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PART ONE: Christmas Day 1984

CHAPTER ONE

There are certain days in your life that you will remember forever. I was thirteen years old in 1963 attending elementary school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania when the principals voice suddenly came over the intercom telling everyone that President Kennedy had been assassinated. School was let out early and all of my fellow students quietly and somberly went home. Like so many other Americans I remember sitting with my parents that entire weekend transfixed watching the events unfold on television. I remembered the caisson that bore the casket, the riderless horse, and the salute from the President’s young son, John. At that time my folks had an old black and white t.v. with about a dozen or more tubes inside, that my dad, whenever it would stop working would kick, and somehow, miraculously, the t.v. would then start working again. Most everyone had a black and white television in those days and the anchorman we followed most was Walter Cronkite. I remember sitting in the sun parlor of our home with my parents watching the civil rights march in 1963 on television and listening to Dr. Martin Luther King deliver his stirring “I Have a Dream” speech. I remember working in my office on September 11, 2001 when I received a phone call from my mother telling me to turn on the television, that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and I watched, with horror, along with millions of others, as the second plane suddenly crashed into the World Trade Center. I remember going to lunch that day at a very large restaurant full of people. The only sound you could hear in this normally very noisy restaurant was the small television the owner had put on the counter where you paid your bill, which was tuned in to the live coverage of the days horrible events, and I sat with dozens and dozens of other patrons eating silently in a stunned, surreal setting. It was a day and time when you knew that whatever innocence we felt as a nation was now gone forever.

When I was growing up in the 1950’s Americans had faith in their government and trusted their government to do the right thing. After the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Report polls showed a significant number of people didn’t believe their own government. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, escalated the war in Vietnam into an seemingly endless conflict that resulted in the loss of fifty-five thousand soldiers, and college campuses all across the country erupted in protests and several ROTC offices were burned down. Some men burned their draft cards and some moved to Canada. Johnson was followed by Nixon, and Watergate seemed to be the exclamation point in the American public’s increasing distrust of their own government.

Growing up in the 1950’s and working for so called “blue chip” companies many Americans had the “cradle to grave” belief that once you started working for a company you would retire with that company and your pension and retirement from a lifetime of hard work would be your reward. The seventies and eighties and beyond saw these same blue chip companies cutting payroll, laying off hundreds of thousands of workers, with some companies going belly up with no money in reserves to pay their workers pensions. The America I woke up to on Christmas morning 1984 was far, far different than the America I was born into in 1950, and distrust of government would increase, distrust of business would multiply, and the third tier, faith, would later be shattered by the thousands of reported cases of abuse of young boys by priests from the Catholic Church. Government, business, and faith were the three pillars you could count on when I was born, but not any longer and things would, in the coming years, only get worse.

On Christmas day, December 25, 1984, in Burtonsville, Maryland, a suburb in the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area where I was living, after calling friends to wish them a Merry Christmas, I decided to have an early lunch and was preparing my lunch when the telephone rang and I heard the voice of my parents. I used to speak with my folks, who lived in my hometown of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, every Friday evening. I had moved from Philly to the Washington, D.C. area in June of 1978 about a year after my divorce was finalized. I felt stifled and held back in Philly and felt it was part of my past and that it held no future and no hope for me. I was hurting from my divorce and badly needed a change. Some folks leave their hometowns for better job opportunities, some for college and wind up settling elsewhere, some get married and leave, but for me leaving was to break from the past, the hurt and bitterness, and the sense that I would never find happiness and fulfillment if I remained.

In early December of 1984 on one of the Friday evenings when my folks called me my dad said he felt weak and was going to the doctor to have some tests. The following Friday my dad told me the doctor thought he had anemia and prescribed some medication to help manage it. The very next Friday, when I spoke with my mom and dad, my dad told me “they want me to have a bone marrow test.” I realized then that it was not anemia that my father had and that it was something far more serious. On Christmas day, 1984, at 11:30AM, everything in my life (and my parents lives) changed forever. The day before, four days before their forty-third wedding anniversary, the doctor informed my parents, in their visit to his office, the results of the bone marrow test.

