As my friend Maureen says, this is an excellent example of corrective messaging.
Separating sports and support, “we celebrate families by trusting women.”
February 3rd, 2010Obama in Bullet Time
February 2nd, 2010I’ve been very busy the last week or so with something that we’ll just keep under wraps for the time being, which means I’ve been somewhat behind the ball on everything else. But Laurie wanted to make sure that I saw this, and now I’m sharing it with you. I’m especially fond of the snarky shot Obama got about how he actually reads the bills people put in front of him.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Q & O | ||||
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37 Minutes to First Degree
January 29th, 2010In what will certainly be hailed as a victory for anyone sane enough to realize that you don’t go around killing people for holding a different view, Scott Roeder was found guilty of first degree murder for the death of Dr. George Tiller. (Roeder was also found guilty of two counts of aggravated assault for threatening Tiller’s church congregation members after fleeing the church lobby, the scene of the murder.)
Roeder admitted that not only was the murder premeditated, but that he had planned it for over a year, and at times had considered other options, including cutting of Dr. Tiller’s hands with a sword. For his defense, he tried to turn his trial into one against abortion, proudly stating that he had killed Dr. Tiller “to protect the children” and that if he didn’t, “the babies were going to die the next day.”
Did he feel remorse after killing a man? No, he only felt relief, because he felt that the “danger” Dr. Tiller represented to the general public justified deadly force.
Contrast that with the heart-rending, emotional stories of women who traveled to Kansas to see, and often be treated by, Dr. Tiller. Read about their heartbreak as they faced wanted children with lethal diseases, often that would cause death before birth. Read about the cruelty they faced in the hands of protesters, the fact that they had to travel from states away to get the medical care they needed, and the compassion and warmth they received at the hands of Dr. Tiller and his staff.
Read about the deliveries, and the fact that the families were allowed to hold their child, given the choice of photos, hand and foot prints, of keeping the receiving blanket. Would the baby be named? What kind of funeral would they like?
Contrast this with the actions of a man who walked into a church, a sanctuary, pressed a gun to a man’s skull, and shot him at point blank range, and tell me who the real danger was.
The Unhealthiest City Has an Unhealthy Attitude
January 25th, 2010
Jamie Oliver took a lot of abuse from locals when filming this show. It was amazing, and sad – people were arguing that they weren’t going to let a poncy Brit come in and tell them they couldn’t eat their good, wholesome, traditional foods. I was following the entire thing as it filmed, both via Jamie’s Twitter account, the tweets of locals expressing their outrage, and other media outlets where locals vented. I think the best thing I heard (with best being very loosely defined) was that Jamie was trying to force British food on people, and take away their all-American cuisine.
Newsflash: deep fried food is not all-American, nor is it healthy to eat at every meal.
Look, I’m a good gamer geek. I have done pizza for breakfast as much, if not more, than most (especially when I worked in software). But I’m not about to argue that deep dish pizza is a great breakfast every day. And that’s what really got me in this video clip – not the kid mistaking a tomato for a potato, or anything else. It was the deep-seated belief that it was tasty food, it was “traditional” food (how boxed food is a tradition, I won’t begin to contemplate), and that it was their food, so there was no way it was bad for them. The denial was, quite simply, amazing.
Somewhere, somehow, people got the idea that if it’s sold, it’s good for them, and therefore it’s okay to eat. (That many of these people are violently opposed to health care where the government tells them how to take care of themselves is just sad irony, given that they seem to have placed their full faith in the government to protect the food system – something that it does not do, and in fact barely even regulates.)
Michael Pollan has argued that we have become removed from our food traditions, and that what we eat today is food that our grandparents and great-grandparents wouldn’t recognize. Huntington appears to be a perfect example of this disconnect from food, health, and how we eat.
BRB, ISO bungee cord and corn
January 22nd, 2010In Which Our Heroine Learns The World Is Not Flat
January 19th, 2010Oh Stephen Fry, this is just wrong.
Saying that philosophers don’t tell you how to live your life is… I actually have a hard time getting my head around that point of view, given that many philosophers (especially those of the applied and normative branches) do, well, just that. Is Bentham’s calculus something other than how you should like an ideal utilitarian life? What about Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a treatise aimed at doing/becoming good, a practical application (some might argue the first in the applied ethics) rather than a meta or theoretical knowledge? (Spawned this entire field, really, called virtue ethics. Be hard to argue that virtue ethics is about anything other than how one should live one’s life.) Kant’s categorical imperatives are certainly prescriptions on how to live your life as a moral agent! (Right there we cover utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and deontology, with just three well-known philosophers. There are entire library sections devoted to the ideas each discusses on how to live.)
