In Memoriam: Hazel Vespa, AM '68

Eulogy for Hazel Vespa, AM '68, who passed on October 13, 2022.

“Let your last thinks all be thanks”  --W. H. Auden

Keeping a Rendezvous

Many years ago I found myself sitting with Hazel in a lecture hall at the University of Chicago.

The school of social work had invited the renowned paleontologist, Stephen Jay Gould, to give the annual Helen Harris Perlman lecture. 

Social work is wonderfully interdisciplinary, and the faculty had expected him to talk about recent developments in the field of evolutionary biology. 

But he had other plans for the evening.  The learned Harvard professor was an everyman of many enthusiasms—he loved baseball and architecture, he knew all of Gilbert and Sullivan by heart and he sang the Haydn Creation Mass with a Boston choral group every New Year’s Day—and we found he wanted to talk about his current passion, his research on the Cambrian explosion and the strange sea creatures of the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. 

I realized my some of colleagues were growing uneasy, restless, as he recounted the story of the ancient sea, speaking of creatures that had never been seen before or since, hopeful he would get on with the talk they had expected.

But Hazel was transfixed, full of wonder, as he shared illustrations of the five-eyed Opabinia regalis, the iconic fossil of the Burgess Shale. The talk took us into the enchantment of natural history, capturing the look and feel and sense of things, the mystery of life itself.  

This was our moment of meeting in deep time.

***

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As we remember Hazel this afternoon I want to think with you about the course of her practice as a social worker and educator, which she carried out for more than half a century. 

Hazel had been a presence at the University of Chicago for 20 years before we met in 1988. 

She had known the tumult of the 1960s as we struggled for social justice, finding herself in the midst of the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the student protest movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement, and the environmental movement.   She continued to encounter protest in the course of her service in the Peace Corps. She was working as a community organizer in a barrio of Santo Domingo when US troops were deployed to put down protests in support of a president who had been ousted by a military coup.  

She decided to pursue training in social work at the University of Chicago and completed her master’s degree in 1968.  She began her career as a clinical social worker at Children’s Memorial Hospital, now known as Lurie Children’s Hospital (at the time across the street from our church).  

In time she found herself overseeing the clinical training program for graduate students in social work, and she was supervising interns from the University when I joined the faculty. She was devoted to her students, and established seminars and case conferences with scholars and clinicians that would serve as a model for other organizations and agencies.  

Hazel remained much involved in the life of the School, serving as president of the alumni association, and she was instrumental in the development of our current field education program. 

It was such a pleasure to think together about our work as we found occasions to explore shared interests and concerns and enthusiasms. I came to think of her as an old soul, wise beyond her years.

She embraced the moral energy that had shaped the social work tradition over the century, joining the psychological, the social, the cultural, and the political in her understanding of vulnerability and need. I found myself returning to our cherished notions of calling and vocation as she spoke of her work with the children and their families in the clinic.   

As many of you know, Hazel came to focus her practice on children with phenylketonuria or PKU, a genetic condition that compromises our capacity to metabolize the protein phenylalanine. Unrecognized and untreated, the condition can predispose children and young adults to a range of developmental vulnerabilities and problems in living.  

In the course of her practice Hazel found that many health care providers failed to recognize the cognitive, emotional and behavioral challenges that many patients experience. She worked closely with pediatricians, genetic counselors, nurses, and nutritionists in developing methods of mental health screening and educational and therapeutic approaches for patients and their families.

There was a time when we did not expect children with rare genetic conditions to survive beyond adolescence, but with advances in care Hazel would see some of her patients live into adulthood and begin their own families before she retired.  She was delighted to be known as the PKU grandmother. 

***

Hazel had an energy of  mind all her own, and I came to think of her as an exemplar of clinical pragmatism, sharing accounts of her practice and research with my students.  She cared deeply about ideas, I explained, but she cared even more about people and lives and how we put our theories and research to use as we work to figure out what is the matter and what carries the potential to help. 

I found a deep appreciation of the scientific and the humanistic in Hazel’s ways of working and teaching, all too rare in our time when many clinicians are trained to rely on algorithms and standardized protocols.  Not so fast, Hazel would say, urging her students to attend to the fundamentals of relationship and uncommon common sense in help and care.   

