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Perhaps you have noticed that, when someone dies, the image remembered by those who survive them usually begins to change within a few weeks or months. All of us have good and bad qualities, and sometimes the negative features of the person who has died were so prominent during life that they were at times difficult for those around them to tolerate. Yet within only a few months, survivors recalling that person begin to speak with humour about the deceased person’s miserliness, bad temper, stubbornness, or even dishonesty and lying—traits that had been astonishingly intolerable to them while the person was alive. Then, with the passage of time, all these features recede behind a more stable image that is, more or less, positive and worthy of respect.

Death is the point at which the process of individuation comes to an end, leaving behind a still image accompanied by neither hope nor expectation. For the first time, what is is accepted as it is. It is as though everything—even the darker shadows of personality—suddenly finds its final meaning and is unveiled within the still, final image of the monument that was the life of the person who has died.

From this perspective, a eulogy is an extraordinary ceremony because nothing in it is entirely hidden. Although the person’s beauty and virtues are emphasised, shortcomings and failures are also contemplated, and one attempts for the final time to understand and forgive them within the shadow of all that was beautiful.

Now that we have reached this point, let me tell you about Teresa: what I knew of her and what I learned from her eulogy. It was about ten months ago that she first came to see me accompanied by an interpreter who knew sign language for people who are deaf. She had already arranged for her complete medical file to be transferred to my clinic, and through her careful planning all the necessary information was available to me. What I remember from our first meeting is the feeling of heartfelt joy I experienced afterwards. Her sick, suffering, frail body in a wheelchair stood in a strange contrast to the smile that never disappeared from her lips and the vivid intelligence and life in her eyes. Her presence conveyed a deep sense of joy, confidence, intelligence, quickness, and clarity of mind.

Although Teresa was deaf, she could speak clearly and needed assistance only to understand parts of what others said. She understood much of the conversation by lip-reading, although for certainty and respect she usually waited for her accompanying sign-language interpreter to complete the translation and interpretation of the conversation.

Looking through her medical file, I learned that she had been diagnosed with scleroderma at the age of twenty-nine. Given the severity of her illness, she had been told that her life expectancy, even in the best circumstances, was somewhere between ten and fifteen years. Through her exceptional spirit and strength of personality, she had lived almost twenty years beyond the most optimistic predictions, although living had exacted a painful price. She had undergone thirty-six major operations on different parts of her body, and relentless, untameable pain accompanied her day and night.

I remember that the first time I examined her suffering body, I began with her toes because severe impairment of blood flow in scleroderma affects the extremities more than other parts of the body. When she removed her socks, what appeared before me were feet on which only two of ten toes remained. The others had been amputated over the years because of impaired circulation and infection in order to save her life. Her whole body had been wounded either by the illness or by surgeons’ blades, and it was difficult to believe that her extraordinary spirit had kept alive a body that should, by all predictions, have died years earlier.

In the months that followed, whenever I saw her, what continually struck me was the strength and solidity of Teresa’s character. She always managed to place her pain and illness like wallpaper behind the magnificent image of her personality: the illness was visible, yet it was difficult to focus on it instead of on Teresa herself. Unlike many patients with chronic illness whom I see every day, she never made pain the central subject of our consultation. She tried to focus only on how to manage her illness and its many complications, which had severely affected everything from her kidneys to her gastrointestinal system.

At the beginning of the new year, she brought me a greeting card she had made herself. The precision, delicacy, and beauty of that handmade card reminded me of fingers that could not even bend properly, and I found myself asking how she could be so “much” that such a terrible disease became so small beside her. She was unmistakably larger and higher than her suffering.