I can understand not being familiar with modern philosophy, even of the last 100-odd years, if it’s not your field, or your field’s kissing cousin. I am not shocked that he has no familiarity with modern virtue ethicists, casuistrists, or much of the work that’s gone on in both applied and normative ethics. But the fields themselves, as subdivisions of ethical study in philosophy, have existed for much longer; Mr. Fry appears to equate philosophy with logic, epistemology, and metaphysics, extending a sort of brief acknowledgment of metaethics (which does indeed ask more broad questions such as “what is goodness” rather than “how do I live a good life?”), and going no further.
It’s sad and frustrating, and to be frank, a bit shocking. Mr. Fry is one of the last great polymaths, and I would have thought he would know his philosophy. Discovering that I know more than him on a subject is, well, I can only imagine that it’s like finding out, for the first time, that the world isn’t flat.
Trust/Time/Pain Relation
January 16th, 2010It occurs to me that chronic pain/suffering is the opposite of trust. In fact, it is in many ways the ultimate in broken trust – a broken trust in your body. We have this implicit notion of what the body can be like, and should do. How it should perform, respond, and behave at any given time. We trust that when we want our body to reach for the wine glass, the right hand will raise and do so , that it will not spasm and drop the glass, that it will not be wracked with pain.
Time loops back into the equation because trust and time are intimately bound. One cannot exist without the other. Time itself is a construct; nothing exists but now, the present. We are always in the present, passing through it. We never reach the future, and the past is always behind us.
Trust is based on experience. Experiences that we have moved through in our present as it becomes past, and experiences that we have witnessed others move through.
These events, these singular experiences,
allow us to look at the seemingly endless options in front of us and narrow them down; trust becomes a filter that allows us to make decisions. In the network of life, trust gives us a way of managing what would be incomprehensible.
When emotional trust is broken,
our options become limitless, and we are paralyzed, not in fear, but in choice. We have no way of narrowing down the potentiality of an event/situation without the ability to trust. But we trust – or not – based on prior events, and to override those prior events that taught us that we cannot believe our instincts is something that can only be done on faith.
Chronic pain/suffering is a different betrayal of trust, though. It’s not emotional, and the result is that it doesn’t result in endless options that we can’t filter, being able to say X would be bad, Y would be good, etc. Instead, the opposite happens. Instead of there being a limitless set of options in front of us that we are unable to sift through and properly respond to, our options shrink to few, or none. We learn that we cannot trust our body, that any instruction could result in pain, in broken items, in exhaustion, in – well, the realm of experiences of chronic pain/suffering. But because I can grab a mug one day and have no problems, and grab it another day and would have dropped it if not for the handle catching on my hand, I cannot even have the most basic trust in my body’s abilities. This limits my options, I can’t do anything.
Go to the movies? Maybe, maybe not. might be fine, but it might be so uncomfortable that I am in screaming pain before an hour is out. Go ice skating? Only if I want to risk injury and pain migration. The list goes on and on, until even getting out of bed becomes a chore, a threat. (Depression in sufferers of chronic pain/suffering is, I maintain, a direct result of this, rather than any other factor.)
And regardless, without the ability to trust, whether external or internal forces, the result is that we are everpresent in the now, unable to pass through the present. We become stuck.
…it’s very odd to quote/crib my own writing. If this looks familiar to some of you, well, there’s a reason for that. I suppose I am building a theory! (And at the very least, I am recording a snippet of a longer email conversation for posterity, and further thought.)
Classism, Inc.
January 15th, 2010Precision Nutrition, a site whose RSS feeds I follow in large part because they offer a very different take on food than the typically more academic materials I read, have a new post up tonight. This post starts out
A few days ago I re-watched Food Inc, a documentary on the food industry. About halfway through, we meet a family of four ordering from the dollar menu at the fast food drive-thru.
During the interview we learn that the father has type 2 diabetes, takes about $200 in medication and may lose his job if his eyesight worsens from the diabetes. Meanwhile, the mother explains how the dollar menu is a better deal than a head of broccoli for 99 cents.
