This is the question that everyone has - October 7 - How Did We Get Here?

A Tribute to Dad

Yesterday marked a year since Dad died. I still find it difficult not picking up the phone every day to call him and going into the house and his bedroom without him being home is uneasy.

Dad was a very interesting person. He was a talented musician and at a very young age, had his own band and later even had a Big Band with a dozen musicians following him. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any of his musical abilities. I can't even keep a beat. My middle brother, Gershon inherited his musical talent. In his teens, his band played in the Catskills and his meeting Mom was a “Dirty Dancing” story. His parents were also staying at this ‘resort’ (a bungalow colony) for a week and Mom’s family were there as well for a couple of weeks. Her mother, father and younger sister. To the best of my recollection, her father came up on the weekends from running his clothes manufacturing factory in the city.

Dad always claimed that when he saw Mom for the first time, he pointed to her and said to his mother, “Mom, see that girl. She’s the girl I’m going to marry.” Up until this time, Dad was quite a swinger. He was a young, handsome musician in the Catskills and families were coming and going all the time. He had quite a few girlfriends. I know this to be true from his old photo albums that had pictures of his girls on many, many pages. All that stopped after he met Mom. She only agreed to go out with him because she figured that, as a musician, he would get her in to all the good concerts.

Dad’s father, Grandpa Ben was a part time musician, a drummer. He would play at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs on the weekends. His mother was not an easy person and resented my grandfather playing on weekends. It was actually one of the ways he had found to get away from her. My grandmother put it in my Dad’s head that as soon as he got serious with a girl, he should leave music behind. She apparently was a good brain-washer. The day Dad planned to ask Mom to marry him, he quit his band. This was something major as his band was just about to leave for a music tour to California together with one of the big names in Big Band music at the time (I don’t remember his name).

Mom and Dad got engaged and then married. He was 22 and she was 19. Besides the fact that Dad loved Mom, it was also a good way for him to get out of his mother’s house. Dad never had a bedroom. He slept in the living room on the couch and never had a closet, either, just a couple of drawers in the living room cabinet. Getting married and moving into their own apartment was truly liberating. He also was free to spend money and buy things. Fortunately, Mom was incredibly responsible financially. At the age of 14, she was her father’s bookkeeper for his factory. Mom saw that she needed to manage their finances and Dad agreed. She gave him a weekly allowance. That was for his commuting costs and lunch money. It turned out that Dad was amazing with his allowance. What Mom didn’t know was that he would sometimes go without eating lunch and secretly save the money. She found out years later when they were planning a big vacation and Mom was busy budgeting every step of the vacation, Dad went down to his workshop and came back upstairs with a wad of money. It was probably only a few hundred dollars but at the time, that was a huge amount. He was only earning about $40 or $50 a week. He continued to do this for many years.

Dad had great hands. He was always known as the person to come to if you needed to fix something. There were always a number of people who kept lists of things they needed for Dad to fix or help them fix and as soon as he would enter their homes to visit, they ‘plunged’ on him before any festivities could begin. He did all of our house repairs and build all of the wooden cabinets and closets in the house. Whenever we had new friends come to the house, we would take them on a tour to show them was Dad built.  We were always so proud of his abilities. His one weakness was plumbing. For anything more than a simple fix, we would call a plumber. As opposed to music, here I did inherit his hands and patience for all the repairs, building and working out the problems. I have been able to do plumbing but never enjoyed it. That probably came to me from him as well.

Dad was such an outgoing person. It’s what made him such a great salesman in the many years that he was in retail. And everyone around always knew that if they asked him for a favor, he would give the shirt off his back. He’d get pissed with them if they didn’t bring it back or insulted him and he did keep grudges. It didn’t mean that he wouldn’t help that person out again, it’s just that he would be angry with them while doing it. For his children (us 3 boys) and our girlfriends growing up, our wives later and our children, he would do whatever he could to help us and make our lives better. This went to the extreme that he would be cheap with himself, not buying things that he should have, so that he wouldn’t take from the money he wanted us to inherit. I would fight with him about this and many times would just buy him the things that he wouldn’t buy for himself.

