Sad News

Most of you already know, but Joreen's sister Jinny lost her battle with cancer, "the beast" as Jinny called it, Wednesday morning at 10:30. It was an epic battle and she went down swinging to the end. Joreen is already in Vermont. The funeral is Saturday, so Mary and I are leaving this morning to head up there.

If there's such a thing as a best friend-of-a-friend, mine is Don House. Don is a close friend of Tom Roller and I see him occasionally, most recently at the Havana Blue gig, which was really good. I've been remiss in blogging, but you already know that.

Don lost his lovely wife Marilyn suddenly some years ago. She was a sweetheart and her illness and death came out of nowhere. Once in a conversation with Don he just came up with this statement: Love your people, and tell them you love them. It's simple and profound and it always comes to mind at a time like this.

Since December 2009 Jinny kept a blog on caringbridge.org. You have to sign in to post comments but I believe you can just read it. CaringBridge is a pretty amazing thing as you can see, providing websites to link friends and families of those fighting cancer. You can read the story of Jinny's journey as a "warrior poet" there. Here is a link to her first entry, page 1 of 8:

http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/jinnyallison/journal/8

I never knew Jinny was such a good writer, but I'm not surprised. It runs in the family. I'm still running across essays and articles that my mother-in-law wrote.

Jinny included this essay in her first entry, which today I think is worth quoting in its entirety.

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world....Either we have hope or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

"Hope is not prognostication. It is an orientation of the spirit, and orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizon.

"Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is.

"Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."

Vaclav Havel, writer, dramatist, politician
Last President of Czechoslovakia
First President of the Czech Republic
Cancer Survivor

Pretty intense, Vaclav. I hope you're right about all that. Thanks for the quote, Jinny, and for the good times we had together over the years. I hope to see you again.