Author and a doctor Irma Kerppola-Sirola died after a long illness at the Koskela Senior Center in Helsinki on December 18, 2021. He was 91 years old, born in Helsinki on March 9, 1930.
Her father was William Kerppola, a respected physician and professor of internal medicine, and Irja Kerppola (née Herlin) was a mother.
Kerppola-Sirola lived in Helsinki all her life. He spent his childhood summers at Kerppola Manor in Kangasala and in Kirkkonummi in Thorsvik. He started the family with Kari Sirola, a pediatric surgeon at the age of 25, and had two children.
By profession Kerppola-Sirola was an internal medicine specialist and specialized in the care of the elderly. He had a long career at HUS and at the Koskela Hospital. For the doctor who worked in hospice care, death was a natural part of the life cycle, and he felt it was important to protect its dignity.
Kerppola-Sirola also dealt with death uncomplicatedly in her literary production. An article he originally wrote in the Medical Journal in 1974, translated into several languages The death of an old professor is his text that has received the most attention.
In it, he tells of his seriously ill father, William Kerppola, who wanted and was allowed to die without examination, curative treatment or an accurate diagnosis.
My grandmother was a very ascetic, thoughtful, ecologically aware thinker and pacifist. He was active in the Defenders of Peace and the Green League for the Protection of Life, and during his life he wrote numerous articles and essays, e.g. To Helsingin Sanomat.
Many of his texts were united by a desire to understand and describe nature as well as man, in their own natural state.
Irma’s uncompromising thinking eventually summed up in seven books: The boys swim in the ships (1968), My profession is a doctor (1971), A verse book for Martti Mikael (1975), The human voice (1978), Teerunoja (1980), Letters to R. (1981) and Mathematics of roses (1985).
Cerebral infarction after receiving it, Irma spent the last seven years in ward care, already immersed in other distant worlds. The last few years were certainly very different from what he would have liked for himself.
He writes in an essay published in Suomen Kuvalehti in 1977 Silent patient lines in hospitals thus: “The old church prayer asks to guard against evil sudden death, but in the Chronicle Department the Visitor instinctively begins to hope for himself and his relatives just that: death by surprise, boots on his feet.”
The irony is that he slept on his own in these “silent rows of patients,” in his own former workplace. In a place where he himself had escorted hundreds of people on his last journey.
Because love is stronger than death, it is worth mentioning in the end what Irma loved the most. In her unpublished memoirs (2013), Irma writes:
“As much as I have loved men, I will never see anyone as much as my sons. Harri and Miki have been the number one people in my life. I have marked their birth with a golden star. ”
Quick Sirola
The author is Irma Kerppola-Sirola’s granddaughter.
#Memoir #Irma #KerppolaSirola
