Category Archives: Family

Cancer

My mother, always a large and heavy woman, was, for the last few years of her life, almost gaunt.  She’d been a fat baby, there’s an oblong portrait of her as an infant, she’d had it blown up and put into a gilt frame.  In the photo her eyes are black, she looks like an apple cheeked glittering-eyed Italian bambina.  She was overweight for most of her adult life, but for the last few years, gaunt.  Cancer and the Widow’s Diet, as she called it, did that for her.

Her mother had died of cancer, a terrible, painful, wasting death we all watched up close.  When it was finally time for my grandmother to die, she couldn’t go.  Her eyes turned huge, and black, and she screamed.  My grandmother was not in there any more, just the will to live.  It was dreadful to see.

My grandfather was gone over a year when she died.  He had survived lung cancer and the removal of a lung.  This all happened when I was a baby, he lived until my 24th year.  Although an ideal weight for his body his whole life, he was terrified of living alone without his mate and started cutting down on his calories.  He went on a low salt special diet with his cancer-stricken wife, although there was no medical reason to do it.  There was no practical reason either, they had always prepared and eaten different food every meal anyway.  My grandmother used to scream at him that he was an idiot, that he should eat what he always ate.   He was stubborn.  He lost a couple of pounds, carried too many bottles of seltzer back on a bus one 90 degree, 90% humidity Miami Beach afternoon, had trouble catching his breath when he came into the apartment.  Died not long afterwards of a heart attack.  Not to say that cancer wouldn’t have killed him too, it had already tried and almost succeeded once.

My father felt like crap the last two years of his life.  Looked terrible, had no energy, went to a cardiologist, endocrinologist and a hematologist regularly.  They tried a B-12 shot, which didn’t do much good.  One day he woke from a nap, paralyzed and yellow.  In the emergency room there was no doubt among the doctors and nurses there, he was clearly in the final stages of undetected liver cancer.  He didn’t keep his appointment with the hematologist the following day, he had only one pressing appointment to keep after that.  He was dead six days later.

His parents, my grandparents on my father’s side, both died young of cancer.  My first cousin, Ann, died of cancer before the age of 40.  Another cousin, Emily, same thing, dead of cancer around 40.  Emily’s father, my father’s cousin Gene, now 85, fought cancer as valiantly as my mother had, for more than twenty years.  He plays tennis and feels good.  He’s a tough bird.  

About five years ago I had skin cancer removed from my nose and my arm.  A year or two later more cancer removed from my nose, a few millimeters from the first site.  “It’s a hot spot,” explained the dermatologist, taking another biopsy.

I’m not bragging about all this cancer, please understand.

But it’s the background, explaining, in part, why this call to my old friend tonight has been tormenting me so much.  Soft tissue sarcoma is rare, the exact kind he has is a rare form of soft tissue sarcoma.  They’ve been cutting at him, assured him they got the whole tumor when they removed a buttock and part of his leg, but cancer is a cunning little fucker and it made liars of the doctors and their assurances.  Nerves were removed from his leg, most of the sciatic nerve on one side, recently the foot on that leg stopped working.  The doctors gave no guarantee about the surgery helping.  It was a good thing about the no guarantee, because the surgery didn’t help.   Chemo, the only game left for him, has been hit or miss, largely miss.  They are blind men throwing darts at a theoretical dart board in a room with no floor.  

I found myself talking like a nattering fool after getting his frank update tonight, blindly changing the subject at one point, the way I’ve heard others talk to people with end-stage cancer.  Tap-dancing, self-conscious, trying to be sympathetic, and helpful while feeling helpless against a horrific futility.  So, nattering on about everything else.   It made me sick to hear people do it to my grandmother, my mother.  It was more sickening still to hear me doing it.  My friend gently interrupted, it was time to change the dressing on his latest surgery, get some sleep before his doctor’s appointment tomorrow.  He was hoping to feel up to a visit soon, but no guarantees, he has been feeling pretty shitty.

