 Our next speaker and final speaker in this first panel will be Dr. David Scheedemeier. David attended the Medical College of Wisconsin, both medical school and residency. He was among the very first fellows at the McLean Center in the 1980s. David is an internist and a hospice and palliative care doctor. He's a community associate of the Medical Humanities Program at the Medical College of Wisconsin. David is also a wonderful musician and an avid harmonica player. And today, David will give a talk entitled Any Day Now. Please join me in welcoming Dr. David Scheedemeier. Well, it's an honor to again bring the news from northern Wisconsin. Yes, where my brother and I grew up planting trees every spring. The April winds were fierce, merciless, just like today. But the timing was perfect. The soil is cool and wet at that time of year. The sod is weak, the grass is dormant, and there's no need to water or fertilize in April. Just put them in with the roots down. My mom would hand us the white or red pines, ash or oaks or apples, and we'd put them in the holes that my dad had dug out in front of us. And 50 years later, I can still remember the smell and the feel of a white pine seedling, no bigger than my finger. And I can still recall the joy I felt as I looked back behind us and I saw these rows and rows of little green trees. We planted 34,000 trees over about 10 years on that sandy, broken down cucumber farm. But we left some openings. You need to do that, you know, for the karner blue butterfly, it's endangered. It's a little silver and blue and orange butterfly speckled that's no bigger than a dime. The bobcats returned bears, wolves, deer and raccoons, skunks and mice, deer ticks, dog ticks, and walking sticks. Cady dids and flying grasshoppers with black and orange wings just like morning cloaks, Piliated woodpeckers and bluebirds, roughed brouse and turkeys drumming in the spring on the hillside. And the trees themselves, well, they have a life of their own. Some of them are now 100 feet tall. The white pines, you know, live through, be 300 to 500 years old. The oaks can live even longer. The biggest ones are more than six feet in circumference and they weigh about 10,000 pounds. What's more, their progeny, especially the white pines, are now everywhere underfoot. Lately I've been thinking as I've been walking our land. I try to keep an eye out for my son Dan stepping out of the woods at dusk, his dog Luna by his side. I know Dan is dead. He died of a glioblastoma on a warm day this May. But I do not want to lose the oldest faith of humankind. I know I will see him again any day now. Besides all the pine trees and the relative lack of suburban sprawl, you know you've crossed into Wisconsin from Illinois here. When as a new pulmonary doc, the first patient you see on your first weekend on call is a woman who gets drunk and aspirates cheese curds. When our pulmonary doc who hails from Chicago tells me this story sarcastically in the doctor's lounge, I look at him with all seriousness and I say, when you did the bronc, did you find white or yellow cheese curds? Because it makes a difference. The yellow ones are cheddar and the white ones are mozzarella. You know my great uncle Roland made mozzarella. He had his own cheese factory out there near Collins by Valder's and I know what a piece of mozzarella could do to the airway. Mozzarella was way stringier than cheddar. The pulmonary doc looks back at me and says, I don't know. They were fried. I couldn't pay that much attention. I had so much trouble suctioning out the breading. Now the surgeon who's listening to this story with me is also from Chicago and he laughs and he says, hey, you wouldn't believe what I saw this weekend on call. A sturgeon fisherman leaves his spear in the back of his pickup truck. He stops suddenly to avoid an accident and the spear goes flying. It goes right through the back of his truck bed. It goes right through the back of his seat and it sticks deep into both of his buttocks. It took me an hour in the operating room just to dig those barbs out. Thing was as big as a pitchfork. Well, you know, I know the rules of the doctor's lounge. Now it's my turn as a local Wisconsinite and a palliative care doctor to try to one-up them with my best story. You guys won't believe this, I say. We had a family, a farm family, keeping vigil up there in the hospital. They were waiting for the grandfather to die. I came to make rounds and there they were sitting around him in the room reminiscing and laughing and there he was cold and dead in the bed. He must have been dead for at least an hour. No one had even let the nurses know. Can you believe that? They both looked at me blankly. I said, don't you see? They didn't bother to tell the nurse. They didn't run out of the room in a panic. They didn't focus on the death somehow being official. They just sat there in the room. They said their goodbyes. They told stories. And when I came in and I said something like it looked like he had died, the man's daughter said, well, yes, he's dead. And we think we'll be going home now. Now the lung doc and the surgeon seemed unimpressed by my story. Wow, said the surgeon as he turned back to his cookie. Yes, said the pulmonary doc as he sipped his coffee. No, I said it's good here in Wisconsin. We're closer to the farm here. It's not artificial or technical. People here know that animals and people die. Death has a particularity, the lack of breath, the bear and peeling limb on the tree, the bleaching corn in the field. Farmers know it. You don't need to be officially declared like it's some new news or something. Well, what it meant was death is nothing magic. It's life that's magic. It's life that we have, that the bobcat has, that the pine has. You don't let anybody fool you. Death is nothing to brag about. It's not sacred, just necessary. Look there at the dead stump of that white pine. There are thousand seedlings within 