After being employed in several fields such as banking, social security, and stock broking, Elaine finally found her passion—in words. “I earned much more money working in finance,” she claims, “but I was bored.” She decided to pursue her post-graduate education in English just for fun, but soon found that she loved teaching the power of words to students. “Students are empowered when they begin to see the potential of language. Teaching is an awesome job.”

Words can help people to deal with grief and Elaine’s doctoral dissertation examined the peculiar modern need for elegies. This poetic form continues to provide consolation for the bereaved, along with other new cultural forms of mourning such as the Vietnam Veterans memorial, the Holocaust Museum, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. We have, of course, seen the ultimate example of how the bereaved feel an urge to construct memorials to their dead in the poignant symbols of life that have been carefully laid down at Ground Zero. The children’s toys and the photos laid to rest in the sepulcher that was the World Trade Center articulate the life that passed so quickly. We may no longer wear the symbolic mourning clothes of the Victorians, but the bereaved still have a need to commemorate the dead in one way or another.

Elaine herself had a close brush with death in 1974 when she was a patient of Dr. Harold Shipman, a British serial killer whose total number of victims is probably around 400. As the only surviving victim, she is a witness in the current Public Inquiry into how a physician could get away with so many killings. Elaine is presumed to be his first victim, the one on whom he experimented with the dosage of morphine required to kill. Her articles about Dr. Death can be found in the London Times as well as many other European newspapers and magazines, and she has appeared on several television and radio shows, including Good Morning America. Her story appears in the anthology Breathing the Same Air.

Maybe because she is very much aware of the transience of life, Elaine has a zest for living and for learning:

“I have an insatiable curiosity about everything, and I love to write. Writing helps me to make sense of the world, to bring some form to the chaos. I have a compulsion to know. I like the challenge of researching and the excitement that comes when I can present knowledge in a new way. I love to be creative when assembling facts to make a point and to discover new relationships in existing knowledge. In this way, my writing and my teaching are similar skills and they feed each other.”

Her favorite quotation is from Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot:

 “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.”

Elaine says she tries to make her own light shine brightly, and her best moments are when students reflect that light back from their eyes.