Yesterday was Memorial Sunday at church, in which the service focuses on people who have died in the past year. (We do a separate service for veterans near Memorial Day). After music and meditation, people line up in the front of the sanctuary to light a candle and say the name of a person they want to remember and want others to think about.
I thought Jim Rothenberger, who died less than a month ago, after almost dying so many times and after living so hard in the periods between his episodes of almost dying. Jim had multiple kidney transplants--the first among the earliest ever in Minnesota--and for as long as I knew him he had that moon-faced, ruddy look of someone on immune suppressants and steroids. He was sick a lot and you might know it from looking at him, but you'd never have known it from his work and travel schedule, which would have exhausted a far healthier man.
I first encountered Jim in 1986, when I signed up for the entry level course in Community Health that's required of all Education majors at the U, and recommended for those (like me), who were contemplating enrolling in a masters' program in public health. I'd settled in to a seat among the 300 or so in the auditorium, expecting yet another dreary lecture-cum-slide show from some teaching assistant. Instead Jim walked in and perched on a high stool, launching into the first of a seemingly extemporaneous series of stories about the sex and drug habits of first year university students; what they were, and how to alter them. He was hilarious, relevant and vastly well-informed, and he had me at "sex and drugs."
Jim was a true teacher in the land of academics, spurned by the establishment of the U because he merely had a masters' degree and had never bothered with the PhD, but awarded nearly every teaching honor he could have won for community service, faculty recognition, and creative teaching. He taught me that to engage people in thinking about public health, all one had to do was to talk about the day's headlines, and that to
do something about public health, all one had to do was to act boldly.
He did something alright, at least in in my case, recruiting me to help him create the University's first course on HIV-AIDS, in 1987. This was back in the day when people weren't so sure you couldn't "catch" HIV infection from swimming in a pool or being bitten by a mosquito. The course, an overview designed to both educate and reassure, led the way for more specialized, technical instruction in the schools of medicine and nursing, and was a first salvo in the School of Public Health's slow turning from an almost exclusive focus on tobacco, nutrition and heart disease to a more encompassing roster of issues in infectious as well as chronic disease.
I mostly lost touch with Jim after I finished my masters' degree, but I would see him around every once in a while, and he always greeted me like a long-lost colleague, telling me the latest School gossip and joking about his apparent lack of status. Despite what I learned from Jim, I never felt like a mere student in his presence; his gift was to take people seriously while laughing at life's frequent silliness. He taught me how to teach public health and how to maintain a healthy disrespect for the status quo, both lessons I am grateful to have learned. Although I didn't light a candle for Jim on Sunday, his memorial service is still to come, and the candle I swiped from the basket after my church service will be lit then, in his honor.
