“It is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” This announcement appeared in the first issue of The New Yorker magazine, published on February 21, 1925.

Also, “it hopes to be gay,” said the editors, thereby displaying another sign of the periodical’s age.

But, as if pleading for indulgence, they added: “It recognizes certain shortcomings and realizes that it’s impossible for a magazine fully to establish its character in one number.”

My access to this literary heirloom has come from a surprise Christmas gift. My spouse gave me a complete electronic set of the magazine through February 2005.  By inserting an appropriate CD into my computer, I can locate and read anything that appeared in the pages of The New Yorker.

That includes cartoons and ads, as well as commentary, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. The index allows me to find any one item quickly, a boon for a literary junkie like me.

Some of the names found in these pages reverberate in me and will in some of my fellow readers: James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, George E. Kaufman and others bring back the witty writers of the Jazz Age.

To veteran readers of The New Yorker, the cover of that first 1925 issue will bring immediate gratification. Drawn by Rea Irvin, it displays the elegant, iconic character Eustace Tilley, sporting a very high collar and a top hat. With dignified hauteur, Tilley is examining a butterfly, using his monocle for detail.

The price for a New Yorker subscription was five dollars, no small sum for the time. Its orientation toward readers with deep pockets appeared from an ad on page two. It displayed a fancy perfume from the Paris company Caron.

Through the years many New Yorker subscribers have taken the magazine for its cartoons. They could not be bothered with the writing but loved flipping through the pages looking for the best drawings with humorous captions.

The cartoons have become a feature of America’s intellectual landscape, much discussed and laughed over. A perusal of them through the years reveals important currents of the time. Not rarely, they also baffle the viewer with references that have long faded from collective memory.

The first issue carried a section called “The Talk of the Town.” This feature would become a fixed department of the magazine and provide a vehicle for sophisticated, witty, and politically charged commentary on all sorts of events and personalities.

I greatly enjoyed searching later issues for the work of a friend, Agnes Bourneuf. According to family report, this longtime proprietor of the Thomas More Book Shop, in Harvard Square, had published two pieces in the New Yorker. Thanks to the complete index, I found them right away.

Agnes’s first contribution, published in 1945, turned out to be a short, humorous, and poignant story about a secretary who discovers that her sister’s family calls on her only when they need money. It showed great flair and might have been the start of a long career of published prose.

The second piece was a brief memoir of growing up in Nova Scotia. It appeared in the issue of  November 27, 1948. Here, too, Agnes proved her talent with words, perhaps whetting the appetite of New Yorker readers for a distinguished literary future.

Agnes, however, did not ever publish anything else in The New Yorker. Her career as a writer apparently began and ended between those two years. I wish she had written more but her superb work as a bookseller provided compensation for me and many others, including her fellow authors.

Admittedly, The New Yorker still caters to sophisticates of a sort. Of course, it also reflects and addresses people of the city from which it takes its name.

However, as a non-New Yorker and a person of dubious literary sophistication, I still value having this electronic treasure-trove of generally fine writing. Having at hand many of America’s most distinguished writers – John Updike, E.B. White, Scott Fitzgerald, James Thurber – gives me inspiration.

I also value having a record of changing tastes and fashions through the last 80 years. My birth came in the third year of the magazine’s existence and we are growing old together.

Others have been even more addictive than I. My late mother-in-law read The New Yorker from the first issue on, and always remembered the general alarm provoked by her uncontrollable laughter at “The Night the Bed Fell,” by James Thurber. This piece appeared on July 8, 1933 and quickly become a comic classic.

Having it on CDs rather than in mile-high piles of glossy paper also benefits me. As a result of this convenient packaging, I do not have to summon a clutter consultant to extricate me from towering mounds of magazines.

So hail to The New Yorker. May we both continue to flourish for years to come.

Richard Griffin

“I’ve had dialogues with my dead mother over the 40 years since she died.” This extraordinary statement comes from Catherine Drew Gilpin Faust, as quoted by New York Times writer Sara Rimer.

I suspect that many older people have conversations with long-dead parents. I certainly do.

Perhaps because I am male, I talk with my father more than my mother. I carry on an inner dialogue with him as I review the past that we shared and speculate about a shared future that his death deprived us of.  

Another motive for this dialogue may also be that, from teenage years on, a certain tension marked my relationship with my father. It’s as if I wish to remedy that situation now, so many decades after that possibility ended.

