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Just Enough: Collected Writings of an Old Gangster

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As I approach my later years, I am constantly amazed at the wisdom around me from my "peers", and find my self remarking, "what a shame we haven't appreciated these "pearls" when we were younger". I stop myself and say - Better Now, than then, for the Now is the the true time we can listen. So is Nancy Jaicks Alexander's book. It's a small collection of such a Large amount of wisdom and insight, that many re-readings is a must and you "youngins" will have to wait until you are ready!!! Thank You for sharing, Nancy ... Kathe Haskell

Nancy Jaicks Alexander (1933 - ) is one of the pioneers of the hospice movement. She's been active in the death and dying movement about as long as it has existed in its modern form. Now 77, she retired in 2010. Her new book, Just Enough: Collected Writings of an Old Gangster, is a short memoir written mainly for her own family and personal friends. Nancy is a dear friend of mine, and I helped her develop some of her private writings into book form.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross asked Nancy to begin training as a member of her international teaching and workshop staff in 1982. Nancy became one of Elisabeth's "Life, Death and Transition" workshop facilitators in 1985 and continued working on that staff through 1993. The workshops were discontinued in 1994. Unfortunately, none of the stories talk about her time with Kübler-Ross.

The book does cover the development of the first prison hospice in the world. In 1991 Nancy and her husband, Robert Evans Alexander, were among the co-founders of a hospice service inside the walls of the California Medical Facility (CMF), a cavernous penitentiary for men in Vacaville, California. The hospice project was an outgrowth of a support group that Nancy facilitated there for seven years for inmates with AIDS. Twenty-five years ago, at the beginning of the AIDS crisis, there were just twelve inmates who were treated like pariahs because they were carriers of the virus. Today, over 250 inmates are HIV-positive at that facility.

Robert died in 1992 and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation dedicated the hospice to him in 1993. Nancy continued to visit the prison regularly to support inmate hospice volunteers. She retired in 2010 after twenty-five years of community service at the prison. The subtitle "Collected Writings of an Old Gangster" comes from a remark made by one of the prisoners that "Anyone who has done twenty-five years time is an 'OG' (Old Gangster)." She describes the prison as "my sangha, my spiritual home".

Looks can be deceiving. Nancy looks and usually acts like a refined, white-haired matriarch with a Patrician bearing. But nothing is off-limits for her conversations, and her stories don't pull any punches. She can chat with an angry inmate about the indignities of cavity searches as easily as she can speak at a professional forum. It seems you can talk with Nancy about pretty much anything. She is a good writer, and her stories are fun to read.