I walked in the humidity trying to hold on to my new habit of cultivating happiness.  Might as well have tried to hold a fart in my hands in the merciless New York City night.

My Father’s Death

When I arrived in Florida, a few days after my father’s sudden hospitalization with undiagnosed end-stage liver cancer, a couple of days before he died, my father told me “you’re the only one who knows what’s going on.”   Although everyone around him knew he was dying, and the look on the Emergency Room doctor’s face had made that unmistakably clear to my sister, who urged me to get on the next plane, he was somehow trying to give me credit he’d often withheld.

“I want to talk to you, I’m gathering my thoughts,” he told me a while later, and I bought him a tiny digital recorder to speak into, if he was moved to speak when nobody was around.  He was beyond writing things down, and though he was an excellent writer, he rarely put pen to paper when he was able to.

We were fortunate to have that conversation, the thoughts he gathered were impressively organized, clearly expressed in that scratchy voice he had at the end.  I don’t know if anyone could have written, edited and delivered those thoughts better.  He always was an excellent speaker, and spoke virtually without notes.  Lucky for us both I have always been a night owl and when I drove over to the hospital at 1 a.m. he was awake and waiting to talk.  Turned out to be the last night of his life, he died before sundown the following day.

I am thinking about my father’s death because of something he said right at the end, it may have been the last thing he said.   We were sitting around his hospital bed, he’d become agitated, grabbed my sister’s hand, and mine, and when he let go I got the nurse and convinced him to take a mild sedative, an anti-anxiety pill, atavan, that a friend of mine is fond of.  I assured him it was fast-acting and would only take the edge off, since he was always very concerned with remaining in control and had never had so much as a beer, let alone a mind-altering pill.  Reassured, and feeling desperate perhaps, he agreed to take it and quickly composed himself.

“I’m feeling much better,” he announced a few minutes later, sounding like his old self.  “Why don’t you all go down and take a break and have a bite to eat downstairs, you’ve been sitting here a long time.  Elie can stay with me, it’s OK.”  My mother, sister, uncle and brother-in-law all got up and went down to the cafeteria.  It was dinner time and outside the sky was turning into a beautiful painting of a Florida sunset.  I recall the silhouettes of palm trees outside the hospital windows becoming more vivid as the light slowly began to fade.  

Two nurses were in the room and one of them said to me “it’s almost time.”  She pointed out that my father’s fingers were turning blue under the fingernails, something to do with the blood no longer delivering enough oxygen to the extremities, apparently a sign that Death is close by.  

“If you pray, now is the time to do it,” said the other nurse.  I told her we were not religious and she took it on herself to sing a Jewish tune she knew.  The African-American woman sang a chorus of Dayenu, a song from the Passover service that indicates we’d be thankful for any fraction of the many blessings God has laid on us. Thinking about it now, the snippet of song was as good a prayer as I could have thought of, though it seemed a bit surrealistic at the time.  She had a nice voice, and carried the tune well, but I remember thinking at the time that it was bizarre.

They helped me take down the railing at the side of the bed so I could sit closer to my father, then silently left the room.  My father looked at me helplessly and said “I don’t know how to do this…”   I assured him that nobody does, that it was OK.  I sat close as he breathed a bit faster for a minute or two, maybe five, perhaps fifteen, and then breathed his last.  His eyes were open, I closed them with two fingers of one hand, like playing a simple chord on the guitar or piano.  It was eerie how natural the movement was.  The nurses returned a moment later and I took the oxygen tube out of my father’s nostrils.  “He won’t be needing this,” I said softly, handing it to them.   I took his glasses and put them in my baritone ukulele case, where they are to this day.

