Seamus Heaney R.I.P. - "Casualty"

Poem of the Day: Casualty

BY SEAMUS HEANEY

I   

He would drink by himself   

And raise a weathered thumb   

Towards the high shelf,   

Calling another rum   

And blackcurrant, without   

Having to raise his voice,   

Or order a quick stout   

By a lifting of the eyes   

And a discreet dumb-show   

Of pulling off the top;   

At closing time would go   

In waders and peaked cap   

Into the showery dark,   

A dole-kept breadwinner   

But a natural for work.   

I loved his whole manner,   

Sure-footed but too sly,   

His deadpan sidling tact,   

His fisherman's quick eye   

And turned observant back.   

Incomprehensible   

To him, my other life.   

Sometimes, on the high stool,   

Too busy with his knife   

At a tobacco plug   

And not meeting my eye,   

In the pause after a slug   

He mentioned poetry.   

We would be on our own   

And, always politic   

And shy of condescension,   

I would manage by some trick   

To switch the talk to eels   

Or lore of the horse and cart   

Or the Provisionals.   

But my tentative art   

His turned back watches too:   

He was blown to bits   

Out drinking in a curfew   

Others obeyed, three nights   

After they shot dead   

The thirteen men in Derry.   

PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,   

BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday   

Everyone held   

His breath and trembled.   

                   II   

It was a day of cold   

Raw silence, wind-blown   

surplice and soutane:   

Rained-on, flower-laden   

Coffin after coffin   

Seemed to float from the door   

Of the packed cathedral   

Like blossoms on slow water.   

The common funeral   

Unrolled its swaddling band,   

Lapping, tightening   

Till we were braced and bound   

Like brothers in a ring.   

But he would not be held   

At home by his own crowd   

Whatever threats were phoned,   

Whatever black flags waved.   

I see him as he turned   

In that bombed offending place,   

Remorse fused with terror   

In his still knowable face,   

His cornered outfaced stare   

Blinding in the flash.   

He had gone miles away   

For he drank like a fish   

Nightly, naturally   

Swimming towards the lure   

Of warm lit-up places,   

The blurred mesh and murmur   

Drifting among glasses   

In the gregarious smoke.   

How culpable was he   

That last night when he broke   

Our tribe's complicity?   

'Now, you're supposed to be   

An educated man,'   

I hear him say. 'Puzzle me   

The right answer to that one.'

                   III   

I missed his funeral,   

Those quiet walkers   

And sideways talkers   

Shoaling out of his lane   

To the respectable   

Purring of the hearse...   

They move in equal pace   

With the habitual   

Slow consolation   

Of a dawdling engine,   

The line lifted, hand   

Over fist, cold sunshine   

On the water, the land   

Banked under fog: that morning   

I was taken in his boat,   

The Screw purling, turning   

Indolent fathoms white,   

I tasted freedom with him.   

To get out early, haul   

Steadily off the bottom,   

Dispraise the catch, and smile   

As you find a rhythm   

Working you, slow mile by mile,   

Into your proper haunt   

Somewhere, well out, beyond...   

Dawn-sniffing revenant,   

Plodder through midnight rain,   

Question me again.

Seamus Heaney, "Casualty" from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. 

5 Things To Consider About Elder In-Home Care

 

Five things to consider about in home care by ElderCarelink Today, there are several different types of care that can fit every need, from occasional light help around the house to around-the-clock medical attention. Two popular options include in-home care and assisted living facilities.   Designed to help your elder stay at home, in-home care agencies typically offer a wide range of assistance, from grooming, bathing and dressing to grocery shopping. For elders who can no longer remain in their homes safely, assisted living facilities could be the right fit. These facilities offer a secure environment where elders can have their daily needs met and socialize with other elders.   Five considerations for in-home care   1. Independence. In-home care allows your loved one to stay in their home and to remain as independent as possible.   2. Family involvement in care. Those who are cared for at home have the advantage of open visiting hours. Family members can help out as necessary without concerns about intruding in the care of others.   3. Continuity of care. Because your loved one is able to stay at home, they can continue to see the same doctor, so the continuity of their care remains intact.   4. A personal environment. Of course, moving to an assisted living facility or nursing home can be quite difficult for an elder. In-home care keeps your loved one in an environment they know and trust.   5. Lower costs. Traditionally, in-home care costs are lower than those found in assisted living facilities or nursing homes. You and your elder get to select the hours of service, using it when your loved one needs the help the most.   Take time to research the various options for elder care, so when you do make the decision, you'll know the choice was the right one.    Start a Caregiving ConversationBringing up the topic of caregiving with aging parents can be challenging. We've created adownloadable brochure to help you start that conversation. Download it today. Have you noticed any changes in your loved one's health or behavior?Update your Needs Survey now so we can keep you connected to the resources that are most relevant and helpful to you. Update Your Needs Survey Now.

