This is a little longer version of the eulogy I gave for my father at his funeral today. I think he would have liked it although I can hear his voice saying, “It’s too long.”
I want to tell you some things about my father’s life. But, before I do, I want to say something about how he died.
As most of you know, he had been sick with pancreatic cancer since May. Pancreatic cancer is a deadly disease for which there is no cure. Death usually comes very quickly. My father lived almost ten months. He had two different rounds of chemotherapy. The first round seemed to have slowed the disease for a time but ultimately stopped working. The second round worked for a while, too, but then he had a bad reaction to it. That, and the spread of the disease, is probably what weakened him so much that his heart gave out on Sunday.
It’s never easy to see someone close to you, let alone a parent die. But my father died in a way that I found inspiring, almost beautiful. He may be the only person I’ve ever heard of who looked forward to chemotherapy. He felt good after chemo because the steroid shots he got stopped the itching that the cancer created. But more than liking chemotherapy what moved me most was that my dad never complained about what was happening to him. He knew from the beginning the prognosis was not good. And while he wasn’t happy with the news, for the last ten months he dealt with it without flinching. He didn’t like being as tired as he was. But he knew he was dying and never complained about it. Instead, he talked about how lucky he was to have lived a long life and how good his life had been. He and my mother became closer than ever—which is somewhat incredible since they had been married almost 60 years. On their last anniversary, he was too weak to go out and buy a card, so he hand wrote and drew a lovely card for her.
A few months ago I started writing what I soon realized would be part of a eulogy for my father. I’m a political scientist as well as a political activist. And one of the activists with whom I work was talking how it would be great if we could predict—or to use the political science jargon—create a model to predict who would respond to our emails and calls and become a political or community activist. I laughed to myself during this discussion because I both knew the answer and didn’t know how to use it effectively.
The answer is simple. The best way to predict if someone will be active in their community is to know whether his or her parents were activists. There is a political science literature that teaches us that. But it was brought home to me when I was involved in creating a school /community playground and, in preparation for a speech, I asked the other people involved in that project to tell me if their parents had been active in their community. Every single one raised their hand.
That was certainly my experience. My interest in politics and working for my community comes from my father. He never instructed or lectured me about the importance of serving the community. He just showed me how important it was.
Except on Wednesday nights, when he went to Rotary, my father always had dinner with us. But I remember many evenings when, after dinner, he didn’t read a novel or a newspaper or watch sports or another show on TV and instead, went out for an hour or two for a meeting of Synagogue Board, or the Board of what was then Community General Hospital or to hold court as a Town or Village Justice.
There are three buildings in this county that my Dad had a role in creating. One of them is this synagogue and community center. There is still a plaque at the head of the steps with the names of the seven men on the building committee who were most responsible for this lovely building which became one of the centers of our lives.
Another is the hospital in Harris. My father was on the board and was encouraged when the state forced the old Liberty and Monticello hospitals to merge because that meant there would be an opportunity to create a new, state of the art hospital for the county. He was the president of the hospital board for the three critical years when the new hospital was built and opened. There is a plaque at the hospital with his name and the other leaders of the hospital and his picture hangs in the board room of the hospital.
And then there is the Sullivan County Community College building in Loch Sheldrake. During the 19 years my father served as Assistant County Attorney, he was the lawyer for the college and did much of the legal work during the construction of the new building.
(There is also the Liberty Movie Theater. When it closed when I was a teenager, my father joined a group of about ten people who bought it, restored it, and converted it into a triplex, not because they expected to make much money but just because they thought that our village, and especially the kid in it, needed a movie theater. That was one project that failed, although it did provide me with a job as an usher for a few weeks, which enabled me to see Rollerball and Tommy each about 15 times.)
Of course it wasn’t about creating buildings for my dad, but what happened in them.
As a Village Justice, he cared a great deal about protecting people from criminals and from the occasional misdeeds about the police.
He cared deeply about the opportunities for education created by classrooms in the new synagogue and the community college.
And, perhaps he cared even more deeply about health care. I’ll never forget the speech he gave at a dinner honoring him for his work as hospital president. I don’t think I had ever heard him give a formal speech before and, to be honest, I didn’t know what to expect. He gave a very powerful speech about how there was no reason people in this county, rich and poor, shouldn’t have the opportunity to get the very best health care and how the hospital would make this possible. And he had a personal reason, too. My father was always upset that his brother had died so far from his home and his family and he didn’t want other people to have to go through the same thing. So it is perhaps fitting that he died at the hospital he did so much to build.