I was amazed at how simple and graceful my father’s last moments were.  I’d been told a day earlier that death by kidney failure, the way terminal liver cancer actually kills you, is an accelerating sleepiness that ends in a usually peaceful death, but it was striking how peaceful that final struggle was.  A friend who read Jewish scripture for years quoted a line from the Talmud, I think, that stated it poetically and true to my father’s death: the moment of death is like lifting a hair off a glass of milk.

“I don’t know how to do this….” rang in my head just now, as I thought of the mountain I am trying to climb, an impossible one, really, for anybody but an exceptional being who is able to recruit exceptional helpers, and I thought to myself, with a sinking feeling “I don’t know how to do this.”   Same phrase.  It struck me.  Now, the same mercy I gave the old man, I extend to myself, if such a thing is possible– “nobody does, it’s OK.”

Either way, there will be the last breath and then darkness.  I’ll be happy to meet angels, and the souls of loved ones who have passed on, but I’m not expecting to.  The only thing to see between now and then is how exceptionally I can climb in whatever time remains for me to climb.

Peekskill USA

My father and my uncle grew up in Peekskill, NY, a once-prosperous river town on the Hudson River.   As times changed, and transport by riverboat faded from memory, the town lost its most lucrative business and its luster.  It took on the haunted quality it possesses to this day.   By the time my father and his then infant brother arrived from the slums of New York City, just in time for the Great Depression, the town was probably a pretty hopeless place.   The father and sons who ran the hardware store were, according to a cousin who punched one of them in the face on his first day in town, proud members of the Ku Klux Klan.

In August of 1949 there was a Paul Robeson concert scheduled for a picnic area just outside Peekskill.  Robeson’s likeness is on a U.S. postage stamp now, but at the time this scholar, college football star and opera singer was considered by many to be a dangerous Communist sympathizer.   Eventually he would be forced to leave the country.  A powerful, outspoken Negro at a time when black people were supposed to be content with their second-class lot and play semi-comical servant roles in movies, Robeson spoke out against wars of aggression, against Jim Crow, against racism, against police violence, against the exploitation of workers and the unbridled materialistic greed of our money worshipping culture, against so many things that patriotic men like J. Edgar Hoover stood for.  It’s small wonder there was a riot in Peekskill in August of 1949 when he came to do a show there with Pete Seeger and other idealists who, at the time, were regarded as a fifth column, fighting for Stalin under the false banner of “brotherhood”.  

It’s easy to get stressed out people to support the fight against an enemy once that enemy is properly demonized, Hitlerized, Stalinized.  Particularly if the people supporting the war don’t have to endanger themselves in any way, they will support the war effort fervently.  And if they get a chance, as they did on a summer evening in Peekskill in 1949,  to kick some mixed race Commie ass in an ambush where they outnumber the race traitor Commies twenty to one, so much the sweeter.

My father was a World War Two veteran attending Syracuse University on the GI Bill in 1949, if I have my chronology straight.  He had grown up in grinding poverty (a phrase he uttered through gritted teeth when tersely summarizing his own childhood) on Howard Street in Peekskill.   A lifelong student of history and current events, in his early years he aligned himself politically with men like Robeson and Seeger.  He was an idealist who’d been in the army fighting fascism and he was passionate about righting injustice.  He wanted to see the world become less fascistic, rather than more so.  He believed in brotherhood,  civil rights and civil liberties then and for decades after.  He also acted on these beliefs, enduring catcalls and rotten vegetables as a spokesman for the integration of NYC schools after Brown v. Board of Education and its “all deliberate speed”, among other things.  I believe he returned to Peekskill for the concert that turned into a riot when angry white mobs overran it.

My father is gone now, as is my uncle, so, unfortunately, there is no way to verify whether he was there or not.  But visiting my aunt the other day for her 85th birthday I spotted a book on her shelves called “Peekskill USA” by Howard Fast.   I recall that my mother admired Howard Fast (although she acknowledged he was probably not a great writer), and hearing from her that he’d been blacklisted by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee and also thrown in jail during the anti-Communist witch hunts of that time.

