Dan Palazuelos: "I lost my captain, my mentor, my trickster uncle, my great friend"

Dr. Dan Palazuelos, director of community health systems at Partners In Health, and assistant professor Harvard Medical School, published a tribute to Paul Farmer at WBUR's Cognoscenti on March 2022. Here's what he wrote:

"I lost my captain, my mentor, my trickster uncle, my great friend. I didn't think there would be much utility in grieving publicly, but I'm looking up from my grief to remember that what Paul wanted was incredible in its simplicity. His message was radical but straightforward: national borders, price points, patents, policy — everything is mutable if we focus first on how we treat one another.

He once told me: humans are fragile, and we have to tend to each other. I don't worry that the world will forget Paul as an icon; I worry that we will forget the core of what he tried to teach us. As we suffer the challenges ahead, I will always work to remember his greatest lesson: nothing is sustainable except for how we sustain each other."

Palazuelos also wrote an original poem for Farmer, published here, in its entirety:

OAK 

I knew a mighty oak  

that filled the night sky 

we lived off her acorns 

we drank the morning dew 

we fell asleep and 

she fell with a thud  

the dust at dusk  

left us lost and squinting 

such a loss changed 

us and the landscape 

everyone took a splinter 

to show how they were there 

their boots step hard on 

where we were once her saplings. 

With her shadow gone 

new light will make us grow, 

although our roots still 

intertwine with her roots below.