There is so much more to say about growing up with Dad but I’ll leave that for another time.

I want to write about his last couple of years. He and I have had a somewhat tumultuous relationship that was always filled with great love for each other. However, we shared a couple of quite negative traits: short temper (mostly with each other), the need to prove ourselves right to the other, stubbornness and a few others. This inevitably caused us to have at least one explosive fight each time we would spend extended time together (since we live on different continents, each occasion was extended time). While Mom was alive, she was able to be the buffer. It turns out that it wasn’t just for me but for both my brothers as well. It was just that I would spend more time with Dad as we would visit every year in the summer. Fortunately, a few years ago I got smart (sometimes that happens as we get older) and started to learn to hold my breath before responding and to ignore some other things that bothered me. This led to far fewer explosions and eventually to none at all. This definitely helped everyone’s time together and most importantly led to a significant change to our relationship. This was exponentially felt by both of us during his last 2 years when he first started getting sick.

Richard, our oldest brother had a difficult life and lots of issues. However, when it came to family emergencies, he was always there to help and be the first responder. He lived just ½ an hour from my parents. For Gershon and myself, living in Israel, this was a huge help and allowed us to have a lighter burden. Richard died 3 years ago just as Dad was getting sick. I was fortunate to be in a position that I could come to Dad to be with him and help out when needed. In his last 2 years, I think I traveled to him about 15 times (each way was almost 24 hours airport time (pre-flight, flights, layovers, etc), so not as simple as New York to Florida. I know that he appreciated it and I was extremely grateful that I was able to do this. Besides just being there, I was able to do so much more to help with his quality of life, and most of all, improving the quality of life of our relationship. He and I bonded in a different way in those 2 years. When I wasn’t with him in Florida, I spoke to him at least once a day.

On some of my trips to him that I had to arrange and leave on the same day, such as him going to the hospital or some other medical emergency, he would say that it wasn’t necessary for me to come and then he would say how grateful he was that I did. He also asked why I was coming when some of those trips were not ‘emergency’ situations. For me, it was very important. I wasn’t there when Mom died. I wasn’t there when Richard died. Mom died as a result of a car crash and we got there right after she died in the hospital. Richard went into the hospital and we didn’t realize how sick he was. He didn’t either and he died a couple of days later. I told Dad that I would do everything I could possibly do to be with him when he time came.

In his last months, he was in hospice care and Gershon and I frequently talked to the nurse in charge of Dad’s care. Whenever there was some type of episode, our first question to her was should we come right now and her answer was that we weren’t at the life and death stage. On February 1, 2019, Dad called me and was quite incoherent. He then called me a few more times and most of what he said didn’t really make sense. While his full time aid thought that everything was ok and it was just a temporary thing, the hospice nurse told me to come. I got on a plane a couple of hours later and was there the next day. Gershon came in later that evening. We fulfilled our promise to him to be with him in his final hours. He was not really conscious, but we had no doubt that he knew we were with him. He was able to squeeze our hands and just before he died, he sat up, opened his eyes (we could see that he wasn’t able to focus on anything), he laid back down and was gone shortly thereafter.

I am eternally grateful for the 2 year last years of his life. While it may have given Dad a lot, it gave me even more. I miss him so much and it makes the pain of not having Mom even greater than it has always been since she left us. As far as Dad goes, though, he was ready to go. His health had failed him so (until he was 88, he was 100% independent and didn’t take any medications). He hated losing his independence, not being able to drive anymore, then having to walk with a walker and then confined to a wheelchair. His COPD made each step a challenge and burden and his physical weakness forced him to need a full time aid to help him with everything. While he was frightened about dying, he was very much ready for it and Gershon and I were able to help him deal with it. He knew he had the love of his sons and his grandchildren.

I am thankful to have had him as my Dad, my wife to have him more as a father than a father-in-law and my daughters to have him as their saba (grandfather). Dad, you are loved and missed every day by so many of the people who love you.