“Peekskill USA” is Fast’s eye-witness account of events in Peekskill on August 27th and September 4th, 1949.  The first one a riot, the second one an actual concert, as far as I can tell so far.  Published by the Civil Rights Congress Press in 1951, and printed in the United States of America (as it states on the copyright page) the book is a collector’s item.  My aunt was reluctant to let it go, though she certainly has not opened it in decades, if ever.  I understood her reluctance and promised to read it quickly, take good care of it and send it back to her soon.

I started reading it this morning.  The forward states that the events in Peekskill 1949 are destined to live forever in the memory of all who oppose fascism.  It was a hope, like many back then, that was swallowed whole during the so-called Cold War.   I often look around at the assumptions that underlie our singlemindedly materialistic society, like the one that says extremely wealthy criminals must be treated under a different, more forgiving, set of laws than petty criminals, and wonder about the actual winners of the Cold War.  

It seems they are the same winners as ever, the wealthiest citizens, casually united by common interests to preserve their sometimes hard-won prerogatives.  So much of the business of the 1% is amoral that it seems churlish to judge it as harshly as I do.  It’s not as though the richest among us want 45,000 Americans to die of treatable diseases every year for lack of health insurance, or want our wealthy nation to have the infant mortality rate of a third world country, or millions of hungry, malnourished, abused American children, or a permanent underclass and the largest prison population in human history.   These are surely forgivable externalities.  In order for some to have 100,000 times the wealth of others, certain sacrifices must be made.  It is only common sense, after all.

I have often thought, with that characteristic uncharitableness of mine, that Fascism prevailed at the close of the Cold War, disguised as Democracy, which, from the beginning, used phrases like “all men are created equal” with a certain puckishness.   The forces of reaction, inherently anti-humanist, amplified through the largest public megaphones, are always behind the status quo.  Why would it be otherwise?

So, if high ranking Nazi spooks were recruited after World War Two and hired by the American OSS, and their extensive anti-Communist knowledge and techniques incorporated into the CIA and used to undermine and eventually defeat the evil totalitarian system of Communism, why should I even mention this, at best, footnote coincidence, here?  If the same baldly manipulative techniques pioneered by Woodrow Wilson’s Committee for Public Information to drum up American support for unexplainable (except in terms of how it enriched certain already rich people) World War One were refined by Josef Goebbels and his Ministry of Public Enlightenment a generation later to drum up support for the war to cleanse the world of the Jewish virus and its Communist spawn, and if those techniques are still largely in use today by those who promote wars of every kind, why should I draw any negative conclusions?  Why bring Fascism into it?  After all, “collateral damage” is so much better than “murder of innocent civilians” and “Freedom is on the March” is so much better than “what are you going to do about it, asshole?”

I’ll report back on Howard Fast’s account of the Peekskill riots in Part Two.

My Father Would Have Loved This

My uncle, who was buried yesterday in a small cemetery outside of Peekskill, would not have gotten anywhere near the kick out of this that his brother, my father would.  My father had a truly dark sense of humor, and few things made him laugh more than things that were tinged with horror.  I felt a pang, when my cousin told me the story, that I couldn’t call my father and tell him about it.   He would have chuckled.

The rabbi had thoughtlessly mentioned my uncle’s unpaid membership dues for 2012 while discussing the burial.  He told my cousin about the congregation’s strict policy about not burying any member who was in arrears.   I had a more violent reaction to this bad behavior on the rabbi’s part than my cousin did.  My cousin was merely annoyed.  For me, it woke a lot of pissed off ghosts who were sleeping in that graveyard.

When the time came, I was mild with the rabbi, even as Sekhnet glared at him.  After the funeral, as my cousin took his wrung out mother down the hill toward the cars, I found myself speaking directly and without rancor.

“Rabbi, I need to raise something that’s a little difficult.  We were all upset that you brought up membership dues with Jon when he called to arrange his father’s funeral the other day.”

