 |
My late dog Trotter (left) and her companion, Nemo,
of YouTube, pooper-scooper fame
 |
Alice Nugent Ward 1891-1981,
my grandmother (in her Rebekah gown, the one luxury in her life). |
|
Comments
This is a tender, thoughtful piece. I had to put my
own 17-year-old dog down a few month's back. I held her (she insisted on
standing, proud dog !) while the injection was performed. She gasped, made a
brief sound, and then every muscle in her body crumbled into relaxation, then
collapse.
Where does all that
organized intention go?
It is the age old
mystery.
The best I can do
for my own 'inevitable ending' is fill out Vermont's "Advance
Directive", put the AD sticker on my license, and hope I don't wind up in
the hands of overzealous caregivers.
Vermont, courageous on
other matters like slavery and same gender monogamy, has declined to pass the
very cautious and reasonable End of Life bill proposed two years ago and
supported by two former Vermont
governors in its legislature.
If I get elected to
the legislature as an Independent (and that's doubtful---lol ) , I will try to
reopen the matter--------- BEFORE the issue becomes personal.
Paul D. Keane
M. Div. '80
M.A., M.Ed.
MERCER-GOLDEN:
Inevitable endings
The Yale Daily News
Meditations
STAFF REPORTER
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
My dog was diagnosed
with cancer more than a year ago. Sasha, then a six-year-old golden retriever,
was limping heavily on her daily walks and had stopped making the frenetic
puppy runs she did whenever she was let off leash at the park. At the time, we
assumed that she had pulled a muscle and would improve. Weeks later, after a
battery of tests — all of which she endured with the affectionate stoicism
other owners of retrievers will be familiar with — we received the diagnosis.
We had two choices:
amputate the leg and try to prolong her life, or let her live as long as
possible, as comfortably as possible — until it came time to put her down.
While initially amputation seemed the better option — Sasha wasn’t old by any
stretch of the imagination — there was a high probability the cancer would
return despite it. Fearing the trauma she’d feel after losing her leg, we took
her home and bought painkillers.
I had a year to
prepare for the inevitable ending, but as it approached, I found myself putting
it more and more out of mind. I couldn’t be a present, loving owner to Sasha
while dwelling on the fact that next Thursday at 10 a.m. she would be put to
sleep. As the day approached, I found myself increasingly struck by the
strangeness of knowing the hour that a creature you loved was going to die.
Sometimes I questioned the decision not to amputate; often I hoped that by some
miracle Sasha would wake up the next morning the dog she had been only a year
ago and we could indefinitely postpone her death.
My parents announced
around the same time as Sasha’s diagnosis that we would be selling our house in
London. We’d
spent the better part of 10 years in the house; I went home for school breaks
there, studied under the willow tree in the backyard, knew every kink in the
staircases and could tell you what time of night it was by the sounds I heard
outside my window. It was the last of my childhood homes that I still visited,
all the others having been sold.
Both in the case of
Sasha and the sale of the house, I had to live in the shadow of certain
endings. Not cataclysmic ones, but small, aching changes that will come and are
impossible to stop. As a senior, I am also facing another certain ending: a
conclusion of my time at this institution that, like my house in London, is home,
intimately and profoundly.
My struggle has
become balancing a desire to live this moment, with my dog, in my house, at my
school, while wondering how many more such moments there will be. In a strange
way, certainty is the harbinger of uncertainty: On the other side of a known
ending lies an unclear future.
While the certain
future is limited, there is at least the illusion that you can shape the time
you have left. The world presents both more opportunities and more anxiety on
the other side of endings, a thought I am working to find exciting instead of
chilling.
Ever the control
freak, I have only a matter of months to learn how to let go, put the dog to sleep
and cope with both certain endings and uncertain beginnings. I am searching for
ways to forgive myself for not always being in control and, more importantly,
to learn how to forgive myself for not always being able to save the things,
people and places I love.
Zoe Mercer-Golden is a senior in Davenport College. Her column runs on Wednesdays.
Contact her at zoe.mercer-golden@yale.edu.
Comments
"Why does it seem so natural that elite
institutions be liberal? They certainly haven’t always been."
I am six years old,
circa 1950. My grandmother is walking me across the New Haven Green. We
approach a group of Yale students and my grandmother says to me, "Stay
away from them. They're pinkos."
Of course I had no
idea then what pinkos are but I reluctantly obey.
My grandmother,
bless her heart, lived two blocks from Yale in a third floor walk-up ghetto
apartment with no hot water.
She was a dignified
lady and in her Rebekah gown (her only luxury) she looked like Lady Churchill,
tall, high cheekbones, white hair, and elbow length white gloves (another
luxury).
My grandmother had a
sixth grade education.
