Daddy Eulogy, March 5, 2009

I have told this story before, so if you’ve heard it, I apologize:

At the end of the summer, the very last time I visited my parents at their apartment at 280 Riverside Drive, we were going down in the elevator on our way to dinner. I looked at my father and said, “Daddy, you’re getting old,” and he said to me, “I told ya I was gonna get old.” And I said, “I don’t like it.” And he said to me, “I told you you weren’t gonna like it.”

On February 18, when he received the diagnosis, he called to say he was “going to start the process of dying.” He said that even though he’d been living on borrowed time for 20 years, it’s never the right time, and that 94 still sounded a hell of a lot better than 85 to him. He said he still had living to do, and that one of his biggest regrets was that he would miss Sarah Maribel’s bat mitzvah. I didn’t want to hear about it, but he said we would be in it together until the end, whenever that would be.

On the airplane coming to see him, I thought about the things I wanted to tell him. I kept thinking about Daddy and the movies: “You know Daddy, how you would see a movie and say, ‘where’s the character development? So & so didn’t change at all, didn’t grow at all in that picture.'” That was always a grave disappointment to him – a lack of character development. So when I got to the hospital, I did get to say, “But Daddy you DID change, you did make the choice to be good, you HAVE made yourself an example to all of us for recovery and redemption, and we are here together now and I do love you and you ARE my hero.” And he could look at me and say “Thank you, dahling.”

So we did get to say goodbye, and in a way I am glad it is here in Green Valley. He loved it here, his friends, his activities, the desert, the sun. We would speak on the phone while he sat in the sun – and these are the things he would say – “Don’t make yourself crazy,” “Don’t worry until there’s something to worry about,” and, “You don’t have to worry because I love you and I’m your Poppa.” And our conversation would wind down and he would say, “Alright, Betseleh, I’m going to go.”

So, OK, Daddy, I’ll let you go -- my Hero, the guy who brought me birthday cake and picked me up into the sun when I was two, my proud poppa, my good boy, my one and only Daddy-o. May you go in peace and always know that I love you.