Maya Angelo (and Pat Jehlen) have it right.

---------- Original Message ---------- From: Senator Pat Jehlen <pat@electpatjehlen.org> Date: 02/03/2023 11:44 AM Subject: Remembering Alice Wolf

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Dear Neighbor,

We are mourning the death and celebrating the life of an extraordinary, inspiring leader, Alice Wolf.

Long before I met Alice, I heard about her courageous, progressive leadership as a Cambridge School Committee member, city councilor and mayor. She fought for many issues that were extremely controversial at the time - and won: making Cambridge a sanctuary city, making condoms available at the high school, allowing domestic partnerships in the city before equal marriage was legal, and keeping rent control (until a state-wide ballot question ended it). After her election to the House, one of her most significant victories was in helping protect equal marriage.

I was very fortunate to serve with Alice for four years as co-chairs of the Committee on Elder Affairs. We were particularly proud to pass her very important bill regulating nursing home dementia care units, as well as the Silver Alert program. We also worked to stabilize the Adult Day Health Program. The photo is of the Dementia Care Units bill signing with Gov. Patrick.

One of her major achievements, after years of persistent work, https://electpatjehlen.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1afb18c1b75b287a2a3... was the passage of Chapter 222, https://electpatjehlen.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=1afb18c1b75b287a2a3... which made school discipline fairer, reduced the number and length of school exclusions, and ensured that students continued to make progress during exclusions. Alice continued that important work after retiring from the legislature, as a senior advisor at Mass. Advocates for Children.

Alice and I also worked together for many years on the Equal Pay Act, which reduced the wage gap for women and people of color, as I will write about in my next newsletter. The photo is of us at the bill signing with Dorothy Simonelli, one of the Everett cafeteria workers whose unsuccessful lawsuit demanding equal pay with custodians got Alice and me to file our bill.

If Alice and her family, like thousands of Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe, had been turned away, it would have been an incredible loss. Shaped by that experience, she led many hard fights for people with less access to power. Her purpose and influence live on in so many people she mentored and inspired to carry on those fights.

This poem has been on my mind since learning of Alice's death:

When Great Trees Fall

 by Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
 rocks on distant hills shudder,
 lions hunker down
 in tall grasses,
 and even elephants
 lumber after safety.



When great trees fall
 in forests,
 small things recoil into silence,
 their senses
 eroded beyond fear.



When great souls die,
 the air around us becomes
 light, rare, sterile.
 We breathe, briefly. Our eyes, briefly,
 see with
 a hurtful clarity.
 Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
 examines,
 gnaws on kind words
 unsaid,
 promised walks
 never taken.


Great souls die and
 our reality, bound to
 them, takes leave of us.
 Our souls,
 dependent upon their
 nurture,
 now shrink, wizened.
 Our minds, formed
 and informed by their
 radiance,
fall away.
 We are not so much maddened
 as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
 caves.



And when great souls die,
 after a period peace blooms,
 slowly and always
 irregularly. Spaces fill
 with a kind of
 soothing electric vibration.
 Our senses, restored, never
 to be the same, whisper to us.
 They existed. They existed.
 We can be. Be and be
 better. For they existed.

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