That's the whole story, really, right there in the title of this post. The article announces the Brandeis (he graduated in 1996) scholarship fund started by Wangchuk's father's relatives.
Please note also the fund started to support Wangchuk's immediate family. Checks should be made out to "Meston Family Memorial Fund" and mailed to Curley Law Firm, 1 Common St, Wakefield, MA 01880. Patrick Curley, a close friend of Wangchuk and Phuni's, led the Buddhist service that took place on July 14 and, with Tenley Palsang, led the memorial service on August 1.
Phuni, along with their friends Robert Barnett, head of the Contemporary Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia University, and Patrick Curley, an attorney here in Boston, speak beautifully about Wangchuk in the obit. Please read it.
Today friends and family will gather for his memorial service at 3 PM at 10 Twin Pond Lane, Lincoln, MA.
Bloggers will understand. In my haste to throw up the previous post before doing something else that was no doubt vitally important, I failed to look at the slide I included, which was for fun during last year's Engage with Grace campaign. The real slide, with the right questions for your family to discuss relative to end-of-life issues is this one. Sorry (and I'm slowing down, she says, while typing like a maniac).
Very important story on end-of-life decisions or, more importantly, discussions that we all need to have. Piece on NPR site and authored by "AP" (whoever wrote it deserves a decent byline), "Americans are treated, and overtreated to death," features the story of Rosaria Vandenberg, who died from a brain tumor in 2004, with very little time at home and, in retrospect, her family thinks, too much intervention.
The result: her sister-in-law Alexandra Drane started Engage with Grace: The One Slide Project, which I've participated in on Thanksgiving for the past few years during its annual blog rally. Will be even more poignant for us this year.
Here are the five questions for your family to talk about:
Once, at a memorial service for Irving, a shirt-tail relative whom I was quite fond of but in all honesty wasn't terribly close to nor had great contact with over the years, I became unreasonably upset.
Embarrassed, I said something to my cousin, who had been quite close to Irving (he was actually her uncle, not mine). "When someone dies, everyone you've ever known who's died dies again," she said, which immediately made me feel better.
Perhaps this helps explain how many are experiencing Senator Kennedy's death and why so many have made the trek to the Kennedy Library in the past 24 hours to honor him. Reliving other deaths aside, he was our senator (yes, I'm from Massachusetts), has been my senator for as long as I've lived here, and present enough that I can remember going to a meeting with him at the local junior high school about, guess what, healthcare as many as 17 years ago. Occasionally, I thought I saw him driving past my house on the way to the private school up the street that one of his sons attended (and which he did as well).
I've already told my favorite story about him here. Please see "Oh, hi, Ted" for a small peak at who the man really was in a unguarded moment.
And with his passing, may the search for the cure for brain cancer be amped up. It took the life of my best friend's husband in the same time that it did "Ted's."
We went there last Sunday, July 19, because it was the anniversary of Margaret Fuller's death. Instead of taking our usual direct route up to Pyrola Path, we meandered through the cemetery, areas that we'd never seen before, for example, Mary Baker Eddy's memorial.
Most Sundays, Daughter #2 and I discuss a single column in The New York Times. Not infrequently, our inner snarks emerge as we eviscerate "Modern Love," the 1500-word essays that appear in Sunday Styles. We haven't had the chance to compare notes yet on "Raising a Princess Single-Handedly," but I'm guessing she, along with you, will choke up a bit and cheer its warmth and evident devotion.
Simon Van Booy and his four-year-old Madeleine are busy making life appear normal after the sudden death of his wife/her mother last year from Marfan syndrome. I don't think it's because my best friend, Linda, died of Marfan's that this piece causes me to pull my laptop into the garden and post in these few moments when it's not raining.
This tender reflection, circling the simple gesture of making breakfast, manages to draw in everything from Sleeping Beauty to the trick of buying store-brand cereal and pouring it into the colorful boxes of crap that children prefer to World War II in one effortless stream.
Witness this from the guy with the funny hat, cane, and mustache, who also takes a bow: "I think it was Charlie Chaplin who said that close up, human life is tragic, but from a distance, it’s funny."
Or how about this capture of a certain aspect of the secret life of children:
We don’t have television, so Hannah
Montana entered our lives on a DVD purchased because Madeleine had
somehow found out about her through that underground toy-smuggling and
gossip network also known as nursery school.
Turns out Mr. Van Booy is a writer of some repute, with books in print and in the pipeline: his new story collection, Love Begins in Winter, is just out, joining The Secret Lives of People in Love (I swear I didn't see the title until after I'd written the line about the secret lives of children); coming soon, Why We Need Love, Why People Fight, and a few more. Prolific to boot.
Do the clickeroo. You'll thank me and we'll both thank Simon and Madeleine. The title of this post, taken from the piece, is self-explanatory.
Wikipedia posts are like plants. They need a little sustenance or they face extinction. A call went out this morning to those of us participating in the Engage with Grace "blog rally" community to keep the term alive by posting more on Wikipedia, which I just did. If you participated, please log into Wikipedia and add a link to your post as well.
Those of us who "staged" the blog rally - around 100 that we know of - believe that this was the first use of the term. Blog rally. Love it. Great idea. Who first came up with it? Alex (the originator of Engage with Grace)?
By the time I responded to the plea to post, the "this article is about to disappear" notice on Wikipedia had, itself, disappeared. But no harm in adding more links. Very worthwhile project.