3 burgers a day for a month — $90.
Diabetes medication for a month — $200.
Your health – priceless.
Actually, even keeping good health out of the calculation, a $1 burger costs a lot more than $1!
Let’s say this gentleman ate burgers for breakfast, lunch and supper for a month – 90 meals that cost $90. Now let’s add in the medication, for a grand total of $290 a month or $3.22 a burger.
The post then goes on to discuss metabolic syndrome, and includes some interesting (if old) studies and results for the most effective way to treat metabolic syndrome. The post ends by saying
As a society we prefer “easy yet complicated”, like discovering new drugs for disease. But “difficult yet simple”, like diet and exercise, is probably the most valuable both in terms of money and well being. …Combining diet and exercise is more effective for losing body fat and improving your health than diet or exercise alone.
And this solution is a lot cheaper than drugs.
Well, yes. And no. The problem with Precision Nutrition’s post is a problem that I repeatedly see crop up in discussions about food, health, and how we eat. What makes it more egregious here is that the movie Food, Inc. is very clear, in their interview with the family of four that Precision Nutrition is using to anchor their blog post, is that finances and time are a significant factor for this family.
Before I go further, it would probably be helpful if we were all on the same page. Here is a two and some minute clip from the movie, discussing their eating/buying habits (the drug costs were in another section which does not appear to be online):
What do you hear the family saying? Yes, they’re talking about their health, but they’re talking about a lot more than that. They’re talking about time, access, convenience, and yes, money; the family interview makes it clear that they have $1-$2 a meal to spend per person, and very little more. Yes, at this point it is in part because they are juggling prescription costs with everything else, but you can’t presume that first and foremost, the father could just stop taking the medications and switch his diet around (that the $200+ on medications would automatically be available to switch to food, if he desired). Nor can you necessarily assume that the extra $200 – an extra fifty cents per person, per meal – will be enough to radically change the diet of a family of four.
As much as I enjoy the Precision Nutrition website and blog (and I do, don’t get me wrong; I don’t have time to read things that bore me), this post of theirs, the tone they take towards the family that anchors their post, and in fact the tone they take towards food and health in general, mirrors a larger issue within the healthy food and lifestyle movement: a lack of awareness of the classism being imported into the discussion.
A family that is straining to spend $2/person on food is not going to find a head of broccoli for $1.29/lb affordable, no matter how many times they are taken to the produce isle. They will point out that the snacks, candy, and even soda are cheaper, a better value, and more affordable (as Michael Pollan notes in the clip, the foods that are made from subsidized crops). Is this a long-term sound plan? No, of course not – but it can be hard, if not near-impossible, to reconcile long-term risks when the short-term benefit (being full) is so clear.
A family that is gone 14-18 hours a day is not going to find the advice to just eat at home a simple, easy, or even practical one. Ignoring advice on when food should be consumed for maximum health benefits, let’s just consider the implications for a moment: the family leaves the house at 6am. What does this mean, practically? Well, it means that the latest people are rising is probably 5:30am. In order to have a fresh-cooked meal, everyone would have to get up earlier, by 15-30 minutes, in order to eat it, and someone else would be up 30-60 minutes prior to that to make it. So we now have three people waking up at 5am, and one person waking up at 4am.
The family arrives home at 10pm. One person has to make dinner; let’s be generous and say that the cook could get the meal on the table in an hour. Now it’s 11pm. The family eats, someone does dinner, everyone cleans up; the “earliest” they are going to bed is now midnight. Practically speaking, three people get five hours of sleep, and one person receives four.
This is as unhealthy, and as untenable, as eating fast food for a meal – and could have greater consequences on many people. (Chronically sleep-deprived people can become a danger to themselves and others at work.)
It’s easy to say make food at home or exercise for an hour a day when your job doesn’t take you out of your house for more than eight or nine hours. It’s easy to say buy unprocessed foods from the perimeter of the grocery store when you don’t have to count your pennies, when you can consider quality instead of quantity.
But for many Americans, these things are not an option. Food, Inc. went out of it’s way to make sure that viewers understood that how we eat is more than a choice, it’s a class issue that is driven by time, money, and knowledge. It’s disturbing to see the class issue continually dropped out of discussions about healthy lifestyle and healthy eating because many of the most at-risk people for health issues from eating habits are in the lower income classes.