Texting While . . . SWIMMING?! Tundra Comic by Chad Carpenter

"A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, And Everything In Between"

BEDSIDE August 17, 2013, 2:27 pm 

When No One Is on Call

By THERESA BROWN

Bedside is a series about health care from a nurse’s-eye view.

TAGS:

HOSPITALS, LABOR AND JOBS, MEDICINE AND HEALTH, NURSING AND NURSES

We nurses all have stories — if we’re lucky, it’s just one — about the time we failed a patient. It’s usually a problem of being too busy: too many cases, too many procedures to keep track of until one critical step, just one, slips through our frenetic fingers and someone gets hurt.

I saw it happen the first time while in nursing school. A patient needed an escalating dose of pain medicine. Her pain eased, but her breathing slowed and her oxygen level dropped. I told her nurse that the patient might need narcan, a reversing agent for opioids.

“Narcan?” The nurse didn’t have time for that. Caring for eight patients on a busy medical-surgery floor meant that getting through the day’s tasks took up all her time. Half an hour later, though, the patient needed an emergency team to revive her. I held her hand while an anesthesiologist stuck a tube down her throat. She ended up in intensive care.

It would be easy to blame the nurse. How could she be too busy? But she was a good nurse, smart and committed. She simply had too much to do, too many acute needs to address. And then one, just one, got out of control.

Bedside nurses are the hospital’s front line, but we can’t do the first-alert part of our jobs if there aren’t enough of us on the floor. More demands for paperwork, along with increasing complexity of care, means the amount of time any one nurse has for all her patients is diminishing. And as hospitals face increasing financial pressure, nurse staffing often takes a hit, because nurses make up the biggest portion of any hospital’s labor costs.

For patients, though, the moral calculus of the nurses-for-money exchange doesn’t add up. Pioneering work done by Linda H. Aiken at the University of Pennsylvania in 2002 showed that each extra patient a nurse had above an established nurse-patient ratio made it 7 percent more likely that one of the patients would die. She found that 20,000 people died a year because they were in hospitals with overworked nurses.

Research also shows that when floors are adequately staffed with bedside nurses, the number of patients injured by falls declines. Staff increases lead to decreases in hospital-acquired infections, which kill 100,000 patients every year.

The importance of sufficient nurse staffing is becoming irrefutable, so much so that the Registered Nurse Safe-Staffing Act of 2013 was recently introduced by Representatives Lois Capps, a Democrat from California and a nurse, and David Joyce, a Republican from Ohio.

Among other things, the act would require that hospitals include their nurse staffing levels on Medicare’s Hospital Compare Web site and post their staffing levels in a visible place in every hospital.

Concerns over money will determine whether this bill has even a chance at passing. It is collecting co-sponsors, but similar legislation has never gotten very far because hospital administrators view such mandates as too costly.

It’s hard to do a definitive cost-benefit analysis of a variable as complicated as nurse staffing because health care accounting systems are often byzantine. But data suggest that sufficient staffing can significantly reduce hospital costs.

Medicare penalizes hospitals for readmitting too many patients within 30 days of discharge, and a full nursing staff is one way to reduce readmissions. Having enough nurses increases patient-satisfaction scores, which also helps maintain Medicare reimbursement levels. Understaffing leads to burnout and nurses’ quitting their jobs, both of which cost money in terms of absenteeism and training new staff. Finally, falls and infections have associated costs.

What this discussion of finances misses, though, is that having enough nurses is not just about dollars and cents. It’s about limiting the suffering of human beings. When hospitals have insufficient nursing staffs, patients who would have gotten better can get hurt, or worse.