CHAPTER TWO

I was very blessed to have the parents I did. You don’t get to choose your parents and sometimes you really don’t appreciate them until after you are an adult, living on your own, and have your own family to take care of. My parents were very, very happily married. My dad was a retired pharmacist and my mom a retired high school counselor with two masters degrees. My dad owned his own pharmacy but was not successful and had to declare bankruptcy. In the 1960’s and 1970’s there was a stigma attached to bankruptcy and my dad felt incredible shame. He worked very long hours, sometimes more than sixty per week, over the next twenty years at other pharmacies, and began paying back his debts, stressing to my sisters and to me that he would pay the smaller companies he owed back first because “they were small and needed it more.” Unlike today when people declare bankruptcy to get out of paying any debts they owe, my dad worked himself to near exhaustion every week so he could pay everyone back that he owed money to. I grew up in a home where devotion and fidelity to one’s spouse was paramount, and where devotion to one’s family was equally so. Times were rough during the early days when my dad went out of business. Every Sunday my folks would take my two sisters and I to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. It was our weekly family outing, something I used to always look forward to but something that had to end when my dad lost his business. I sometimes wonder if the reason I enjoy Chinese food so much and go to Chinese restaurants every week, and sometimes a couple of times a week, is to get back that lost part of my youth and the family dinners we once had that meant so much to me.

Other than not having family vacations or outings to local restaurants any longer my parents did everything they could to make our lives seem as normal as possible. My sisters and I never had to want for a sweater, scarf, coat, mittens or gloves to wear in the winter, and the food on our breakfast and dinner table remained the same as it always had been. Emotionally, losing his business was a very difficult thing for my dad and his lack of success made him feel as though he was a loser, but he was far from being a loser. He was a devoted and loving husband and father and a great friend to those he called his friend. My dad was an only child and more than anything else wanted a big family, and was thrilled to have three children. He was deeply in love with my mom. The sound of her voice would bring a smile to his face, and he used to refer to her as “my Bernice.” Oftentimes I would see my parents sitting on the sofa watching t.v. and holding hands. When I was a teenager and we sat around the family dinner table I accidentally used the word “damn.” Visibly quite angry my father immediately got up from his chair and came towards me. I got up from my chair and ran to the other side of the table and my father reared back to give me a wallop but my mom stepped in the middle and stopped him. My father told me “don’t you ever curse in front of your mother.” It was something I never did again, even when I was well into my fifties.

