Rant
In Memorium
I wouldn’t feel right about putting out
another Rant without mentioning the tragic and untimely passing of Cynthia
Lucero. By the same token, I
wouldn’t feel right about having a piece about Cynthia embedded in the usual
egocentric garbage that fills this space issue after issue, I feel somehow that
might have trivialized both her life and her death.
The fragility of life, the finality of
death, and the enormous existential implications of why someone so young, so
giving, so generous, and so good could have such an unspeakable tragedy befall
them are far too much to be grappled with here, and my way of making sense of
things may not be of much help or comfort for others who knew her better or who
were closer to her than I.
What follows then are some of my memories
of Cynthia and an attempt to make some sense of this event for our
community.
I had only gotten to know Cynthia very
briefly in my time at MSPP, and a little more over the past seven months at the
Shattuck Hospital.
I first met Cynthia when she was
unfortunate enough to draw my name as a subject for Rorschach administration in
the fall of 1999. We met at the
Newton Free Library, where she was tutoring someone, something I would find out
later was part of her generous and altruistic nature. Before administering the test, she
engaged me in conversation, I think to defuse some of the anxiety I must have
been radiating in megawatts. After
talking to me for twenty minutes, she said “I think you would be very
comfortable practicing psychology in Ecuador”. I may have offered to exchange passports
on the spot.
I was by no means an easy subject for
testing. I’m sure every response I
gave was overly detailed, overly intellectualized, and overly obscure. I think my response for the first card
was “a gothic relief of the devil from a Netherlandish cathedral”. All the same, she never let on any
annoyance or irritation.
The next year, when I was taking the
Rorschach class and I found out what various response styles indicated, I would
stop her whenever I saw her and ask “How many Vs did I have? Was there any texture in my response?
Did I contaminate?” and other neurotic questions of that ilk.
She would always offer reassuring answers
like “Oh, we didn’t actually score the responses”, or “That was so long ago I’m
not sure what you said” or “I probably didn’t score it right”.
At one point I asked her directly “Just
how crazy am I?”
She said in response, obviously at the
end of her rope with my neurosis, but too kind a person to show it, “Seth, how
crazy do you want to be?”
I said “Just crazy enough to be
charming.”
“Well,” she said, “that’s exactly what
you are.”
It wasn’t until I we started at the
Shattuck this September that I got to know Cynthia a little better. I was always very impressed by the
rapport she had with her patients, especially this one testing referral, who,
when I found out she had been assigned to him I took her aside and cautioned her
about him. This was the largest and
angriest man I had ever seen, so angry that I almost had to eject him from my
anger management group. Even with
this man, who wanted nothing to do with psychology, testing, student interns, or
participating in psychological testing with a student intern, she was able to
not only engage him, but also bring out a “good” side of him that our unit had
not yet been able to see.
Later in the year, she knew I had no
plans for New Year’s and invited me over to a small gathering at her house. Initially I was going to make up some
excuse, but then I felt guilty (I could never say no to her for anything,
especially when she was raising money for the many charities and causes she was
involved with, once I tried to avoid her when I saw her with a clipboard, but
then felt guilty about that and went looking for her), and felt that she was
kind enough to invite me, so I should go.
I don’t like showing up empty handed, so brought a bottle of wine and a
pack of Lucky Strikes. She didn’t
have a corkscrew, and I think she was so well-mannered that she couldn’t leave
the bottle unopened, so she opened the wine with a phillips head screwdriver.
She made a face at the pack of Luckys, but told me she would hang on to them as
a reminder to encourage me to continue quitting.
I think I will always remember how
sensitive and attentive to others she was.
I had an emotionally trying time with the internship interview experience
this year, and even though I didn’t tell her anything about it, she somehow
sensed that I was unhappy, and she would send me these e-cards with
inspirational messages.
She would also be the organizer for our
group of interns at the hospital.
When Jennifer’s son was born, she quickly got on the web and got us
together to visit Jen, Mark and young David. I think she did this as much out of
her generativity and love for children as well as out of concern for Jen, who
may have been feeling guilty for leaving the internship and feeling out of the
loop.
As a final story, when I printed a half
page of symptoms I was experiencing as a result of nicotine withdrawal, although
most of them were joke symptoms, she called me at home expressing concern,
wondering if I needed anything (other than the unopened pack of Luckys) to help
me through this.
I guess what I am trying to get across in
these stories is the point that although I didn’t know Cynthia that well, and
although I wasn’t as close with her as I am with others, the qualities she held
as a person touched my life.
Throughout the ordeal of her
hospitalization through the gathering at school, I was able to see how many
people’s lives she has had an impact on.
Throughout the events, there was a sense of community, people coming
together, sharing, comforting one another, helping each other through grief, and
celebrating her life. This sense of
community sometimes gets away from us as we lose sight of others in our own
individual struggles, challenges, and triumphs. With the pressures of papers, exams,
thesis preparation, colloquia, financial aid forms, scheduling requirements,
internship duties, and events in our personal lives, sometimes we withdraw into
ourselves and forget about our larger community.
Whether we are aware of it or not, we
affect one another’s lives. We do
impact one another.
I don’t think Cynthia ever lost sight of
that.
I know I will try to honor Cynthia’s
memory by trying not to lose sight of our impact on others. I will try to think of her when I get
pissed at one of my fellow students for saying something I don’t agree with, or
when I get caught up in ideological turf battles, or even when I’m being just a
plain jerk. At these moments I will
try to stop and think of the sense of community that we do have
here.
And I’m sure I will think of
Cynthia.