Sometimes In Life, It Is Best To Lead With The Heart

To the editor: I was disappointed to learn the Finance Committee recommended against funding the Island Home, but then I considered they were doing their job by looking at its cost and how it would play out in the lives of Nantucket taxpayers. That is not the task given to all of us, and the Board of Selectmen wisely chose to bring the issue to Town Meeting once more.

I have long faulted science for measuring only what it can measure. As a teacher, I saw qualities in my students that promised abilities and accomplishments that did not show up on the many tests handed to them. Tests do not measure kindness, community building or leadership.

We are narrow-sighted if we measure support for Our Island Home only in dollars. It is easy to do, but it makes simple something that is more complex and gives a bleak view of the future by standing as the only information we consider.

Like you, I know people in town who visited a family member daily over years at Our Island Home. This is a gift that could not be duplicated were that family member moved to the Cape or further away.

Like you, I know people who wound up in an unfamiliar setting elsewhere with people they did not recognize who felt lonely and unaccepted. The comfort of having your loved one in a local place with other locals, of having the familiar available in terms of residents and staff must be given the value it deserves.

When I worked on the Social Service team at the hospital, I had many conversations with families who dreaded placing a loved one in Our Island Home, believing it was the worst thing that could happen to them. Later, I would hear enthusiastic accounts of the comfort and care they witnessed during their frequent visits. Our neighbors and friends undergoing surgery on the Cape or in Boston sometimes need a rehab program and return to the Island Home to recover their strength, close to family.

While the Finance Committee does its job of examining the financial costs of building a new Island Home, the rest of us have the equally important task of examining the cost of losing it and our connection to our older and more vulnerable neighbors. Sometimes in life, it is best to lead with the heart. The people in the Island Home right now were contributors to our community and deserve to remain in our town, not be dismissed from it.

I came across a quote from Iain McGilchrist, philosopher and psychiatrist, in a recent Times op-ed: "Not everything that matters is matter — and not everything that counts can be counted.”

Sincerely,

Kathy Butterworth