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Jay Monroe Jensen, M.D.
"This parent wanted a great deal for his children."
A Eulogy:
Jay Arthur Jensen, M.D.*
December 12, 1995
There are an appointed number of days in the lives of men. We know not why. For Jay Monroe Jensen, days of great promise and achievement, days of service to his family and his community, days of travel and discovery are over. He is gone. We have come to say good bye.
Jay Monroe Jensen would have liked to have seen the so many family members assembled here today, particularly the children. He would have smiled when the solemn formality of this proceeding was interrupted by the cry or unplanned participation of a child. Because for him, life was really about family, about the transition of life from one generation to another. It had great meaning for him and does for all of us.
His own existence was, at its beginning, most precarious. Arthur Jensen and Violet Monroe had tried for many years to have a child. They had been unsuccessful. Dad's arrival, on his parent's 14th wedding anniversary, in the 35th year of his mother's life, must have been met with equal measures of joy and reserved skepticism. A premature child, delivered at home, smaller than his father's hand, incubated in the family's wood burning stove, might not have been given much of a chance to survive. But live he did, and live he shall.
The hopes and dreams of the pioneer families, nourished by the red soil of the Sevier Valley, produced a child who survived his uncertain beginnings and grew. His mother, a school teacher, taught him rhymes and hoped he would grow into an educated and cultivated man. His father, a cattle rancher who had known considerable hardship as a child, had a different idea of success. So Dad grew into an unusually talented child who could ride a horse, rope a calf, build a fence, hit a ball, and from memory, recite long passages of poetry. He went on to surprise and delight his family and friends by studying at some of the most prominent universities in the world. There, as he had done first in the schools of Sevier County, he played with ideas as he had played music, looking at themes from different scales, running them up and down, turning them, twisting them and from the process, synthesizing his own original formulations. It was a process he would use to think about politics, religion, history, and science for the rest of his life.
To his good fortune, he met and married Bebe Daniels. In her, he found a kindred spirit and loving companion. With her, he raised and educated 7 children. Her love and support of him and his love and support of her created the family which defined our lives. They would have celebrated 49 years of marriage this June. In 1947, though, as my father prepared to pursue medical studies in Chicago, no one knew how fate would treat this young couple.
At the University of Chicago, he admired the men who could use their minds to understand human disease and use their hands to treat it. The combination of great mental processes and great physical competence captured his understanding of himself: He became a surgeon. There is a time in the management of disease to gather facts, there is a time to understand them, there is a time to predict nature's course, and there is a time to do something about it. There is a time to talk and a time to move. Jay Monroe Jensen was a man of intellect and a man of action. If one man had to stand between a sick human being and death, he wanted to be the man. With his powers of mind and of body, there was no one better suited to the task.
He learned the ancient and honorable craft of surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, the oldest such institution in the United States. There he attended to the sick, learned the principles of medicine, as all must do, patient by patient, problem by problem, day by day by night. When he emerged, he was as well trained and as well skilled as any surgeon of his generation, or any other.
Where would he practice these skills, where would he exercise these vital powers? He went home. He went home to the valleys and the people of this state. Here, he cared for relatives and friends and members of this community and he did so with an understanding and sensitivity of a son of the pioneers.
As a father, he was a smart, handsome, funny, athletic man who was intermittently critical but was always firmly on your side. He exuded so much self confidence and charm that as a child I wanted to stand close to him in the vain hope that some of that magic would spill over on me. Even as he became weak and infirm, he continued to occupy a large place in my emotional landscape. A parent has that power: they are the ones who encourage and reward us, and criticize and admonish us. While almost everyone else in life wants something from us, a parent wants something for us. This parent wanted a great deal for his children.
He remained true to his roots. He grew up on a ranch in Sevier County and when he inherited the ranch, he did not sell it and invest the proceeds. Rather, he used it as a way to share some of the experiences of his childhood with his children. We were the fortunate beneficiaries of that decision. I remember summer afternoons when we would saddle up the horses and ride up through the hot canyons above Elsinore. By evening, we would have reached the grassy meadows on top of the mountain. There, as the light began to disappear, he would tell us stories about making the ride with his father. We would run the horses a little while when we got to the top, but it seemed like we always got to the cabin only by the light of the stars.
Other times, we would fish in Clear Creek Canyon. His favorite time to fish was in the Fall, when the water was low and the trees had yellow leaves. He taught us how to fish, how to look for the dark spots in the water, and float in the bait, just so. After getting us started on the creek, he might fish for a time, or he would take out a book and study the works of Sophocles, Marcus Aurelius, William Butler Yeats, or Karl Popper. He read these works not because he was going to be tested on them, but because he was simply interested. This natural curiosity was not limited to literature: he was constantly wandering into new ideas, new interests, new places. To know him was to understand he loved to travel.