What does Drew Faust, the newly chosen president of Harvard University, say to her mother? We don’t know but we can speculate.

Some of it almost surely centers on what Faust calls “continued confrontations” with her mother about what it means to be feminine.

Reportedly, her mother brought her up to be an old-fashioned southern woman. She expected her daughter to observe the hard-and-fast social guidelines of the traditional Virginia society in which the family lived.

That meant “a community of rigid social segregation” as Faust herself describes it. Not only were racial divisions kept strictly, but so were those between rich and poor. In that setting, horseback riding for the privileged classes loomed as much more important than efforts to reduce the distance between groups of people.

A friend of Drew Faust has observed that she was brought up to become the wife of a rich man. This kind of social destination now seems at a far remove from her call to become president of a great university.

Presumably, her new job has now taken its place among the topics that Faust talks about with her mother. The latter, four decades dead, would have been astonished at the way her daughter’s life has evolved. Step by step, the hoped-for southern belle has been transformed into one of the foremost educational leaders of America.

With my own father, I review aspects of his career that I failed to ask him about when he was alive. When in 1939, as a reporter for The Boston Post, he sailed to Rome and covered the election of Eugenio Pacelli as Pope Pius XII, did he have any inkling of how the war in Europe would confront the new pope with agonizing decisions?

What most influenced my father, I can now ask, in moving from a fairly mainline position to the political right?  I cannot forget that one of the floral arrangements sent at his death came from Senator Joseph McCarthy. However, I like to think that my father would have turned against the Wisconsin senator after more information about his duplicitous tactics was exposed.

Most of all, I now think about the adolescent rifts that I provoked, spoiling the close relationship we had in my earlier boyhood. One of my deepest regrets connected with my father’s early death, (he was only 56) has been the lost opportunity to repair the distancing that had occurred as I moved into my teenage years.

Moving to safer ground, I wonder what he would think about the decades from 1930 to the middle 1950s. He observed social change from up close because he had to write and speak about it. In his newspaper columns, in weekly television appearances on a current-affairs program, and in talks he gave to various groups, he had reason to analyze the shifting currents of life in America.

My father would probably not be surprised at some of the changes in Boston society and elsewhere. I remember him telling me at the end of World War II that our national life could be expected to change radically. Apparently he foresaw the burst of post-war prosperity and what that would do for America.

Many years later, I discovered that he had predicted to my mother that I would eventually leave my first career, that of being a Jesuit. Apparently, he saw more clearly than I did some aspects of my character that would eventually make me opt for that radical change. He may have known me better than I knew myself.

For my father and my mother, too, I feel greater sympathy than I ever could when younger. This change strikes me as typical of us as we grow older, encountering more and more of the challenges that our parents must have faced.

To their problems we, in our maturity, can now bring much greater understanding than formerly. This provides further material for the inner dialogue by which we continue spiritual contact with them.

Maintaining and cherishing spiritual bonds with our parents, even long after their death, becomes an important part of our character. It enhances our inner life, quite possible making of our later years a richer experience.

Richard Griffin

In 1832, the town of Sandown, New Hampshire auctioned off three impoverished women ─Anna Harvey, Ruth Collins, and Molly Blough─to the lowest bidders.

Each “purchaser” agreed to these two requirements:

1. to move the person or persons “off to the place where he intends to support them”;
2. to provide “suitable Meats, and Drinks, Bedding mending, Nursing, & Tobacco if needed.”

No bidder was to be selected unless, in the opinion of the town’s three selectmen, he had the means to support the pauper. The town agreed to pay for clothing and a doctor.

Anna Harvey was successfully claimed by Captain Daniel Hoit who bid 75 cents a week. The other two women were taken by David Pressy who bid 74 cents for Ruth Collins and 80 cents for Molly Blough.

This is what happened to some of the aged poor in one New Hampshire town in the 19th century and other places as well. Approaching local government for help meant agreeing to a loss of freedom. The impoverished person could also be required to work without pay, making the arrangement come perilously close to a form of slavery.

The legal document behind this arrangement can be seen online in the town clerk’s handwriting. The web site can be found at http://www.poorhousestory.com/AUCTION_POOR.htm  

Later on, “workhouses” were established in many places as a way of curing people from laziness, the alleged cause of their poverty. These institutions were later succeeded by “poor farms” or “poorhouses” where aged people were sent to live with others, often including the mentally ill and criminals.

