Category: Tributes

Heading north-east on Kennesaw, make a left onto Armstrong Mill. Go up the road past the farms, over that narrow bridge to Delong. Make a right. Enjoy Delong. The rolling hills, beautiful views, horses, trees, the wind in your face, the challenge of the ride until you get to Walnut Hill. Hang a left. The beauty continues. At the corner of Shelby Lane, hang a right or just keep going on Walnut Hill. The former brings you to Jacks Creek which then gets you to Old Richmond, the latter to Old Richmond. Whatever your choice, head north on Old Richmond and soon you’ll see Delong. The circuit is almost complete.

I love riding this route on my bicycle. Challenging ride but beautiful. Broken only by the cars and trucks that whisk by, sometimes dangerously close, sometimes close enough to end your life.

David Cassidy wasn’t on the route I love to cycle. He was riding in another part of town but he faced the same dangers that every cyclist who loves riding on the street faces. This past weekend, he was killed while doing something he loved – cycling.
He wasn’t a friend. He was a colleague and a very good and helpful cardiologist. On the occasions we met in the dining room at St Joe’s at lunch time, we talked about riding. He knew the coolest routes.
I didn’t know him well at all. However, this strange ether in which we all humans swim has the uncanny ability to reverberate with the experiences of others. And those reverberations forces one to pause and look around. Sometimes they redirect you. Sometimes they puts things in perspective. Other times, they makes you ask questions. Questions like “Why?’ Then are the occasions where realization hits, like, “It could have been me!”
In an instant, David was killed doing something he loved to do and had done tens of times. In an instant, his life was no more. And it could have been me. It could have been anyone of us who loves to ride our bicycles.
Matter of fact, for all of us, life could end in an instant. Poof! Just like that.

All day, I have lamented about this – what does this life mean if it is just like a “candle in the wind”?
Then it hit me – we cannot change that! It is what it is! What we need to do is make each day count. Live each day like that is the day the flame will go out.
Kiss your spouse with passion, hug your kids till they gasp, enjoy that steak with gusto, make love like it’s the first time, call your parents, have dinner with your brother, smile at that stranger, sing, dance, cry….make the day count. For life is “… even a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away”.

Dr David Cassidy, rest in peace.

Dear Whitney,

Four years ago, the demons that haunted you got the best of you. You left us. I miss you!
For a while, you wrote the soundtrack to my life – your highs, my summits, your lows mirrored the downs.
Your voice drooled with passion, love and emotion. Your life couldn’t capture that. I miss you.
Hope you have found peace where you are. Hope you found the greatest love of all! RIP

Love,

 

 

Nanadadzie

“A great man is different from an eminent one in that he is ready to be the servant of the society.” – B.R. Ambedkar

Madiba, goodbye! You go to a well-deserved rest. Rest In Peace

Madiba, you didn’t have to but you did. 27 years! 27 years of a man’s life. Spent confined within  four narrow walls to stand for what one believed in. 27 years!

Many years ago, I heard my dad play this very haunting a cappella song. It made me cry. He told me it was from South Africa. I asked him why the song was so sad. Then he told me about you. He told me about Steve Biko. He told me about apartheid. I was 10. I never forgot. How could I? How could anyone with a heart?

When you were arrested in 1962, you were 44 years old. In your prime. Two years later you started a journey that was to have a great impact on you, your family, your beloved country and the whole world down the line. Back then, you may have hoped but how long can a man hope? How long can a man believe in what is not seen and seems so hopeless? But you did.

What is amazing is that even though it seems like your life was taken from you, in the process, you lived it better than most. You did, because your life had an impact on so many. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what matters most? You sacrificed so much for your fellow man.

Being ready to die for what one believes in and hope are not the only lessons you leave behind.  You also epitomized forgiveness. In spite of all the decades of apartheid, you rose above the fray and reconciled. What strength and fortitude that must have taken. Were you ever bitter? Madiba, were you ever mad?