Several months ago I started a new job, and a few weeks in I heard my name being called. A patient getting a drug that can cause dangerous reactions was struggling to breathe. I hurried to her room, only to discover that I wasn’t needed. The other nurses from the floor were already there, stopping the infusion, checking the patient’s oxygen and drawing up the rescue medication.

The patient was rattled, but there were enough nurses to respond, and in the end she was completely fine.

Now picture the same events in a different hospital, one that doesn’t adequately staff, and this time the patient is you. As the drug drips in, you feel a malaise. You breathe deeply but can’t quite get enough air. Your thinking becomes confused, your heart races. Terrified, you press the call light, you yell for help, but the too few nurses on the floor are spread thin and no one comes to help in time. A routine infusion ends with a call to a rapid-response team, a stay in intensive care, intubation, ventilation, death.

This kind of breakdown is not the nurses’ fault, but the system’s. We are not an elastic resource. We can be where we are needed, but only if there are enough of us.

---

Theresa Brown is an oncology nurse and the author of “Critical Care: A New Nurse Faces Death, Life, and Everything in Between.”

"N.J.'s Titanic" The Morro Castle; 134 Killed In 1934

At Shore, recalling 'New Jersey's Titanic' The Morro Castle at the beach Asbury Park where it ran aground after initial unsuccessful attempts to tow it. (Courtesy of The photos the New Jersey Maritime Museum) GALLERY: At Shore, recalling 'New Jersey's Titanic'  Edward Colimore, Inquirer Staff Writer POSTED: Monday, August 26, 2013, 1:07 AM He was awakened at 2:30 that morning by a clanging gong and the shouts and screams of people just outside his cabin. A fire was quickly spreading across the Morro Castle as the big luxury liner rocked and rolled through a nor'easter off the New Jersey coast. Jerry Edgerton, a 19-year-old relief radio operator, and others tried to fight the fire, then realized they'd have to abandon ship. The blaze had heated the metal decks, and heavy coats of paint eventually ignited. "The deck was getting so hot that I would stand on one foot as long as I could and then stand on the other foot, and lift my foot to try to cool it off," said Edgerton, who decided his "best bet would be to leave the ship." Edgerton, 99, of Elizabethtown, Pa., the last living survivor of the Morro Castle, wrote down his memories for use in talks about that Sept. 8, 1934, when 137 people lost their lives and hundreds were forced overboard. In fragile health as the anniversary approaches, he doesn't publicly speak of the event anymore, but his eyewitness account still paints a vivid picture of the ship's destruction and the heroics of rescuers. The story is also told by Long Beach Island authors Gretchen Coyle and Deborah Whitcraft in their 2012 book, Inferno at Sea, which includes interviews with Edgerton and other survivors over the years. Whitcraft, president and founder of the New Jersey Maritime Museum in Beach Haven, has created a permanent Morro Castle exhibit, displaying artifacts, photos, and documents to recreate a piece of history that left its mark on the Shore. The museum's researchers are now scanning records at the National Archives to help unravel the mysteries - left unresolved by an official inquiry - that still surround the ship's loss. What caused the captain's death before the fire? Was it a heart attack or was he murdered, as some believe? Was the fire accidental or was it set, as some have charged? "Everybody knows about the Titanic; we have called the Morro Castle New Jersey's Titanic," said Whitcraft, 58. "This was a horrific maritime disaster. We wanted to make it known to those who never heard of it." The smoldering vessel eventually washed up on a beach at Asbury Park, where its towering profile drew hundreds of thousands of gawkers over the next several months. By that time, Edgerton was glad to have solid ground under his feet. He never forgot his last frightening minutes on the Morro Castle, which was making its usual run from Havana to New York. "I waited until the ship was on the crest of the wave and