{"id":16676,"date":"2014-09-11T11:55:35","date_gmt":"2014-09-11T15:55:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pmedicine.org\/epatients\/?p=16676"},"modified":"2014-09-11T11:55:35","modified_gmt":"2014-09-11T15:55:35","slug":"jessie-gruman-poetry-in-motion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/participatorymedicine.org\/epatients\/2014\/09\/jessie-gruman-poetry-in-motion.html","title":{"rendered":"Jessie Gruman: Poetry in Motion"},"content":{"rendered":"
This essay was written by Sarah Greene,\u00a0<\/span>co-founder of the Journal of Participatory Medicine and currently Founder\/CEO of RapidScience.org<\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n \u201cThat the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.\u201d<\/p>\n – Walt Whitman, \u2018O Me, O Life\u2019<\/p>\n We New Yorkers have been marveling at the beautiful weather bestowed on us this summer, and yet the dark and heavy cloud of Jessie\u2019s leave-taking on July 14 has kept me in a months\u2019-long swelter.\u00a0 I think Jessie would have dubbed this an \u2018Aftershock\u2019, although in her book of this title the heroine returns to offer sage learnings after jousting with the Grim Reaper.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve found inspiration, if not solace, re-reading her writings in\u00a0books,\u00a0the Prepared Patient blog<\/a>, and various other essays, and have witnessed her grace again in the \u201cGood Behavior!\u201d videos<\/a>.\u00a0Not to mention the many eloquent tributes<\/a> to her legacy at the Center for Advancing Health, where I was honored to serve as a trustee, and at the Journal of Participatory Medicine<\/em> (JoPM), on which we worked closely in its infancy.<\/p>\n Yet some solace has arrived through the heavy lifting of poetry. What I want to recall here, as two memorial services<\/a> approach in NYC and DC, is the soulful side of my friend Jessie \u2013 surfacing in full bloom in her college years as a poetry major and finding expression throughout her life, including recently when she accepted the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship\u2019s \u201cExcellence in Health Media\u201d award. That talk<\/a> began:<\/p>\n Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest said that the poet gives to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name. Think how beautiful that is\u2026<\/p>\n Then she repeated the opening, knowing that we must brake for poetry; and proceeded to suggest that her peers at NCCS had given survivorship a place and a name.<\/p>\n I believe it was this poetic reach that energized and centered Jessie\u2019s work and personal challenges as a patient and survivor, putting a name to the edge of life we will all inhabit with our loved ones and with our selves.<\/p>\n Our poetry friendship began when Jessie was diagnosed with cancer #4 in 2010, as she was forced to resign her co-editorship of JoPM. I brought her a book by a favorite poet, former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser \u2013 Winter Morning Walks: One Hundred Postcards to Jim Harrison<\/a>, written while he was in recovery from squamous cell carcinoma (hear the Emmy-award-winning CD based on these poems, described and sampled on NPR<\/a>).<\/p>\n