Blog Posts by David Salmanson

The snow the day before was ominous.  A bad tiding.  The boys and I spent an hour stuck in traffic to go a mile after getting our haircuts.  My friend Debby was in from California and on chauffeur duty for my daughter.  She hadn’t driven in snow in thirty years, if ever.  Lenny coached her through it on the big hills, with phrases I’d shouted at cars in the past, “whatever you do don’t stop!”  Julie got grounded in her flight in from Boston.  Kir, who had already taken two or three trains from Vermont had to take another to get to Chestnut Hill; it would have taken hours to get her in Center City.  Philadelphia was gridlocked.  Lori’s relatives driving in from Ohio had made great time, and spent two hours on the last three miles.

And yet, dinners were eaten.  We all said it’s been too long since the last time I saw you.  Was it six months?  A year?  Three?  Too long, and the kids have grown and you look great.  And remember that time when we were at the beach, the wedding, the graduation?   Talking about anything and everything but what we had to do tomorrow.

But the next morning, was clear and bright.  We shoveled the snow off our cars and our walks.  Donuts were fetched.  Ties were affixed.  Snow boots put on, and dress shoes carried to the car.

I pulled up to park behind a car with a Maine license plate, Steve had driven down over two days to be with me and honor our New Mexico history together.  Across the street, my brother Jon shoveled the walk of the church again.  Students trickled in to their soundcheck.

The boys and their cousins threw snowballs in the yard and then rushed inside to warm up by the roaring fire in the parish house.  We drank coffee and met each other again.  My cousin Marilyn, meet Lori’s cousin Nick.

Folks wandered by looking for the bathroom and awkwardly encountered us.  Too long, we’d say.  It’s been too long since last I saw you.   I promise I’ll come to Delaware, or Wisconsin, or DC again soon.  There’s a wedding in Boston over Labor Day, I could arrange a side trip.

And finally, we entered.   The Church was packed, three hundred or more.  Please take a seat up front on the side, said the pastor.  And some of you did, but still more stood in the back, afraid of the palpable wall of grief from our families, perhaps.  Or wanting to share but not intrude.

And the service began.  You required two ministers, your personal theology was complicated.  The Episcopal host priest called in Mennonite reinforcements.  We sang Amazing Grace and those who had never been to St. Martin’s discovered why we hold concerts there, the acoustics were perfect and we sounded warm and glad.  Weber picked up the melody quickly, by the time we reached “Through many dangers, toils, and snares/ I have already come…” his 9 year old boy voice was clear and on-key.

We prayed.

Loretta told of you as a mother and a professional and how the instincts of one reinforced the other.  Everyone laughed in the right places as she told the story of you escorting a nervous young couple to a showing holding the pause before “so when the gunshots rang out…” just long enough to get the maximum laugh.

Susan encouraged us to be like you:

“The best way to keep Lori with us is to do what she would do, and share it with others. Take a minute and think about something Lori liked and commit to doing it in her memory.
Here are just a few of the things that come to mind for me.
Go outside.
Go camping.
Ask a girl a question, instead of telling her something. Support her as she finds an answer.
Help others find their place and love their home.
Stand in the cold for something you care about (and it is totally okay to remember to bring hand-warmers!)
And definitely eat ice-cream for breakfast at least once a year.”

The Chamber Singers from school sang one of your favorite Christmas carols.  They sang it joyfully and beautifully.  And then Jarret gave the Homily.  His text was supposed to be  from Ecclesiastes but he went off-script.  Instead he preached on this poem:

The service was beautiful.  It was everything I hoped for and more.

And then the hugging and the eating and the “it’s been too long.”  And the “Seth, I can’t believe you drove down from Boston.” And “My dad fled to the car; he didn’t want you to see him cry.”  And all the hugging and the introductions as we found our little groups, the New Mexico folks and the Michigan folks, and Swarthmore folks and the couple that drove in from Indianapolis to sit with Lori’s mom.   “It’s been too long.  it’s been too long since the last time I saw you.  Was it six months?  A year?  Three?”