When we were children, he would take us to the planetarium where we would sit in reclining chairs and learn about the motion of the stars. Afterward, he would stand in the bookstore and read books with equations written on their covers.
Geologic history was also of great interest to him. Near the town of Elsinore lies an interesting geological formation. From the road, a rider can see that an old, striated mountain range directly abuts a geologically new, volcanic range. I have always suspected that some of his interest in geology may have originated from that physical contrast. It was with great energy and enthusiasm that we would travel to the Grand Canyon where he would sit and look at the layers of the earth's crust exposed by the slow, but continuous knife of the Colorado River. He would squint his eyes as he looked over the canyon and tried to comprehend the two billion years of natural history there on display.
His wanderings were thus physical and intellectual. He led us through the ancient temples of Greece and Rome. We walked through the great museums of Florence, Paris, and London and over the fields of Runnymeade. Together, we studied the mysterious circular monuments at Stonehenge. And I will never forget spending a day with him at Gettysburg. There, with great reverence, we walked over the hallowed ground of the Civil War and talked of the importance of freedom and fairness, and of the sanctity of Union.
I remember him hitting a baseball in the Spring, and throwing a football in the Fall. And I remember him taking pictures of my sisters the whole year through. It was as if in the act of photography, he wanted to freeze time, hoping a moment with his wife or his children would never end.
Some may have viewed Jay Monroe Jensen as not fundamentally much of a religious man. It may have been that his quality of questioning paradigms and dogma was more favorably received in universities than in churches. But I would argue that he was religious. Whatever he lacked in faith, he made up in works. And I would argue that he had a deep and abiding faith that life had meaning, and that decisions had consequences. But, true to his nature, he may have had a little different twist on the details.
I remember as a child hearing him remark that my brother Niels Fredrick was more like his father than coincidence would allow. When Fred was particularly difficult and my father was almost out of patience, he would only shake his head, mention his own father, and say the similarity was "spooky."
It was with both pride and interest that Jay Monroe Jensen discovered, while doing his genealogy in Scotland, that his mother's family, the Monros, had made considerable contributions to anatomy and surgery since the 17th century. Furthermore, the involvement of the Monro family was not limited to one or two individuals, but involved many surgeons and anatomists over several generations. "You have to admit," he would comment, "it's a little spooky."
Historically, religious thought has held that after this life, man goes to heaven or to hell. There we will see each other again. But I think Dad suspected the authorities always had things slightly backwards. He thought that within broad bounds, religions passed on rules of behavior which had been tested by the centuries of human experience. He believed that behavior was rewarded favorably or unfavorably in this life. Some people live lives which leave them content, satisfied with the consequences of their choices. And others? He felt confident that for those who violate the dictums of commonly held morality, that there was plenty of hell right here on earth.
It is an interesting point, heaven and hell as phenomena of the living rather than ones exclusively of the dead. An idea that he would have enjoyed turning, and twisting, considering, and debating, and finally trying out on objecting relatives or friends.
Of course, thinking about heaven and hell for the living doesn't exclude such places for the dead. For those of us with a more skeptical nature, such an idea makes these concepts all the more believable.
I believe. I believe, as Dad did, that one's life goes on in the form of one's children. So I believe we will see him again. We will see him in our children, and in our grandchildren, and in ourselves. We will see him when we ride on cool summer nights in the mountains, and when we fish in clear creeks among the yellow trees in the fall. We will see him at the Grand Canyon, and at Runnymeade, and at Gettysburg. And we'll hear his voice, too. He will encourage us when we are discouraged, he will advise us when we are confused, and he will congratulate us when we have made him proud. And if we waste our lives, if we abandon our children, if we seek the vanities of life, believe me, we'll hear from him.
If it exists no where else, heaven certainly exists in the minds and memories of the survivors. There, the dead are finally judged. Are there strata, are there kingdoms in such heavens? Maybe there are. If there are, let me say that in my mind, no one will occupy higher ground, or command a better view, or be received with greater love than the man who lies before us today. Tomorrow, we will return him to the soil of the Sevier Valley, to a place where an old striated mountain abuts the volcanic ash of a new one. There he will rest. It is my prayer that, in time, he will be released from the bounds of the earth and be allowed to continue his wanderings among the suns and moons and stars in the heavens that lie beyond. Amen.
Jay Arthur Jensen, M.D.