as the ship started to go down after the crest had passed, I jumped over the side, feet first," he says in his memoirs. "I was on B Deck when I jumped and knew that it was about 60 to 70 feet above the waterline. "That sure was a long way down!" he says. "As soon as I hit the water, I started to swim away from the ship toward the shore because I suddenly thought about the ship sinking and I heard that when a ship went down, it created a large whirlpool and I didn't want to be sucked down into it." Though about 13 miles from shore, Edgerton had a life preserver and felt confident he'd survive. "What really surprised me, though, was when I put some distance between the ship and me, I looked back and saw that I was on the crest of a wave and the ship was in the trough, and I was able to look right across A deck," he said. "I was actually higher than the ship. "Boy, did I ever start paddling to put as much distance between me and the ship as quickly as I could," he said. In the churning waters, Edgerton met a couple of young female passengers. Only one of them had a life preserver, so he grabbed one floating nearby. For the next few hours, the three struggled toward land. Whenever they were separated, Edgerton "would swim over to the one farthest away and tow her back to the other one so we could stay together." He remained confident they'd make it to shore. "In fact, I was so confident that I turned to the girls and said, 'Do you realize that we have something we will be able to talk about for the rest of our lives?' One of the girls said, 'That may be all well and good, but right now all I want is to get out of this water and lay down and go to sleep.' " They looked back at the Morro Castle and "we could see nothing but fire . . . no rescue ships or anything that would indicate any rescue efforts were being made," he said. "Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere we could hear a horn blowing." It was a fishing vessel, the Paramount, which had braved the stormy waters against the orders of the Coast Guard to collect as many survivors as it could. Capt. James Bogan of Brielle, N.J., his sons, and a crew of volunteers pulled 67 people out of the water, including Edgerton and the two women. In the investigation that followed, criticism was leveled at some crew members for fleeing - with only a handful of passengers - in the few lifeboats that were lowered. The liner, launched in 1930 and capable of carrying more than 700 passengers and crew, was considered one of the safest on the seas, but the catastrophe led to improved shipboard safety, including the use of shipwide fire alarms, fire-retardant materials, automatic fire doors, and more attention to fire drills. Edgerton went on to serve in the Army Air Corps during World War II, setting up radar stations in the United States and flying C-47 cargo and troop planes. He once flew a training mission with the Tuskegee Airmen, the name given to African American pilots. His survival during the Morro Castle disaster was one of the stories that stood out, Whitcraft said. Another involved the third assistant purser, Tom Torresson Jr., who jumped from the ship with a 10-year-old boy on his back, said Coyle, 73. The child had been seriously burned and couldn't wear a life preserver. "He tried to keep him talking," Coyle said. "But after a couple hours, he stopped. [The boy had] died. "The Morro Castle was a tragic story, a story of perseverance that showed the best and worst of humanity," she said. "It left a great imprint on the Jersey Shore."   To Learn More Gretchen Coyle and Deborah Whitcraft will speak and sign copies of Inferno at Sea at Independence Seaport Museum for Coast Day, Sept. 7 at Penn's Landing. The New Jersey Maritime Museum, at 528 Dock Rd. in Beach Haven, is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily June through August, and from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Friday through Sunday from September through May. Admission is free. For more information, call 609-492-0202.   Contact Edward Colimore at 856-779-3833 or ecolimore@phillynews.com.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/new_jersey/20130826_At_Shore__recalling__New_Jersey_s_Titanic_.html#yZrr9CKqv2Kr4GyC.99