I remind myself that Hazel was working in the Division of Genetics, Birth Defects and Metabolism at the time of her retirement from Lurie, and she realized that emerging lines of study in the fields of genetics, neuroscience, and developmental psychology promise to strengthen our understanding of problems in living and therapeutic action. She followed work in diverse fields of study, trying to determine what is valid, sensible, useful.

We talked much about the ways in which the humanities help us consider essential concerns in our practice, enlarging ways of seeing, understanding, and acting.

The liberal arts challenge the abstractions of theory and the generalizations of empirical research, we realized, enriching our faculties of reflection, intuition, imagination, and empathy as we negotiate the irreducible ambiguities and complexities of our practice. 

The sensibilities that we cultivate as we engage stories, novels, poetry, theater, art, music, and film deepen our capacities to bear witness to “all sorts and conditions” of human life (to call upon the words from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer) and help us attend more fully to our experience of suffering, limits, and difference, working to recognize and respect the individuality and uniqueness of the person.

I imagine you will not be surprised to find that we were often forced to end our conversations in the middle, given the press of life, but I would follow up with the promise: “to be continued.”  

We found more occasions to continue our rendezvous here at St. Pauls when my partner, Allen Heinemann, and I joined the church.

It seemed as if there was nothing that did not excite her curiosity and interest as we shared the work of writers we loved, among them the poetry and essays of Wendell Berry, Christian Wiman, W. S. Merwin, and Mary Oliver, the nature writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Robert Macfarlane, the novels of Robertson Davies, the depth psychology of Carl Jung and Donald Winnicott, even the natural history essays of Stephen Jay Gould. He published the research he had introduced in his talk at the University in a book called Wonderful Life, giving us a tremendous feeling for the huge role that fortune and contingency play in the course of evolution. Hazel was thrilled to see the book become a New York Times best seller. 

It was a happy alchemy, always, on Sunday mornings.

***

Hazel was deeply moved by the writings of the neurologist Oliver Sacks. They enriched her practice and teaching in the medical setting, but in a more personal sense she called upon them as she cared for her husband, Carl, who developed Parkinson’s Disease late in his life.  

I had used Sacks’ case studies in my courses on human development and psychotherapy over the years, and his accounts had deepened my appreciation of essential concerns in the ways we think about our experience of vulnerability and resilience across the course of life, documenting our capacities for change and growth following adversity and misfortune.  

I had written to Sacks in 2002, wanting to thank him for all he had given us in his books and essays. He wrote back and said he would love to meet.  We had dinner three weeks later and continued to meet and correspond until his death in 2015. 

As I learned Hazel was approaching death, I found myself searching for words of mourning that Sacks had written after the loss of his dear friend Wynstan, the poet W. H Auden. 

He had shared them in a letter I received early in 2015 with an essay he was preparing to publish in the New York Times, “My Own Life,” after his own diagnosis of cancer. 

“There will be no one like us when we are gone,” he wrote, “but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. We leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate—the genetic and the neural fate—of every human being to be a unique individual, to find our own path, to live our own life, to die our own death.”

He remembered that Auden’s death had brought “a sudden darkness, the eclipse of all light from the world,” and he realized:  

“There is a Wynstan-shaped space which will never be filled.”

But the experience of loss moved Sacks to return to Auden’s poetry, and he began re-reading his final work, Thank You, Fog.  In the last poem of all, Lullaby, he came across these words:

“Let your last thinks all be thanks.” 

Auden’s mind and heart had come closer and closer until thinking and thanking had become one, Sacks realized, and he would come to find holding and comfort and, in time, joy in Auden’s extraordinary capacity for “affection” and “gratitude.” 

***

We find ourselves with a Hazel-shaped space which will never be filled, but we realize that Hazel, like Auden, leaves us thinking and thanking.

Hazel gave us everything she had to give, and we find a treasure of lessons in her example. 

Hold everything dear: 

Know love, and affection, and exuberance.

Know kindness, and care for one another. 

Find beauty and wonder.

Taste the sweetness of this life, often. 

William Borden, PhD
St. Paul's United Church of Christ, Chicago, IL, October 31, 2022