(This Is A Long Sad/Angry One)

Dear Phil--

Today I went to your funeral. I found out you died on Monday morning, when Dan called me at my desk with the news. It was pretty surreal--remember when he got laid off and I had to have him repeat what he just said to me? Same sort of thing. He said that you'd died, and I just felt shocked, angry and sad all at once.

All week I've been grappling with this feeling that you're not really dead. That it's just a rumor, or a crazy story I've heard, and that I should file it away in the back of my mind to tell you about the next time we met for lunch.

I'm so glad I got to see you about a month ago or so for lunch. Thanks for paying, by the way. You get it--you'd been a cops reporter before, you'd worked all sorts of journalism jobs, and you knew that even though Dan and I could pay for ourselves, it would help if you paid. And you did. Even for the slices of pie we all had.

I also wanted to let you know I joined the membership of the church we had talked about, St. Mary of the Assumption. Dan and I didn't know what to do in terms of joining a church and establishing a membership to get married, and I was really glad when you said you liked St. Mary, just down the street from where I live. That's the church where you got baptized and where you got married, and that's where Dan and I plan to walk down the aisle next fall.

I'll be honest, I'm really, really angry you're not going to be there. In so many ways, you were like family and friend wrapped up into one, and you know that's not an easy thing to do. Dan and I even briefly considered trying to get you to marry us, but then we opted for the full mass instead, which requires a priest, not a deacon. Remember when we were joking about getting Bob Schieffer to our wedding, and how we asked what we had to do to get him there? You said that you'd probably have to die in the same week, because then he'd already be in town and might be willing to go to the funeral of two journalists he's never met. He gave a beautiful eulogy today, by the way.

After the funeral a bunch of fairly young college alumni went out to eat and drink at Fuzzy's Tacos. One of the former students said that was where you used to take your college journalism ethics students after the end of the semester, which made me feel old (I know I'm not) because you used to take classes to Jon's Grille, when it was still around. One person made the comment that it was very Irish of us all, going out to drink and talk about you and life and journalism, and I answered that it was just very reporterly of us. What else were we supposed to do? (On a side note, I'll admit I'm writing this with a few drinks under my belt, but you never turned down a good drink and I've seen you drink mai tais with little umbrellas, so I feel ok about that.)

You were one of the kindest people I ever met. When I was a senior in college and became really, really sick with mono and a host of other concurrent infections, you gave me some leeway on my final project and let me turn it in late after seeing how sick I was and how I had a hard time just getting through classes, much less doing anything outside of class. Of course, you also expected the best of everyone, and you were totally right when you scolded me and my editors for eating a cake that had been left in the ads department. It wasn't our cake to eat (even though it was really, really delicious.) I'm really glad I bought a replacement cake before you found out about the whole incident. I feel like every journalist who's known you should always keep in mind, "What Would Phil Record Do?"

There are a lot more things I've thought about writing, because all week I've know I'd have to write you and let you know my thoughts on all of this. For a while I thought about writing everything out longhand, in a reporter's pad or something like that, but I feel ok with putting this on something goofy like a blog. You were a big proponent of communication, of the media, no matter what form it took. I always looked forward to getting e-mails from you, when you'd start by saying "Beloved Liz" and end saying, "Love Ya, Phil." I don't know how to hold on to those things that you sent me. Do I print out the e-mails? That seems bizarre. Do I keep them in a folder? That seems even more bizarre, since maybe someday e-mail will be passe and everyone will communicate in some other way.

I don't know what to do to hold on to the few things I actually have that you gave me in some (semi) tangible form, but I do know that everything you taught me, starting more than five years ago when I was just a student in your media ethics class, an editor of a student newspaper, will stay with me. I like to think I'll be a journalist forever, I won't give up and do something else, but it wouldn't matter if I did. The things you taught me -- to be a gracious, kind-hearted person, to expect people to try their best, to forgive when people didn't, to laugh frequently and to never had a bad day, to be proud of the people you love in your life -- will last forever, even if my journalism career doesn't. You should have seen all the people at the church today. They all felt the same way. And that, in my opinion, is saying a lot.

