“I would just like people to believe that humility — listening to the other person and trying to understand the other person — and forgiving are important.”
—David Plant, who reflects on his legacy knowing his skin cancer has spread to other parts of his body
Photo of David Plant with his stepson Frank Lilley courtesy of StoryCorps
“I’ve been more than blessed with people, with miracles, with angels all around. When I’ve been in trouble and couldn’t get up the stairs, along came a neighbor, and she just said, ‘Can I help you?’…So I consider myself really blessed, and I want my children, I want everyone to know that they need to help one another. It comes back to them ten-fold.”
—Ruth Wilkes, on what she would like to tell her family before she dies
Photo courtesy of StoryCorps and Suncoast Hospice (distributed with instagram)
The Witness of True Love and the Grace of Loss (Video)
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
The notion of contemplating mortality can be an abstract one for those of us not facing death. It can be waxed about in highly romanticized language, such as in a Wallace Stevens poem, or shown on television in the most inhuman ways, leaving us cold and unmoved.
While editing this week’s show on facing and contemplating reality, I suggested we ground our interview with Dr. Ira Byock, a leading figure in palliative and hospice care, with other people’s voices from StoryCorps. 
Their words, their stories, I hoped, would take Dr. Byock’s clinical experiences and complement the doctor’s ideas about dying well with the necessary pathos of those families facing death.
To close the hour, we included audio of Annie and Danny Perasa, a couple from Brooklyn, New York. They had been married for 27 years when Danny was diagnosed with a fast-spreading, painful form of terminal cancer. It’s a love story illustrating that the process of dying is not only a medical event, but a personal one in which “eloquence, grace, and poetry” can still be found. Danny passed away on February 24, 2006.
As a result, we’ve heard from so many listeners asking to hear this audio again. Here’s a wonderful animation extending the story you heard on the radio.
Show Your Gratitude and Honor Your Favorite Teacher for StoryCorps’ National Day of Listening
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
If you read this blog or listen to our public radio program, you more than likely know that we’re super-big fans of Dave Isay and his StoryCorps project. And, for the fourth year now on the day after Thanksgiving, they celebrate by sponsoring a National Day of Listening. This year’s theme: show your gratitude and thank a teacher.
Honor your favorite teacher and share a story about her or him. You can write an essay or, even better, take your iPhone or Android set and record something for yourself and for us. We’re teaming up with NPR and StoryCorps and posting some of our favorite stories — audio, video, text, or tweet — right here on this blog. Or send a “thank you” Tweet to us at @Beingtweets (#thankateacher). Don’t worry about the technical details or that you say (or write) it perfectly, sometimes it’s most important that you just show up and say “Thank you!”
We can’t wait to hear your stories!
Two Friends Who Could Have Been Enemies: Forgiveness and Mercy from a Mother to Her Son’s Killer
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Mary Johnson and Oshea Israel (photo: Brian Mogren)
The death of one’s child, I’ve been told by several people, including my grandmother, is something you never get over. My uncle Dennis died of an accidental gunshot wound when he was a young boy living on a farm outside of New Rockford, North Dakota. My grandma once said that she’d rather lose a husband or her parents before she ever lost another child again. Nearly four decades later, the pain is physically present, palpable and thick with grief and sorrow. It breaks my heart to think about it. And Dennis’ death was just an unfortunate accident.
So what Mary Johnson endured 18 years ago and has seen her way through is almost incomprehensible, but it’s a marvelous story to behold.
“I just hugged the man who murdered my son.”
In 1993, Oshea Israel was a teenage gang member in Minneapolis, Minnesota. One night at a party, he got into a fight with Laramiun Byrd — Mary Johnson’s only child — pulled a gun, and shot and killed him.
Convicted of second-degree murder, Israel was sentenced to 25 years in prison. Twelve years after his sentencing, Johnson asked to meet her son’s killer.
The experience transformed both Israel and Johnson. Now 34, Oshea has finished serving his prison sentence. They are friends working together to share their story.