A friend once was in crowd that met you in Berlin and described an aura that you emanated. I believed her because one didn’t have to be in a crowd around you to feel that aura. It sprang from you words, your stature, your eyes, your life. It sprang from a life well led.

Madiba, the World will miss you but you have done enough.

Thank you and Good Bye!

 

 

 

A Tribute to all the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre on December 14, 2012 in Newtown, CT.

Who kills children? 20 children? At school?
Senseless!
On the afternoon of the Sandy Hook massacre, I drove to go pick up my kids from school. Tears fell down my face as I drove. I imagined having my kids in Sandy Hook and not knowing…
Senseless!
When I finally drove up and saw their smiling and impish faces, more tears welled up. I had to hide them.
I hugged them when we got home. Really tight. It didn’t matter what trouble my son had caused that day, I hugged him extra long and covered my daughter’s faces with kisses. I had them back. Up in Newtown, CT, some parents were not so lucky.
Senseless!
The teachers who rushed to protect their wards. The principal. Families broken, forever.
Senseless!
As a physician, I know minds can be sick. Mental illness is a a scourge that seems to lurk, poking it’s ugly head out in ways that can be rather heartbreaking. Great strides have been made in treating them but first, they have to be diagnosed. The patients and their families have to be willing and compliant. There must be an awareness. However, when the mentally ill have easy access to guns, because of a permissive culture, isn’t that senseless?
Senselessly Senseless?
My heart breaks for all this families starring at Christmas trees that cry to be decorated and yearn for voices that shriek with delight as presents are unwrapped.
My heart breaks for mothers who aren’t home anymore, husbands sleeping alone, daughters who won’t hug one more time.
That didn’t need to happen, but life being what it is allows the good, the bad and the ugly.
It allows the senseless!
And for that, there usually aren’t any answers.
May their souls find eternal rest.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players….”                                              Shakespeare in “As You Like it”.

If life is but a play, or to be post-modern, a movie, in which we all are nothing but actors and actresses, then Whitney Houston gave me the soundtrack to my movie. Like a maestro, she was able to match the highs and the lows with her amazing octaves and seemed to mirror the emotions I was going through. Whitney once said that when she listened to Aretha Franklin, she could clearly feel her emotional delivery and that she could feel it coming from deep within. She (Whitney) wanted to emulate that and did she!

My love affair with Whitney started probably in 1985-86. Like the rest of the world, I listened to her croon on her first album “Whitney Houston”. Even now I can hear her sultry voice “…So I’m saving all my love, Yes I’m saving all my love , Yes I’m saving all my love for you…”…I can hear Tom Scott on the sax. It was a heady time. I was head over heels in love and knew what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Like Whitney, I felt the sky was the limit.

Then came 1987. In August of that year, I headed out to Germany to study – all alone. I was 21. I left behind a girl I was crazy about, my parents, my siblings, friends….In my suitcase were several cassettes. One was the newly released album “Whitney”. Even as I heard her sing “You’re still my man”, it matched the words I had heard during a last conversation. I cannot recount how listening to those songs in my room in Radebeul, Germany reminded me of what I had left behind and as always, Whitney manged to draw out that emotion in song, in the timbre of her voice, in her lyrics.

The years went by. She dropped “I’m your Baby Tonight”. It brings memories of Moritzbastei in good old Leipzig, rain in October, the chill in the air but so was love…I thought. It was a time of deep loss and regrets and what-ifs. And the soundtrack she provided was perfect.

Even as she got married, I also got involved in a relationship that would change the trajectory of my life. Even then, she always provided the soundtrack. Even as things spiraled down for me, I could always count on her. In times of deep thought, I’ll pop in a Whitney CD, turn down the light, relax in the armchair and just float on her voice. Her voice was that love that I couldn’t lose. It was always there. Be it on “the Bodyguard” soundtrack or on “Waiting to Exhale” – reassuring, sultry, sorrowful, powerful, emotional.