I was the youngest of three children. All three of us went to the same elementary school but my sisters were always much better behaved than I was and I often heard my mom return home from a parent teachers night after hearing glowing reports about my sisters, upset with what she heard my teachers report about me, and my mom would angrily tell me “just wait until your father gets home and I tell him!” I used to cower in fear under the covers in my bed and hoped I could pretend I was sleeping when my father came home from work and that I would not have him yell at me for misbehaving in school. My folks never used to hit me but they did yell and scream when I did something wrong. It seemed as though my two sisters could never do anything wrong and were never yelled at. We had a traditional home. Even though my mom had graduate degrees and a professional job and my parents did have an egalitarian relationship when it came time to go to college I was expected, as the male, to work and help pay for college whereas my parents paid for my sisters education. In our home I was expected to work and did everything from being a paperboy for the now defunct Philadelphia Bulletin, to working as a stockboy and sales clerk at the local pharmacy. I remember one summer when I had trouble finding work having to endure my parents anger every day for being home. I worked since I was fourteen and had a variety of different jobs. Unlike some other kids in the suburbs that I grew up with I did not have the luxury of spending the summer at the shore in Atlantic City, or visiting other countries. Either I found a summer job or else incurred the daily wrath of my parents. Looking back I’m glad my folks were as insistent as they were about my working and paying for my college education. I learned that once you work and earn your own money you have more of an appreciation for the things you purchase with your own money. While I would borrow my dad’s old car to go on dates in high school, my friends all had brand new cars their parents gave them when they reached sixteen. When I attended the University of Connecticut I had to walk across campus to pick up my dates and go out for a pizza and a movie. I was able to get my first car when I was twenty-three, a used 1973 Oldsmobile Cutlass my parents co-signed a loan for, which I paid back at the rate of $100.00 a month for twenty-four months. I treated it as though it was a Rolls Royce, taking it to the car wash every week, and feeling a sense of pride every time I looked at it. My friends may all have had cars since they were sixteen, but my first car, at the age of twenty three, was a feeling of enormous pride and happiness. My folks never had a lot of money and it always seemed that they had to struggle to make ends meet like most families. I didn’t grow up in a Jewish neighborhood and my neighborhood became mostly African American. When I was growing up racial prejudice was prevalent whether it was the separate drinking fountains and sitting in the back of the bus in the south, or like my neighborhood in Philadelphia where my parents had moved in 1950 when I was born, when after the first black family purchased a home on the block many other white families decided to move and within days “for sale” signs sprouted up all over and it seemed the white neighbors were engaged in a stampede to leave. It was insidious and was racism although northerners loved to criticize the south as being racist while the north supposedly wasn’t but it was in Boston where busses of school children were attacked when black children were bussed to white elementary schools. As Jesse Jackson once famously stated “it’s ain’t the bus, it’s us” and that was true all across the country when I was a growing up. Philadelphia didn’t have the Klan but white neighborhoods all across the city suddenly had white families moving to the suburbs once the first black families began moving into their neighborhoods.

I relished growing up in a neighborhood that was quite mixed. Northeast Philly was the area where most Jewish families resided and my peers went to schools where most of their classmates were Jewish. There was a lot of keeping up with the Joneses in those neighborhoods, but not in mine. I had many black friends in elementary and high school and the first time I went to school where whites were in the majority was when I went away to college in 1970. I attended Germantown High school which was made up of more than fifty percent black students and back in 1968 when I graduated the black and white students ate lunch together, were friends, and had each other over their homes. Despite all the reports about racial progress it was very sad to hear that in many of today’s high schools when you enter the lunch rooms you see the white kids sitting with other white kids and the black kids sitting with other black kids and rarely do you see them mixing. It seemed that we had come so far but yet still have not realized Martin Luther King’s dream of judging someone by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin. We still had and have a long way to go before we can judge our fellow man by the size of his heart rather than his skin pigmentation. I found that growing up with people who were of different races and religions helped broaden my horizons and perspectives on life. Meeting other people was paramount in my growth, and unlike those who grow up in areas where their race, religion or culture was predominant I found that when you are able to see things from a different perspective it most definitely does affect the way you view your fellow human beings. Sometimes when we don’t share the experience of getting to know people who may look or sound different than we do and who may have certain cultural differences than we have we fail to see that in the end we are all very much the same, and want the same for our lives and those we care about. Our goals are not that much different. We live, we learn, and we love, we care, we share, and we laugh and cry and in the end we have many, many more things in common that should bring us together than we have that bring us apart. I’m proud that my parents did not sell their house when the first black family moved in. The black families that moved in were not that much different than my family and the color of their skin was the main difference but the lives they led, the things they wanted for their children, and the dreams they had for their future were dreams we all shared. Later on in life thru college, graduate school, and being in the workplace I found that most people who had prejudices against Blacks and Jews never lived in neighborhoods with Blacks and Jews nor did they go to school or work with many people who were different than they were. The people they had negative stereotypes about were the people they knew very little about. It seems so simple minded and plain stupid but unfortunately that seems to be the way of the world. We dislike those we know the least about and harbor negative opinions about them. This may make many people ignorant but if so it sometimes seems that the majority of people have one thing in common they dislike those that in reality they know little or nothing about.

