There is the story of Bob Gates, an NYPD emergency services officer who once grabbed a man trying to jump off the World Trade Center. Some of Terkel’s subjects find the beauty of life in the most terrifying moments. “She’s a person who behaves decently in an indecent world.”
“What did Matta want? She wanted Norma to die with dignity,” says Terkel. The hospital workers were laughing.” Kelly fights to take the dying Norma off life support. “Norma Saunders is dying of AIDS,” explains Terkel. She recounts how she had to fight hospital officials to allow a client of hers to have a dignified death. Readers meet Matta Kelly, a former drug addict and prostitute who became an HIV caseworker. Death hasn’t come to them yet, but they gave up. “I know people who are 30 years younger than I who are dead. “We make a choice: every day of our life, we can choose to live or die,” says Mihalas. Or there is Dmitri Mihalas, a physicist battered by depression and several suicide attempts. “Humor, laughter and the need to live for his little girl.” There is Randy Buescher, a carpenter allegedly dying of a virulent cancer, who refused to leave his 3-year-old daughter behind. Some are witty and others are quite gripping. The stories in “Circle” are contemplative and beautifully crafted. In Terkel’s house, on a sideboard, there sits a picture of Ida as a stately elderly woman, pumping a radical fist in the air. I was only making $85.” Ida Terkel was an activist, always at the center of demonstrations. “I married her for her money she was a social worker making $125 a week. “I saw this attractive woman in a maroon smock,” says Terkel. Terkel met her during the Depression, when he was a government researcher. Soon after Terkel started his new book in 1999, his wife of 60 years, Ida, died.
0 kommentar(er)