Camp Firefly: For Kids Who Have Lost A Family Member

Philadelphia Inquirer, Local, Sunday, August 25, 2013, Page B4:


Medford camp helps deal with sorrow. At Camp Firefly, a light for children facing losses The two-day camp isn't about just grief; there's plenty of time to have fun, too. GALLERY: Medford camp helps deal with sorrow. » Julia Terruso, Inquirer Staff Writer POSTED: Sunday, August 25, 2013, 1:09 AM With their legs dangling off a wooden bench facing the lake, Cabin Six - the 7- and 8-year-old boys - took turns using a drum to tell a story about someone they lost. Gabriel, 8, went first, hitting the drum in sequences of two. He told the group the sound reminded him of his younger brother, who still calls out "Dada" when shown pictures of his father, who died in May. Dino, also 8, volunteered to go next and played the drum slowly first, then more rapidly. It was a rhythmic representation of the first time he caught a fish while out with his father, who has also died. "So you and Dino have something in common, you both lost your dad," counselor Michelle Halliwell said as sullen faces nodded on the sunny, clear afternoon. Moments later, a counselor pointed out a turtle, and the boys ran over to check it out, erupting in playful giggles. Camp Firefly, for children who have recently lost someone close to them, held its eighth annual two-day overnight this weekend at Camp Matollionequay, a YMCA camp in Medford. The camp is sponsored by Moorestown Visiting Nurses & Hospice, and this year, 45 children ages 7 to 14 attended from Burlington, Camden, and Gloucester Counties. Camp Firefly, named to represent a bright light in a dark situation, was born out of need, organizers said, after a similar South Jersey camp closed in 2004. Over two days, campers canoe and swim, play sports and do crafts, as well as share memories and feelings associated with the people they've lost. For many, it's their first time with others their age who share a similar loss. Dishéa Lightfoot, 11, took a break from decorating signs for his cabin to talk about his grandfather, who died in February at 74. Dishéa helped take care of his grandfather, who had Parkinson's disease. "My routine was, I'd wait till everyone fell asleep and then I'd go crawl up on his bed and turn on the PS3 and we'd just talk," he said. "There are a lot of memories on his medical bed." The incoming sixth-grader at Octavius V. Catto Community School in Camden said he wants to be a research scientist when he grows up - to try to cure diseases such as Parkinson's. He sleeps with his grandfather's blanket every night. "I cover up in it and all the good memories rush over me," he said. "It's like a dream-catcher you can wear." Dishéa speaks easily about his grandfather but says some of the campers are much more fragile. That's why the camp is staffed with 35 volunteer counselors, including Tom Jennings of Pennsauken, who was 9 when he lost his father to stomach cancer. "Back then, kids were just told to get over it," Jennings said. "It wasn't until my 40s that I started to feel this grief that I wasn't allowed to feel back then. This gives me a lot of hope that their lives can be different and that they have encouraging parents that recognize this is something that needs to be shared and talked about." The camp is free, paid for through bake sales and charity events organized by Moorestown. While splashing around in a lake one moment and writing a letter to a deceased loved one the next might seem disjointed, grief counselor Andra Vasko says it mirrors the grieving process. "We go from sad activities to very happy ones and then back to sad ones. And in the course of someone's day, this is very much how grief is. You could be having a great time, having a belly laugh, and then, all of a sudden, longing for the person you lost." The most moving part of camp is on Saturday evening, when each camper releases onto the lake an illuminated milk carton decorated in tribute to his or her lost loved one, Vasko said. "The children come up with their cabin-mates and, one by one, launch their boats," Vasko said. "It creates such a sense of connection to their loss to see all these little lanterns lit up. In a way, we're saying goodbye again, but we're also saying hello again."   Contact Julia Terruso at 856-779-3876, jterruso@phillynews.com, or follow on Twitter @juliaterruso.
Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/local/20130825_Medford_camp_helps_deal_with_sorrow_.html#12qxZKyGGwmodFMg.99

Circus Clown Lemmings' Leap comic by Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine

Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis, August 21, 2013

Fatal Mercies - Assisted Suicide? Yes or No

New York Times August 10, 2013 Fatal Mercies By FRANK BRUNI FEW of us get anything approaching the degree of control we’d like over our lives. Must we also be denied a reasonable measure over our deaths? That’s all that Joseph Yourshaw, 93, seemingly wanted: to exit on his own terms, at home, without growing any weaker, without suffering any more. And that’s all that one of his daughters, Barbara Mancini, 57, was trying to help him do, according to the police report that set her criminal prosecution in motion. She’s charged, under Pennsylvania law, with aiding a suicide, a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Such a sentence would be ludicrous, but so, by all appearances, is the case against her: a waste of public resources, a needless infliction of pain on a family already grieving, and a senseless prioritization of a frequently ignored (and easily ignorable) law over logic, compassion, decency. It would have been easy for prosecutors to walk away; that sort of thing happens all the time. That it didn’t happen here suggests how conflicted, inconsistent and bullheaded we Americans can be when it comes to the very private, very intimate business of dying. These are the facts of the case, according to public records and news reports: Yourshaw was receiving hospice care at his home in the small central Pennsylvania city of Pottsville. A decorated World War II veteran who had gone on to run his own contracting business, he was terminally ill, with severe diabetes, heart disease and kidney disease, among other ailments. He was frail and in pain, and had indicated a yearning for an end to it all. On Feb. 7, he sought one, swallowing an unusually large measure of his morphine in the presence of Mancini, who did nothing about it. A hospice nurse who stopped by the house afterward found him unresponsive and later said that Mancini, herself a nurse, confessed to having provided him, at his request, a vial or bottle of his painkiller that contained a potentially lethal dose. The hospice nurse called 911. The police and paramedics arrived. Although Mancini insisted that her father did not want to be revived, he was given medical attention and brought to a local hospital, where his condition stabilized. He nonetheless died there on Feb. 11. He did not get to spend his final days in his own home or his final hours in his own bed. The statement of the police officer who interacted with Mancini on the day of the overdose says, “She told me that her father had asked her for all his morphine so he could commit suicide, and she provided it.” Mancini, through her lawyers, later denied that she was deliberately enabling him to end his life. Trying to reconcile these conflicting claims is, for now, impossible: a judge has issued a gag order for the main players in the case, which is headed to trial, barring a plea agreement or a prosecutorial change of heart. But nowhere can I find any dispute that Mancini’s 93-year-old father was fading and hurting. Nowhere can I find any insinuation that Mancini coaxed him toward suicide. Or poured the morphine down his throat. Or did anything more than hand it to him. That’s it. And the lightness of this alleged assist, coupled with the ambiguity of its connection to his death after he’d rebounded from the overdose, has not only provoked outrage from Compassion and Choices, an organization that supports more options in end-of-life care. It has also prompted befuddlement on the other side of the issue, with a leading opponent of assisted suicide scratching his head about the way the case is being handled. “It is odd to see one like this prosecuted,” Stephen Drake, the research analyst for the advocacy group Not Dead Yet, told me. He added that the case worries him, because if it gets significant publicity and informs what many people believe assisted suicide is, they’ll see it as a more benign act than he believes they should. “It’s going to make it even harder to prosecute ones that really call out to be prosecuted,” he said. Such prosecutions are rare all in all, even though assisted suicide — under medical supervision and specific circumstances — is legal in only four states: Oregon, Washington, Montana and, as of a few months ago, Vermont. Alan Meisel, the founder and director of the Center for Bioethics and Health Law at the University of Pittsburgh, said that that’s partly because “these kinds of things usually happen in secret.” But that’s also because when they do come to light, the police and prosecutors exercise enormous discretion, knowing that there are all kinds of gray areas in which the law is a clumsy, crude instrument; that a jury may be loath to punish a gesture of apparent mercy; and that it’s not uncommon for death to be hastened by painkillers, even in hospitals. Did Mancini break the law? If the accounts of both the hospice nurse and the police officer are accurate, probably so, but the Pennsylvania statute that forbids assisted suicide, like similar statutes in other states, is worded broadly and says nothing about what rises to the level of assistance. That vagueness can be a blessing, allowing the police and prosecutors to filter the law through their own good judgment and sensitivity. No such filter has been applied here, at least based on the evidence presented at a preliminary court hearing early this month. A SPOKESMAN for the Pennsylvania attorney general’s office, which is in charge of the prosecution, declined to comment for this column, citing the gag order. So I couldn’t ask anyone there how, in an era of severely limited government resources, the dedication of time and money to this case made any sense. I couldn’t ask anyone how, precisely, Mancini had done her father wrong. I couldn’t point out that his widow — her mother — had spoken out in defense of her before everyone involved stopped talking. I couldn’t note the different exit made recently by a terminally ill journalist in Seattle, thanks to Washington’s Death With Dignity Act. Her name was Jane Lotter, and last week, in The Times, Michael Winerip wrote this of her last moments with her family, including her husband, Bob Marts: “On July 18, the couple and their two children gathered in the parents’ bedroom. Ms. Lotter asked to keep in her contact lenses, in case a hummingbird came to the feeder Mr. Marts had hung outside their window. The last song she heard before pouring powdered barbiturates, provided by hospice officials, into a glass of grape juice was George Gershwin’s ‘Lullaby.’ Then she hugged and kissed them all goodbye, swallowed the drink and, within minutes, lapsed into a coma and died.” No paramedics. No arrest. No need.