All her life she
would be the unwitting victim of the propaganda of another Yale graduate and
former Yale Daily News editor, Henry
Luce, whose Life magazine and its burgeoning journalistic empire, spewed
anti-communist rhetoric to its sixth grade mentality readers through 'cold war
years.'
My grandmother,
bless her soul, was also a bigot.
She would NOT have
attended Rick Santorum's lecture last night even though it was easy walking
distance at two blocks, and even though she might have agreed with his ideas,\.
She would not have
attended because he was Roman Catholic-------sin of sins ---- and she worshiped
at one of thee WASP temples on the Green.
Thus cometh The Anti-Yale.
PK
MASKO: Santorum
and anti-anti-
intellectualism
The Yale Daily News
GUEST COLUMNIST
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
Rick Santorum scares
a lot of people here. That much was clear when he was still running for
president, and even clearer yesterday as he spoke to the YPU amid choruses of
profanity and other kindergarten-appropriate responses. Santorum’s
outspokenness on issues like gay rights and abortion gives his opponents ample
license to bellyache about “insensitivity” and are always good for an indignant
Facebook status or eye-roll.
While we have heard
other controversial conservative speakers, Santorum seems particularly good at
provoking Yalies’ ire. Through the campaign season, one of Santorum’s platform
planks that most negatively reverberated around campus was his critique of
elite academia, which he referred to as “indoctrination centers for the left.”
He also frequently
criticized the Obama administration for its taxpayer-funded support of
widespread college education. At the same time, Santorum was a well-learned
holder of a law degree who liked to quote classic works of political philosophy
offhand — it seemed a contradiction.
Interpreting his
speeches as anti-intellectual, though, completely misses the point of
Santorum’s critique. Rather than being a learned anti-intellectual (in other
words, a hypocrite), Santorum is critiquing the tack that education in elite
institutions has taken in recent years. While he may undermine his own argument
by his conspiratorial tone, implying that American leftists set up academic
institutions to indoctrinate students, his argument would be better served by a
different justification: Academia, simply by its inherent egoism, is liberal
and statist by nature.
Why does it seem so
natural that elite institutions be liberal? They certainly haven’t always been.
Conservatives like to scapegoat the licentiousness of the ’70s, but, as William
F. Buckley brought to light, liberal bias in education far predated the victim
studies era. The roots of this bias, rather, lie in the social sciences.
Now that we claim to
understand the human psyche in our psychology classes and divine how they will
behave in groups through political science, we the learned are privileged with
a higher position in society than ever. Beyond an education in the classics,
studying the conflicting great thoughts and leaders of the past, the social
sciences give us the false assurance that we know all the answers and have a
greater right to design our fellow citizens’ lives than ever before.
New disciplines like
behavioral economics provide a forum for the socially learned to try out their
inventions. Therefore, a social science-centered academy will always be, in the
bigger government sense, liberal. The social sciences tell the ennobled they
have both the right and the responsibility to lead where everyone else’s
understanding falls short. Our modern academia will always demand a more
centralized government power, because leaving so many daily decisions up to all
the little people will seem irresponsible and a waste of time. Plus, it feels
good to be important.
Modern conservatives
and economic liberals have always staked out the opposite approach. Friedrich
Hayek, in his “Road to Serfdom,” identified central planning as the greatest
bugaboo of freedom and prosperity. This is the classic academic tradition — the
desire for academic humility, for the realization that no matter how many right
answers the ruling class may have, the free human spirit always loses something
in the transfer.
Rick Santorum thinks
“the purpose of government is to create an opportunity for people to be free.”
No matter how smart one person or group may be, they are never smart enough.
This is why, when Santorum accuses President Obama of trying to “remake
Americans in his image” by trying to get more Americans college-educated, he
may as well be attacking the academic desire for bigger government control, not
education itself.
So many see
inconsistency in Santorum’s stance because they fail to distinguish between
leadership and control. They fail to see how it is not hypocrisy that a man
with a law degree who talks about leadership while quoting Burke and
Tocqueville simultaneously tells an audience that many American universities
are centers of liberal indoctrination and that too many Americans go to
college.
Santorum believes in
the real liberal education, which values debate, experience and everyday life
over formulas. We can argue all day about whether universities really are
liberal indoctrination centers or whether Obama really wants to nationalize
curricula. It is clear, though, that Santorum’s problem is not with
intellectualism but with modern academia’s lack of diverse thought, and, though
he may not say this directly, its slide toward the desire to control.
Santorum’s ideas of
replacing government with a powerful social infrastructure, grounded in faith,
family and, as he stated last night, a sense of shame, will never ring true to
Yale or the rest of modern academia. This tone of Santorum’s made Yale so
reflexively angry at his appearance. To Santorum, the educated class — that is,
us — are a little less special than we think.
