Creative Lady E-Book

Mark Tochen

• Herausgeber: Free Spirit
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Creative Lady is a book about Helen Tochen, a lady of many talents who has never talked about those talents.  It is time for me, as her loving husband, to tell her story.  A dear friend, who was at our wedding over fifty years ago, commented, Helen is finally getting her due. This book is a biography, a chronicle, a lyric in a life that is a beautiful song.  Helen has lived a full life as a physician, as a loving daughter, mom, and wife, and as a creative lady.  I wish to honor her and to share my marvel at the rich inner life that is the source of her creativity.  She is full of resolutions to achieve, of wishes to create!  At age nine, Helen knew she would become a physician—and she made it happen, graduating with honors from medical school. At age 12, she was studying piano at the family home in Hong Kong, where they had immigrated from Tientsin, China. She would later win honors playing piano in a classical music competition playing a difficult piece with elan.  At age 15, she studied painting with a Chinese master; now in her senior years, she is painting abstract art pieces of beauty.  Free Spirit and Poets Choice publisher and founder Akshay Sonthalia commented on Helen’s goals and dreams while still a young girl, such clarity of vision and focus in life is rare to come by. As a pediatrician retired for twenty-five years,  she has been approached while shopping by smiling family members of old patients.  One lady greeted her, saying, Hello, Dr. Tochen, you took care of my little girl and she loves you!  She will be so excited to hear I ran into you.  As a mom, she was always loving, always engaged with the children, but as our daughter said of her mother, if I needed support, mom could turn into fierce mom!  Why do I write now?  My desire to write about my wife crystallized when she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s eight years ago.  I must chronicle the great losses in her impactful life.  This lady deserves to be seen, she deserves to be heard, she deserves to be honored. People should say with love, I see her.

Leseprobe

Creative Lady

The Artistry of Helen Tochen

Free Spirit®

Mark Tochen

Publisher Page

All Rights Reserved.

Published By

Free Spirit®

Poets Choice and Free Spirit LLC

1216 Broadway Floor 2 PMB 1010 - New York NY 10001 - USA

www.freespiritpublisher.com

Phone: [phone] (Primary) [phone] (Fax)

1stEdition February 2025

Book & Cover Designed By Laura Antonioli, England

Cover Art By Helen Tochen

Edited By Daniel Rosario

Printed In India

ISBN: 978-9-36-617901-8

BCID: 719-17481610

Use it here - www.bookcrossing.com

About this book:

The views and opinions expressed in this collection of stories are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Free Spirit®. Any content provided by our authors are of their opinion and are not intended to malign any religion, ethnic group, club, organization, company, individual or anyone or anything.

Not suitable for children. Use of foul language.

Reading and editing Creative Ladywas such a pleasure. Although I do not know you or Helen, your touching tribute enabled me to appreciate Helen’s many talents, and I’m sure your readers will have the same experience.

Dan Rosario

Free Spirit Editor for Creative Lady

Creative Ladyis an impressive multi-media and multi-discipline tribute to and commemoration of Dr. Helen Tochen’s so rich and productive life as a physician, wife, and mother. Her other diverse accomplishments are on display here as well, including calligraphy, quilt-making, and flower arranging! Her husband, Dr. Mark Tochen, assembling this collection not only captures his deeply appreciative sense of his wife’s life—and their lives together—but it also allows him to express his own creative energies as a poet documenting and sharing his wife’s Alzheimer’s journey. But if this collection is a wonderful reprise of the lives they have lived pre and especially post-Alzheimer’s, it also has a lot to offer people in a similar situation, as Mark demonstrates how “art therapy clearly works for [his] wife as she selects her paints, humming.” For so many seniors suffering from Alzheimer’s and other dementias, as well as for their devoted but stressed caregivers, the fact that “studying art has liberated the spirit of dearest Helen” can offer a creative therapy as well as an avenue of hope. In doing so, Creative Ladyspeaks straight to the heart of the reader.

Eugene Stelzig, Conesus, NY

My brother-in-law, Dr. Mark Tochen, is a pediatrician dedicated to helping children and a family man dedicated to his wife, children, and grandson. His compassion is now focused on his wife who is also my sister, Dr. Helen Tochen. Helen is battling Alzheimer’s disease and Mark is her sole caregiver. The love they share is truly inspiring and is reflected in this book of prose, poetry, and pictures, telling the story of Helen’s many creative endeavors all her life, even during Alzheimer’s.