I have discovered this slice of history through a new book, Aging Nation, written by two scholars personally known to me. Robert Binstock, one of the authors, is a political scientist who used to teach at Brandeis where long ago I took his course on aging and public policy. The other, James Schulz, an economist, is an emeritus professor at the same university.

The authors’ main reason for recalling the way the aged poor were treated in earlier America is to show the difference that Social Security has made. Starting in 1935, this federal program, initiated by Franklin Roosevelt, has gradually helped assure most older Americans of at least some financial independence.

Binstock and Schulz emphasize how Social Security, in freeing people from dependence on their children and from the often humiliating means testing required by other programs, gives older Americans the kind of revenue system they feel comfortable with.

Social Security fits comfortably with our tradition of independence and self-reliance, they point out. Recipients have paid into the program and it is seen as an insurance system rather than a dole.

The system also has other virtues that most people have little awareness of. A notable feature is the way Social Security, from the beginning, has been skewed to favor lower earners. Some with insufficient contributions to the program have been enabled to receive more than they were strictly speaking eligible for.

Both authors believe strongly in the advantages for Americans at large assured by a system that has always paid out what it owes. By contrast with many pension benefits promised by private employers and not delivered, Social Security has never missed coming through with payments.

The writers deeply distrust schemes such as the Bush plan that would privatize Social Security by relying on so-called “personal accounts.” Though they think it wise for the system to invest some of its money in the financial markets, they stress the undesirability of having recipients take charge of managing their own accounts.

Most Americans do not possess the expert knowledge necessary to make wise choices in complicated money matters. Nor are they interested in managing the dollars invested for them by the federal government. For spending our time, most of us have found more interesting ways than that.

I certainly qualify on both these counts and feel fortunate to have found assistance in basic planning from some knowledgeable and trustworthy professionals. Beyond that, I am ill-equipped to go, and much prefer sports, music, and the other arts to financial planning.

Public programs of the magnitude of Social Security are best handled by public authority. As the authors of Aging Nation state: “Only governments can secure the benefits promised in old age─given the economic vicissitudes of global, regional, and community shifts in economic opportunity in the face of such things as changing product demand, technology, the competitive milieu, and macroeconomic events associated with recession and inflation.”

Unfortunately, some Americans are still impoverished in late life. But when you consider the way old age relief was handled before the advent of Social Security you have to be grateful for this life-saving program. The United States was not the first nation to adopt this response to the plight of impecunious elders and it was not easy to get the Congress to approve it in the middle 1930s.

However, in time its arrival would make the New Hampshire town’s response to the poverty of three women look primitive indeed.

Richard Griffin

“When you have been writing novels as long as I have, you never quarrel with your instinct.”

These words come from Norman Mailer, the 84-year-old author of many novels, nonfiction books, essays and articles. Speaking to a generally hero-worshipping crowd on the last stop of a book tour, this long-famous author proved able to spark laughter and applause with the skills of an entertainer.

He had entered the sanctuary of the church, navigating carefully on two canes. Arrived in a tall armchair, he beamed at the audience with a warm smile of relief. Short and less stocky than formerly, dressed in an experienced dark blue jacket and baggy pants of nearly the same color, Mailer showed himself a lively, sometimes blunt, and witty personality.

This is the man who electrified the literary world in 1948 with The Naked and the Dead, a novel that grew out of his World Ward II experience. A lot has happened to him since: 34 other books; six marriages; nine children; and much controversy.

As his introducer, Amanda Darling of Harvard Book Store, observed, Mailer has “staying power.” Despite his physical disabilities─ labored walking, increasing deafness, hoarse throat─this literary lion retains the aggressiveness that has always marked his personality.

His newest novel, The Castle in The Forest, has been published in 19 countries, he proudly announced, but only recently in Germany. In it, Mailer focuses on Adolf Hitler’s early life, up to teenage years. He would like to continue this theme in later volumes but “at age 84, you don’t go around making predictions of what you’re going to do next.”

During his discussion of one of Hitler’s alleged physical defects, he sang a bawdy song dating from World War II. Acceptable newspaper practice bars me from reproducing its lyrics here but I can vouch for the singer’s boast: “I have never been known to hit a note on pitch.” It should have been sung to the tune of The Colonel Bogey March.

The most important character in the book, in the author’s view, is a subordinate devil, Satan’s assistant, who serves as narrator. Adopting a classical view of evil, Mailer believes there to be “a satanic effect in human affairs.” Hitler’s impact on the world cannot be explained by mere psychology.