Later,  my friend Mike finds me.  He always tells me the truth because once you have lived together and been broken together by college AND grad school together, you are obligated to never to lie one another.  “How long has it been?”  We decide nine months.  “You look like shit,” he whispers in my ear as we hug.  He’s not wrong.  I’m dehydrated so my wrinkles are pronounced, and my eyes are bloodshot from lack of sleep and crying and trying not to cry and crying anyway.

More hugs.  More introductions.  More It’s been too long.  it’s been too long since the last time I saw you.  Was it six months?  A year?  Three?

Don’t wait too long, my friends.

It matters a lot not to.

Dear Lori,

The tree is up, although with fewer ornaments than you would have liked.  On the other hand, we didn’t break any.  There are lights in the windows in the living room (and in Lenny’s windows too).  We are doing our best to celebrate your favorite holiday without you.
When we started to get really serious, when we tried to figure out if we could have more than a mad love affair and build a life together, you were willing to sacrifice Easter, but Christmas was a non-negotiable.  You loved everything about it and did nothing halfway.  On our honeymoon in Italy you haunted the pop-up Christmas markets in old Roman racecourses.  In Philadelphia, you prowled the shops of Germantown Ave and the downtown stalls at City Hall.  We tried a variety of Christmas services before you found the Mennonites in their 17th century meeting house around the corner.  You loved the plainness of the hall, the lack of pretension, and the wonderful singing.
You would listen to Christmas music year-round (being careful to check I wasn’t around of course) and started building your Christmas mixes in July, listening to hundreds of songs to find just the right ones for CDs, and later digital dropboxes.  I cannot lift the plastic tub, that houses all your Christmas music it is so full.
You were patient with me when I complained about buying too many gifts that were useless: the plastic birds that talked to each other, the CDs and concert tickets purchased because I said I liked an artist one time, stocking tchotchkes that would break by New Years.  And then you put socks in my stockings every year because you knew I wouldn’t buy them for myself.
You let me make Christmas dinners.  There was the ill-fated goose on our first Christmas in Ann Arbor together when you indulged my New York Jewish fantasies about Dickensian yules.  More recently it was turkeys or beef tenderloins with chimichurri.  You handled the roasted root vegetables, including the various many colored beets, your favorite food discovery from meeting me.  Breakfast, however, was your domain.  Your family’s bubble bread recipe (never to be messed with) and various egg casseroles as your palate moved away from lil smokies and towards chorizo and green chiles.
You loved all your old family traditions and you loved the new ones we invented together.  You loved the fact that it was a family holiday and that we always found some folks to celebrate it with, even if we couldn’t be with our own families.
You loved that if it was a warm year, we could sit on the porch after walking home from services and listen to the church bells from the Methodists over on the Avenue and then the Anglicans up the street.  You loved driving around and looking at the lights, the more garish the better.  You loved wrapping presents and making fun of my terrible jobs and you always enjoyed watching other people open presents far more than you enjoyed opening your own.
But you rarely told people why you were such the Tiny Tim.  You only explained it to me once, in that first conversation.  But once was enough.
Christmas hadn’t always been happy for you.  There was a Christmas season, maybe thirty years ago, where you thought you didn’t want to wake up on Christmas morning.  You thought it might be easier if you just skipped out on the whole thing.  Your teen years were rough, far rougher than mine and you’d had enough.

But.

Instead of acting on that terrible impulse, you went and sought help.  You “went away” for a bit, and only dropped occasional hints about what happened on “the inside.”  I know the walls were green in the hospital, and lots of people smoked, and you were always grateful that your dad worked a good job with spectacular health insurance that allowed you to do the in-patient stay that saved your life.
And so Christmas was a non-negotiable.  It was your yearly affirmation that when you made the choice to live, that you’d chosen correctly.  It was your celebration of life, and the fact that you were here for another year.
Well, who could argue with that?  And so I became a Jewish boy who celebrated Christmas, but what I really was celebrating was the fact that in choosing to live, you eventually chose me and the life we built together.  You chose a city you loved, a house you adored, a job you took great pride in, and a family that you loved deeply and well.  And every Christmas, I was reminded of how much we had done together how much your choice before I ever met you changed me for the better.  And I threw myself into it.

