Date Posted:Tue, August 05 2003, 14:01:01 Author: Margaret Subject: Re: Added two images In reply to:
Todd
's message, "Re: Added two images" on Tue, August 05 2003, 1:45:05
In Memoriam:
ELISABETH TARG
Psychiatrist, Researcher,
Spirituality & Health Columnist
1961 - 2002
by Stephen Kiesling
The world lost someone truly wonderful on Friday, July 19th, when my dear friend and Spirituality & Health columnist Elisabeth Targ died peacefully in the arms of her new husband and among friends and family at the house her parents built at the Hayfields in Portola Valley, California. Elisabeth was only forty and still in the early stages of an extraordinary career. She was also extraordinarily kind, compassionate, brilliant, and beautiful. In her gentle way, she was fully engaged in improving all of our lives.
For me the phone call about her brain cancer came just a few weeks after the invitation to her wedding. The wedding to Marc Cummings on May 4 would go on, of course, a beautiful and loving gathering on the waterfront in Saucilito. But her S&H column would have to wait. "People would put too much weight on anything I write now," she said later. Then she smiled, and gave a small shrug. "This is an extremely rare cancer — only 7,000 cases a year — and it happens to be the one I was studying."
Her words, a typical understatement, reminded me of how she financed her Stanford education. To provide evidence for the most hard-headed skeptics that pre-cognition is possible, she set up an experiment to predict the market in silver futures. It worked spectacularly, and I suspect she could have continued with it to become very rich. But she understood even then that what's most important in life are your intentions. She saw the best in everyone, and her commitment was always to build community and to help people expand their awareness and heal.
I grew up with Elisabeth. The Targs lived down the street from us in Palo Alto. Her father, Russell, is legally blind, a giant of a man who was then building the first lasers. Her mom, Joan, was raising Elisabeth, and Alexander, and Nicolas; meanwhile, she was conspiring with my mom to create an "intentional community" with organic gardens and windmill power. Joan's brother, the chess player Bobby Fischer, would show up every so often, and it wasn't a surprise to learn later that Joan taught Bobby to play.
The Targs had the first computer I ever saw, and they brought it over to share. They got connected to the ARPANET, which thirty years later became the Internet. They also shared with us the electronic ESP machine that Russell helped to design and build. A child could play with the ESP machine and get better at predicting which picture would randomly come up next. When Martin Gardner of the Scientific American was confronted with the data, all he could say was that it couldn't be true. Gardner carried with him the absolute certainty of someone who can see that the world is flat and feels compelled to save potential explorers from falling off.
Elisabeth's world was never flat. She grew up among people who could see places thousands of miles away and could look forward and backward in time. A lot of these people gathered in our living room in Los Altos for the monthly meeting of the Parapsychology Research Group. Looking back I suppose there were some real kooks among them: wishful thinkers, the self-deceived, and perhaps even con artists. Through it all, Elisabeth was there. She remained both open minded and open hearted, while diligently and thoroughly trying to figure out what is probably real from what is probably not. Later, as a psychiatrist, she would become a great protector of those who had stepped off or fallen off the solid ground that most of us cling to. Her orbit was big enough for everyone.
Elisabeth's research credentials were impeccable. At 13 she started working in Karl Pribram's renowned brain lab at Stanford. She returned to Stanford for her undergraduate degree and continued for her medical degree because, as she said, "to ask really good questions about the brain and mind, you need to know how the body works." From Stanford she went to the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA, where she began working with AIDS patients, finding that group therapy was as useful as Prozac for fighting depression.
The work for which Elisabeth would become famous began in San Francisco at the California Pacific Medical Center, where she and her colleagues began to carefully quantify the healing effects of prayer and intention with AIDS patients. Her data, published in the Western Journal of Medicine, has set a new standard for scientific rigor and thoroughness that will be carried forward by new centers funded by the National Institute of Health.
When I think of Elisabeth, however, I don't think of the rigor of her fine work or her courage and unassailable integrity as a researcher. What I remember is the beauty of her smile, the gentleness of her eyes, and the kindness she radiated to all those around her. Perhaps what strikes me most right now is the gratitude I remember in the voices of her cancer patients. Elisabeth understood that each of us has the power to heal through our intentions. She lived that understanding, bringing insight and joy even to those who were dying. One thing I know for sure is that all of us who are now saddened by her loss have also been blessed by her loving intention.