“Hitler goes beyond our comprehension of human nature,” the writer claims. Contrasting the Führer with his Soviet counterpart, he says; “Stalin killed only those people who were in his way; Hitler killed by metaphor.”

By the latter phrase, Mailer means that Hitler gained no practical advantage by wiping out Jews. Instead, this policy actually hurt the war effort. But, as psychiatrist and scholar Robert Jay Lifton has explained to me: “They had to be killed for abstract reasons, for Hitler’s psyche, translating it into an ideology.”

Though Mailer did not wish to linger on a discussion of incest, it plays an important part in the book. Alois Hitler, the father of Adolf, was involved in more than one incestuous relationship, the novelist says, including that with Adolf’s mother Klara Poelzl.

Mailer claims that incest sometimes gives rise to a few individuals who may not be mentally weak, but instead brilliant and unusually creative.

In the course of his talk and during the question period, Mailer commented on all sorts of important subjects, among them aging, politics, belief, literature, and women.

On aging, he says “When you get into your 80s, each year counts as two or three.” Later, when faltering in answer to a question, he excused himself with “Sorry, 84, losing it already.” Given his overall performance, however, this admission seemed merely rhetorical.

As to politics, he displays strong feelings. “Iraq is not exactly the seedbed for democracy,” he says in condemning the invasion. In explaining what he takes to be Karl Rove’s advice to George W. Bush, he says: “One half of America is very stupid and we have got to appeal to that half.” He quickly adds: “It’s very important for stupid people to be patriotic.”

After being an atheist for much of his life, Mailer now believes in God. However he has faith in what he calls an “existential God.” His friend Dr. Lifton, understands this term as meaning “a God who himself or herself is struggling and doesn’t have a clear path.”

In response to a woman who raised the question of his alleged misogyny, Mailer pleads innocence. “I’m one of the small injustices of the feminist movement,” he claims in defense. However, he also would like to have been “more macho than I was.”

As to literature, “the ideal novel will give you a structure for thinking in the future.”

Walking away from a stimulating evening, I felt the force of character in this man who is obviously in physical decline but who can summon up reserves of inner strength. Mailer still inspires controversy─and sometimes indignation─ but he continues to be creative and rollicking.

Richard Griffin

“You all send the strangest people down here,” a Congressman from Mississippi once told Barney Frank. The Mississippian was referring to Father Robert Drinan, who represented the Fourth Massachusetts Congressional District from 1971 to 1981.

Congressman Barney Frank included this anecdote in the eulogy he delivered at Father Drinan’s funeral Mass in Boston early this month. As Drinan’s successor in the House of Representatives, Frank has been well positioned to appreciate the many virtues of this colleague.

At the heart of Father Drinan’s service in the House was his demonstration of what a moral response to politics can be. The Jesuit priest recognized the dignity of every person, said his successor.

On another light note, Barney Frank observed that “Bob Drinan wrote more books than many members of Congress have ever read.”

Another skilled eulogist, Harold Koh, Dean of Yale Law School, recalled that he was six years old when he first met Father Drinan. The young boy’s father had insisted that his son wear a tie in honor of the event.

Of his longtime friend and inspiration, Koh said: “Father Bob Drinan was not one of those lawyers who love human rights, but not human beings.”  In response to people who asked how Father Drinan got so much done, Dean Koh cited his mentor’s succinct answer: “Celibacy.”

These remarks about Father Drinan indicate the respect and love for him that suffused the funeral. Everyone present in the church seemed to recognize that they were celebrating the life of an altogether extraordinary person. We mourned his loss but rejoiced that he had left us so much.

My friendship with Bob Drinan goes back to 1953, when we were both students at Weston College, then the suburban Jesuit seminary. In June of that year Bob had been ordained a priest while I was a student of Scholastic Philosophy.  

In January 1954, he came to my door with the terrible news that my father was dying.  Sharing information that had been entrusted to him by one of my father’s friends, Bob eased the blow with the compassion that he felt for me and my family.

In succeeding days, Bob continued to offer me support as my family and I grieved over our loss. He helped us deal with an event that had devastating consequences for us all.

The other moment that stands out in our friendship came in 1970, when he arrived one evening on my doorstep to ask me a question, presumably one that he asked of many others.

What would I think if he ran for Congress? At first, I was astounded that a fellow Jesuit could propose such a daring step. That, after all, was something a Catholic priest had never done. And he would have to challenge an incumbent entrenched in office for many years.

