I don’t know whether these folks think of themselves as followers of Jesus, but if you ask me, their actions pass the What-Would-Jesus-Do test:
Nearly a year after a woman was electrocuted while walking her dogs on a wet East Village street, Consolidated Edison has agreed to pay her family more than $6.2 million and to set up a $1 million scholarship fund in her name at Columbia University, where she was a doctoral student.
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It was the Lane family’s idea that a settlement include an education aspect, and Ms. Lane’s father, Roger M. Lane, said yesterday by telephone from his home in Texas that the settlement "will lead to a great way to memorialize my daughter through the scholarship at Columbia."
"A settlement like this is never easy to achieve, but I think the parties to the settlement acted in a first-class manner and the end result is something quite unusual," he said.
The Lane family will use part of the money to create the Jodie S. Lane Public Safety Foundation, which will pursue efforts to improve public safety in New York, Mr. Lane said.
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The fund will bear her name and carry her memory, and that is what is important to her family and her former doctoral adviser, Barry A. Farber. Ms. Lane was writing a book for children who suffer from attention deficit disorder, Mr. Farber said, and the fund will help ensure that the research she was doing will continue.
"I’m struck and gratified by the generosity of the family," said Mr. Farber, a professor of clinical psychology at Teachers College. "It’s a wonderful way of remembering her, and it’s so consistent with who she was and what she would have wanted."
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Perhaps it was Mr. Farber who put it most succinctly.
"It’s a remarkable family – they’ve taken their grief and found a way of transforming it into meaning," he said
(From Ian Urbina & Sabrina Tavernise, Utility Will Pay $7.2 Million in Electrocution, NY Times, Nov. 24, 2002.)
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