and there. Her diagnosis: misaligned pelvis. Maybe someday you'll make such a diagnosis – without a physical therapist having to bail you out.

Now, take that scalpel and go to it. I'm with you all the way!

I'm back alive. On May 2, medical students will hold their annual memorial honoring donors and Dianne Person has graciously invited me to attend. I will be there. By very weird coincidence, May 2 is also my birthday. At the memorial, I'll be in the interesting position of celebrating my 71st birthday and my death at the same time.

Dianne Person, Mike Doyle, and I will no longer be strangers. They have met my wife Barbara. We have talked about our families and shown photos of loved ones. They now know me as a person.

I asked Dianne how she would feel if I suddenly passed away and she received a call from Barbara. Those warm, expressive eyes looked into mine. Ever so softly, she said, “I ... I would be honored.”

I asked Mike how he would feel about hearing from Dianne that I had died and that he would soon be receiving my body. Sitting on a file cabinet top in Dianne's office, the young embalmer, in a surprisingly humble voice, said, “I would feel blessed to have met and talked to you.”

For a dead guy, it doesn't get any better.

P.S. Dianne and Mike. While I trust you both completely, you should not trust me. Be wary of what I may write on my arm. Do not put it past me to find some way to smuggle this story, or even my novel, into the anatomy lab. It's this loss of identity that I find the hardest. Georgie would help. But, as my grown children will tell you, that probably would not be enough for me. I need to be watched – as I'm sure the two of you quickly figured out.

So long and keep moving.

Starting Over at 84: Beloved Elaine Gone, Alone in a House of Memories, What's Next for Larry Behr?

“I've been down the last few days,” Larry Behr said at his home in Bristol, Connecticut. “I feel like I'm declining.”

But, as we shall see, this 84-year-old's idea of decline would be more of a summit for the rest of us mortal souls.

It has been nearly three months since Larry lost Elaine at 72, his soul-mate of 18 years, to breast cancer that spread to her lungs. She died after a final, glorious journey through Denver, Albuquerque, Sante Fe, and breathtakingly beautiful surrounding country. The pain of the loss has not subsided. If anything, Larry hurts more.
Improbably and unfairly, he has been through this before, having previously lost Helen, after 31 years of happy marriage. She also died of cancer, at 64. By choice, they had no children but they had each other for all those many years and that was enough for both of them. Larry does not know how he managed to survive the loss of Helen.

And now he does not know how he will survive the loss of Elaine. In one lifetime, he has been called upon to somehow endure a double loss of daily love and sharing. This is something that most men avoid by wisely dying. Women live an average seven years longer than men, leaving us with surplus widows and scarce widowers.

It is well established that women do much better than men in adjusting to the loss of a spouse, largely because women tend to have wider and stronger family and social relationships. When it comes to surviving the loss of a life partner, there is no doubt which sex is more successful: women.

Yet society at large still expects grief-stricken men like Larry Behr to do what they have always done – be strong, pull yourself together, get the job done. In short, be a man. We say to them: Hey, nothing lasts forever. This is the way it is. Get on with your life, man.

This is the way it is, of course, and Larry knows that. He not only gets the societal message, he embraces it. But this is purely intellectual and cultural and has almost nothing to do with what Larry is actually going through today.

His heart is broken. His love has left him. He is bereft. He is lonely. He is inundated with powerful emotions that, even the second time around, he does not fully understand. He only knows that these emotions are trying to take him down and, dammit, they ain't gonna do it.

Larry could play the helpless old man, except that he obviously isn't. He is a fully viable adult man, in good health except for normal aches and pains. He has prospered first as a sales manager for 28 years at the same New Jersey company and then during the many years since in active “retirement.”

He is quick to say that he is not the retiring type. There are men many years younger than Larry in nursing homes, whiling away their days in dependency and despair. Not Larry. He is independent. He has his own money and has had the same financial advisor for 20 years. He lives in the large, comfortable home that he and Elaine shared and enjoyed together.