Slowly, the songs stopped coming. I missed them at first but then I could always turn to her old tunes. Then were the stories and misadventures. I could feel the love for her slipping. Soon, I stopped caring and she became just another girl. However, I knew deep in there was something, something for her. Anytime I heard anything positive about her life, I perked up.

Then she died.

I cannot describe the sorrow I felt. I never knew her and she probably didn’t even know I existed but I was devastated. If our lives are just movies, then the music we love is the soundtrack to our lives. Whitney matched my movie in ways only she could. I felt like I had lost a part of me. I also felt sad because she couldn’t deal with this ordeal called life. She provided a lot of joy to a lot of people but couldn’t take care of herself. Life, like they say, is a bitch and she succumbed to it. I felt sad for the choices she may have made that destroyed her. I empathized because this thing called life scares me too.

Last week was her funeral. The service was powerful. In life, she gave me hours of her beautiful voice. With her death, she helped me put my finger on why I don’t have faith. True, I lack faith and have always wondered why. OK, let me explain. As I watched the service, I was struck by the words of Pastor Marvin Winans. He preached about the importance of prioritizing things in out lives. Then he said not to worry because God says “I got you!” That got me thinking about my lack of faith. I know God watches out for me but being human, my weaknesses and the uncertainty of life sometimes make his power seem insufficient. No matter how great God is, I am human and can totally mess it up. It is this fear that prevents me from having faith. It is not lack of faith in God, but fear of my own foolishness. If anything illustrates my point, it was Whitney’s life. By all accounts, she always spoke of her love of God. In spite of all that, her demons go the better of her. No amount of God’s grace could save her from herself.

So she is gone. Gone with her voice, her grace, her beauty. Like Shakespeare said, “The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.’ For me, the joy she brought me is going to live forever, because that is what I want to remember. Everything else pales in comparison.

Miss Whitney, even now you may be singing “Greatest Love of All” to adoring fans in another realm. Lucky them. Don’t forget to Rest in peace!

“We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.” – Steve Jobs

 

When I sit at my desk, I stare at an Apple Display, hooked to a 2008 Mac Pro.

The phone rings. I pull out the iphone…I have to make an appointment.

My son walks into my office listening to HipLife on his ipod touch…singing along.

I yell at him to be quiet. I hang up and go to iTunes to check out a cool new app and download “The Nutcracker Suite” for my daughter’s music class.

Then I create a home movie I made with iMovie and scan some negatives I developed.

The files are huge but with 16 Gb of RAM in my MacPro, it’s a breeze.

The kids want to watch a movie. I turn on the Apple TV…oh, peace and quiet.

I lie down, whip out my Ipad…have to catch up on the news – WSJ, NYT, Washington Post, Facebook – right there..

My medical literature – right there…

My pictures…right there…

The Vision, the Beauty, the Sleekness, the Style How much can one man achieve in 56 years?

What could have been?

Steve Jobs, we owe you a lot – not just for the devices, but for a life that teaches

That teaches that one should seize the moment and follow the call of the heart.

You will be missed!

Rest in Peace

In iHeaven!

“Mother Dear, one day I’m going to turn this world upside down.”                                                   Christine King Farris

The date is August 28, 1963.

Venue: the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC.

It is late in the afternoon and finally he steps up to speak:

“I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”

For the next 12 minutes or so, he laments about the lot of colored people in America – injustices, police brutality, inequalities, segregation…In his words they (the people of color) had come “to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.”

It must have sounded like a speech any civil rights leader in that era would give.

At least one person was hungry for more.

So it was that shortly after the statement:

“Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends”,

someone yelled out:

“Tell ’em about the dream Martin, tell ’em about the dream!”

It was Mahalia Jackson. She needed uplifting words and so did the whole nation.

He must have heard for he obliged her.

His next line was:

“And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream…”

He departed from a prepared speech in that instant…

He went to church. He made history. He winged. He brought hope to a nation.

Dare to dream!