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On 12/26/2007 by Barry Tavlin to Jeanni Tavlin
“This isn’t the way that I expected things to turn out”. No, it sure isn’t. None of us – your family or your friends – expected you to have to endure the kinds of challenges that you’ve faced. And none of us would have wished this for you.
But the challenges have come – first the CRPS and then the COPD – and they were as powerful as they were unexpected. They were so severe that they forced you to quit working 10 years ago, and then four years later they took you to the hospital, again and again, for months of intensive care treatments. But somehow, through all of this you were strong and you survived.
There was little you could do to prevent this. Your years of community service – as a dedicated teacher, a civil rights and peace activist, a union activist and city-wide strike coordinator, a neighborhood block captain, a support resource for RSD/CRPS sufferers – improved many peoples’ lives; but they couldn’t prevent this. Your dedication to your friends and family were appreciated by many, but they couldn’t prevent this.
Your family, friends, and medical team watched with great trepidation as you barely hung on to life back in 2004. I remember talking with your doctor over Memorial Day Weekend. We asked him how it looked for you. He said that, to be honest, it didn’t look good at all, but that sometimes miracles happen and you could survive.
Somehow, against all odds, you came around. Then, I remember the time in 2006 when things looked pretty bad again. And then you had that dream where you decided that you wanted to live, when you spent the rest of the night saying to yourself, “I want to live”, and then you accelerated your recovery. Your medical team called it a miracle that you survived - not only once, but twice; they were blown away by your determination.
But your miracle of survival after the many trips to Intensive Care is not what I want to write about. I want to write about some of the choices you’ve made since you survived.
These days you face enough difficulties getting through each day that you could easily sink into despair. But you have chosen not to do that. Instead, you have tried to maintain a PMA – Positive Mental Attitude – and looked for ways to still contribute to making the world a better place.
You support petition drives to end the war in Iraq and oppose other Bush administration outrages; you write for and edit the newsletter for the Westside Chapter of the Alliance for Retired Americans; you correspond with and send gifts to soldiers in Iraq; and you still try to provide counseling and support to others suffering with CRPS. And you find ways to use email or the Web to send a joke, or a funny or inspirational story to brighten someone else’s day.
For someone who is weakened, homebound, and not very mobile, you accomplish a lot. And, most inspiring, you are choosing to use whatever capabilities you have to try to be of positive service to others and to engage in the process of changing the world.
Out of these most difficult challenges, ones that no one expected or wanted, has come an example for others.
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