He has all his cookies. He is fully mobile. He drives. He sails. Here he is on his boat on Gardner Lake. He travels. He keeps up with current affairs and can expound at length on the pros and cons of President Obama's stimulus plan. A whirlwind of interests and activity, he is always doing something.

“Idleness is my enemy,” he said. “Time on my hands gets me thinking too much. And when I think too much about Elaine, I get down.”

He said he couldn't sleep last night. “I kept waking up with my mind going in all directions. Finally, at four this morning, I took a sleeping pill. I can't bear the thought of going to a movie."

The plan was for three of us -- Larry, my wife Barbara, and I -- to have lunch, take in a movie, and fill a Tuesday afternoon together. He and Elaine used to love movies; the two of them went almost every week.

But Larry said he was just not ready to go to a movie without Elaine. So we decide to do lunch, have Larry give us a guided tour of historic Bristol, and cap off the day with a trip down memory lane in the home he now lives in alone.

A bright spot in Larry's life is that Elaine's family of five grown children (and 16 grandchildren), have reached out to him and make a point to include him in family gatherings. He deeply appreciates this and wants to remain a part of the family as he has been for 18 years.

But at the same time, he knows that as caring as Elaine's family is toward him, they can never fill the emptiness he feels. "They have their own lives," he says. "They are busy running here and there and I understand that."

He is also close to his sister Norma in New Jersey, and his nephew Mark and Leslie and their son Alan. But they are in New Jersey and Larry is three hours drive away in Connecticut. The distance is difficult to surmount regularly.

The neighbors have been wonderful, sending food and making a point of checking in with him. But now there is less of this as his being alone in the house has become more and more accepted as the new normal. Normal for others maybe, but not for Larry.

It is a leisurely two-hour lunch in a Bristol family restaurant, Applewood. "You can't beat this place," Larry said. "The food is good, there's plenty of it, and it's cheap.” He proved to be right on all three counts. Elaine was an excellent cook and did all the cooking.

Larry does not cook. He has been eating out a lot, coming to Applewood three or four times a week. The staff now know him. While reinventing himself emotionally, it is a safe and familiar place. He and Elaine used to come to Applewood to give her a break from cooking.

I insist on picking up the check, Larry having characteristically snatched the previous lunch bill. I said: "This is to let you know just who is making the decisions about your life now."

The running joke is that I have applied for and have received court custody of Larry. I tell him that the reason we are there is because the court requires regular visitations. He laughs.

As heartsick as Larry is over the loss of Elaine, his sense of humor still marches on as if to its own imperatives. The sign here is typical Larry Behr humor. It is near the front door and greets every visitor.

He blames his poor mother for his sense of humor. “Wherever she went, even to the store, she would come back with a story about somebody she met or something that had happened,” Larry said.

Larry's stories are legendary and come out when they have to, which is all the time. You have to run off somewhere. Too bad. You have to hear a story on your way out. Not feeling yourself, Larry will have a story for you. It may or may not make you feel better. It may or may not be funny. It may, actually, be awful.

But quite a few are hilarious. Many are cultural jewels from his childhood, from his wartime experiences in World War II, from his stint hosting a Connecticut radio show – and thus the sonorous voice – and from going on nine decades of living.

Normally, I limit Larry to three stories a visit. He good-naturedly goes along with the limit and Elaine seemed grateful for it. But Larry never stops trying to slip in an extra story and must be gently but firmly restrained.

He is also a thoroughly addicted punner. When you thank him for something, he invariably says, "my pressure.” Much in Larry's life may be changing, but the punning goes on delightfully impervious.

Driving through historic sections of Bristol, Larry demonstrates a keen eye for architecture, pointing out structure after structure with striking form and appeal. Some are Victorian or even earlier mansions, evoking long ago entitled classes. Some bespeak Bristol's history, such as the Bristol Clock Museum. The city was a leader in the manufacture of clocks. Larry himself is a skilled clock craftsman, attested by the antique clocks in his home that he has restored.

Larry drives by the site of the Hope Clinic where Elaine received loving treatments for her cancer from Dr. Virginia and her dedicated staff. The Hope Clinic and Elaine's hopeful, humane experiences at the Hope Clinic was the subject of an earlier blog.

