Two nights ago, I dashed off a text to my husband, who was likely putting our two kids to bed while I made my way to my seat in the crowded Mclaren Hall to listen to acclaimed bestselling author and notable physician Dr. Abraham Verghese speak, writing, “Sometimes I can’t believe how good our life is.” In a space of five deliriously beautiful spring days, I’ve had one of those weeks in the Flathead Valley where I can’t believe how robust, generous, and creative our community is. Between watching my students at Flathead Valley Community College perform in the hilarious “Pirates of Penzance” musical to hearing how the author and physician of international stature made his way in life through the power of stories and the opportunity of immigration, to the passage of the Kalispell public high school levy, it’s been a week for the ages. Plus, the crabapple trees are flowering, tulips are blooming, and the sunshine extends its reach later and later each day.
While the larger world beyond the boundaries of our mountains and rivers feels quite precarious thanks to President Donlad Trump’s dangerous tariff games and fantastical claims to purchase Canada and breaches of national security thanks to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s continued misuse of the group chat function, celebrating our local community’s wins feels more important than ever. It’s not as if those pressures of the economy or failures of policy, competence, and respect for the Constitution don’t impact us in the Flathead Valley – they have and they will – but in order to keep my head up and not despair that the Department of Education will dissolve or our nation will lose all our allies because of greed and malicious whimsy, I have to keep my sights on the good that happens here at home.
And this good work didn’t materialize overnight. The opportunity to listen to the author “Cutting for Stone” and the “The Covenant of Water” is the result of community leaders and benefactors building the Wachholz Center on FVCC’s campus, fulfilling a decades long dream to provide such cultural, artistic, and musical opportunities that rival any major city. Students who can act, sing, tap dance, and run the tech for a musical don’t simply show up at rehearsal without any prior chorale or acting training. This week’s landslide victory to support the new high school levy wasn’t without its tireless advocates and volunteers, many of whom knocked on doors, wrote letters to editors, and placed signs in their yards to solicit support for this critical funding.
Dr. Verghese spoke to nearly 600 people on Monday night about his life’s story and he certainly held command on stage in his gentle and sincere tones about the confluence of medicine and stories in his remarkable life. Prompted by an audience member during the Q&A session, he talked about his important distinction between being healed and cured. Although his stance between the focus on curing a patient of a disease over the more spiritual and whole patient centered approach of healing stems from his long work in medicine, this difference could apply to our current situation locally and globally. Often, we’re all driven toward a cure, especially if it’s a quick one. Healing, which can also take place on a community-wide level occurs when we invested for the long term, like with public school funding. We work together to raise money for community centers and libraries, knowing that these long term, sometimes not quite so obvious investments mean we’ll raise the next doctor who will reframe medicine to look once again at the patient and not the electronic medical record system, reminding patients and physicians alike about the power of connection.
The good we have here in the Flathead should be contagious. Let’s put that in the group chat.