When I was a little boy growing up in Philly I never misbehaved, at least not by the rough standards of today, but by the standards of the 1950’s, I had my fair share of problems with a few teachers who would catch me in the act of doing something they disapproved of and make me stand outside the classroom for the entire class. One day, when I was about eight years old one of my fellow students passed me a note. I opened the note and it read “have you ever had intercourse?” I was rather naive back then, rather bookish looking with thick glasses and I kept reading the note wondering what intercourse was. I thought to myself, “well, there’s the appetizer, the main course, and the dessert, but what is intercourse?” Not wanting to appear that I did not know what my fellow classmate asked me about I decided to write back and wrote “yes, many times.” At the precise moment I reached over to hand my classmate the note my teacher suddenly appeared next to my desk, intercepted the note, and once again I was made to stand outside the classroom and missed my class. This routinely happened when I was talking in class and I always seemed to be the one who got caught. One day, when I was in the fifth grade, while all the students were taking an exam another student fired a rubberband at me. Looking up I was able to see who it was, and not to be outdone, I picked up the rubberband, but unfortunately due to my total lack of agility and physical prowess fired the rubberband but instead of hitting the student it went up in the air and landed right in front of my teacher who was sitting at her desk as we were taking the exam. She immediately looked up and saw me, but instead of making me stand outside the classroom she allowed me to finish the test and then told me not to do it again. I realized at a young age that there was simply no future in my acting up in class because I was the one who would always get caught and incur the wrath of my teacher. Beginning with the sixth grade I cleaned up my act and had good grades in behaviour from then on. I was reformed.

My teachers in elementary school all seemed to be quite old, and I guess when you’re eight or nine years old everyone seems old but the school I attended did seem to have teachers that appeared to be in their mid to late fifties. It wasn’t until the ninth grade that I had a young teacher in her twenties and I thought I must have died and made it to heaven. My favorite teacher was an African American biology teacher that I had when I was in the tenth grade at Germantown High School in Philadelphia. I did well in that class but struggled throughout elementary and high school with math. My mom was rather disappointed when I told her (after I was in my forties) that when my test scores for my math exams were so poor and I had to get my parents signature on the test that I forged her name. It wasn’t that I was afraid of being punished by my parents, but instead was that I felt ashamed and did not want to embarrass them.

After college my two sisters became very interested in Israel. My parents were not religious, and the extent of our observance growing up was to attend synagogue on Rosh Hoshanah and Yom Kippur and observe Passover for eight days. However, when it came to Israel, my family, and those of our friends, were fervent supporters. I was born in 1950, five years after the end of World War II, five years after the world learned the true extent of the Holocaust when six million Jews were murdered, of which one million were children, and two years before I was born the State of Israel was proclaimed. In those days everyone supported Israel and the miracle the Israelis created of making flowers and trees grow in the barren desert as they worked to build a country from the ashes of the Holocaust. In 1967, after the Six Day War, my eldest sister went to Israel for one year, met her future husband, and got married in 1969. They lived in America for three years, in New York, where my sister was an elementary school teacher, and then returned permanently to Israel in September of 1972. A few years later my other sister went to Israel for one year to see if she would like it, and decided to permanently reside there as well. She married in 1984, to another former Philadelphian she had known during college who had also later moved to Israel. Like so many Americans who moved to Israel my sisters were more zealous and more fervent in their support of Israel than even some Israelis were. Oftentimes when someone converts to a different religion they become far more observant and knowledgeable and even dogmatic about that religion than people who were born into it. Moving to a different country for religious and ideological reasons has the same effect. My sisters did not live in settlements but their political views regarding Israel were absolute. My oldest sister married an observant man and from the time they got married in 1969 always seemed to resent the fact that I was non-observant. My other sister married a rabbi, and with both sisters, for more than thirty years I felt like the black sheep of the family. I was not religious and had no desire to become religious, and as part of the Vietnam generation I did not adhere to the “my country right or wrong” attitude some people did. I believed that in a democracy, there is absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing or questioning your own government. It does not make you less of a patriot, but makes you more of one. However, to my sisters, especially the eldest, questioning or criticizing anything the government of Israel did made you suspect as a Jew, and even mentioning a two State solution back then incurred accusations of self hatred and being anti-Israel and even accusations of being anti-semitic.