"A few months after Elaine died, the Hope Clinic closed," Larry said, "and Dr. Virginia moved out to Colorado. The clinic could not go on. It was buried in debt." We passed the building that the Hope Clinic bought in the hope of expanding its services. "It went into foreclosure," Larry said.

After the Bristol tour, it was time to inspect his home redecorating. The home is gradually becoming his home as opposed to his and Elaine's home. “In my redecorating, I want to make it a tribute to both Helen and Elaine,” Larry said. Elaine is already a powerful presence in the home since she and Larry furnished and decorated it together.

During his years with Elaine, memorabilia of Helen were stored in boxes in the basement and in his office. Now he is going through photos and mementos and figuring out how to make Helen a presence in his life once again along with Elaine. The restored clock shown here recently went up in Helen's honor.

He points at the dining room wall. “I'm thinking of a large framed picture of Elaine at one side of the wall and one of Helen at the other side, as a tribute to both of them.” He asks if he can have photos enlarged that much. We tell him that it is done all the time.

He takes out a photo album of Helen and we go through it viewing Larry's life with a longtime love, while he supplies a running commentary. She was beautiful with the figure of a fashion model. She was also bright. “This was a woman who did The New York Times crossword puzzle in pen,” Larry said.

Speaking of his life with Helen, Larry's voice is soft, his eyes wistful. It is exactly the way he speaks of Elaine, who was not formally his wife but was in every way that counts the most.

Next, he shows us his office or “War Room.” There is a large framed montage of old photos from his World War II service in the U.S. Coast Guard. He was an anti-aircraft gunner on a Coast Guard vessel. It's mission in the Pacific was to deliver arms, munitions, supplies, and U.S. Marines to enemy beaches.

Serving through most of the 1941-44 war, he took part in several fiercely fought and bloody invasions. He first fired at attacking Japanese warplanes at the age of 18. The photo shows him manning his anti-aircraft gun.

He vividly recalls one particular combat moment. “A Jap plane had come out of the sky at us and the pilot had positioned the plane between our ship and our destroyer escort. He figured we wouldn't risk hitting each other and hold fire. I fired with everything I had and the Jap plane caught fire and crashed into the ocean between us and the destroyer.”

To this day, Larry has not been able to forgive the Japanese. “I do not forgive and I do not forget,” Larry said. He says that he has never bought a Japanese car and never will. Two monster American cars are in the garage; one of them was Elaine's, which she loved.

The War Room has a display of Larry's collection of antique guns, including a wood model of a 12-pounder cannon. This was a weapon used by the American Man of War in conflicts from the Revolution through the Civil War. He restored it himself. He fixed the jammed wheels, made the ramrod, and added chains.

In remembrance of his radio host days, the War Room also has an oldtime radio mike along with an “On the Air” sign. Here Larry reenacts his old radio days. A wood sculpture depicts him on the air "almost live." He boasts that he has "the perfect face for radio."

The theme song for his radio show was Duke Ellington's "A Train." The choice was easy for him. Besides loving the music, Larry used to ride the A Train from Coney Island all the way up to the Bronx.

He has a collection of old military hats and happily poses in his old Coast guard hat and other hats, not all of them becoming. In posing, Larry does not, frankly, act his age.

In the deepest of grief, he cannot seem to stop the child in him from repeatedly coming out. It is a child that we get to see in old photos, such as the one of him taken with his 1939 classmates.

Larry plans to stay in the home that he and Elaine shared and that he will now share with memories of both Elaine and Helen. “For one thing,” he said. “look at all this stuff. The cellar is packed too. What am I going to do with it?”

Yes, Larry's home has lots of “stuff,” but it is also spotless and in perfect order. Nothing is out of place. There is no dust on anything. Elaine used to keep the house that way. I tell him that I expected to be stepping over all kinds of junk. I ask if he has a housekeeper.

“No,” he said. “I do it all myself.”

“Even the vacuuming?”

“Yes.”

