January 19

It’s my dad’s birthday and he would have been 94 had he not passed away 45 years ago.  Passed away seems too euphemistically passive.  His death was difficult, painful, harsh and cruel for both him and his family. His cancer met his anxiety and created a reality he could not face and could not ignore.  The neurotic solution to the convergence of illness and claustrophobia was to be treated as an outpatient.  In the end, this solution served neither master. He spent the final weeks of his life confined to a hospital room fighting the cancer that had gone too far to overcome.

On many levels we ceased being a family at his death. Ruth was married within a year.  Susan months later.  I returned to SUNY Albany and then moved to Israel.  My mother married Jerry, who had no time or patience for us.  Eve, my beautiful younger sister was left holding the bag, as it were.  At age 14 she was, in many ways, the “last man standing”.

Somewhere back in my memory I recall hearing a song with the lyrics “you’re not a man until your father calls you a man”.  Which, of course, he never did.  That he died before I became a man is both developmental and causal.  At 19 I was a child man with little sense of responsibility and no sense of direction.  I had no sense that I needed to figure out the world or more my role within it and, perhaps, no capacity to do so.  His death thrust me into a vacuum and my life meandered until I meandered into the BBYO office in Southfield, Michigan and thus began my career as a Jewish communal professional.  This, in turn, led me to Columbia University School of Social Work.  I could have meandered anywhere.  But God had a plan.

I think of my life in the context of my father’s life and death and, I am both so saddened and so grateful.  If social work school was only God’s set up for me to meet Jo at a party for recently graduated social workers – then it was a good plan.  Well played God.  That it led me to a life with three remarkable children, all of whom, in their own ways, have become remarkable adults is a majestic feat of divine strategic planning.  That, all of this, including the death of my father, made me who I am is equally clear.  I take a great measure of pride, perhaps not at who I am, but who I am trying to become – and that I will keep on trying.