Eight years later
A few years ago, I got sick. Extremely high fever sick. Hospital sick. Undignified Stomach Issues sick. I don’t remember much about the first few days I spent at Cedars. I remember shivering, and I remember a nurse wrapping a
Two words ended an argument (no—not those two words)
The caller was hopping mad—angry enough to unload on a stranger. I was the stranger. The unloadee. And according to the guy at the other end of the phone, I was biased, corrupt, intentionally misleading, and, among other things, no
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Seven Years Later
There’s this idea out there that the human body regenerates itself every seven years, and so you’re literally not the same person you were seven years ago. It’s wrong. And it’s unintentionally right. The body does not regenerate every seven
As time goes by
Today – Aug. 17 – always was special in my family. A day to celebrate. On this day in 1958, my parents married. Every year on their anniversary, I’d ask my dad the same questions my brothers and sister did.
A Very Important Halloween Message
This year, I am very pleased to have arranged for the eminent educator Dr. Science Person to record a special Halloween video. Watch if you dare. But consider yourself warned: This is no ordinary spooky story. This is a spooky
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Five years later
The thought flashes into my mind rarely enough that I’m surprised when it does. I’m surprised at the flood of anguish, surprised how quickly it subsides. Three times a year, maybe four, I’ll hear something or read something or think
The thought flashes into my mind rarely enough that I’m surprised when it does. I’m surprised at the flood of anguish, surprised how quickly it subsides.
Three times a year, maybe four, I’ll hear something or read something or think of something that reminds me of my dad, and I’ll get an automatic impulse to call him.
As soon as the impulse arrives, a wave of grief appears and washes it away. But the grief sticks around.
I first met that grief five years ago today.
It had been lurking for some time, but as my father got sicker, it began to venture out. In the week before Dad died, it got bolder. It became a vague, unwelcome presence and then a more insistent one.
And then, on this day five years ago, Grief kicked down the door.
That morning, I trudged up the long hallway in my parents’ house to see my dad. The hospice nurse asked me to wait for a moment while she checked his blood pressure.
Less than a minute later, she uttered a phrase that was absurd on every level:
“Your father has no blood pressure.”
Grief prepared to burst in while I tried to make sense of what the nurse had just said.
“You mean he’s gone?” I asked.
She said it again. “He has no blood pressure.”
Grief slapped me hard in the gut.
It made no sense. I understood that my father had been dying, but for him to actually die? Absurd. He was too gregarious. Too alive to die.
Alvin Weinstein managed to be both stubborn and open-minded, silly and urbane. He was a brilliant lawyer who excelled at the scholarly analysis of law and at the combat of trial. He was a remarkably talented classical musician who could explain the logic behind Paganini’s music and play that music with passion. He spoke four languages – and could tell fart jokes in each.
He was a fighter. An infantry officer. He had always been there. How could he be gone?
Five years have passed. Grief began to relent. It’s now a dull ache rather than a screaming raw nerve, but it’s still strong enough to surprise.
I’m surprised by the impulse, however fleeting, to call my father. I’m surprised that his name and long-ago discarded telephone number are saved in an iPhone that hadn’t been built when he died. Maybe I should delete it. But I won’t.
Five years.
A lot has happened. A pandemic. Two presidential administrations. Family weddings. Successes. Disappointments. Things too sad to type.
There’s an artificial heaviness – a phony significance – to the number five simply because it’s half of 10, and our numerical system is based on 10. That quirk of mathematics splashes into life, and we assign special meaning to the number five. We think we should feel something at five years, and at 10.
I do feel something: Sad. A similar sad, I suppose, to six. I’ll let you know then.
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Who shall wax rich
Today is Yom Kippur. My least-favorite holiday. A grim and joyless day in which we unworthy humans beg a skeptical God to forgive our sins. In the Yom Kippur of my youth, the pages of prayerbooks promised that God was
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Winter
I like winter better than summer. Always have. Winter demands an urgency and seriousness of purpose that Summer cannot – and does not want to – match. People walk a little faster when it’s cold outside. They involuntarily hunch their
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Writing names
Sometimes, writing character names is satisfying. I always like the last name “Flam,” which sounds like “Phlegm.” I went to school with a guy named “Flam.” First name was Flim. A real no-goodnik. None of that is true. But this
Four years later
Four years ago this morning, the hospice nurse uttered a clunky, hard-to-decipher phrase. “Your father has no blood pressure,” she told me. At first, her dumb and inelegant words didn’t register. This was a woman whose job was taking care
Four years ago this morning, the hospice nurse uttered a clunky, hard-to-decipher phrase.
