A Good Life

Marvin Stanley Plotkin passed yesterday.    He was beloved by his daughters.  He was a faithful husband.  He loved airplanes and military ceremonies and honors.  He lived a long life but also did suffer at the end from the diseases of diabetes, cancer, and the heart.   He was fortunate to die in his sleep, with his daughter in his home.  The same home that he lived in for the past six decades.

  

What is a good life?  Everyone has joys and sorrows and moments of elation.  We all try to do good for others and perform acts of kindness.  We might not be the valedictorian of the class and win science fairs, but we probably had more fun chasing butterflies and collecting stamps and coins.   A good life is one of love, and Marvin loved his wife and daughters.   He found it hard to express in his earlier years, but I most remember his words to Joan and to Aryln and to Janet,  "I love you…have a good time"

Marvin lost his dad at a young age.  He always longed to be a part of a brotherhood that a father and son relationship might engender.  I think the military was in a sense a kind of father that he did not have.   Marvin suffered from a seizure disorder from his young adult years.  I recall that he drove his new Mercury Cougar into a home.  The house's porch was destroyed but the Cougar emerged with only scratches.  Having a medical condition that conflicted with his military desires must have been difficult-- a medical condition that would excuse him from pursuing long term military honors.   A seizure disorder that might at times jumble his brain and make the world a little fuzzier.

 

My best memory of Marvin is his birthday at Gus's Mariner restaurant at Virginia Beach shortly after Joan and I met.    He loved seafood.  His joy was infectious.   He had the pure happiness of someone who is never unencumbered by guilt.    Joan's best memory is Marvin at the Deltaville's Ullmann Sails sock burning oyster festival at the beginning of the sailing season last year.   On a sunny yet chilly Spring Day,  the warm fire, the happy sailors, the promise of the new season, coalesced into slurping a perfectly roasted Oyster.  Life is good.  Life is elemental.  These moments are fleeting but preserved in our crystalline memory.

 

Marvin was a fortunate man.  He was beloved by his daughters.  He was a transformed Republican who voted for Biden and knew that Biden won this election.  I have never heard him raise his voice in anger.  He had poor hearing so practiced selective hearing to his advantage.  He had a terrible disease of lung cancer and received wonderful care at his beloved VAMC.   The treatment caused his Right Heart to fail.  He suffered.   He was supposed to move to our house on the day he died, but I think he, in a way, loved being at his home and did not want to leave.    He was at his castle.  He raised his daughters and married them off at Farmington Drive.   He was the major, the captain of his home.

 

What is a good life?   Every life is precious.  Every moment is fleeting.  What remains are faith, love, and family.  Faith in God or life force or goodwill.  Faith in oneself that we can finish the race or complete a demanding task.   Faith in the goodness of people.   Faith in love.   

 

We all love.   Love of our partners and children, grandchildren, and greatgrandchildren and brethren.  Love of community, people, and country.  Love of nature.  Love of our pets like Waverly and Cupcake and Ginny.  We all have faith and love in family.

 

Family is the bond that strengthens our place on earth.  Family is the most complex of all demands and emotions but the most elemental and strong and simple bond.   

 

Marvin Stanley Plotkin had a good life.  He had faith, love and he has family.  We will miss you Marvin.  You will be remembered in a place of honor in our hearts.

 

Ripples

Becca smiles.  She is lost in her sleep and is seeing her dead sister Ida.  She is chasing a toddler.  She has raised and adored many grandchildren.  She is contracted, both in body and in mind, suffering from Alzheimer's dementia for the past five years.  She is curled up in fetal position, emaciated.

Becca is our Bubbe, beloved grandmother to our kids, mother to my wife, lover of stray cats and dogs, and my friend and mother in law.  She lays dying in our home, not knowing who or where she is. 

I met Bubbe almost 34 years ago.  She was a blur.  A woman in constant motion.  She smiled at me and then rushed off to her kitchen.  I did not know that she had told her daughter:  "Why did you bring him here ?"  She is from Chicago but lived in the capital of the Confederacy where Monument Avenue still pays homage to Stonewall Jackson and Robert E Lee.  They are beautiful statues from a time only one hundred fifty or so years ago.  A time so brief that it would be a nanosecond in geologic time scale.  Recent sediment.

