Great Tributes to J [UPDATED]
Just in case you haven’t seen them:
by True Ancestor (my brother David)
by The Love Goddess (my friend Dalma Heyn)
by Head Butler (J’s old friend Jesse Kornbluth) (follow the link within for more)
by Stuck in the ’80s (St. Petersburg Times blogger Steve Spears)
by Dreidel Hustler (virtual friend Brian Abrams, formerly of Heeb magazine, who wanted to declare J an “Honorary Heeb.” Which he was, anyway.)
The last two focus on J’s cameo of pop-culture immortality in Trading Places; there is even a clip. (Proof that we can’t direct our own legacy. What I’m going to be remembered for is this.)
I will add any others that turn up and front-page this post for a day or two each time.
The very friend who introduced us over cats writes to me:
Before a memorial gathering, isn’t it pushing on an open door to get an obit of Jacques printed in the NYT? He is pure Big Apple legend. And of course as photogenic as Nicole Kidman – in his own way. The snag is you would have to write it. … Do you have it in you to do this so close out? It does not have to be magnificent. As your brother proved, the heart will tell the story.
I’m not sure I have it in me just yet, and if too early for me it must already be too late for the NYT; doesn’t an obit have to be news?
Meanwhile, I’m on the way to pick up his ashes. When I called the mortuary, I was a bit staggered by a cheery, “He’s ready!”
Ready when you are, C.M.
UPDATE: From the Kyokushin Karate community in his birthland of Romania, old friends in Bucuresti, Sibiu, and Tirgu Mures. I could almost translate them, but not quite.
Afterburn
A dear friend just wrote me a long e-mail in which she said, among many other things, that where J is now he isn’t thinking about food, because “the soul doesn’t have a stomach.”
I sent her a two-word reply: “His does.”
Stupidity is Forever. [updated]
That’s the punchline of a Romanian joke. God is handing out various qualities to people getting ready to be born, and finally there are only two left: Beauty and Stupidity. The last one in line is Bula, the hapless hero of many Romanian jokes (a sort of wise fool, or idiot savant, whose name bears a near-miss resemblance to the word for “penis”). God gives him a choice, and to His surprise, Bula chooses stupidity. “May I ask why?” says God. And Bula says, “Beauty is fleeting, but stupidity is eternal!”
Lots of paperwork has arrived, and it has perversely cheered me (if also made more work for me) by being all wrong.
Social Security, taking my statement over the phone, misheard and misrecorded J’s date of death as November 16, which will necessitate at least one more phone call to set it straight. Screen Actors Guild has been sending his pension to his legal name, Jack Herman, for years, but is now addressing correspondence to his professional name — another potential source of rich confusion. (Partly our stupidity, in this case, for maintaining multiple names.) But it is American Express that takes the cake. When I called them to have J’s senior gold card account, on which I was an additional cardholder, transferred to my name, they gave me their condolences and said no problem, but they would be sending me a new primary card with a new number, which they did on November 23. On the same day, they sent me the following notice:
To the Estate of
Annie Gottlieb
C/O Annie Gottlieb
Re: Account Ending [NEW card number!]To Whom It May Concern:
We are sorry to learn ot the death of Annie Gottlieb and want to thank you for taking the time to notify us. We value our relationships with our customers and are pleased that you want to continue with Cardmembership. . . .
Please complete, sign, and return the enclosed Primary Cardmember Change Request Application so that we may process your request to transfer this account. . . .
We need to receive the completed and signed application within 30 days, or we will have to close Annie Gottlieb’s [NEW!] account, as well as any Additional Cards.
Delicious. I’m bracing myself for J’s death certificate. What can they get wrong there? Maybe they’ll send me a birth certificate instead?
One of my ex-brothers-in-law, who was Mexican and unsure of his English and also hung over at his wedding to my sister over 30 years ago, screwed up the vows and actually married himself.
Night Thoughts [UPDATED AGAIN]
“Home” from Florida.
I’ve taken to putting “home” in quotes for Chapel Hill. Florida is home. New York, which I’d about given up on, is rapidly reacquiring its homelike magnetism. (I had to write my address this morning and almost wrote my New York address.)
Chapel Hill never “took” for J — he always just assumed he was in New York — and it seems it hasn’t taken for me, either. For one thing, I never got out into it and got to know it. It has only been the place where I took care of J. And so it only reminds me of him. I can’t go through the parking area without seeing him sitting in his wheelchair in the sun. Or seeing him not sitting . . . or not seeing him . . . The place is totally defined by an absence. It is hollow.
Not that New York won’t be strange without him. But New York is where our hale and active life was, as well as both our lives before we knew each other. The beginning where we part company again. The reverse fork in the road. The place to reclaim all that, separate, together, separate. I need to give J back to New York, where he was something of a famous character, in his element, before I entered his life. (His dementia taught me the humbling lesson that the best days of his life, his pride and prime, were before he met me.) And I need to resume — immeasurably fortified — the independent discovery that he interrupted, even hijacked, the best thing that could have happened to me. “Jacques therapy.”
* * *
My father asked me, “What do you think your life would have been like if you hadn’t met Jacques?”