My father didn’t do all the work for these buildings and institution himself. He, like my uncle Hesh, was part of a generation of builders whose names can be found on the plaques and in the records along with my dad’s. It was a pretty extraordinary group of people and my father was just one leader among many. But he clearly was someone who others looked to for leadership.
One reason they did so was because my father had a reputation for honesty and integrity second to none. When he went to the annual County Bar Association Christmas party the year he announced that he was closing his private practice, one of his colleagues gave a short speech at which he said my father was the most ethical lawyer in Sullivan County
At a time when publicly supported health care and retirement benefits as well as public unions are under attack, I want to say a word about what made it possible for my father to live the kind of life he did. He was a brilliant man whose friends always joked about how he never studied much in college or law school.
But he was able to go to college at Syracuse and law school at Harvard only because of the GI Bill. That education made it possible for him to provide for his family and also to dedicate himself to community organizations. He was a part-time and extremely dedicated public employee for most of his adult life. He retired with a good, but not extravagant pension, which Social Security supplemented. He received the best possible medical care during his illness in part because of Medicare.
My father’s life is a testimony to how communal provision makes us all stronger by giving people opportunities they would not otherwise have and by enabling them to live their lives focused on something more than their own wealth and power.
Dad was not just a model for me as an activist but as a father. And that makes sense because I’ve always thought that politics is a lot like parenting. In both, you need a lot of patience and you have to spend a lot of time hanging around with people and waiting for the right moment to say something that will strike a chord with them.
My father was a gentle unobtrusive parent didn’t make a big point of giving me a lot of instruction or even correcting me when I said things that didn’t make sense. When I was in my early teens during the Vietnam War and was first getting interested in politics, he didn’t waste much time correcting my foolish ideas either when I supported the war while he was already opposed to it or when I turned against the war and started saying silly things about revolution. He let me talk and he listened with respect.
We spent a lot of time together, at dinner, working at our hotel, or fixing something around the house. And we spent a lot of it watching ball games on TV or even better, going to New York, usually with my uncle and cousin Craig, to see the Yankees or Mets or Knicks play. And we spent a lot of time laughing. My father was one of the funniest men I’ve ever known. And he loved to laugh. I’m afraid I haven’t been able to capture that in these remarks.
He was around when I needed him, always rising to the occasion. Let me give you some examples.
I think one of the best bits of parenting my father ever did was on our month long trip across the country. We arrived in Las Vegas and stopped for lunch at a diner. In the place where you would normally find a juke box, there was a small slot machine that took nickels. I put in a nickel and won $20.00 in nickels. My Dad, said, “Let me show you something” and he and I took turns putting every one of those nickels back into the slot machine until he gave me the last one. I’ve never had any interest in gambling since. My sister was, I guess, too young to get that lesson.
When my mother’s parents died, and I would become incredibly anxious when he and my mother would stay out late at night, he realized what was going on and helped me overcome my fears with just a few calming words.
Sometimes my dad did things behind the scenes that made a huge difference. In my last year in Hebrew School, my classmates and I were a real handful for our new teacher, Rabbi Grodner. I was sent out of class many times for cutting up. My father gave me a good talking to about that. But he also, unknown to me, went and had a talk with Rabbi Grodner. He told the Rabbi that we were in our bar mitzvah year and that it was too late to teach us Hebrew grammar and other rote subjects. He suggested that, instead, the Rabbi should try to engage our interest in modern Jewish ideas. Rabbi Grodner found a good book, which I still have, on post-enlightenment Jewish thought and all of sudden our class turned around. Later in the year, Rabbi Grodner told me that my father had been the one that was responsible for that happening.
I only remember seeing my father cry once. It was a few days after Valentine’s Day, 33 years ago. Both of my mother’s parents died on Valentine’s Day. As usual, my Dad spent the next few days taking care of everything and all of us. After the service, everyone came back to our house, as I hope you all can do today, after we bury my father. I was hanging around with him when he went into his bedroom for a minute and I saw him tear up. Someone came into the room and asked him if he was OK and he just said, “They were good people.”
That pretty much sums him up too. He was a good man.