I realize that the target audience for the Precision Nutrition website is people with some very disposable income, rather than those within a lower income bracket. However, when the family from Food, Inc. is utilized like this, an uglier side of classism can be seen: patronizing humour. By swiping the Mastercard format and slogan, Precision Nutrition moves away from an informative discussion of metabolic syndrome, and crosses the line into poking fun; those poor folks who don’t know better, if they only did X, Y, and Z, their lives would be so much healthier.
I am sure that almost anyone who is in a lower income class bracket would agree that their life would be better, and healthier, if they spent less time at work, less time commuting, were paid more, and had more time in the day to cook, relax, sleep, and do all the things that are advised by pro-health and pro-food advocates. But until the jobs pay more and the food costs less, ignoring the issues of class to instead focus on why of varying income levels aren’t just like people in the more privileged income levels is just going to isolate and alienate those who can benefit from the great knowledge the pro-health and pro-food advocates bring to the table.
One Year.
November 5th, 2008For the Soul’s Safekeeping
When, through intense propensities, we are wandering in the Sangsara,
Along the bright light-path of the simultaneously-born Wisdom,
May the heroic Knowledge-Holders lead us,
May the bands of the Mothers, the Dakinis, be our rear guard.
May we be saved from the fearful narrow passageway of the Bardo,
May we be placed in the state of the perfect Buddhahood.
May the ethereal elements not rise up as enemies;
May it come that we shall see the realm of the Blue Buddha.
May the earthy elements not rise up as enemies;
May it come that we shall see the realm of the Yellow Buddha.
May the fiery elements not rise up as enemies;
May it come that we shall see the Realm of the Red Buddha.
May the airy elements not rise up as enemies;
May it come that we shall see the Realm of the Green Buddha.
May the elements of the rainbow colors not rise up as enemies;
May it come that all the Realms of the Buddhas will be seen.
May it come that all Sounds will be known as one’s own sounds;
May it come that all the Radiances will be known as one’s own radiances;
May it come that the Trikaya will be realized in the Bardo.
Marianne Christina Hills
June 3, 1954 – November 5, 2007
Om mani padme hum I bow to the jewel in the lotus
Om ami dewa hrih Diety of endless light
Om vajra sattva hum May you open the gates of samsara
A a ha sha sa ma And purify my mother’s life
I miss you, Mom.
political quotes
September 22nd, 2008[Voters] make a terrible mistake, believing that we have to find something wrong with the people we can’t vote for.
-Bill Clinton
HIV and Viagra
September 17th, 2008Normally I love the “Things I Learned from my Patients” thread on the Student Doctor Networks forums. Funny, full of the kind of morbid medical humour that’s rampant with ED docs, EMTs, firemen, etc, and just plain amusing stories.
However, this particular post got my ire up for the following comment:
In a urology clinic, had a patient come in for ED (see, that’s why it fits here!) and asking for Viagra. Denied any medical history, but when I got to meds, tells me he’s on Truvada and the such. Also, am I a jerk for not wanting to give someone with HIV ED meds? Wouldn’t this be like telling him to make sure he shares his dirty needles as well?
Well no, no, as a matter of fact that’s not. What, people who’re HIV+ should never ever have sex again? HIV has gone from being a fast moving death sentence, And the Band Played On plague, to a managed infectious disease. Yes, it’s still infectious, yes, it can still kill – and it can also be managed, like many other chronic infectious diseases, and it’s not our jobs to decide who’s allowed to continue living their life and who has to wear a scarlet HIV across their chests, forever denied intimacy, love, or just the physical gratification of sex.
Yes, one would hope the doctor would educate the patient about HIV being a preexisting condition and part of the medical history. One would hope the doctor would talk safe sex and how to reduce the risk of transmission, and the need to be open and honest about your status with your partner. But it’s not the doctor’s job to decide that the patient can or cannot have sex – just like a doctor shouldn’t decide that about anyone’s sex life, for any reason.
The Women [movie review]
September 12th, 2008For the last half a dozen years or so, women outnumbered men in my family home. Me, my sister, my mother, and my poor lonesome father. While there was the ex-husband for a while, and my brother when he was around or living there, it wasn’t at all uncommon for the three gals to override Dad on some movie choice, and he’d end up groaning through some Disneyesque chick flick. Granted, he had me, and when Lifetime or Oxygen got to be too much for even me, we’d disappear and watch football or science fiction and leave the kleenex and girly stuff to Mom and Trace.
