Erik, your situation is "heavy" for sure, but your blog has captured your spirit, which is so full--still and despite all--of optimism, generosity, love, brilliance, and, yes, some goofiness! Your last days resonate with all the many days I've known you; you remain an inspiration to us all, a model of how to live life and how to leave it.
I wish I could be there to give you a very big hug!
Thank you “from the heart” for your beautiful writings in this blog. They add to the beauty of your other writings, talks, and practices of illumination that have enlightened the lives of countless beings like me, even though (as I’ve mentioned earlier on this blog) I never have enjoyed the pleasure of meeting you face to face.
Two other brief and probably inadequate expressions of gratitude:
One concerns medicine, public health, health policy, and medical sociology. In the blog you have conveyed mainly positive experiences and relationships with those fields, as painful as some of them have been. For those who spend our working lives in those fields, the day-to-day experiences often become darker, reflecting the dark social realities of capitalist health care, especially in the United States. I’m not sure you realize that you have exerted a profound influence on those of us confronting the reductionism, empiricism, victim blaming, and superficiality in the usual depictions of social class in our fields. Your work has allowed us to construct, still incompletely, ways to theorize and to study social class as a “social determinant” of health. These ways of knowing social class incorporate the Marxist-based approaches that you have created, and your influence continues to grow.
Another gratitude focuses on the utopias project. You are one of the very few people on the planet with the courage and brilliance to confront in a meaningful way the incredibly challenging task of imagining the “transition” from capitalism to post-capitalism. As Jameson and others have said, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of our economic system. Yet, aware of the criticism you would generate, you audaciously have accepted that challenge of imagination. And now, your profound contributions are helping many experiments in building solidarity economies outside capitalism to flourish.
Finally, while your stardust image may help in your own current transition, I would argue that your existence and profound contributions to sentient beings on this fragile planet do have another meanings as well. One of these meanings has to do, I think, with the evolution of “mutual aid” (to use Kropotkin’s persuasive term) and consciousness about its importance – a principle you have embodied throughout your years among us.
I remember occasionally carpooling to Wingra and stopping for dinosaurs!
Also, you are a beautiful person and a wonderful storyteller. Safira, Vernon, and Ida are very lucky to have these stories.
Thanks Rik. Great stories, or story generating ideas. Can you give me Canadian rights to the stories? My children are all grown. But I have a three and a half year old grandson, Julian, to tell the stories to. Of course, all he can be is a singulo (since I assume that all characters should be children or grandchildren or at least
relatives of the story-teller). For many reasons, I would love to have more grandchildren. Thanks for giving me an additional reason: so that Julian can become a duplo. (or, rare as it is, a tripulo). Carol and I think about you a lot, and hope for the best in the circumstances. Love to you, Marcia, Jenny and Becky. Peter
I hear your voice, Erik, as I read the story, and your grandchildren will, too.
P.S. No gimmick would bestow on me the power to spin a story like you do!
Hey Eriki! Great story! I really liked it but I also loved the beginning about Jonathan Zucker ... I never knew about his hearing your story over an over and then retelling it! And thanks for the tip about how to create a story around a gimmick. I've always felt tongue-tied when kids ask for telling (as opposed to reading) stories, but you make it sound easy (it isn't but I appreciate the help!) But most of all it's great to read your blog. We were getting anxious because TWO WHOLE DAYS had passed without a post. Ron and I were telling ourselves that you no doubt have to pour most of your energy into the grandkids' letter, of course. But thanks for this lovely update and lesson in silliness!
I wish I could be there to give you a very big hug!
With lots of love and admiration,
Margaret