I love you and I miss you,
Liz

Dear Teacher

My French-Canadian couch surfer, Lino, and I were talking about our lives and education last night, and it was on my mind this morning when I was at work. Waiting on phone calls to come in, I started looking up things from my high school years, including the website of the first high school I went to in Fort Walton Beach, Florida.

I don't think the school had a website when I was there in the late '90s as a freshman and sophomore, and even now it's a fairly shitty one. There isn't a lot on there, but there are staff pictures, so I was browsing through and looking at the teachers there. I remembered a handful--the math teacher who oversaw the math club I was on (YES, it's been established I'm a mega dork, shut it), the teacher who taught me AP European history and whom I always disliked because she was such a bitch and whose class I only passed because I copied one of my best friend's homework every day, the Spanish teacher who started crying in the middle of a lecture because the plight of the indigineous people of South America was generally terrible.

There was also a picture of my favorite science teacher ever, a woman whose classes I took and whose books I borrowed when I became a student aide. She had a huge menagerie in her biology classroom--parakeets, frogs, guinea pigs, fish, pythons, iguanas, chameleons, hamsters, a hedgehog who would throw up every time you picked him up--and was pretty indulgent to me as her aide. I was there during her break period, so sometimes I could nap, sometimes I'd watch TV (I think I watched the Columbine shooting unfold on her classroom TV), I made her a poster that said "Gravity: Not just a good idea, it's the law."

I got psyched, seeing that she was still teaching there, so I got her e-mail address and wrote her an e-mail, saying I hope she remembered me and thanking her for encouraging me and telling her that although I never went to med school, I still knew about symptoms of Marfan's syndrome and toxoplasmosis during the lecture I went to at the med school when none of the first-year students knew the answers.

She wrote back using lots of exclamation points, saying of course she remembered me, and she was on her way to a meeting and would write back in more depth as soon as she could. It made me feel special that she remembered me, even though this was more than 10 years ago, and I hope I made her feel good, knowing that she really was a huge influence. It prompted me to look up the faculty list of the school outside Albuquerque, N.M., where I did my junior year, but none of the names really stand out. (And fuck Enterprise, Alabama. I hated that school, hated my senior year, my journalism teacher thought man walked with dinosaurs, and I have zero desire to contact anyone there.)

The exchange also made me think about teachers from middle school and elementary school. I remember a few teachers--fourth grade, for example--that were fantastic, but now they're untraceable, retired or even (in the case of a band director from middle school) deceased. And then I think, Shit, people my age are teachers now. That's freaky.

My mom is a career elementary school music teacher, and she's still doing it, and I've considered off and on through life that it would be something worth doing. I'm not born to be a teacher or anything, the way my mom is, but I do think I could be a decent one, and it's always floated in my mind as an option in case I get pushed out of journalism. I would never, ever teach journalism, and strangely enough, I think I'd decide against teaching science and would rather do literature or reading or even straight-up English. (My copy editing professor from college would probably faint at the thought of me trying to explain the difference between "lay" and "lie," because I still don't know what the difference is.)

But teachers were always people I (generally) respected, even from a young age, and it's nice to think that maybe if they knew their students as adults who are working toward ambitions, they would respect us, too.

Fan Club Of Eight Years Olds

It was a pretty busy week; I was out half the day on Tuesday, since I was going to see a sleep study that night, and even though I went home and slept for three hours I was still exhausted and booked up on Wednesday. Busy weeks make me always focus on Thursday: If I can live through Thursday at about noon, then I'm set.

Also, I took off Friday this week, so if I could make it through until Thursday afternoon, then I was practically free.

My managing editor volunteers at a local elementary school, and they'd invited her to come present for career day. Since it was Thursday and she's busy putting out the paper, she asked us reporters if any of us wanted to go. I volunteered because it sounded like fun. I can entertain a group of third grade students for a half hour, no problem. There were many years when I was in high school and my entire income came from birthday money and babysitting.