Having raised her three girls, mostly by herself, she is a fierce champion of women.  She made friends easily although she was shy and unsure of herself.  She never benefited from the affirmation from her father or her husband.  She was in a sense like Edith, brave and nice to a fault.  Her determination is palpable when she sets out to bring sustenance to the table.  She has been the main breadwinner for her family.  She was a clerk at the VCU registrar's office for over 31 years.  She retired early to take care of our first child so that Joan could continue her OB residency.  Her retirement party was attended by a crowd of her co-workers.  She was beloved at her work as she transformed a group of people into a community.

Mothers and mothers in-laws.  Strange category for men.  When my mother died in a land far away, I categorized it in a dark recess of my emotions and she still remains there, walled off, an earthen levy threatening to collapse.  Stoic, not many tears, just reticence and sadness, and regret.  I should have done more to the woman who gave her all to me.  Still, she left,  to be with her husband, thinking it would be easier on me…

My younger brother blames me for her leaving.  He imagines a Arthurian stand where we do battle with the people who are taking her away.  In fact, it is more of an Overload dystopia.   I am hovelling, and my father, the Overload, gives a command, and I meekly comply. 

Immigrants and clash of cultures and generations and different mores are a broad theme of our growing up.  We harbor kernels of these feelings.  Feelings of being an outsider.  An orange in an orchard of apples.  Reading books brought me to inclusion as I became friends with Homer Price and Danny Dunn and the childhood protagonists of novels of American life.

Bubbe and I shared a similar thread of being a part of "Stranger in Strange land."  It is expressed as a kind of reserved sadness.  We are not the first ones on the dance floor.  We laugh with a slight reservation.  It is hard for us to let our hair down.

 Bubbe passed on in our home, surrounded by her three daughters.  The hospice nurse predicted that she might die that afternoon, so Janet and Aryln came to the bedside.  She apparently took a large gasp and then was no more.

I had a date, an outing with Becca in the summer of 1987.  Joan was on call.  It was the fourth of July, and we were in Norfolk.  I had a rare weekend off but without my spouse.  Bubbe and I were an odd couple.    We decided to go to Waterside where the fireworks were brilliant.  We went more like dates rather than son and mother in law.  I remember laying a blanket on the ground.  The crowd was in an ebullient mood.  There was no 9-11 yet.  America was prosperous.  The warm air caressed our skin.

We lay on the blanket gazing at the dark sky. When the fireworks started, we were transformed into children staring at wonder.  Like a magical date, we were the only two people at Town Park.  All others receded from our focus.  We felt like two co-conspirators, a connection was forged.

I cannot remember the specifics of that day  except for the feeling that Becca and I despite  our cultural differences, we were one and the same.    She became for me, Becca, rather than my mother in law.

We buried Becca last week.  As per her wishes, she would lay in Perpetua in a pine box, at the Hebrew Cemetery.  We had to almost bury her twice as we were at the wrong plot, freshly dug from an incorrect map legend.  She would have really enjoyed the consternation.  She literally was rolling in her grave as she went twice to her resting place.

 

As I get older, I am more attuned to coincidences and magic.  Her burial was a special setting.  The June air was crisp with no humidity and the sun was brilliant on a cloud speckled day.  Her passing had brought all of the kids back home.  Miju and Gideon from San Francisco, Ben and Megan from Washington, Mark and Abbie and Teddy and Eden from Charlottesville, Reuben from Austin, and Noah from England.  She united our family even from the grave.  Ben read the Caddish.  A Merrit Malloy poem:

Love does not die, people do.  If all that is left of me is love, give me away.

I thought that I would move on.  Becca was 92 years old.  She has seen the world transform.  Yet, her life and death are ripples in our fabric of life.  Her energy and waves of love would forever change our own path.  I see her in m children, in my wife, and in me.  She has always made me smile.   Becca smiles ….

(Written one year ago.  Rebecca Plotkin, Becca, passed away one year ago.  May 29th.  It was one day after her 70th wedding anniversary.  She was with her husband and her three daughters.)