I learned not to discuss politics with my family in Israel. While I respected their religious adherence and beliefs and never felt I had the right to question their level of observance, to my eldest sister, being non-observant, and having no desire to move to Israel, were more than enough reasons to treat me as though I was not a good enough and decent enough Jew, and that my sister was ashamed I was part of her family. It did not matter to her that my level of observance was not that much different than our parents but somehow it gave her reasons to denigrate me and criticize my lack of adherence to Jewish customs, rituals, and holidays. Although my feeling was that the way my sister and her husband and their children observed Judaism and lived their lives was none of my business, I was constantly ridiculed for my lack of observance. My sister was a very judgmental person. When wealthy family friends would visit Israel and spend a night or two at my sisters home inevitably I always heard my sister comment on the shoddy gift they brought her and her family. For someone who claimed to be so observant and knowledgeable about her faith, she somehow forgot that in Judaism having a guest in your home is an honor, and whether or not the guest brings you a gift should never matter.

I wondered why my parents were calling me in the late morning on a Tuesday when they always called me on Friday evenings and like so many other times where you remember exactly what you were doing and where you were when you heard some terrible news I would remember this day forever. My dad spoke first and told me that he and my mom learned the day before that he had acute myeloid leukemia. My mom then got on the phone and spoke with me as well in a calm, but decidedly sad voice. I did not learn at the time what my parents already knew, that my dad was originally given six to eight months to live. He was buried exactly eleven months from the day they learned he had leukemia. I remember calling my sisters and the sister I thought would be the most emotional held back tears and sounded solemn but clear headed while the sister I thought would handle the news most stoically was not able to hold back her tears. My parents lives, and my life were about to change forever. I didn’t know it then but the call I received from my parents that day was about to set events in motion that would change my life forever.

CHAPTER THREE

In the middle of January I got a new job as a salesrep for a software company from New York that had regional offices in McLean, Virginia. The territory was parts of southern Virginia as well as northeastern Pennsylvania, and although it excluded Philadelphia it enabled me to see my parents about every two weeks. My dad went thru a rough period during the next eleven months when he was in and out of the hospital getting chemotherapy treatments which often left him quite sick. I remember that whenever he was in the hospital my mom would be there the entire day and then she would call the night nurse every morning, very, very early, usually around 1:30AM to get a report about how my dad was doing. One time when I had left work a little early to go to the hospital from an appointment I had two hours north of Philly I happened to walk into his hospital room at the precise moment he was having an adverse reaction from the cancer fighting medications he had just been given. I stood at the door to his room stunned as doctors and nurses began rushing into the room to stabilize him, which they were finally able to do when a respiratory specialist came into the room. He was breathing in and out so heavily that his chest was heaving and was doing so quite rapidly. My mom was there watching, taking it all in, being strong, and holding on. Later after my dad’s condition improved and they gave him medication to help him go to sleep she seemed more concerned about me walking in and seeing my dad struggling for the breath of life, when it was she who was there day in and day out by his side. I guess when she saw the look of shock on my face her first instinct was to be concerned about me, when she, as my dad’s caregiver, had to deal with many such events without anyone being there to support her. There were highs and lows during my dad’s illness but when the lows came my mom and dad endured them together.