I contacted the school counselors, who asked if I could do two classes instead of just one. I said sure, and my ME gave me little tiny notebooks with the paper's name on them to hand out to the kids, and I got a giant bag of pens from the children's hospital, since I figured a lot of kids had heard of it or been there before.

I showed up about five minutes late, parked across the street and tried to run across the street to the school. I ended up dropping most of the notebooks in the middle of the street, and a kind semi-truck driver stopped so I could pick them up without getting killed. There was a volunteer student aide in the library waiting for me, and she lead me to the first third-grade class.

When I started talking, I found myself getting flushed and my voice quaking a bit. Then I remembered that I could definitely spell better than the kids, and I was good. I talked about what I did, and they asked a lot of questions. I handed out notebooks after explaining that most of my life is spent taking notes, and they all excitedly wanted to write my e-mail address and the paper's website address in there. That took forever. Seriously. I said the website like 10 times and spelled it out and wrote it on the board and they still got it wrong.

Then my aide took me to my next class, and these kids were a little slower to get in to everything, but then they kept me there for an hour, asking question after question. The good news is they were good questions and I had plenty of good reporting stories to entertain them with. I told them about going out with a falconer to scare grackles, Dumpster-diving with anarchist freegans, finding a blind man's dog, trying my hand at being a crane operator, and doing the sleep study. I encouraged them to be nosy, ask questions, and always be curious. One girl in particular seemed to love this, and asked as many questions as she could possibly think of. The teacher finally cut them off, and as I was leaving the students all waved and the one girl wanted to get a hug.

I was smart. I didn't tell them that they won't get paid much and that journalism is changing and freaking out everyone involved in the industry. With any luck, one of those students will become a journalist and get into the business so I can someday retire. My 401k won't exist at that point, but I need some other kid to get suckered into this business so I can die anywhere but at my desk. (Just kidding. I did tell them I usually love my profession.)

So I took off Friday, and so did Dan, but he was invited to come in and speak to a couple of intro journalism classes at SMU so I tagged along. They were hour and a half classes, and Dan's presentation was about online journalism, and it was a really interesting presentation and then Q&A. (I'm not being biased, either. Not too biased. The students got into it and the discussions.) It's always strange to see someone in their professional role when you're used to seeing them elsewhere. It's like going to one of those take your kids to work days and seeing your parent doing something other than getting you snacks or telling you to clean your freaking room.

Naturally, every off day has a result, so Dan's working today. It's Saturday. It's ok, though. We got up and went to a bike race before he had to go in, and he did really well in the race, and then I went back to bed because I was cold and tired. My sister is in town today to see her best friend, so the three of us are on our way out to get lunch. Fooood. Then I'm going shopping. If I were a housewife, I could live every day like this!

Two Stories Up

Saturday morning Dan and I got up early, pulled on cycling clothes, put on T-shirts and shorts over everything and loaded up our pedals, wrenches, helmets, shoes and a bike pump to drive out to the Superdrome to meet our doom.

Ok, so it wasn't mortal danger. Not entirely, anyway. I am here, still alive, no broken bones, all my skin intact, and Dan came out unscathed as well. The whole track cycling experience was really unnerving, though, and let me just take a moment to proclaim my love for brakes on bicycles.

When we showed up at the Superdrome, we stopped by a little concrete building outside it to pick up track bikes, which were study bikes with a single, fixed gear. That means that if your wheels are moving, your pedals are moving, and if your pedals are moving, your feet are moving. There are no brakes on track bikes--if you want to stop, you have to try to pedal backward. "Try" is the operative word, here, because the force it takes to stop the pedals is fairly ridiculous.

Walking our bikes and gear into the Superdrome was intimidating. The track is a quarter-kilometer around, and in the corners it's a 44-degree angle and the top of the track is two stories off the ground. It was like a giant wooden wall raising up, and you could see these splintery-looking parts where the wood was getting torn up at the end of the season.

There were two instructors who helped us through the next four and a half hours. We all got comfortable on our bikes, and then they lead us up and down the straightaways (only 17 degree angles), and then gradually worked us up onto the giant curves. They were good instructors, and I know that physics would keep me alive if I was cautious, but the whole thing was so strange.

