Ben

Dear Ben,

I saw you standing at the back of the church by yourself when it was still just family there. You looked uncomfortable, like you’d rather not be there. I could relate. I didn’t want to be there either. Before you even introduced yourself I knew who you were. Mark talked about you often when you rotated in his lab. He told me that you learned differently than the other grad students and that once he figured out your rhythm he was able to steer you in the right direction. In that short rotation time, he saw your progress and when you wanted to join his lab he was so excited.

It turned out that Mark already had a couple of grad students and so your #1 choice wasn’t going to happen. Mark was known to buck the system when he knew that students weren’t being served and he took that decision up the chain. He was turned down and months after the fact he’d still get riled up about it.

Before you came along Mark had another student that would need help. His name was Hiroo and he was from Japan. He and his girlfriend came to our house one year for Easter and when he was leaving he came into the kitchen to say goodbye to me. I said goodbye, hope you had a good time, it was great having you here, and they both stood there looking at me until Hiroo finally told me that Dr. Fisher said I should give them some leftovers because he was a starving graduate student. I thought that was so funny because I remember early in our marriage and those end of the month meals of ramen noodles.

Mark would say that Hiroo had magic hands when it came to working on the bench doing experiments. He was so close to graduating when the tsunami hit Japan. Here in the middle of this country with his family and girlfriend back in Japan, he became frantic with worry. He watched or listened to the news constantly. Even when he found out that everyone was safe he could not stop worrying. He wouldn’t show up in the lab for days on end so Mark would ride his bike over to his apartment. He’d bang and bang on the door and finally Hiroo would answer. Mark would tell him that he had to check into the lab regularly to show him his writing progress on his dissertation. He would say he would and he’d come in a few days and disappear again. This went on for months. His father once emailed Mark because he was so worried about him because he wasn’t answering his phone. After all those years of training, Hiroo eventually returned to Japan without his degree. Mark never heard from him again and would always refer to him as his lost soul. Isn’t it funny that Mark could see that Hiroo was a lost soul but he couldn’t see when his own soul was lost?

The chance of us crossing paths again is highly unlikely, but here’s what I wanted to tell you on that Wednesday morning; Dr. Fisher believed in you. He believed that you were capable of the work and that the med center owed you the chance to try, that their job was to work with your challenges to make you successful. I can’t even tell you how many times he told me that.

I hope you reach the goals you have set for yourself, and when you doubt your ability or your place in the field that you remember that from the very first day Mark saw your potential.

He would want me to tell you that. That science needs you, Ben, exactly as you are.

xo,

k.