Brilliance twice recalled
They came to the Harvard Club the other day, to sit beneath the three great chandeliers in the great room off Commonwealth Avenue to remember a great man: Julie Richmond.
Dr. Julius B. Richmond, who died last July, lived 91 years because he had so much to do. And if he had lived another 91, he still wouldn't have had enough time.
All those neighborhood health clinics, in places like Southie, Roxbury, and Dorchester, in places like Mound Bayou, Miss., the ones that help people who don't have any money, they exist because of Julie Richmond.
The 25 million poor kids who got their bodies and minds fed over the last 40 years through something called Head Start did so because of Julie Richmond.
He was more than this nation's surgeon general, more than a gentle doctor, more than a fierce intellect, more than a distinguished professor. He was a mensch, and countless Americans are better off because of him.
Julie Richmond's greatest legacy sat beneath the chandeliers in Harvard Hall: his protégés, dozens of them, some of the world's great physicians, many of them serving the poor, here and abroad. Judy Palfrey is one of them, and she sat there, a few rows behind Rosalynn Carter, the former first lady.
In a montage of photos at the end of Julie Richmond's memorial service, there was one image showing him in repose on one of the benches outside Harvard Medical School off Longwood Avenue. From that bench, you could hit a golf ball across Huntington Avenue, into the projects where the sort of children who Julie Richmond tried to help, the ones Palfrey still helps, live in conditions that make a lie of the assertion that this is a nation committed to equality. If you turned around, you could hit another golf ball into Judy Palfrey's office at Children's Hospital.
She is one of the pediatricians who enlisted in Julie Richmond's war on poverty and healthcare inequality. She is, as Julie was, perpetually upbeat. But her shoulders sagged uncharacteristically the other day, not so much from the emotional weight of losing her mentor last July, but from losing a protégé last Saturday.
With her husband, Sean, a pediatrician at Boston Medical Center, Judy Palfrey is housemaster at Adams House, one of Harvard's residence halls. Peter Cai, a 20-year-old junior, was one of the students who lived there. He was from Pittsburgh and wanted to become a doctor. He played violin in the Mozart Society Orchestra. And he volunteered to teach English to immigrants in Chinatown and CPR to young people in Chinatown and Roxbury.
On Saturday, after he finished Harvard's semiannual River Run along the Charles, Peter Cai collapsed near the Weld Boathouse. A pair of doctors were nearby and began resuscitation almost immediately. But his heart was dead, and soon, too, was Peter Cai.
"All of these young people saw him die," Judy Palfrey said. "There were 80 kids, praying, in a circle, and they watched him die."
And so she stood there, remembering Julie Richmond and a young man who was cut from the same cloth, who saw health care as something that should be doled out without reference to numbers in a ZIP code or bank account, a young man who died too soon and too cruelly, before he got a chance to be the next Julie Richmond or the next Judy Palfrey.
Julie Richmond had a saying, "If they don't stop you, keep going."
Judy Palfrey has no choice. She has to keep going. 