Growing up I was closer to my mom than I was to my dad. My was bitter about losing his business and felt that people who had success in business had good luck, and those who were not successful were the victims of bad luck. Whenever I would earn good grades in high school and college my father used to tell me the only reason that happened was because I had easy teachers. Later on in life, after college, when I went into sales and was earning more money than my dad ever earned, he would constantly tell me that the only reason I did well or won awards for the number of sales I brought in was because I had either an easy product to sell or else had an easy territory. To my dad it was never my ability and hard work that were responsible for my success, but instead, it was always something external to me that made success possible. Having heard this since high school, throughout college and graduate school, and then once I was in the work force had an negative effect on me. I began changing jobs, doing well wherever I worked but because I did not believe my success was due to my abilities, I tried constantly trying to prove myself, I initially thought, to me, but in reality, to my dad. I was in my early thirties when I finally realized that I was never going to change him, never going to make him understand me, and that all I was doing was hurting myself by the constant job hopping. My resume had so many jobs on it that even after removing a lot of them it still looked as though I was unstable and moved around much too often. If I did not get my act together I would soon approach the time when no one would hire me. I was becoming my own worst enemy but was fortunate enough to realize before it was too late that I was burning myself out and that I had to find personal satisfaction with myself and my life irregardless of whether my father approved or not.

There were times when my dad had temporary improvement, that even though my folks knew would not last and could change overnight, would enable my parents to make the most of whatever time my dad had left and they would go to dinner or a movie if my dad was able. Those times, unfortunately, were few and far between. During the early stages of my dad’s illness the doctors told my mom and dad that if they wanted to go on a vacation now would be the best time to do that. My folks went on a cruise to the Mediterranean and stopped in Israel where my two sisters met my parents at the boat and spent a day with them and their families. Several months later the cruise ship they were on became infamous for a brutal act of terrorism. The ship my parents were on was called the Achille Lauro, a ship that several months later would be hijacked by Palestinian terrorists, and an elderly Jewish man, Leon Klinghofer, was thrown overboard in his wheelchair by the terrorists in an act that horrified the civilized world.

I had appointments scheduled in the Philadelphia area and had to be about eighty miles north of the city the next day but before leaving for my hotel met my parents at a local restaurant for dinner. I remember this day because it was on this day that I sat at the dinner table with my parents and looked at my mother and saw a depth of sadness in her eyes I had never seen before. She was losing the love of her life, her companion, her best friend, her husband whom she deeply loved, and the pain and hurt in her eyes was so profound that when the dinner was over and my parents left to return to their apartment I got into my car to drive the eighty miles to my hotel, and found myself, for the very first time, crying. I saw two people that I loved, one that was dying and one that was trying in whatever way she could to be strong for him and her family trying to make sense of tragedy. I learned much later when my mom became ill what I observed that day, that the two worst things in life are watching someone you love suffer, and knowing that you cannot do anything to end their suffering.

My dad was in the hospital again because of a relapse. We knew things were not good and that there would no longer be any improvement, not even for one day. When my mom told me about this I was about to go into an appointment I had but since I had a few minutes decided to call my dad. I told him that I wanted him to know that I loved him very much, and that after all these years I understood that everything he said to me since I was a little boy and now an adult, all his criticisms and all his advice, were what he felt was best for me and that he only wanted to help me and that I was not angry with him and that I thought that having him for my father made me the luckiest man in the world. At the age of thirty five, for the first time in my life, I heard my father weeping, and then he had to hang up the phone. I drove to my appointment with a heavy heart but glad I had the chance to tell him that I loved him and that I forgave him.

In late September things got progressively worse for him and when the doctors informed my parents that the chemotherapy was no longer working my dad decided that he wanted to return home from the hospital, have hospice care at my folks home, and die in his own bed. I went with my mom to the hospital and when she told me she was going to the billing department to handle the check-out for my dad, I helped dress my father. Never before in my life did I have to do this. It was as though I was the father and he was the son. As I finished dressing him and he sat in the wheelchair he motioned for me to come closer. He could not speak very loud and was very weak. I knelt down close to him and barely above a whisper he said “I’m not going to let them take me into the apartment. I’m going to walk in by myself.” He repeated this three times. My mom returned and the orderly took my dad to the ambulance which transported him back to my parents apartment. My mom and I followed the ambulance in my car. When the ambulance arrived at my parents apartment and the medical personnel put my dad in the wheelchair and began wheeling him to the front door of the apartment complex my father held up his hand, motioning for them to wait. I watched this man, the pillar of strength of my childhood, struggle without success to try and lift himself out of the wheelchair so he could walk into his apartment. When he realized he was so weak and did not have the strength I saw a resignation and loss of hope in his eyes that I will never forget and that still saddens me to this day, almost twenty five years later.

