In many ways we were so much alike. I mean when I look in the mirror sometimes, I
see how much I look like him. I mean a
bathroom mirror not a full length mirror.
But our lives could not have been more different. He worked and sacrificed to make sure that
Naomi and I started out with every advantage because he started out with none.
And in so many ways, Dad’s personality, his big personality
-- you could only really understand it in the context of how he came up. His early childhood, everyone here knows. An orphan, He grew up poor, raised by his
grandmother who spoke no English, in a close Jewish family who filled the gaps
left by his parents. Filled his jilted
childhood with love and attention, but I know that was always missing in his
life.
So his childhood, as with all of us in ways we are and are
not aware of, drove his every day as an adult. And then ironically, roughly the last third
of his life after he lost his eyesight -- posed challenges that rivaled those
in his childhood. It was one thing
after another. I remember when he came
to my law school graduation and his good eye had become so bad that he could
not see me. And he pushed through those
challenges on a daily basis just has he had when he was younger - by sheer
force of will. And, just as he had to
make himself over as a young man because of his humble beginnings -- he had to
make himself over as an adult because, at 59, he lost the vocation that was the
Sun around which everything else in his life revolved.
So, Dad, who became a Doctor probably because of his origins
(his mother died in childbirth - and my point is he never recovered from that -
we may think we do but we never do) - no longer had that tool to express his
love of his fellow person. And his
presence, which was outsized already, became even moreso.
Every one here knowns what I’m saying. My father did not believe that any human
encounter was successful unless he tried to help the other person in some
way. Sometimes it was by a compliment.
Sometimes it was by a hug. Sometimes by
telling them he loved them or they were great.
Other times it was by giving some form of charity he could not really
afford. He elevated tipping at
restaurants, or to the car park guys, to a form of high art.
When he could no longer practice medicine and they moved to
NC, he thrust himself back into teaching.
He joined the faculty at UNC med school and his students bonded with him
there, as many had at Einstein, and became life long friends. Marcus called me the night dad passed. The medical faculty asked him to sit on their
admissions committee. He told me once
that admissions officers looked to admit people that were like them. Perhaps not realizing it applied to him too. And he filled his days finding young women
and men who did not look like him, but who were like him - who grew up
disadvantaged and who wanted to leave the world better than they found it, one
patient at a time.
When I was a little boy, Dad used to take me on rounds with
him at the hospital. It was boring
punctuated by flashes of the expressions of humanity and kindness I have rarely
-- maybe never -- seen in any other part of my life. I couldn’t go in the patient rooms, so I
would wait outside and eavesdrop and try to angle myself to get a glimpse through
the slightly open door. And what I heard
and saw made me who I am. I saw Dad
touch his patients on the chest. Pat
their hair. Give them a sip of water
from a plastic cup. Hug their worried
family members. Sometimes even change
their IV or their bedpans and tuck them in.
We would go from floor to floor at the hospital - dad would
take the stairs which was the surgeon’s form of exercise - the orderlies would
so often lean on their mop or look up from their tray of food or their cart of
linen and say hello Dr. Tein and he knew their names and would ask them about
their kid or whether they got their car fixed so they didn’t have to take the
bus. And he would shake their
hands. And that was Dad when no one was
looking.
And alongside his private practice, until the end, he spent
several days a month at the public hospitals in the Bronx, operating on gunshot
wounds and the heroin addicts. And he
bonded with them too. I remember him
taking calls during dinner from Stock Wilson.
Dad never said I did this. He did
it. He knew we were watching.
Dad was a science guy but every once in a while there was a
flash of humanities and somehow we both shared a love for Thomas Wolfe, who
wrote in the 1930s and spoke to both of us.
This, paragraph from the beginning of Look Homeward Angel, is worth a
listen:
“. . . a stone, a leaf, an
unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark
womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we
come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us
has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever
prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among
bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we
seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a
leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost [of my
father], come back again.”
― Thomas
Wolfe, Look
Homeward, Angel
I got a glimpse into my father’s heart after he
retired. Mom and he came home from his
office in the Bronx. Dad had an office
near the hospital in a very modest neighborhood, mostly first generation
immigrants. Those were his
patients. He had this waiting room that
took up the first floor of the building with seats all around. I found out later that when he had a surgery
that went too long and he kept his office patients waiting, this was in the
early days of medicare when patients still had large co-pays and many had no
insurance - he would tell them all that their office visit that day was
free. And he would stay at the office
until he saw every one of them. I knew
he had touched that community. Mo and I
felt it when we went on special occasions to the Pine Tavern in the Bronx. And when mom and he came home from the office
that day, they brought a shopping bag literally full with cards and letters and
boxes of little carvings and watercolors and things that his patients had made
for him. Think about that.
