In Memory of Kay Shultz:

Moth­er­loss is a top­ic I’m deeply famil­iar with and sen­si­tive to. So, when my dear friend and col­league from chi­ro­prac­tic col­lege called me to say her mom had passed and could I help with a hand­out for her memo­r­i­al, I placed my self at her ser­vice.  There were restric­tions and dead­lines as there always are.  She was in Penn­syl­va­nia and I am in los ange­les.  The memo­r­i­al was two days away and we had to pull this togeth­er from scratch.   She called me from the car where she was with her broth­ers on the way to their house from the air­port.  I sug­gest­ed my favorite method for gen­er­at­ing text based on Natal­ie Goldberg’s Writ­ing Down the Bones.   Since her fam­i­ly wasn’t keen on writ­ing, I sug­gest­ed she apply the same tech­nique and have mem­bers of the fam­i­ly recount sto­ries and mem­o­ries they want­ed to share about their mom, while she wrote it down for them.  My job was to take the best sliv­ers of sto­ries and cre­ate this doc­u­ment that would be worth sav­ing.   The cutouts fea­tured are a multi­gen­er­al lega­cy of scheren­schnitte (ger­man for “scis­sor cuts”) and which fol­lowed the fam­i­ly from Ger­many to Penn­syl­va­nia.  They were print­ed in Los Ange­les and sent overnight via Fed­er­al Express in time for the memo­r­i­al service.