Unanswerable question, of course, but I tried to answer it. “I probably would’ve gotten married, had a couple of kids, and gotten divorced. I would have been more of a typical member of my cohort — an ecofeminist, or something. I probably would’ve written more books, but they would’ve been more like other people’s books. I’d have been a bird of a feather.”
* * *
As J was dying, I chanted to him the names of some of the cats and people who would be waiting for him on the other side, if there is another side. It was quite a while afterwards before I smacked myself in the forehead and said, “I forgot his sister!” Who died as a prisoner in Russia, unknown to him, only 50 miles from where he was, only a few months after her capture. Whom he rarely talked about. Then: “But maybe that’s because I am his sister.” I’ve long thought that. If there is reincarnation. It would fit, in timing and many other ways.
* * *
I always thought of J as robustly physical. So I was very surprised, after he died, to discover that more than two-thirds of that had been energy, not matter. That’s why it doesn’t bother me that his body has been cremated. It wasn’t him — at all. This is true of everyone, but it seemed more true of him. He seemed more physical and was, if anything, less so. What do you know.
UPDATE: Well, of course this place is empty. He wouldn’t hang around here for a second. He’s back in New York already!
UPDATE 2: I was worried that my going to Chicago for 4 nights, and leaving J in the (supposedly excellent) hospice facility, where they had trouble taking good care of someone as big and relatively healthy as he was — someone who was just “parked,” rather than departing — was the trigger for his shingles. I wasn’t comfortable about leaving him there, but needed respite and, having lost my job, could not afford a round-the-clock aide. I asked my main ally the home hospice aide whether I should bring along extra-large Depends from the supply she brought me, and she said, “Oh, no, they have everything there, and if they don’t, they can get it from the warehouse right across the street.” As it turned out, they didn’t have any extra-large Depends, and they didn’t bother to get any (though I brought him on a Thursday, so they didn’t have the weekend excuse). So they couldn’t dress him, couldn’t sit him up straight in his wheelchair, left him parked on his bare tailbone in a hospital gown, and he got a pressure sore in 4 nights that he hadn’t gotten in 4 years. The home hospice team was upset and angry that this had happened; but they were also on the verge of having to decertify him because he was too “stable.”
I’ll never know whether that discomfort and temporary sense of abandonment (he expressed his distress to me over the phone) contributed to his depressed immune system and the outbreak of shingles, but something else struck me. Every time he has gotten seriously ill, it’s been in the fall. He got a spinal staph infection in October 1975, descended into aspiration pneumonia in November-December 2006, and now this. The dread of winter impressed on his very cells in Russia, and triggered by the cooling and shortening of the days, may have been the greater factor.
Even if I came up with this to make myself feel better, it is also true. And as surprisingly “stable” as he seemed for how long he had been ill, the robust façade was deceptive. He had declined, and was vulnerable. His disease, called Lewy body dementia, had very slowly, with remorseless patience, dragged him down within death’s reach.
One more odd note: significant events of his life tended to take place on the 19th. He crossed into the Western zone of Germany on February 19, 1947, two days before his 19th birthday. He fought in the Jack Dempsey tournament on September 19, 1949 or 1950. He died November 19.
When He Began To Bellow . . .
. . . he made such melodious sound . . .
His legs they were fourteen yards long
His ears they were broad
Round the world in half a day
On him I could ride
This makes me cry.
(A favorite song of mine when I was about fifteen.)
Orion
Having gone to sleep around 12:30, I woke at 5:48. It was my habit to sleep about 5 hours a night, staying up late to have some time for myself, and waking up relatively early to tend to J. (I was not too sleep-deprived because I’d take a nap sometime later in the day.) That schedule seems to be stamped on my nervous system for the time being. Anyway, I had to pee.
The window was full of pale light, but dawn wasn’t visible yet. (I suppose we had already entered astronomical twilight.) It was the half moon — technically third quarter — shining directly overhead, so brightly that the sand was silver and there were sharp black shadows under the palm trees and the beach chairs. Despite the bright moon, the first few stealthy photons of sunlight, and the light pollution at both ends of this island, I could see quite a few stars. Especially Orion, my favorite constellation, standing foursquare and manly above the Gulf of Mexico, framed right in the center of my window.
I sat down and answered an e-mail from Pat, and minutes later, when I looked again, the moon had dimmed and the stars were gone, erased by a rolling fog.
A Poem for Jacques
Sent by dear friends, “Felix Randal” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (the speaker is, as Hopkins was, a ministering priest):
Felix Randal the farrier, O he is dead then? my duty all ended,
Who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome
Pining, pining, till time when reason rambled in it and some
Fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?Sickness broke him. Impatient he cursed at first, but mended
Being anointed and all; though a heavenlier heart began some
Months earlier, since I had our sweet reprieve and ransom
Tendered to him. Ah well, God rest him all road ever he offended!This seeing the sick endears them to us, us too it endears.
My tongue had taught thee comfort, touch had quenched thy tears,
Thy tears that touched my heart, child, Felix, poor Felix Randal;How far from then forethought of, all thy more boisterous years,
When thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers,
Didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!
Circle of a Life
(Look above the accordion)
Jacques and Omar, who saved his life in Russia
Warmest thanks to Chris Davis for scanning most of these photos.
An Attack of the Haikkups
empty wheelchair van
as launch pad is to orbit:
loose straps’ job is done
Ambiance 