36TH Anniversary Of Elvis Presley's Death

Thousands honor Elvis Presley at Graceland vigil for the 36th anniversary of his death Nicholas Woodlief, 7, left, his sister Annabelle Woodlief, 11, and friend, Eli Crain, 11, right, strike an Elvis Presley pose at Graceland, Presley's home, before the annual candlelight vigil on Thursday, Aug. 15, 2013, in Memphis, Tenn. Presley fans from around the world made their annual pilgrimage to Graceland to pay their respects to the rock n' roll icon with a solemn candlelight vigil on the 36th anniversary of his death. (AP Photo/The Commercial Appeal, Nikki Boertman) Print By The Associated Press on August 16, 2013 at 1:43 AM, updated August 16, 2013 at 1:46 AM Email MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Elvis Presley fans from around the world made their annual pilgrimage to Graceland on Thursday to pay their respects to the rock n' roll icon with a solemn candlelight vigil on the 36th anniversary of his death. Thousands of Presley fans carried lit candles as they walked silently through the Mediation Garden at Graceland, Presley's longtime Memphis home. The garden is the location of Presley's grave and also is the spot where his mother, father and grandmother are buried. Wreaths of flowers and pictures of Presley encircled the grave, while shadows cast by the glowing candles danced along the stone wall surrounding the garden. Soft music played in the mild night, as some in the procession bowed their heads or cried quietly. Each year, fans of Presley's music and movies come to Memphis for Elvis Week, the weeklong celebration of his life and career. Presley died on Aug. 16, 1977, of a heart attack after battling prescription drug abuse. The vigil is the highlight of Elvis Week, which this year featured a listening party at Stax Records for the recent release of the three-CD box set "Elvis at Stax." Performances by Presley tribute artists and a screening of the "Aloha from Hawaii" television program from January 1973 are other featured events of the weeklong reunion, which wraps up Saturday. Police estimated 35,000 people would attend the vigil. Last year, an estimated 75,000 people descended on Graceland for the event. Elvis' ex-wife Priscilla Presley and his daughter Lisa Marie Presley spoke at last year's event, the first time they appeared together at the vigil since it began. Christine Jeffords made her fifth trip to Graceland with her husband Jon and three other members of a fan club called the Elvis Midwest Mafia, whose members are from Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. They wore red T-shirts with Presley's image emblazoned on a king of hearts playing card on the front. The back of their shirts had a quote that gives one reason why fans have made repeated trips to Memphis for Elvis Week and the vigil: "If you have a friend who is an Elvis fan, you have a friend for life." "Where else can you go where you meet people from year to year who have the same passion?" said Christine Jeffords, a pre-school teacher from Hartford, Wis. Jeffords, 52, smiles when she talks about buying her first Presley 45, "Let Yourself Go," which she bought as a young teen with money she had saved from babysitting jobs. She said the vigil is a way to remember not only his career, but also his giving personality and ability to make people happy with his music. "If you were sad or happy or whatever, he was such a big part of your life," Jeffords said. "I always felt in my heart that he was a good person, a beautiful person." The vigil started as an informal gathering the year after his death. It has blossomed into a major tourist event. Fans begin lining up along the outer wall of Graceland about 12 hours before the vigil, and many will stay until the early morning hours of the next day. The event also has become an international affair and a tribute to the Tupelo, Miss., native's worldwide popularity, hosting fans from Australia, Brazil, England and Japan and other foreign countries. Miguel Salinas Caceres, 53, came with other members of a fan club whose members are from Chile. Making his first visit to Graceland, Salinas Caceres recalled making scrapbooks of newspaper article clippings about Presley when he was a teen. The articles and scrapbooks were a way he and his family followed and learned about Presley because they could not afford a record player or even the records themselves. He said his family used to pay a neighbor who owned a television so that they could watch Presley movies and other TV programs at the neighbors' house. "For a person who is an Elvis fan and has the chance to come to the place he lived, it's emotional for me," said Salinas Caceres, of Santiago, Chile. "It's hard to believe that I'm here on the street where he walked, the street corners where he stood, the restaurants where he ate." His fellow fan club member Rodrigo Gandarillas, a native Chilean who now lives in Houston, is on his second visit to Graceland. An Elvis tribute artist himself, the 39-year-old Gandarillas said the vigil is a way to give thanks for the enjoyment Presley has given him. "The thing that impacts me the most about the vigil is the large amount of people from different countries, different races and different languages who understand 'the King's' musical message," Gandarillas said.