It took a lot of pumping and leg strength to pick up the appropriate speed to stay up on the wall, but the biggest thing about Saturday was how much it effed with my head. We went up in groups of eight or nine, and so I'd be in the middle or toward the back of the pack, watching everyone in front of me also on this ginormous wall. It looked like they were floating in the air. They were being held to the surface by two tiny strips of rubber, and I could see that the flat ground was a story and a half below us. (I only went up to the very top once, to make sure I could. It was too weird to do it again.)

Not all velodromes are built the same way. A lot of them have curves in the 30s, and I feel like I could have been more confident on something like that. I am proud that I stayed on (and stayed upright) on such an extreme track, but it made me realize how grateful I am that I have a bike that has brakes. It was just scary at some times being up on a track with a pack of other people who were also new to it and knowing you couldn't really brake if something happened in front of you.

I will definitely go back to the Superdrome. I just think I'm going to go back as a spectator next time.

How Much Again?

I don't like finances. Or money. At all. When I got my first checks, right before going to college, my mom sat me down to teach me how to balance my checkbook. I have lots of childhood memories of her sitting at the dining room table on Sunday nights, once a month, late at night with a calculator and paper spread all around her. I tried for about a month and then gave up.

I've never taken any finance or accounting classes because--duh--they weren't required for journalism or science, so I didn't take them. My undergrad reporting classes never included anything about reading annual reports or looking at municipal budgets, so I remained happily clueless.

In grad school, one of my classes touched on finances. We spent one class session in a computer lab, learning to look up publicly traded companies and their annual reports. I paid as much attention as anyone else, I think, but we spent a helluva lot more time looking at other numbers--numbers in studies, looking at whether the statistics made sense and the numbers meant anything.

I'm trying to make an effort to be not so geeky at work. I can talk about resident work hours or tumor profiles all day, but when it comes to following the finances of hospitals, I'm kind of lame and lost. Today was the annual budget meeting for the board of managers for the county hospital, and I went.

And oh. my. gosh. The public relations director--who's a wonderful woman--had copies of everything and handed them to me when I arrived. All of the papers were in two binders; one was a three-inch binder, and the other was an inch and a half. It was ridiculous. All these numbers, all these acronyms, all these board members discussing and changing and tweaking things and voting on motions and GAH.

At the end I picked up my ginormous binders and headed to the elevator, alongside a couple of people who worked for the hospital system. Waiting for the elevator, I asked one of the women, "So just to make sure: they did approve the budget, right?" She gave me this Look, then told me that they approved the budget and expanded services. The whole situation was embarrassing--I had told her at the beginning of the meeting that I had little experience in this, and I've worked with her briefly before, and she just made me feel two inches tall because I wanted to confirm everything.

Anyway. The meeting was about three and a half hours long. It was pretty tedious. But I survived. (Just ASK me how excited I am for next year!) The whole thing just reminded me that in no way am I prepared for the finances required to be an adult.

Bodies

I'm reading a book right now about a physician and her journey through Harvard Medical School and the transition to becoming a doctor, and while her writing style sort of grates on my nerves, I'm still fascinated by the whole idea of turning into a doctor. Physicians in this country are still largely better educated, better paid, and better respected than most in our communities, and sometimes I lose sight of the fact that they all started off somewhere.

As a reporter, I've gotten the chance to glimpse into that somewhere-starting place a few times, and every time I do it leaves me more confused about my future. I love journalism, I love writing, I love words and sharing stories and scenes with others, but at the same time, I find myself pining for the scientific knowledge that would let me change lives. Anyone close to me can attest to the fact that I'm constantly talking about how maybe I need to become a doctor or a nurse or a PA or NP or something.

A few weeks ago, our local medical school hosted about a dozen high school students during a summer seminar called More Knowledge In Science. I was writing a story about this, since it's a demonstration of the community outreach the school does as well as an example of how much funding is needed through various levels of the government to make these programs possible. I went with the kids the day they went into the gross anatomy lab at the school, and it really made me excited to see these kids as engaged and curious as I was.