Before Mom died, she took the two of us girls to see Menopause, the Musical. I think she knew, even then, even when she was on the first round of chemo, that she wasn’t going to make it. She said she wasn’t going to be there for us when we went through this. She had needed a hysterectomy a few years earlier, so she knew… and this was the best way she could really share with us. So we went to the musical, and we laughed and laughed, Mom sitting between us, holding our hands. Sharing knowing looks with my sister.
It was wonderful. It was shaded with sadness. In some ways it was the epitome of all those Hallmark, Lifetime, Oxygen movies, rented taped or watched live.
Laurie and I went to see The Women tonight. It was a funny and touching movie, about friends and family, the bonds women form. Best friends, mothers, daughters, grandmothers. And through the entire film, I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a movie I would have seen with my sister and my mother.
Mom would have loved it.
the more things change…
September 10th, 2008There is the difference that in geometry everyone is of a mind that usually nothing is put down in writing without there being a sound demonstration for it; thus the inexperienced more frequently err on the side of assenting to what is false, wanting as they do to give the appearance of understanding it, than on the side of denying what is true. But it is the reverse in philosophy: since it is believed that there is no issue that cannot be defended from either side, few look for the truth, and many more prowl about for a reputation for profundity by arrogantly challenging whichever arguments are the best.
-Descartes, Letter of Dedication, Meditations on First Philosophy
…the more things stay the same.
misreading at Panera
September 8th, 2008I’m at Panera, trying to wake up enough to do a tutorial I need to finish ASAP, before gathering my reserve energy to run errands – mostly stock up on food before the trimester officially begins. So I’m blearily trying to make weekend plans, chat with friends via email, and contemplate getting a pastry or something, since I’m still hungry. And I glance over at the table tent to my left and see:
Caramel and Nuts go together
Like fresh bread and warm mercury
The WHATFUCK?!
Oh. And warm memory.
But it still looks like mercury.
WoBioBlog: Reproduction of 1998 Wakefield Study Finds NO MMR/Autism Link
September 4th, 2008It’s pretty commonly known that Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 Lancet paper on the link between autism and the MMR vaccine has been the source of considered controversy over vaccinations and autism, even after the majority of the paper authors removed their names and the journal retracted the paper. Wakefield’s unethical conduct, the leaps of logic, and the small sample size itself, all contributed to reasons the paper was ultimately discredited.
Unfortunately, that sort of discrediting might hold weight in academic spheres, but doesn’t necessarily take hold in the public sphere. It’s much more entertaining to write scare-tactic headlines touting fears of vaccines and the rise of autism than it is to say “woops”, let alone “woops, we maybe made something worse… sorry about that, please go vaccinate your kids before measles skyrockets to new epidemic proportions.”
Hopefully the news that a reproduction of the Wakefield study shows absolutely no link between autism and the MMR vaccine will gain foothold in the media at large, and go a long way towards convincing parents that vaccinating their children…
Late, yet still funny
August 15th, 2008Death isn’t always sad:
I had an interesting conversation with That Guy the other day about Westboro Baptist; they came up for some reason, and I mentioned the rather excellent idea of full on drag queens, trannies, out and proud gay and lesbian couples, etc, protesting his funeral when Phelps dies. That Guy objected on the principle that it’s just distasteful to protest funerals, it’s not a moral or virtuous action, and playing dirty just because someone else does isn’t a good reason. He thought it would simply be better to throw a party on your own elsewhere- and I admit that he raises good points.
But there is something in intolerance and hatred spewed forth by people like Falwell, Robertson, Phelps, and etc, that makes it hard to be neutral and say a funeral is a funeral, and all should be given respect, all mourners the right to mourn in the way they want. Because sometimes, death isn’t a sad thing – not because it brings relief, but because it removes a really really bad person from society.
Would protesting at Phelps’s funeral make a point? Yes, I think so. Would it get through to his family? I would hope so – but am not optimistic that it would. Could it be done in a way that wasn’t spiteful, mean, and full of hate? Perhaps – but again I’m wary.