“But Jon didn’t say anything,” the rabbi said, looking slightly aghast.

“Jon’s pretty stoic, and his father had just died,” I said.

“I’m so sorry,” said the rabbi sincerely.

“I found an invoice in my uncle’s files dated December 2011, seven months after his stroke.  He was billed $2,640 and his letter was attached, along with his payment for $350 and yet another special waiver.  There is a pile of letters, year after year, from my father and my uncle, about their out-of-town membership rate.  They’d each paid dues for more than 60 years.”

“I… I apologize, I shouldn’t have brought that up at that time,” said the rabbi, looking pale in the cold.

“OK, you should tell Jon,” I said, pointing down the hill towards Jon and his tiny, huddled mother.

The rabbi apologized to Jon, we said goodbye to Jon and my aunt as they prepared to make the long drive back to Maryland.  I had Sekhnet go get her Where The Wild Things Are fake fur hat with the pointy animal ears on top, and she got a smile out of my aunt with the adorable hat.  They drove off.

I spoke to Jon last night and he gave me the details that would have brought laughs from my father’s wry skeleton.   About 150 miles south of Peekskill Jon’s cell phone rang.  The caller introduced himself as one of the directors of the Jewish Center, the son of the kosher butcher who was the best friend of our cousin Eli, the guy with the famous temper who told the rabbi to put a dog in his grave, that he wasn’t paying any more in dues.  The man offered his condolences, apologized again for the rabbi’s thoughtless imitation of a rabbi from an anti-Semite’s joke.  He went on for some time, my cousin reported, although Jon had no idea what the purpose of the call really was.  Clearly the rabbi had given him the cell phone number.

There was another apology from the rabbi, this time in email form.  But here’s the punchline, dear reader, and Dad.  They sent Jon an electronic invoice for the membership dues in the amount, not of the $350 he’d billed to his credit card right before the hearse left for the cemetery, but $325.

“$325,” I laughed, “what percent discount is that?  Less than 10%, hmmmmm, that’s good.”  The laugh I laughed was bitter and not very satisfying.  My father would have been able to get more out of it. 

The Purpose Driven Life

As I start thinking about what I will say on a frigid Monday morning near a man-sized pit outside the benighted little town where my father and his brother, my recently deceased Uncle Paul, grew up, and where my father’s skeleton sleeps the long sleep in the frozen ground, I am distracted by a book I just looked at.  It is about the deep inner purpose, outside of the naked profit motive, that drives every successful business, according to the upbeat marketing creep who wrote the book, a consultant for McDonald’s and Proctor and Gamble, two exemplars of this purpose driven business culture.  I’m going to go downstairs and fetch it for a few quotes, but first, a few distracted words about my uncle, my aunt, my cousin and the fucking rabbi.

After my father’s death I found among his papers a cc of a letter he sent to the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill.   It was a remarkable piece of work and I have it somewhere.  In it was reflected my father’s great intelligence, his ability to tell a story and craft a very persuasive letter.   It was an appeal to be allowed to continue paying a discounted $350 annual out of state membership dues rate instead of the proposed rate of several thousand dollars.  

My father and my uncle, who had not lived in the town since graduating from Peekskill High in 1941 and ’43, respectively, continued to pay dues to the synagogue they had attended as children.  After all, my father pointed out in his letter, they felt loyalty to the place they helped their father mop and care for.  

He no doubt wanted to mention it was the place where they did menial jobs as children, assisting their father, who was paid a pauper’s wage as caretaker.  And that it was the place their religious mother donated money that probably should have been spent on clothes and food.  The family was poor.  Their father was so poorly paid as caretaker for the synagogue that the family received Relief, the shameful precursor to Welfare.  The boys helped him work there sometimes.  When they were young men they paid a few hundred dollars annually in dues for more than fifty years each.  My father’s letter was asking for an exception to the new rule that every member, whether in state or not, had to pay the full dues.

