Peter Sipe

Shakuntala Devi

My instruction has, I’d like to think, a reasonable degree of academic rigor. If pressed, however, I might concede that it’s not daily I transport students to the boundaries of human mental ability. Shakuntala Devi’s Telegraph obituary gives us a glimpse.

Known as “the human computer,” she could, upon hearing your date of birth, tell you its day. In about the time it takes to fish out your phone and find the right app, she mentally calculated 7,686,369,774,870 x 2,465,099,745,779.

Ms. Devi, for whom the term “gifted” seems dissatisfyingly insufficient, had no conventional schooling, and attributed her powers to divine endowment. Still, she sought to share what she could: “I cannot transfer my abilities to anyone, but I can think of quicker ways with which to help people develop numerical aptitude.”

Her obituary taught us the vocabulary prodigy, prowess, aptitude, innate, and cognitive.

To explain what a cognitive meant, I showed them the test below, allowing that I hadn’t yet figured out the solution. Most students got it very quickly, thereby offering a glimpse of their mental abilities, and mine.

Grace Cyr

Grace Cyr was a foster mother to 98 children.

According to her Boston Globe obituary,

Ms. Cyr often cared for multiple children, including many with complicated medical needs. They joined whoever of Ms. Cyr’s daughters were living at home, along with grandchildren. For a time, she fostered three children under age 6, all of whom required wheelchairs.

Ms. Cyr, a stylish dresser, kept her chandeliers sparkling and was “never boring, ever.” A lovely 2010 profile contains this example of her ingenuity and devotion:

A boy born without a brain stem could neither speak nor see. Grace put his bassinet near her grandfather clock, whose ticking seemed to soothe him, and took care of him until he died.

She couldn’t get everything right, though:

Grace still laughs at the story of sending one of her foster sons to school on St. Patrick’s Day. She had dressed him in green and carefully packed his lunch for the occasion, including green Jell-O and a green can of ginger ale. Then she got a call from his teacher… Mistakenly, Grace had thrown in a can of Heineken instead of Canada Dry.

Vo Phien

“What he created – it’s incredible and valuable.”

I put this unhappy question to my students: “If you could take only a handful of books to start a new library in a new country, which would you choose?”

To give them some historical perspective, we read brief accounts of the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria, and of the fall of Saigon.

Then we learned about Vo Phien, who worked to save his country’s literary heritage. As his Los Angeles Times obituary describes, he began his mission in the final days of the Vietnam War:

Fearful of what to come, he resolved to collect and preserve literary treasures, essays that had appeared in newspapers and magazines, books that might soon be banned, even diaries…

His success in doing so is all the more remarkable because for years this was his side gig: by day he was a benefits specialist for the Los Angeles County Employees Retirement Association.

Crunching numbers (which he did “with such speed”) was among the vocabulary Vo Phien’s obituary taught us, along with banned, scour, refugee, mentor, prolific, diaspora, and expatriate.

Also, since Vo Phien was his pen name, we all invented ours. (My favorite was Liam Lemon Lime.)

And the books students were most likely to preserve? The Harry Potter series made many lists, as did the Divergent trilogy, the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, and The Fault in Our Stars. The Day the Crayons Quit also appeared more than once.

Augusta Chiwy

“I would have done it for anyone. We are all children of God.”

Christmas of 1944 was memorable for Augusta Chiwy because her visit to Bastogne, Belgium coincided with an attack by 200,000 German soldiers.

This would have troubled anyone’s holiday, especially someone’s whose mother was from Central Africa. But this did not stop Ms. Chiwy, a nurse, from heroically tending wounded Americans during the Battle of the Bulge.

As her Washington Post obituary recounts, not all patients shared her grace:

One man… suffered from severe frostbite and asked [U.S. Army physician Dr. Jack] Prior not to allow the black nurse to touch him.

“Fine,” Prior replied… “Die, then.”

Ms. Chiwy’s extraordinary service was almost lost to legend until it received recognition late in her life. The commander of the 101st Airborne Division’s “Bastogne Brigade” told her in 2011:

Ma’am, you embody what is best and most kind in all of us… There are men and women in America who would never have a father or grandfather if you hadn’t been there to provide them basic medical care.

After their first Christmas together, she and Dr. Prior would regularly exchange Yuletide greetings, with which Ms. Chiwy would include Belgian chocolates.

Esther Earl

“She has been a beacon of hope for so many people… It’s because she’s so utterly human and so utterly graceful.’’

My students and I looked at the dedication pages of the books we’re reading, and agreed that we usually don’t bother to notice them.

Sharing the dedications with each other, we found two commonalities:

Whether clear or cryptic, simple or elaborate, earnest or irreverent, each dedication was heartfelt.
We didn’t know any of the dedicatees.

The dedication to one of the students’ favorite books reads:

To Esther Earl.

Many of my students have read this book, and most have seen the movie, but none knew who Esther Earl was. So we read her Boston Globe obituary. Esther’s sixteen years teach us that, as John Green says, “a short life can also be a good and rich life.”

Vocabulary we learned from the obituary includes demeanor, muse, vibrant, terminal, domain, precocious, and beacon. I asked each student to pick one and use it in a sentence Esther would declare awesome. Here’s my favorite (yes, it’s two sentences, but neither is it unawesome):

Yesterday I had a vibrant taco. It grew legs and walked out of my hands.