The satire Mahr provides is one way at poking the people who deserve to be poked for who they are, but if it would be wrong to protest at a funeral, shouldn’t it be equally wrong to speak ill of the dead? What about, as Mahr points out, when the dead made their living speaking ill of others?
I don’t know. On the one hand, I attempt to live a peaceful and moral/virtuous life. So That Guy raising the possibility of a protest stepping outside those self and religious imposed guidelines certainly brings me up short to think. On the other hand, it feels like a very human response to people who have caused so much pain and suffering. On the gripping hand, however, I wonder if the best thing is indeed to simply offer well-wishes and show how much better a person it’s possible to be.
Then again, it’s not like they raised the bar all that high…
WoBioBlog: A Month Without Plastics
August 14th, 2008
Over on the BBC website, reporter Chris Jeavans is blogging about her August challenge: to live a month without buying or accepting anything wrapped in or made with plastic. Why? Because even though we’re all repeatedly implored to reduce, reuse and recycle, plastics are still one of the most common things to make it into our trash, our landfills, and our oceans. So she wanted to track exactly how life would change if she gave up plastics – first, of course, tracking how much plastics she and her family used over the course of one month.
The numbers were surprising…click to continue reading
WoBioBlog: Controversial Infant Heart Transplant Redefines Death
August 14th, 2008Surgeons in Denver are happily announcing a major break-through in infant cardiac transplants: using hearts from infants that have died of cardiac-related deaths. According to the Wall Street Journal,
Until now, it was thought that hearts from those donors were too badly damaged to be transplanted successfully. Only hearts from donors who were brain-dead — and whose hearts were still functioning after they were declared dead — have been considered suitable for transplant.To make the donors’ hearts more viable, doctors at Children’s Hospital in Denver altered the standards for declaring the patients dead… The Denver researchers narrowed to as little as 75 seconds the time between when the donor was pronounced dead and when the heart was harvested. Current guidelines call for waiting up to five minutes as a way of making certain that the heart does not start beating again on its own. But removing the heart earlier increases the odds of a successful transplant since it limits the damage caused by a lack of oxygen to the organ.
Most professional medical types I know, be they bioethicists, doctors, nurses, etc, agree that there are significant and severe problems with how transplants are handled in this country, and that we need to do something to increase the number of available organs…(continue reading)
Whistles of the Wind
August 9th, 2008Whistles the wind Well it breaks my heart to see you this way My isolation Well it breaks my heart to see you this way So you drank with the lost souls Now there’s an ocean between Well it breaks my heart to see you this way Well it breaks my heart to see you this way
Blowin’ my way
Sweepin’ me back, back here to stay
Can winners be losers?
Runnin’ on the same track
While some head for glory, others we crash
The beauty in life where’s it gone
And somebody told me you were doin’ okay
But somehow I guess they were wrong
Now there’s a sobering thought
A minute alone, a lifetime too long
See the face in this mirror
So pale it could crack
Desperately wantin’ the color it lacks
The beauty in life where’s it gone
And somebody told me you were doin’ okay
But somehow I guess they were wrong
For too many years
Tied to their ankles now crippled with fear
Never been righteous though seldom were wrong
Life’s only life with you in this song
Where I am and where I want to be
So you prayers in doubt
Doubt not for me
The beauty in life where’s it gone
And somebody told me you were doin’ okay
But somehow I guess they were wrong
The beauty in life where’s it gone
And somebody told me you were doin’ okay
But somehow I guess they were wrong
-Flogging Molly
Sigh. Sometimes, not being able to fix things for other people really sucks. And I am not very good, when it matters, of thinking of the right words to say under pressure (even if that pressure is my own).
Which doesn’t mean those in the know should worry – things are still fine. Just, baggage handling issues.
ink trailing in the sea
August 3rd, 2008It’s not that I forgot, it’s just that missing you has died down to a steady ache, rather than one sharply punctuated every year. Or maybe it’s that I’ve been talking about you a lot lately, to new people, retelling the stories and the lessons learned – how important it is to never let things go unsaid. And what an amazing impact that’s had on my life, especially lately.
In life, you taught me a lot – fierce stubbornness, how to play. But in your death, you gave me the strength of conviction, of following what’s right even when it’s hard. The final emphasis to live without regret.
I know you would like him, and I know you’d be pleased to know the fruits of your efforts were felt on Friday – an appropriate day, of all days.