“Your father has no blood pressure,” she told me.
At first, her dumb and inelegant words didn’t register. This was a woman whose job was taking care of dying people. Couldn’t she have offered a straightforward, “He’s gone,” or a leaden, “I’m sorry,” or a euphemistic, “He has passed?”
Time slowed down and my feet became very heavy. A great whirring filled my head. I glanced at the pile of sheets that covered what had been my father and attempted to piece together the meaning of her words. Finally, I managed to croak out a stupid question:
“Do you mean he’s gone?”
Her answer was dumber than my question: “He has no blood pressure.”
Time snapped back in place, and with it, my ability to comprehend. I made notifications and then padded my way down the steps, past the living room, down the hallway, through the kitchen and to the family room, where I hyperventilated.
I sat alone, hyperventilating, for five minutes. Maybe an hour. Possibly a few seconds. And now it’s four years.
Sometimes it feels like forever, as if my father – a funny, accomplished, talented man who played juries and violin – was a character in a book I read once. He could spell words backward, shouting the letters rapid-fire: “L-A-T-N-E-D-I-C-C-O!” (It’s a funny word, “Occidental.”) He could speak three languages. He put ketchup in chicken soup. He was an Infantry officer. He couldn’t follow a map well. He thought fart jokes were funny. He indulged his dogs – good ones like Maggie, a regal and sweet-natured collie, and terrible ones like Casey, an obese, neurotic beagle. He hated injustice and he loved my mother.
Four years is forever. It’s longer than law school. It’s a presidential term. It’s 1,461 days. And it’s nothing. He just drove me to school, just played Paganini, just delivered a closing argument, just helped a neighbor.A hospice nurse just took his blood pressure.
Four years.
Time has been playing tricks on me lately. Or I’ve been playing tricks on time. Days and weeks and months are fuzzy. Tuesday lasts a month and September zips by in hours. Friday is the same as Monday, and Monday bleeds into Wednesday. I can tell day from night, but not June 7th from July 23rd. I’m living in Pandemic Time, which is elastic and unpredictable, lazy and urgent.
When I was a kid, time followed the rules. After the fourth grade, there was summer, which, like the previous summer, stretched an impossibly long time. It ended, as expected, with the fifth grade. Impossibly long summers sound nice, don’t they? But I grew up in Miami, where summer is brutal. It is sticky and stormy and sullen – perfect for mosquitos and snakes and sawgrass. Until I was well into my 20s and had moved to my beloved Maine, I couldn’t understand why anyone would look forward to summer. By then, though, summer had gotten shorter.
My father was born on the Fourth of July 1929. He was a few months old when the Great Depression began. He lived through wars and crises and hurricanes. He saw his granddaughter graduate college.
So much has changed in four years. That granddaughter – my niece – is now married. Like my father, she is a lawyer. Like him, she manages to be both dignified and silly. Tomorrow, she’ll be sworn in as a member of the North Carolina State Bar. She is a law clerk to a justice on the state Supreme Court. Dad would be proud of her, and he’d crack a familiar joke:“You know what you call someone who made As in law school? ‘Professor.’ You know what you call someone who made Cs? ‘Your Honor.’”
Another granddaughter is about to graduate the University of Chicago, and a grandson is a college sophomore. Not the children my father knew.
I wonder what Dad would say about the rest of this – about the pandemic and the unrest and the murder hornets. I think it would be irreverent.
Time is a trickster. It warps and folds and stretches and contracts. The rest of this will pass in confounding ways, as the past four years have.
Alvin Weinstein lived 87 years. That sounds like a lot. But Time is a trickster. An endless summer can stretch too long and 87 summers aren’t nearly enough.
