Memorial to Ruth Ellen Bloustein

November 3, 1988

Ruth Ellen Bloustein made me and my friends who sometimes find ourselves doing a lot of our
skating out where the ice is thin feel a lot more self-confident. Ruth Ellen was no dinger to the
safety of the shore, herself, but she offered more than a model. She gave her hospitality, her
support, and her friendship. It hurts to think we cannot be with her anymore.

Ruth Ellen brought an essential instability to the pale rituals that form such an enormous part of
our lives. When things drifted in the direction of arid formalism, Ruth Ellen seemed to know the
precise dose of humor, doubt and informality required to arrest that trend and set things back on
a more human course. When confronted with smugness, Ruth Ellen had at hand a subtle
armament of deflationary devicesand she could, depending on the circumstances, let you down
gently or not so gently.

Ruth Ellen was never one to make it easy to let you rest on a belief that our prevailing political
and social conventions were somehow "just fine." Neither did she think that a mere Politesse nor
an insulated professionalism justified obliviousness to the compelling realities of other people's
lives. She permitted no insensitivity to the condition of those not as fortunate as she. She was a
leveler, but in enacting her own democratic ideal, she raised us all up.

Though she was never my doctor, I think I can infer how good a doctor she was just by
remembering how great her imagination was. Of course, she practiced the scientific and
scholarly pursuits of inquiry and keeping up with her fieldshe would even sometimes grill me
on some recent revelation in a medical journal and prompt me to think about it in our work. But
more important, Ruth Ellen possessed that rare quality of being able to sense the possibilities and
dimensions of another person's life. You knew that when you talked with her: she entered your
life and permitted you some admission into hers.

Ruth Ellen made the imaginative leap between her own experience and her own world to some
other worlds apart from hers. In doing so I am sure that she wasn't "doctoring" herself when she
was treating a patient, rather she was allowed into the life of her patient, in the terms and in the
territory of that patient's life. When a doctor teaches, she shouldn't be engaged in a process of
reminding herself what she already knowsinstead, she must come to know the learner and she
must minister to that person and that person's life and circumstances. Ruth Ellen had a sense of
medicine and health that comprehended otherness and in so doing reached and embraced the
differences in the lives of her patients. It is that kind of doctor that can make a difference in the
life of a patient.

Ruth Ellen made a difference. She inspired progressive programs in health care. Her presence,
always unobtrusive, gave us in the health service a sense that we had someone who understood
and supported the reforms we needed to make. She nudged me on topics ranging from pharmacy
(their space is inadequate!) to women's health (do more!) and from the special interests and

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needs of gay students (again, do more and do it better!) to the quality of lighting around some of
our facilities (in this case, get more!). Her suggestions and interests were distinctly "unofficial"
and almost always purely privately communicatedbut hers was the interest of someone
devoted to service and the improvement of our students' 1ives.

Just as she provided the necessary instability in certain social rituals, Ruth Ellen had a low center
of gravity that kept her and those around her aright in complicated human situations. She had a
deep moral sense anchored in a profound concern for the human spirit and the humanness of
those she came to know. She instinctively sought to right injustices she saw and to relieve
someone else's pain, if she possibly could.

She could see through all the extraneous dimensions of human situations to their essential core.
When she, as she often did, sensed a need to touch and then to be in touch, Ruth Ellen extended
this affection gracefully and gently. Her tenderness and even her hard to describe but very
convincing pronunciation of the word "dear"seemed ever so much more soft and nurturing
because her natural style was often direct to the point of bluntness and as unadorned and
unembellished as the country furniture she loved. But, because of this genuineness, there was
never any question about whether Ruth Ellen really meant what she said or did. There was
nothing counterfeit about Ruth Ellen. She was real.

Ruth Ellen's passions and enthusiasms were as contagious as her laughter was infections. When
we came to know we had shared enthusiasmsespecially for music and gardeningwe were off
and running in conversations conducted in the half-Latin of botanical nomenclature or of that
kind of spoken shorthand of people who share similar tastes in musical performance. She
delighted in the progress of our music students and shein league with Henry Kaufmann, Sam
Dilworth-Leslie and othersgave her attentions and encouragement to these students in the days
when few others shared her sense of the importance of human virtuosity and its cultivation.
While I paid several visits to her gardens, Ruth Ellen visited mine only once. But this was no
casual visit: hers was the visit of an interested gardener. The tour was peppered with her
questions about this or that plant, punctuated with claims that some such plant just will never
grow for her and, as always, fill advice on a promiscuously wide range of plant possibilities that
I should try in my garden. Oddly, I think of Ruth Ellen most as a gardenerbecause gardening
somehow melds the scientific and the technical with the human and the sensual. The growing
seasons of plants do seem to mirror so much of our lives, it is to gardens and our human
connections to them that I turn for many of the metaphors that help me understand things.

Last year, after my uncle died, my sister and I wrote a little piece in his memory. It celebrated his
life, and particularly his life as a gardener and student of nature. We recalled how he had
discovered some relatively rare fringe gentians growing wild in the meadows below his home.
He had noted how unusual it was that they should be found, for they really are quite rare. On a
cold day in late October last year just before he died, we went looking once more for the gentians
and we couldn't find them. To us, that they were not to be found just a year after he had found
them for us suggested the evanescence and the rarity of both this plant and our own relationship
with our uncle.

Monday, early in the morning before I learned that Ruth Ellen had died, I was at my uncle's

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house with my sister because we had to settle some matters in his estate. My sister told me that,
much to her surprise, she had found the gentians in another part of the meadow (and then we
remembered my uncle telling us that they had a tendency to "migrate"). They had been there just
yesterday, but with the frost she doubted they would still be blooming. Monday morning was
very cold19 degrees, in fact. We would look for the gentians, nonetheless.

My sister took me to the new spot in the meadow where, despite the heaviest frost that turned
everything else to dreary shades of brown, we found again a mass of these wonderful but elusive
plants. There, in the improbability of the place and time, were these luminous blue flowers.
The memory of the gentians and my uncle would probably have been enough comfort to us
there is comfort in these small tokens in times of great loss. But the fact that they survivedeven
though they had moved aboutgives a sweet hope for a kind of rebirth and suggests to me that
these rare flowers may find a place to bloom even in the darker corners of our lives. This, I think,
is the meaning of our sense that some people will continue to live in the lives of those they
touched.

The memory of Ruth Ellen will impart the same pure light of those gentians in the dreary field.
The light may shift about and might be just as unpredictable as Ruth Ellen was. But when we
sense it, it will offer us consolation and inspiration.

In 1958, another Brooklynite, the poet Marianne Moore, wrote a wonderful little essay called If I
Were Sixteen Today. This was intended to be her "advice" to the young. The essay evokes so
much about Ruth Ellen for me. It begins; "When I was sixteen in fact thirteenI felt as old as
I have ever felt since: and what I wish I could have been when sixteen is exactly what I am trying
to do now, to know that to be hindered is to succeed. If one cannot strike when the iron is hot,
one can strike till the iron is hot."

It is Moore's last piece of advice that captures best my sense of Ruth Ellen: "And lastly, ponder
Solomon's advice when God appeared to him in a dream and asked, 'What woudst thou I give
unto thee?' Solomon did not say fame, power, riches, but an understanding mind, and the rest
was added."

Ruth Ellen was an "understanding mind" and I feel blessed to have known her.

David Burns

November 3, 1988