The extreme housekeeping is part for Elaine – she would want it that way – and part to keep busy. Larry is investigating our world to find out what it has to offer an 84-year-old starting over. He is looking into getting involved in Literacy Volunteers, for example, and other social service organizations.

He has joined a 150-strong Bristol choral group that meets for two hours every Monday night. His base baritone is a welcome new voice. The group, led by the head of the music department at Bristol Eastern High, described by Larry as "brilliant,"sings everything from Latin liturgy -- in Latin --to modern pop.

The choral group is rehearsing for a public performance in May, at a location to be announced soon. Larry is shopping for a tuxedo to wear at the performance. "Music helped me get through the loss of Helen," Larry said, "and now it is doing the same after Elaine."

He has started a business selling and fixing antiques and calls it “Fetherson & Fothergil, Purveyers of Antiquity.” We are all invited to make of that name what we like. Sounds to me like old comporting with old.

His business card offers restoration and repairs of the following: Weapons. Scientific. Clocks. Tools. Primitives. Does the last one refer to people or things or both? He makes house calls. The card sums up his business as “specializing in almost everything.”

Rarely does one see or hear of a business with almost no interest in making money, but Fetherson & Fothergil is such a business. “I'm not doing it to make money,” Larry said. “I'm doing it for people, to see them, to be around them, to talk to them.”

He didn't also say, “to save my life,” but that is surely the bottom line for Fetherson & Fothergil just as money is the bottom line for General Electric. In pursuit of his own surely quixotic idea of business, Larry will be hitting the antique shows, fairs, and other places where antique-lovers gather.

While serious businesses follow the money, Fetherson & Fothergill goes to where the people are. Its “customers” don't need fat wallets; they just need to love antiques and be willing to hear Larry's stories and tell him their own. He will charge something for his wares and services, but it is largely a front to maintain appearances.

“I'm cheap,” he said. But he is quick to add that he does quality work. Should there be any doubt about that, it is dispelled with one look at the beautifully restored fine antiques displayed throughout his home.

If you are an antique-lover and are in the market for a cheap antiques purveyer and restorer who makes house calls, there is a number you can call. It is 860-585-6484. In conscience, however, and in the interests of full disclosure, there is a caveat.

If you are a woman, you must understand something. Having loved two fabulous women, Larry Behr is a newly-single man who is fast approaching the day when he may be ready to love again. Do not think that because he is 84 that he is romantically harmless. He is 84 going on 55.

“I'm on the prowl,” he admits. “I'm looking for a meaningless relationship.”

He has already gone on one date. Date? At 84? “Aren't you a bit too old to be even thinking about dating?”

“Look,” he said not the least bit sheepishly. “I like girls.”

So girls -- excuse me, ladies -- watch out for Larry Behr. Also, he has been known to dangle enticements, as in this photo. There, you have fair warning.

In March, he is heading to Florida to visit a woman from high school days. "She lost her husband and son and I've lost Elaine," Larry said. "We have a common bond." They have been in touch by phone. During one such conversation, Larry turned on an early 1940's arrangement by Harry James, "Lush Life,"for her to listen to.

"That wasn't fair," I said. "What woman could resist something as dreamy and romantic as that? We've all grown up slow-dancing cheek-to-cheek to that piece."

"Actually, it is very sad," Larry said. "It was inspired by a guy whose love affair ended badly and he turned to drink. He went from bar to bar and ended up drinking himself to pieces."

"You're not going to do that, are you?"

"If it weren't for the gout, I would."

He is just playing with me, as usual. Drinking is not on Larry Behr's agenda. What IS on his agenda are life, love, and the pursuit of happiness.

As we were leaving, Larry said he was going out that night to learn the tango and swing dancing at a Bristol library. Speaking as his court-appointed custodian, I gave him a stern lecture. I told him that there were going to be a lot of lonely widows at that dance session and that they were all going to be “hungry.” I said I expected him to leave the dance exactly as he arrived – alone.

“Have a good trip back, “ he said.

So long and keep moving.

P.S. CUSTOMER SURVEY: At Fetherson & Fothergil, customers come first. Which of the following five hats would you prefer to have Larry wear to your house call? He asks that you be honest.