Recovering quickly, however, I embraced the project enthusiastically and urged him to run. Among other considerations that loomed large for me was my fervent opposition to the war in Vietnam. Knowing that, unlike the incumbent, Bob would work to bring that misguided American effort to a halt, I felt great enthusiasm for Bob’s candidacy.

In recent years my contacts with Bob were rare but I continued to follow his activities with interest. He impressed me as a model of flexibility when he resumed his career of law professor after leaving Congress in response to the edict of Pope John Paul II.

I felt little sympathy for the papal command but had to admire Bob for his conscientious decision to obey it.

In his role of law professor, Bob championed the human rights of people in many parts of the world. El Salvador, South Africa, and Chile were among the places where he traveled to press for those rights.

At age 86, Bob continued to teach enthusiastically. It was in the classroom that he collapsed, stricken with his final illness.

As many have noted, Bob cared about the oppressed wherever they were. That same spirit moved him to continue publishing books and articles at an impressive rate. He also understood that “unjust wars are immoral” and worked to halt them.

Calling attention to a central belief, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has said of him: “He believed that there was a spark of divinity in every person and he acted on that belief.”

I will always remember his face, in latter years at least, so bony and ascetic. In repose, he sometimes looked like a grim monk, but when other people approached, that look would be transformed into a warm smile.

Inevitably, the nation will miss his prophetic voice. He supplied to us all a dedication to the common good that we sorely need at this stage in our national life. I only hope that others, both public officials, and private citizens, will come forward and incorporate in themselves the spirit that animated Bob Drinan.

Richard Griffin

As a child I could never understand why grown-ups did not welcome snow. The adults in my parents’ circle of acquaintances, at least, wanted no part of the white stuff.     

They might dream of a white Christmas, at least in song, but their hardheaded preference even for that fabled day was for bare streets and sidewalks. They would be delighted with this winter, which (as I write, at least) has been almost snow-free.

This attitude we young people considered Scrooge-like. Our elders were not only violating New England’s hereditary rights to Currier and Ives snowy winter scenes, but they were depriving us of outdoor fun.

My family lived on one of Watertown’s hilliest streets; it provided a fine surface for sledding. We kids looked forward to sliding down the hill at high speed, no matter the peril. Until after WWII, skiing was not a popular sport; we and most of our neighbors did not have equipment for sliding down the mountains up north.

Those storms that led to no-school announcements received a heartfelt welcome from every kid. To have lamented the loss of a day in the classroom would have been unthinkable. Expressed, it might have led to excommunication from your circle of friends.

Snowball fights brought us pleasure and, for us boys, gave vent to some of our macho instincts. It was fun to throw at one another; ungallantly aiming at girls enhanced the experience.

Snow provided us with work, too, welcome work because it was done not for our families but for pay. I loved putting on my overshoes and venturing forth into the new-fallen snow, seeking employment. Armed with my shovel, I would do the minimum for my family before venturing to ring the doorbells of neighbors.

The five dollars that you could earn shoveling a driveway was a special boon. It could entail heavy lifting but the reward made the effort worth it. With the proceeds we could buy frappes and other heady food and drink.

Now, of course, I have come to understand why my parents and their kind did not welcome snow. I now experience it more as an threat to my mobility than an inducement to fun. No longer do I throw snowballs at humans of any age, nor do I indulge in sledding.

As to shoveling for neighbors, now I am not allowed to shovel even for myself. In fact, my spouse and I have recently signed up with a contractor who has pledged to remove snow from our sidewalks. His company will remove anything over four inches  deep, leaving us free to sweep off more superficial covering.

All of my age peers in surrounding neighborhoods can now take advantage of this service. This counts as one of the amenities intended by an ad hoc elder planning group to increase our chances of remaining in our own homes. Drawing inspiration from Beacon Hill Village, we hope to enable residents of a certain age to stay put rather than being forced to move elsewhere.

Despite my later-life attitude toward snow storms, the esthetic qualities of snow have not been lost on me. Perhaps more than before, I stand ready to admire the beauty of newly-landed snow as it adorns our environment. It’s just that I want our region’s current dearth of snow storms to continue through this whole winter.

What I most appreciate about snow, when it does fall, is its power to bring out our neighbors─ “bring out” in both senses of the word. They come out of their houses in order to shovel their sidewalks, to free their cars, or to kibitz with the likes of me, no longer doing either.

