DIED 2016
DISEASES DIDN’T KILL HIM (polio, leukemia, von Willebrand’s), history left him standing (World War II, Korea, market crash of ’87), his marriages proved nonlethal, and one escape was sheer James Bond: a collision between a commuter seaplane and a police helicopter over Brooklyn that killed everyone involved except him and a woman whose life he saved. Just after the plane hit the water, he forced open the emergency exit and pulled her out, then tried to get back into the rapidly sinking plane. The other passenger was his buddy, a fellow stockbroker with kids the same age—but the current tore the door out of his hands, just as it would in his nightmares for years to come. How did he get to shore with a broken back, a split-open head, and an unconscious woman? the reporters asked. We were lucky, he told them. Just lucky.
This modest hero was my mother’s favorite cousin—an old-school gentleman who loved a good joke and a good cigar. He had a seat on the stock exchange for forty years. He called his own mother every morning. His boys were the center of his universe, and they worshipped him in return. He never raised his voice at home, and the first time his older son heard him curse in anger he was seventeen years old: he had gone to work with his father on the trading floor. His ninth life lasted seven years, the long goodbye of losses and forgetting. This is when Sweetums, which is what my father used to call his wife, not to her face, and not because she was, became a hero, too. He would have hated being such a burden, but of course he barely knew about it. The only consolations of Alzheimer’s, and they are small indeed, are that it doesn’t hurt much, and that once the full nightmare is under way, you are long gone.