Diana Mann, Los Altos, CA

Table of Contents

The Way We Were1

Remember When22

Music29

Calligraphy31

Quilt-Making34

Ikebana Years37

Bon Mots48

Making Greeting Cards 106

Coda123

Previous Works of Mark Tochen132

Previously Published In134

Preface

Creative Lady celebrates the creative talents of my wife, Helen Tochen, through the multimedia and multi-disciplinary use of prose, poetry, photographs, and paintings. The Australians might call this book a shout-out, a public expression of praise for admirable work. This quiet lady has never spoken of the many accomplishments in her professional life, family life, or creative life. Since her professional life and family life were more readily observable than the rich inner life of her creative self, I will showcase Helen’s achievements so that readers can better appreciate her talents.

Eight years ago, Helen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. All who love her grieve with us. As I wrote in my previous book about Helen and loss, Tides of Change, most people do not understand how Alzheimer’s progresses. As my wife’s champion and spokesman, I stated in the preface to that book, People with Alzheimer’s deserve to be seen, they deserve to be heard, they deserve to be honored.

Helen has multifaceted talents and a glowing inner beauty. Her talents, which help define her, are woven with and held together by love. Since she never spoke about her many accomplishments and is now unable to share them, I, as her loving husband, will do so. This book is written to give Helen Tochen her due and to honor her life and accomplishments. Please enjoy reading Creative Lady.

1

The Way We Were

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Helen Tochen’s early years were marked by two major moves of her family. She was born in Tianjin, Hubei Province, in northern China around the onset of World War II; the family later moved to Hong Kong to escape the advancing Chinese communist armies. In Hong Kong, she attended primary and secondary school. Early creative endeavors included music—piano lessons and voice as a member of her high school choir. Helen came to the United States for college and has lived in the U.S. ever since. She won awards in college and graduated from medical school with honors. She held medical licensure in six different states, mirroring all the places where she has lived and practiced medicine. In addition to publishing articles in medical journals, she served as a faculty member at a medical school’s Department of Pediatrics, a faculty member at a school of nursing, a blood bank specialist running an American Red Cross plasmapheresis program, and a pediatrician practicing medicine in four states. Twenty-five years after her retirement, we still run into families of Dr. Helen Tochen’s former pediatric patients, who greet her cheerfully in malls and stores with big smiles.

Helen has unstintingly supported me during the fifty-four years of our marriage. As a mother, she gave our children the gifts of her love, her wisdom, her support, and the ferocity of a mom protecting her children’s development and well-being. She is a loving spouse, mother, grandmother, sister, and friend who understands people in their spoken and unspoken selves. She is My Lady of Perfect Pitch, because she understands the inner spirit of others. Helen is gifted in the creative arts—piano and voice, calligraphy, ikebana, quilt-making, the art of Bon Mot, and, most recently, beautiful abstract art.

3 | Helen Tochen & Mark Tochen

A Woman of Many Parts

Helen Tochen’s creativity has always been inherent and remains so to this day. Creativity is as much a part of her as her professional life or her family life, yet not as well known or recognized. I am proud of all her abilities. I wroteCreative Lady partly to describe Helen’s achievements and wide interests and partly to enlighten the reader about the scope of her talents and the enormity of the losses to herself caused by Alzheimer’s. I will first discuss the non-creative aspects of Helen’s life in two broad areas—her working life as a physician and her family life, beginning with a review of her education and work life.

Helen the Scholar

Helen was a brilliant student, first as a schoolgirl in Tianjin, China, and then in Hong Kong. She came to the United States at age 18 for higher education, attending The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, while winning honors as a chemistry major. She has wonderful friends from her college days, and one of them told me that Helen was always a welcome guest in the homes of her friends. Their parents enjoyed hosting this demure young woman. At Stanford University School of Medicine, she was a gifted, hardworking medical student who graduated with special honors as the best student in pediatrics, an honor that thrilled her father and sister Diana, who sat in the audience. As Helen walked across the podium, her father was ecstatic, over the moon with pride! He had followed his daughter’s academic trail from elementary school in Tianjin to medical school in

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Palo Alto, and he was present to cheer her on at each academic milestone.

Helen the Pediatrician,the Hematologist, the Blood-Bank Specialist

Helen received her pediatric training at Bronx Municipal Hospital, affiliated with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. A friend and fellow pediatric resident told me about an incident that occurred early in Helen’s residency. Once, while on call, she attended the delivery of a woman with a high-risk pregnancy, and the baby was born not breathing. Helen rushed to establish an airway, but some officious obstetric residents got in her way, not believing that the quiet new resident, a young woman who was not a bossy surgical type, could manage the resuscitation. She could hardly get to the baby’s side! A Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology attending the delivery observed this outrageous behavior and barked at the obstetric residents, “Get out of the way and let that doctor work!” Helen immediately placed the lifesaving endotracheal tube in the baby’s airway and commenced resuscitation. Soon, the baby was breathing normally and responsive to stimuli. The baby was transferred to the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit and did well. Dr. Helen saved that baby’s life with her skills.

After her pediatric residency, Helen did a two-year hematology fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine’s program at the Boston City Hospital, where we