Over a year ago, my first posting in this blog was about Senator Edward Kennedy's illness. Now he has died, and many of us feel impoverished. Having lived in Massachusetts for most of the last 20 years, I had the privilege of seeing Senator Kennedy a few times, at political rallies, at events at the JFK School of Politics at Harvard. I have always thought that it was a major privilege of being in Massachusetts that we have such honorable political leadership at the national level.
A week ago, a friend of mine, Franco Benazzi also died - tragically young and rapidly - of a brain tumor. Franco was a psychiatrist in Italy, a researcher about bipolar disorder, whose work focused on discovering that most mood episodes are neither depressed, nor manic, but mixed, a viewpoint that goes against many current assumptions about how to diagnose and treat mood disorders. If correct, as I believe he was, we need to change our understanding of "depression" radically.
Kennedy was a politician; Benazzi a doctor. Both lived for others. Kennedy's struggles personally and his accomplishments politically are at a different level. But the differences in quantity do not change the same basic quality: they both tried to help humanity.
Skeptics abound in our world: those who say that politics is useless, that psychiatry is corrupt. All their complaints, though loud and tiresome, are written in sand. What endures in the future is the truth that lies underneath the hard and silent work of the Kennedys of the world - and, I would like to think, also of the unheralded Benazzis.
In one of his last speeches, Senator Kennedy commented that the future will outlast us all, but that we will live on in the future that we make. I firmly believe this about him and Franco and those who try to constructively contribute to understanding and making gentle the life of this world.
As I bid goodbye to this honored leader and this esteemed friend, hoping to live up to their examples, I find that this poem (written by Mary Frye and also attributed by some as an Indian ballad for the dead) is a helpful reminder that these worthy dead are still alive in our lives and in our world:
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awake in the morning hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight
I am the soft starshine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there. I did not die.