That was Dad. He
didn’t care about making money. I found out later how true that was many years
later when I found a tax return from the early 80s. Right or wrong, he raised Mo and I, by
example, that you had to help others not just yourself. Business -- which he was horrible at anyway
-- was just not something we did in our family.
I have given lip service to that Ideal, but Naomi has lived a life of
public service.
That’s the Dad I’ll remember always. As a kid, when my friends ate dinner at 630,
we ate at 830 or 9 because he wanted to see us.
And we’d run down the stairs when he came home, in the winter always in
his green Jerry coat wearing some winter hat that looked like Nanook of the
North, and we would jump into his arms, and get squeezed and lifted up and
kissed and we could feel the stubble on his cheek and smell his brut by faberge
aftershave.
Mom - I haven’t spoken about you much today. We used to say that when Uncle Nat passed,
because of how he cared for Aunt Ida, we were going to build a statue of him in
Miami Beach. I wrote you a note during
coronavirus because it dawned on me then that you had decided that the most
important thing in your life was loving Dad and caring for him as he declined
over the last decade. You who gave up
your job as a scientist to marry dad the doctor. You who after we were born tried to went back
to teach math and then had to give that up again for us and Dad. And you who got into law school at 50 and
then had to give that up in your first semester because that was when Dad lost
his eyesight. You who bathed and fed and
nursed dad for the last decade. And your respite from that was dipping out of
the house once or twice a week to beat the your group of girls at cards. I didn’t realize until this week that you
were still doing people’s taxes for free because, like you said when you
tutored me in algebra, math is fun.
Mom, we all hope you can open a new chapter and live your
best life and find joy in every day. New
things like going back to school or old things like counting cards at the
bridge table.
So, the way the universe works, on Monday, Naomi and I went
to see him on what we didn’t know would be his last day. And we had lujch in
the kitchen. Dad had decaf after and I noticed (but didn’t pause on it) that
dad was really going at some chocolate cake - with a fervor uncommon even for
him. And at the end we took a family
photo. Dad was smiling. It could have been taken after any Sunday
brunch when we were kids in New Rochelle when dad came home from early morning
rounds with donuts and hugs. He passed
two hours later. The photo is here.
So if you are here today, it’s because Dad loved you so
much. Each of you. [
Names ]. He hoped to make each of your
days a little brighter. Gaby and Paulina
you were the brightest stars in his sky. In ways you may not ever be able to
put into words - like Thomas Wolfe was saying - but only maybe feel. Because Dad
understood that our love for each other, and being grateful for the smallest
things around us, was what counted. And
when he told people here how he loved you -- maybe sometimes too often -- that
was what he was getting at.
One more memory before I go. On so many weekends when we
were growing up, Dad used to hole himself up in his study upstairs and write
his lectures out in longhand and put the slideshow together in a couple kodak
carrousels. And I remember Mo and I getting
into those carrousels later and pulling
the slides out and look at them one by one.
I have a memory of a slide of us standing on the edge of tupper lake in
upstate new York, which was one of the first memories I had of a family
vacation, and probably was why I love the woods so much.
But when I was in law school I was selling my futon and a
surgical fellow came to buy it and did buy it.
And we got to talking and he had trained at Einstein under dad. And he told me that he remembered some kind
of big lecture dad had given to surgical residents and that in the middle of
the lecture there was this slide from a family vacation - it was a sunset from
a dock on a lake with trees all around. When
he described it - I knew it was that slide of tupper lake. And in the middle of this lecture he told
this roomful of hardcore about to be surgeons - this is what is really
important in life. Don’t lose sight of
it. That was dad.
“Death is always on the way,
but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from
the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But
because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet
everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. --
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood,
some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even
conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not
even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty.
And yet it all seems limitless.”
― Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Mom and Mo - remember that full moon we watched rise on
Tuesday night. Dad you probably saw it
too. I will miss you more than I can
ever say. I love you. I hope you knew that.
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