Last weekend I attended the funeral of a dear friend who died after an almost two-year battle with pancreatic cancer. Though not a religious man, Bob’s funeral was held in a Catholic church in a scruffy section of Syracuse.
It was a neighborhood Bob loved, with the farmers market down the street and an old-world Italian grocery nearby. Also near, a cigar shop he frequented. Bob didn’t smoke the cigars; he chewed on them. I imagine the visits to the tobacco shop were more of a way to push aside — if only temporarily — the pressures of a job that was always with him, that of a pediatric critical care physician.
Bob wore his hair in a ponytail. He was a voracious reader (“Moby Dick” and “The Sound and the Fury” multiple times). He was a watercolorist, a baseball fan … he’d rooted for the Giants since he was a kid and they played at the Polo Grounds. He was kind, an intense listener. His medical colleagues, both doctors and nurses, loved him. So did his patients and their parents. When our kids were little, we could — and did — call him anytime, day or night, with a medical question and be assured of getting his full attention.
The funeral service was magnificent. His brother, a cellist, played “Simple Gifts,” the Shaker melody Aaron Copeland appropriated for “Appalachian Spring,” one of Bob’s favorite pieces of music. A colleague read from Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.” His son-in-law’s four-person a cappella group sang Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.”
His medical partner offered a heartfelt and, in places, laugh-out-loud eulogy.
Every feature of the service was moving, but the eulogy delivered by Bob’s oldest child, Caitlin Gucker Kanter Taylor, a daughter he raised but did not father, was something apart. Caitlin’s tender, eloquent and profound eulogy described so well this gentle man we had gathered to honor:
For me, David and Anna, trying to find the outer edges of what our father taught us is almost impossible because he so carefully taught us not what to see in the world but how to see it.
He taught us how to see the world as he did — with critical and analytic rigor, but also with gentleness and steadiness. He taught us to see the beauty and logic that reside in all things and all people, and he taught us to be universally kind.
He taught us to drink jet-black coffee with the consistency of river bottom sludge, the importance of taking good notes, and how to nap absolutely anywhere. He taught us when to chase an idea and when to be still. He taught us to love April snowstorms for their unpredictable beauty.
Being raised by a pediatric intensivist often meant that our garden-variety ailments — like a stubbed toe or a bad date — were met with a loving yet dismissive chuckle. Like, for example, the time I called him at midnight to tell him that Aaron was taking me to the emergency room with an inch-long wooden splinter all the way through my finger and his sleepy response was to “just be nice to the nurses.”
But if our everyday mishaps didn’t always catch his attention, our accidentally deep questions about the geometry of a snowflake, the history of the JFK assassination or the deepest point on the ocean floor were met with considered, researched and esoteric responses. …
He taught us that no question was unanswerable if framed in the right context or asked in the right language. He taught us that no equation was unsolvable if you knew which variables to solve for — even if the last, crucial variable was a healthy dose of mysticism and an acceptance of the unknowable. He taught us to seriously study science, art, and fantasy fiction with equal rigor, good judgment, a straight face, and a sense of humor.
Anna, David and I also share a mother, and I think that I speak for all three of us, and all of you, when I say that our parents marriage provided us with an unrivaled example of a partnership built on curiosity and amusement, generosity and trust and an absolute, undying love. In their historic marriage, they made many things: They made children, made a home, made meaningful careers, and made off-color jokes. They made mischief, made aspic, and made many stops at many suspicious diners on many meandering road trips. The adventure of their marriage is something to gratefully venerate — we were all so fortunate to be raised in its warm glow.
My son and his grandfather overlapped on planet earth for exactly five months to the day. Dad came directly from a long stay at Johns Hopkins to meet Ellis in the hospital the day after he was born in October, and he spent a few quiet minutes whispering in his grandson’s ear in a sunny corner of our hospital room.
Though I’ll never know exactly what secret knowledge he passed on, or what mysteries he revealed, I hope that whatever it was remains lodged in the deepest folds of Ellis’ memory forever — I hope somehow he passed on his gentle wisdom, his love of a good book, his poetic and precise view of the world, and his secret to the perfect tomato sandwich.
As I teach Ellis to make his first ever tomato sandwiches this summer, I’ll make sure he knows that it was his grandfather that taught me exactly how thickly the bread must be sliced and exactly how juicy the tomato must be — and how they’re best enjoyed while sitting outside late on a warm summer evening watching the sun go down.
So my most sincere hope for Ellis, and for all of us, is that every slow summer sunset and every perfectly ripe tomato calls to mind some small and deep memory of his grandfather and reveals one of the many tender secrets he carefully left behind for us to find.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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