My father was born in Brooklyn 109 years ago today. He only lived for 72 of those years, and I’ve spent almost half my life without him.
I’ve never written about my father, even though I’ve written many times about my mother, with whom I had a close and intense relationship (or, as we psychotherapists like to call it, “enmeshed”). My bond with my father was not the same vibrant technicolor, but we, too, were close. I look like my father, our temperaments are similar, and I share the BRCA2 mutation he passed on to me, something he never knew was part of his inheritance to me, or, for that matter, his inheritance from one of his parents. He died from mutation-linked pancreatic cancer a month after diagnosis in 1990. In 2012, I did not die from a rare and aggressive cancer of the uterus, which is the organ my BRCA2 flaw made its bodily debut in. My father lives on in me in many more felicitous ways, and I honor him today, Earth Day–a fitting marker for such a down-to-earth, life-sustaining mensch.
One of my favorite childhood memories is of walking with my father along the banks of the river that ran through our town, me climbing a tree while Dad stood at its base. This memory captures his steadfastness and stability that have always been at the root of my ability to explore, to climb, and to risk. I could do so knowing there was a solid and safe foundation below.
My father, a brilliant chemist, nuclear physicist, and deputy director of a radiological health laboratory, often took me and my friends to the lab on the weekend, where we raced each other on rolling desk chairs through the corridors, froze pencil erasers in liquid nitrogen, and gazed with mesmerized horror at the grotesque photos of people disfigured by tumors and burns caused by radiation.
As a graduate student, my father worked on the Manhattan Project, and liked to tell the story about how his superiors took the team out to a Japanese restaurant to reveal that they were working on developing the bomb that would destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like many of that generation, my father convinced himself that their deadly endeavor saved more lives than it cost, and that it was certainly in better hands than the Nazis’. He dedicated his professional life to harnessing the productive powers of the atom, and finding safe ways to mitigate its risk. I am ambivalent about my father’s role in ushering in the nuclear era, but one of the gifts he bestowed was an appreciation for complexity and the necessity of risk management—a skill that helped me decide how to deal with carrying the BRCA2 mutation.
Perhaps my father atoned for whatever ambivalence he had about his role by staunchly opposing the Vietnam War. When I was in middle school, he took me and my older brother to the Lexington Common, where colonial-era Minutemen once mustered and where in 1968 Vietnam Veterans Against the War and their supporters risked arrest by insisting on continuing our peaceful protest past the park’s curfew. It had been a hot summer day when we set out, and we dressed accordingly. As night fell and temperatures plummeted, people in shorts and sandals ran toward the police vans for the warmth of the station where they’d be processed after arrest. My father, brother, and I were freezing, too, but we, along with dozens of other hardy souls, held fast. The sun rose, curfew ended—we had held the Common! It was one of the most exhilarating moments of my youth, enhanced a few years later when my father took me to Washington, D.C., for one of the massive anti-war protests there. He and my mother also worked tirelessly for civil rights, instilling me with the values that motivate my activism today.
My father was also endlessly patient and generous. When my brother’s marriage and business collapsed, my parents gave him love, support, and a roof over his head, and my father taught him everything he knew about physics, chemistry, statistics, and scientific analysis, mentoring the broken former cheese-shop owner into a well-regarded and high-level scientific researcher and writer who rebuilt his life. As my brother said at our father’s funeral, “Dad taught us how to live . . . not so much through words as by the example he set in the way he lived his life. He was kind; he was funny; he was decent; he was caring; and he was gentle. His death leaves all of us who knew and loved him with a great emptiness and cherished memories to help fill it.”
I am so glad my father lived long enough to meet my husband, walk me down the aisle at our wedding, spend time with our firstborn daughter, who was almost two when he died. She charmingly nestled right next to him in his hospital bed, exclaiming, “Camper! Camper!” because she couldn’t pronounce Grandpa. Being with her pleased him so much he rallied for a day or two before succumbing to the cancer. My father bequeathed his signature handkerchiefs to her for her collection of beloved “raggies.” Even as I write this, I have the last of those hankies in my lap, helping me weather a long virus.
I am sorry my father missed the birth of our second daughter, whom we named after his mother—not because any of us, including my father, were so fond of her, but because of the connection to him. He’s missed so much in the last 36 years–our daughters growing up, marrying good men as I did thanks to his example, all of us living full and satisfying lives.
I miss you, Dad. Happy Birthday, and thank you.
