My friend Franklin Servan-Schreiber delivered a speech last week in Houston at the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and will speak on Tuesday at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic in Pittsburgh about the final weeks of his brother, David Servan-Schreiber. Co-founder of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and one of the founders of the US branch of Médecins Sans Frontières, David was the author of multiple bestsellers including Healing Without Freud or Prozac and Anticancer, A New Way of Life and ultimately of  Not the Last Goodbye: On Life, Death, Healing and Cancer that came out in France one month before David died (July 2011) and was published in the US in November 2011.

How can you die of cancer when most of you adult life was spent fighting it and helping other overcome this ordeal? David was diagnosed with brain cancer and operated in 1992 when he was 31 years old and he survived for nineteen years, despite a relapse in 2000. But on June 16, 2010, things weren’t looking good. The tumor was huge. He was just coming back from Detroit and here he was with a “ticking bomb inside [his] head.” No matter how famous you are and how knowledgeable about cancer you may to be, you are crushed. He took his bike to go back home. This was unsafe: “So why would I act so carelessly? Was it a fleeting suicidal impulse? A romantic wish to die on the cobbled streets of Paris? An attempt to escape the months of pain and anxiety that surely lay ahead of me.”

In just a few words, David described an overwhelming sense of dereliction, feeling betrayed by his body and ashamed of failing the millions of people who had read his books. He knew that his cancer would come back at some point. Yet, for years he had been able to “slow down the inevitable [...] The thing I’d been dreading all these years had finally happened.”

“The support from my loved ones was a gift from heaven.” As David writes, “the sicker you feel, the lonelier you feel, and the more anxious you become.” When I read those words first in the French version, and then in the American one, I felt a pang remembering the help that David tried to provide to my own brother, the year before. The support that David received from his family was amazing and is the reason why this book exists.

Over the months, David went through multiple treatments, but by February 2011, despair was settling in. He could not work any more and he didn’t have much to do, except to wait for death. He felt increasingly despondent, Franklin recounts, at the idea that his readers would forever be discouraged from following his recommendations. That’s when Franklin helped his brother rebuild a sense of purpose: “Let’s kill two birds with one stone,” Franklin told him. “First you are really bored between treatments. Second, you owe it to your public, the people who trust you to explain what is happening to you and you will fill up your life.” At first David resisted. He was tired. But one morning, as his voice was starting to disappear, Franklin left him no choice: “We need to do it now.” Franklin knew it was urgent. He reminded his audience that doctors rarely describe to their patients, let alone to their families, what’s going to happen step by step — but he himself was made aware by a friend that degradation in cancer patients is not linear, and that everything can go well until one morning everything goes wrong. The number of weeks David still had was unclear. What was obvious was that he might be unable to speak at anytime.

Franklin started to interview his brother in March 2011. His first question was unambiguous: “You are the author of Anticancer, you are dying of cancer. What do you have to say?”  Wait for Chapter 11 before you know… for David had a lot to say over the course of seven interviews, transcribed by a journalist and infographic artist who had worked with him on Anticancer. David reviewed and corrected every single page. By June 15, 2011, the book was published, rose to number one in France the following week (believe it or not, people were reading this book on the beach!), and remained number one until the Fall. David died a month later.

Dying well : As David takes us through the various steps of his cancer and his treatment, he trains himself into the art of dying and into understanding what this really is about: “Today, as I am closer than ever to the final moment, I realize that I am reacting more or less like my patients I cared for as a psychiatrist [...] Like many of them, I am afraid of suffering but I am not afraid of dying.” The text reads as a free-form recollection on the events that have structured his life, on what he learned from his patients, on what he would like his legacy to be — and on what he sees as the “balance sheet of [his] life.” In the end, dying well is “departing with a sense of peace and connection” — of connectedness to all the dear ones who lived before and will live after: “Our dead live in our hears. It’s the most comforting form of immortality, and the one that means the most to me.”

Cancer has now become the leading cause of death in America. Each of us will have to take care of cancer patients at some point. David’s book is a must read.