100 yards of this tree. I don't need to plant any more trees there. Life is far more abundant than death. Walk in my dad's woods and see. You know, I once went to see a patient who had suffered a small stroke a few years earlier and been doing fairly well in an assisted living facility. She now had heamed positive stools and severe anemia. I think her crit was about 10. You have some blood in your valve movements. I said to her and she said, what does that mean? It means you may have some kind of inflammation or ulcer in your inside somewhere. What does that mean? She asked. Or realizing that maybe she had some aphasia. It's a stock statement like, help me, help me, or I'll, I'll. I said, it means unless we can fix it, you might die. What does that mean? She asked. This time she looked right up at my face. Well, I said, when's your daughter coming in? But I wanted to tell her that when my mother was dying of heart failure, she had pulmonary edema and severe chest congestion, despite all that we could do just minutes before she died. I felt the strongest presence above me. And I looked up and I, you know, I never look at hospital ceilings. I worked in hospitals for 30 years. Ceilings are nothing to look at, are they? But I was drawn to look up because I felt her there right above her bed, right above us. And I said out loud to everybody, I said, she's here, right, right here. But, you know, no one else felt her presence. I'm sure it was her. I had the strongest sense of her love and her intellect, her joy, her forgiveness. There's just no doubt about it, you know. And I felt that presence again the next morning. Not much since. A religious friend told me it was God. And I said, no, I'd know my mom anywhere. You know, as family members, we're just desperate for any light that will come shining during our dark vigil at our loved one's deathbed. It's an ancient circle of attention and observation that we keep. Life is aware. You know, animals have a consciousness of life and death too. When we put our beagle dog, Shiloh, to sleep, we had Sparky the Chihuahua come along to be there at the euthanasia. The vet had said it was a good idea for Sparky to know that Shiloh was really gone. After the injections, Shiloh exhaled one long, last deep breath of life and the room grew silent and felt different. It was obvious, just like the death of the grandfather farmer whose family was around him. You know, I looked over at little Sparky and I could tell he was thinking about several things. First, and this is certain, he realized that Shiloh was dead, suddenly gone and he confirmed it by the lack of breath. He didn't have to be told. He went over and sniffed Shiloh several times and then he turned away. And then he looked right up at me and he thought, how can I be of the most help to you now, oh wonderful and wise master, old buddy, old pal, perhaps we should leave this place of death, you and me. So that's the news from northern Wisconsin. You know, my advice to you up-and-coming ethics consultants, philosopher, poets, palliative care folks, young and old is, you know, perhaps we should leave this place of death, you and me. I'm telling you it seems to me that it's life that's magic, not death. I'm thinking maybe we have something like spirits. I'm hoping there might just be a consciousness that outlives our bodies, but don't take my word for it. Keep your eyes and ears open. Go find out for yourself. Look for your own reflection somewhere so high above this wall. In the pine forest, in the evening, the light comes shining from the west and to the east. The rays are filtered through endless layers of green needles. Each one is a lie. And under each old pine, there are countless young pines waiting to grow tall. As for me, I've kept the oldest faith, the faith in life itself. Any day now, I shall be released. Hope it will be early dusk, the time of long shadows, with the moon just starting to rise. I plan to hover over there by the fire lane, where I know it's likely that my son Dan is waiting, wondering what might be keeping me so deep in the woods so late in the day. Thank you. Questions? I know we're running late. I have a question for the audience, of course. What does a walking stick look like? Who knows? Yes. I think that's Dr. Dursty there. Dr. Langerman, please. A stick with legs. It looks like a stick with legs. How many have ever seen one? Oh, fantastic. What makes a tree live long? What things can you do to make a tree live long? The truth is that to become an old tree, you need a lot of adversity. You need many of the oldest trees have been exposed to cold and high altitude drought. And many of them have been cut, polluted about eight feet high, and they cut them and then they grow. And they kind of rot in the middle. So as trees age, even it doesn't matter if they rot in the middle, they still live. True or false, there's many trees over a thousand years old. True. In California, there are bristle, cone, pines that are over 5,000 years old up there in the White Mountains. In Scotland, there's a U that's 9,000 years old, and many trees in Beijing are over a thousand years old, many. And as I was driving here today at Washington Park, I see you're getting to have a lot of old locusts, you know, a lot of locusts. In fact, a forest of locusts all the way from Martin Luther King Drive to here. It's a forest of locusts. Any other thoughts, questions? It's a pretty smart girl. You know, they're really the original ants. You know, they could, you know, if they just had a bigger brain. Carnivlou's are endangered, so the focus is on keeping some openings. Wisconsin, if you look at it from satellite, it's almost all trees now. We've really got a lot of trees growing and we actually need some openings now, rather than more forest. But yeah, if you see those little silver butterflies brew their silver, or about as big as a dime, you know, don't step on them. All right, thank you very much.