In this interview from StoryCorps (audio above), they speak in loving terms about one another and talk about forgiveness, pain, and the love and mercy of a woman who embraces a man she could rightfully have hated.
Unnatural deaths caused by accidents are unbearable enough, but to lose a child at the willing hands of another individual, I imagine for most parents, might precipitate into bitterness, anger, rage. For Mary Johnson, it became a redemptive moment, an opportunity to transcend the violence. She founded From Death to Life, an organization that supports mothers who have lost children to homicide, and encourages forgiveness between families of murderers and victims. And, Oshea Israel, he’s going to college.
StoryCorps Moms: Myra Dean and Gary Jamison
Shubha Bala, associate producer
“In the story of Job, Job lost everything, and he got everything back twofold. … I’m blessed and I’m loved, and I know that I’ve made a difference.”
In honor of Mother’s Day, this touching story of Myra Dean, who lost her son, at age 10, to a reckless driver.
StoryCorps Moms: Lourdes and Roger Villanueva
Shubha Bala, associate producer
“I knew that we didn’t have wealth to leave you guys. So I always thought that my responsibility was to leave you a legacy of honesty, integrity, and education.”
This story reminded me of my own grandmothers who, having been forced to drop out of grade school to get married, both taught themselves how to read so that they could help motivate their own children to obtain the education they did not get themselves. This is a story that is echoed by so many mothers — working hard to be something, solely to help their children achieve a life they did not have.
StoryCorps Moms: Nancy Wright and Her Son J.D.
Trent Gilliss, senior editor
“I think about two weeks after that conversation, I picked up the phone and a small voice on the other side said, ‘Hi, this is your friend.’”
Many of us on staff have been traveling a lot these last couple of months for the live events we’ve been producing during Krista’s speaking tour. And air travel can lose its luster awfully quickly when I’m separated from my wife, Bella, and our two remarkable boys, Lucian and Rainier, for even a couple of days. For me, this was unimaginable only five years ago.
But, unexpected gifts are delivered during all the waiting, ascending, descending, taxiing — and Dave Isay’s book, Mom: A Celebration of Mothers from StoryCorps, is one of them. I pored over these individual stories in less than two hours. I smiled, I sobbed, I laughed, I paused, I reflected, I remembered.
Somewhat ironically, I was on a flight to the Bay Area of California to attend a conference titled Wisdom 2.0. There were many smart voices from all the tech elites — Twitter, Facebook, Google — and sage roshis and journalists, but very few of their stories compared to the love and experience conveyed in the personal reflections in Isay’s book.
So, on this Mother’s Day, I’ll be posting a few of my favorites and asked Shubha to post several of hers too. We’ll be releasing audio of these stories throughout the day. They’re only a few minutes long. Consider them moments of meditation as you think about your mothers — the joys, the sorrows, the moments of beauty — and what you carry forward as a child and/or parent in this wonderfully crazy world.
Here, Nancy Wright teaches me that sometimes I just need to pick up the phone, or walk to the bedroom and let go of my pride to give my boy a hug, even when I’m upset.
Photo courtesy of StoryCorps.
Forgiving His Daughter’s Murderer
Shubha Bala, associate producer
In response to last week’s show, Hector Black pointed us to this StoryCorps interview. The listener from Tennessee tells the story of his daughter being murdered in her home and his process of seeking vengeance and granting forgiveness:
“I’d never been in favor of the death penalty, but, I wanted that man to hurt — the way that he had hurt her. I wanted him to hurt the way I was hurting. But after a while I wanted to know who it was…”
He narrates the events in detail — from the murder of his daughter to the process of wanting revenge, and ultimately to granting forgiveness. The heinousness of the crime makes me think of Desmond Tutu speaking about forgiveness during the South African truth and reconciliation process. He said you would think there are things that are unforgivable, like the horrendous violence of apartheid. And yet, he says, they saw many people who ought to have been bristling with bitterness and anger but actually embraced their perpetrators when they met face-to-face.
In some small way, it’s a good lesson reminding me that it should take much less mental work to forgive the person that steals your parking spot or cuts in front of you in line.