A Jew Among the Indians: this year’s BMOP’s winning composition: The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), a major orchestra dedicated exclusively to performing, commissioning, and recording new music, presented its 11th annual Boston ConNECtion concert on January 17th at Jordan Hall (Gil Rose, conductor) featuring works by William Thomas McKinley, Michael Gandolfi, Peter Maxwell Davies, John Heiss, Kati Agócs, and Matti Kovler’s Cokboy – A Jew Among the Indians. Right after she saw this final version of Matti’s piece, my daughter, Sophie Delphis, sent me an enthusiastic email, of which this is an abstract:  “I have seen Matti’s piece in a number of transformations this past year: with piano, with a small group of non-classical musicians, and now with an orchestra. In this third version, the wider palette of sounds available to him has apotheosized his vision. The reaction I hear from the majority of people about him, and specifically this piece, is their surprise at the broad range of sources that find themselves into his music. It is certainly not every young, contemporary composer who has the knowledge and the courage to explore both “schmaltzy” and abstract motives, and incorporate them so easily into the same piece. It is only fitting then, perhaps, for Matti to work with a large ensemble, wherein the breadth of soundscape can corroborate the breadth of his material. Cokboy is in many ways an epitome of Matti, the man: sensitive, Romantic, part mystical, part comical.”

Meet with Matti Kovler: Matti Kovler, 28, was born in the Soviet Union and
 spent his childhood in Moscow, where he started to play the piano and write small
 pieces. When he was 10, 
his family emigrated to Jerusalem and he encountered the Hungarian-born composer Andre
 Hajdu (who studied at the Paris Conservatoire National de Musique under Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen). By his late teens, Matti was already a successful composer and had an opera already staged, Ami and
 Tammy, inspired by the story of Hansel and Gretel. Following his army service in Israel, he received his
 bachelor’s degree from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance (working with Menachem Wiesenberg and Michael Wolpe). He earned his master’s degree from the New England Conservatory (NEC), and is currently working towards his Ph.D., also at NEC.  His teachers and mentors in this country include John Heiss, Anthony Coleman, and Michael Gandolfi, to name a few. He was a 
Tanglewood Fellow in the composition program in Summer 2008.

Many high-tech entrepreneurs bootstrap their companies. Artists bootstrap their entire existence and live from their ability to express themselves – and can do this quite successfully. This is the case with Matti, who makes a living as the current director of the
 NEC Children’s Choirs, teaches privately piano and composition, receives scholarships and gets commissions for his compositions, the latest one being the commission of a large scale vocal orchestral work from Carnegie Hall for the Osvaldo Golijov and Dawn Upshaw Workshop (to be performed on May 9 &10). His goals? To work even more and be able to create a touring company one day.

Sophie Delphis & Marylene Delbourg-Delphis 

More about Matti Kovler:

http://www.myspace.com/mattikovler: This site offers an earlier version of A Jew Among the Indians as well as Shoresh Nishmat, performed at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall during a concert celebrating Israel’s
 60th anniversary, as well as his Clarinet Quintet. Upcoming performances include his
 string orchestra piece Nineveh, scheduled to premiere in Boston on
 January 31, 2009. 

http://www.mattikovler.com: More compositions are offered on this personal site, especially  Enosh, a rock opera, and the The Escape of Jonah, an oratorio that was performed at the
 Jerusalem Music Center in June 2008.

www.newenglandconservatory.edu/prep/ensembles/children_chorus.html

More about Jerome Rothenberg: Born in New York in 1931 from Polish-Jewish immigrants, Rothenberg is certainly one of the most prominent American poets, and an amazing translator and anthologist. He is the author over seventy books. For details see:

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/rothenberg/bio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Rothenberg

Incidentally, for high-tech readers, he is the father of Matthew Rothenberg, who worked for Ziff Davis for a number of years and is now the Director for editorial and content at The Ladders (http://www.theladders.com).

More about Zoomorama: http://wla.zoomorama.com (Special thanks to Franklin Servan-Schreiber)