CHAPTER FOUR

When my father returned home he began receiving hospice care with regular visits from a hospice nurse. Being a retired pharmacist he knew how medications worked and refused to take morphine because he insisted on being lucid and in control. He fought with every ounce of energy he had left not to take morphine, and it was only after my dad had passed away, after the funeral and after my sisters had returned to their homes in Israel that while helping my mom dispose of a number of things I saw the nurses logbook and went thru page after page of the number of days and number of dosages of morphine my dad had to have during his final days for the pain. I had been oblivious to what was going on and did not know that the last few weeks of his life things were so bad and that he must have been in excruciating pain. Around 11:30PM on November 20, 1985 I was lying in bed asleep and was awakened by a phone call from my mom. “It’s over” she said. The pain and suffering my dad endured had finally ended. My mom told me it was foolish to drive the hundred and fifty miles from my home at this late hour and that to instead, come the next day, November 21st.

I remember arriving at my parents apartment, walking in and seeing several of my mom’s friends there. I went over to my mom and held her close to me in a giant bear hug and could tell she very much needed me there at that moment. Her friends then began leaving and I went with my mom to the funeral home to pick out a casket. It was the most surreal experience I had ever had at that point in my life. You meet with one of the people from the funeral home and they take you into a large room filled with a variety of different caskets. In effect, it’s a showroom, just like a showroom at a car dealership, but experiencing this for the first time made me a bit woozy and felt like I was in some kind of strange dream and that I wasn’t really there. I guess “surreal” is the best way to describe how I felt. I remember my mom choosing a casket and asking me if she thought my father would like it.

My sisters and their husbands arrived on the twenty second of November. I stayed up late into the night on the twenty third writing the eulogy. My mom asked me to speak about the love she and my dad shared and one of my sisters asked me to add a line that “family was the most important thing in my dad’s life.” I also wrote that “in his life and in his time my father saw sickness and tried to heal it, he saw hunger and tried to feed the hungry, he saw sadness and tried to end it, and amid a discomfiting world he never compromised on his ethics, integrity and honesty.” I was too grief stricken to read the eulogy and instead the rabbi presiding over the service did. I remember seeing my mother dressed in black for the first time in my life. I remember her strength and her resiliency, her courage, her devotion to my father and to my sisters and I. It was she, who in the darkest days of our family, held the entire family together.

My sisters stayed in Philly a week after the shiva, or mourning period, ended and then had to return to their families and jobs in Israel. I remember going with my mom to donate all my dad’s clothes to a charity and how sad that felt. I told my mother that I felt very badly that I was not there at my fathers side when he passed away and my mother replied “he was in a coma and would not have known if you were there or not.” I told my mom, “Yes, but I would have known.” In all the years that have gone by since my father’s passing I still wished I had been there by his side and to lend support to my mom at a time when she needed it the most.

My mom eventually decided to move closer to the center of Philadelphia where she could be a short bus ride away from the theater, symphony, and museums she and my father so dearly loved. I would come in on the weekends and help her pack and also to dispose of things she no longer needed or wanted. She moved into an apartment complex where her best friend and her husband lived. Initially I was concerned that my mom was moving from an apartment complex where she and my dad had many friends, but my mom was not a recluse after my dad passed away, and my concerns were allayed when she made many new friends in her new home. In January of 1986 my mom came to spend a weekend with me at my home in Maryland. I enjoyed taking her out to fancy restaurants every night and to movies during the day. When it came time for her to return home to Philadelphia I remember watching her get on the train and standing there as the train faded into the distance, as she, for the first time in more than forty-four years, returned home alone. I felt so sad inside for her as I stood there staring at the now empty train station and then I slowly walked out of the station to my car to return home.