Contemporary Classical

Requiescat in Pace

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One of my dearest friends and a neighbor of many years died this afternoon.  He was a lifelong bachelor who had lost most of the hearing in both ears when an anti-tank gun fired while he was crawling under it in France during World War II when he was 19.  He went on to become a respected man of science, a cancer researcher, and a well-known skeptic of alternative medicine.  He had no tolerance for miracle cures and especially hated those who sold hope to the hopeless with their promises of blood transfers and shark skin enemas and other exotic cures.  He was not warm and cuddly and he didn’t have a lot of friends and I was one of them.  I saw him today about a half hour before he died but the last time we connected was on Thursday, just before he went into that final morpheus cloud.  I was talking to him when he suddenly opened his eyes–for the first time in several days–and squeezed my hand.  His eyes said:  “Don’t be afraid.  It’s not that big a deal.  It’s just science.”