They come out of their shells also, those that have them. People in my environs, at least, open themselves up when they are standing outside amid the latest snowfall. They find it hard to resist impulses to be sociable and thus exchange observations with nearby residents and passers-by.

Especially on those bright, blue-skyed days that often follow snowstorms, do neighbors slide into good moods. Common tasks or maybe common dilemmas put most people into higher spirits than usual. It becomes harder to be curmudgeonly when everyone is engaged in the same obvious situation.

It usually proves to be ideal for gathering news about neighbors. If you possess reportorial instincts like mine, you can learn facts that can surprise you. Not real dirt, mind you; some of us still feel scruples about digging up anything like that. But good clean gossip material─that’s different.

So, on the subject of snow, I have evolved to a position half-way between my parents’ view of it and the way I looked on it as a child. As on so many other issues of major importance, I find myself in the middle, this time not an uncomfortable place to be.

Richard Griffin

“My body once had served me well with little care or thought for maintenance on my part. Now it was beginning to let me down.”

These words come from my friend and colleague Andrew Achenbaum, an historian who has written several valuable books on aging. In a brief personal statement in the latest issue of a professional journal in the field, he shares with readers how illness has changed his life.

Andy got off to a head start. At age 40 he took on two chronic illnesses that afflicted him for the next 15 years. However, with good medical care he managed to keep these maladies under control.

Even so, the experience brought about changes in his outlook on the world. What he terms “a taste of mortality” gave my friend greater compassion toward other people. He became more conscious of how, for some sufferers, long-lasting diseases can be as difficult as acute ones.

Lately, Andy has come into a new area of health problems. For two years he had to cope with a prostate infection, a disease that has changed him in both body and mind. It required two operations, neither of which cured the root cause of his illness.

He also found himself forgetting things and feeling lethargic much of the time.  Through a biopsy his urologist discovered cancer, a finding that required removal of the prostate.

That latter surgery happened a year ago. Now Andy has to deal with his changed body along with other problems such as a dislocated knee cap caused by a fall.

The upshot of his new situation has been a further change in his outlook. It has changed his concept of what it means to grow older.

In explaining it he writes: “Successful aging to me means having family and friends who prove to be wonderful caregivers, chauffeurs, and cheerleaders. And in my vulnerability, I see more than I imagined in the aging faces of others.”

On reading his statement, I felt sorry that my friend had to suffer so much. Until I saw his article, I had no idea that his health had become so precarious since I last saw him. Since he lives in Houston, I do not have the opportunity to visit him or offer any help.

Of course, I welcome the broadening and deepening of Andy’s view of life. Clearly, he has gained from the experience of illness an appreciation of what it means to be human. I only regret that the price for this breakthrough has proven so high.

Most of my age peers have tasted at least some of the same bitter fruit that my friend has. Hardly anyone of us escapes this fate, much as we wish otherwise.

And, while undergoing this kind of trial, we ask the same question that people have presumably been posing for millennia. “Why me?” asks Andy as he looks for some rationale for his suffering.

No more than anyone else can I pretend to offer an explanation. Yes, the experience may offer a chance for greater compassion for others. And it can deepen our understanding of what it means to be human─our vulnerability along with our capacity for hope.

But these profits extend only so far. They do not relieve the pain, nor are they certain to increase our chances for curative processes to take hold.

More promise, perhaps, lies in what my friend says about family and friends. In reaching out with care for him, they have given him a convincing sign that he is loved. Their actions show him his own importance as a human being, a person deserving of deep respect and, yes, love.

That has been my experience when suffering crises in health. Last winter I underwent two such crises. In response to my need, professional caretakers provided me with needed help and encouragement. They reached out to me with skill, sensitivity, and compassion.

Even more, my wife responded to my needs for physical assistance and moral support. To my amazement, she never flinched at the often nasty business of helping me take care of the new mechanics of bodily processes that were forced on me. I envisioned being in her position and wondered how she could cheerfully take on these tasks without being put off by them.

This kind of response to illness can change the whole experience. That is some of the meaning I find in a poem by Rumi, a 13th century Persian poet. Astonishingly enough, he happens now to be one of the most popular poets in America. Here, in a translation by Coleman Barks, is what Rumi says:

I saw grief drinking a cup of sorrow
and called out,
“It tastes sweet,
does it not?”
“You’ve caught me,”
grief answered,
“and you’ve ruined my business.
How can I sell sorrow,
when you know it’s a blessing?”

Richard Griffin