“I realize the impact on the congregation’s finances and ability to carry on its work if its many out of state members did not contribute the full dues.  I spoke to Lisa, who informs me that my brother and I are the only two such members.  In light of this, I respectfully submit that the harm to the congregation would be minimal and request that we be granted a waiver, and be allowed to continue paying the $350 annually.  It should also be noted that we have faithfully paid annual dues since the mid-1940s.”  

My father’s first cousin, Eli, long gone now, was less diplomatic, more inclined to turn purple and react with his fists.  A few years before my father’s letter he’d reacted to the news his dues were being raised by picking up the phone and barking.   “You can put a fucking dog in my hole,” he roared at the woman at the synagogue, “I’ve been paying dues for 60 years, out of respect, for a place I haven’t set foot in in decades.  I’m not paying one fucking dollar more, and you can tell the rabbi to go fuck himself too!”

Eli received a letter of apology and an assurance that the 85 year old’s dues would not be raised.   Two years later he died and was buried in the plot he’d probably paid tens of thousands of dollars to reserve for himself, next to his beloved wife Helen who left us early.

In my mother’s papers I found letters from my uncle, after my father’s death, assuring her that the Peekskill dues had been frozen at $350, in spite of new dunning letters.  My mother paid every bill she ever got on time, and must have called or emailed my uncle when she got the bill every year.  For her part, she always indicated a desire to be cremated, the stone was already over the double grave where her husband’s mortal remains were already eternally resting, she didn’t like religion, had no connection to the shul, or need for it, yet paid anyway, $1,750 for the last five years of her life.   In the end they forbade us to inter her ashes in the grave she’d paid and paid for.  She truly doesn’t care, I’m sure.

After my uncle’s stroke my cousin and I found correspondence in a file folder regarding the promise that the dues to the congregation would be kept at a preferential $350, in spite of the fact that members actually using the facilities paid many times that.  My uncle wrote a patient letter annually and was granted the exemption each time.  

When I called to tell the rabbi that my uncle had had a stroke, the rabbi sounded genuinely concerned.  He seemed like a compassionate guy in those couple of conversations.  He called my uncle once, which I found touching and which my uncle appreciated.

My uncle died early Thursday morning after a two week hospital stay that could not save him.  Later that day my cousin called the compassionate rabbi to arrange the funeral.  The rabbi asked my cousin if he’d mind if they made the hole a bit deeper and buried some old prayer books?  Jewish law apparently requires this odd practice, and my cousin said it would be fine.  They spoke about my uncle and his wishes for the funeral arrangements.  Then the rabbi mentioned that the congregation had a strict policy about burial arrangements and that members who were not up to date on their dues could not be buried.  There was the matter of the $350 unpaid on the most recent invoice.

“Please tell me you’re shitting me,” I said to my cousin.  He assured me that he wasn’t.  “Please tell me you barked ‘you can put a fucking dog in my father’s hole’!”  He hadn’t.  He, like me, seeks to avoid confrontation, and though he was disgusted, as most people would be, he did not make an issue or argue, he just made arrangements to pay the $350.

I am walking the difficult path of trying to remain mild and gentle in all circumstances.  You’d be surprised how many loved ones throw this kind of vow in your face, if you ever raise your voice, if you express exasperation, or anger, or, say, the desire to give this religious quack a quick short shove into the open grave.  Their mockery makes it no easier to become truly nonviolent, but ahimsa is difficult in any circumstance, living in a violent, angry often irrational world.

In my mind, as I think of the quick remarks I’ll say for my uncle  mainly to comfort my aunt at the grave, in that freezing cemetery where most of the rest of our family is already interred, I’m searching for the perfectly turned phrase to deliver, looking directly and mildly at the hypocrite rabbi as I do, to bring sudden color to his face and an abrupt, involuntary absence of breath, like he’d been punched in the solar plexus.