It was my first time in the gross lab; there were about two dozen stations, each with a computer and a basin for dissection, and bright yellow trash cans stenciled with "Human Tissue Waste Only" or some other dire warning. We all gathered around one stainless steel table with a white body bag on it, and the PhD who was teaching that day gave the kids a short intro about how all the bodies were donated to science, and that these were people who wanted others to learn more about the quiet inner workings beneath the skin, fat, muscle and fascia.

The cadaver had already been dissected, and it had the muted, beige-gray colors of formaldehyde and time. I don't know how old it was, but the organs had already been separated and could easily be removed, like puzzle pieces. The kids pulled on gloves and handled the organs, poking fingers into blood vessels and pulling on tendons. I thought of the exhibits at the Body Worlds shows, touring through museums.

I went back to work that day and a coworker asked if something smelled funny; it was me, naturally, chilled and marinated in the chemical smell of science. It was quite a different experience than the autopsy I got to see at the medical examiner's office back in the late winter.

The autopsy made me nervous; for days before, I worried about whether I would pass out or feel nauseous and have to leave. When I was in high school, we had a family friend who was a veterinarian. I was thinking of being a vet at the time, and she invited me to spend a day with her during the summer. The first thing I saw was a small dog having surgery on its eye, which I think had been popped out of its socket for some reason. I was in there for about a minute and a half before I started getting lightheaded and woozy. I had to spend a half hour on the floor with my head between my knees and drinking a Coke before I felt well again.

The autopsy didn't make me woozy or lightheaded. Part of me feels proud of that, and part of me feels guilty. This was not a person who donated their body to science. This is a person who had been found dead in their bed just hours earlier. The body was still wrapped in the bedsheets. The colors were rich and still had the tones I would associate with life. The heart was full of thickening blood. The brain had many subtle colors. The organs looked as though if they were put into the right body, they would still work.

I was awe-struck by the autopsy, and asked lots of questions, along with my fellow media people who were there as well. The ME's office has a policy where autopsies can be viewed for teaching purposes; med students, nursing students, etc, can come through and see a body be studied for clues about its death. By asking questions and trying to remember all the info from my anatomy and physiology classes, I would stay detached. It was just a body.

The autopsy did have an effect on me. I was afraid of nightmares that night, but I didn't have any. The next day, I went on the ME's website and looked at the listings of deaths. Remembering the body and the rough time of death, I was able to figure out who the body belonged to. It belonged to a person, and I had the name, and I wondered how the family was going about making funeral arrangements. It had been a sudden death.

I guess it's taken me a while to write about it because I didn't know how to go about it. I don't want to trivialize death, but I don't want to trivialize the learning opportunities in it, either. As other writers have said, death is a great unknown, but there is so much to be learned from it. The cadaver, the body, each was a person with a history and life. Same goes for the various pickled organs on the shelves at the medical school; the stillborn baby with anacephaly and conjoined twins had mothers who carried them in their bodies and fathers and family histories. But you can't think about that too much if you're trying to learn.

I think that's the most fascinating thing about becoming a medical professional: learning to draw that line between detachment and compassion. As a journalist, it's something I can look in on, and I can have my own small struggles with sources or whatnot, but it's nothing compared to what the MDs and RNs face.

Also, it doesn't compare to what some reporters face, like cops reporters or those who cover disasters. Dan has seen his share of dead bodies, many from car accidents, and he's never said that he's been affected by them. He has said that they have to be viewed as mannequins or puppets instead of people, though. Thank goodness I haven't had to interview family members shortly after a death or tragic event.

I don't really have a grand thesis to this post or anything; it's just some musings on the body, and specifically the dead body and how to handle it. One thing I would do, however, is encourage people to consider donating their bodies to science. It's not for everyone; many people have religious objections to it, which is fine. Everyone should become an organ donor, though. The body is a glorious thing, even if it is deceased. And what better way to honor something than to share it, either through its individual parts or through the knowledge that comes through knowing and understanding all of it together.