And now I’m telling the story again.  I’m telling it to convince myself to embrace the season, to get up in the morning, to grade papers, and do dishes.   I’m telling it because I don’t want to do any of those things.   I’m telling it because listening to the radio in the car these days is a fraught exercise in dodging songs and phrases that have me fighting back tears when I’m driving.  And I wasn’t exactly a good driver to begin with.
But I’m also telling it because I know there are other people that need to hear it.  There are teenagers and adults that are despairing.  And you were the proof that things got better.  You were in a place so dark, that you wanted to extinguish your light forever because the flickering seemed in vain.  And over the next thirty years, you nurtured the tiny candle that almost went out into a raging fierce bonfire of love.   The hurt never went away completely for you, but you managed it and every year you celebrated.  And every year your fire burned brighter. And even though your fire went out far too soon, it burned thirty years longer than it could have.  And so every Christmas, I’ll remind myself to celebrate that.
But I won’t lie to you, Lori.  It’s a struggle.  People keep asking me what I want for Christmas, reminding me that I need gifts too.  And I’ll answer with a bottle, or movie tickets, or chocolates.  But there’s only one thing I want for Christmas, and it’s the one thing I can’t have.

In the last two weeks, I’ve heard from so many people.  Some of these people are our relatives.  Some of them are friends from childhood, or college or grad school or work.  Some are former or current students.  Some are parents of my kids’ classmates.  There’s the folks we went to day care with, by which I mean we were parents of toddlers together, and the folks who only know me from the internet. Some of these people were clients of Lori’s.  Everyone has a kind word.  There have been gofundmes and we’ve raised a scholarship.  I never knew just how many friends we had.

But I should have.

Lori and I always tried to practice a politics of love.  Sometimes, it’s simple.  Back when I still took the train to and from work, before the kids started at SCH, I was coming home in a bad rainstorm.  Lori came and picked me up at the station near our house.  While I was waiting for her, I had struck up a conversation with a young man who was waiting for the storm to break before he walked the few blocks home.  When Lori pulled up, perhaps with my daughter in a car seat, I told the young man to get in and we drove him home.  He was very grateful.  Lori told me later that giving the young man a ride was something she loved about me, that it would never occur to her to do that.  We talked about why I considered it okay, and how maybe if she were alone, it wouldn’t be a good idea.  My former students write and tell me about how I was there for them and now they want to be there for me. People I haven’t talked to you in years are sending me notes on facebook telling me about a time I helped them out and wanting to do the same for me.

While I’ve always been good with strangers, Lori was the kind of person who once she knew somebody even a little, loved them almost unconditionally.   She was a room parent at day care every year for about a decade.  Her clients loved her and wrote tear-filled tributes on facebook about how Lori was the first one to know about their happy things:  pregnancies or promotions; and their sad things, a miscarriage or a family death.  I got a note from one who told me of how Lori talked her out of buying a house until she had more money so that she wouldn’t lose it if she had a setback.  She cared about her clients as people.  She was always willing to kill a deal if she sensed her clients would be harmed by it.

The politics of love can be hard.  It means telling people no; it means helping them through their pain.  It can mean asking a kid a really tough question when there facing the music for an action that hurt other people.  But it also means checking in with that kid for the rest of his school career so that he knows who to talk to when he’s on the verge of making another bad decision.  It means opening your heart to the risk of rejection and hurt, and when that rejection or hurt comes, you open it up again the next time.  It means caring about people you know well, and caring about people you don’t know well, and sometimes, caring about people you never met at all.

As I was getting coffee the other day in the school cafeteria, a parent I didn’t know came up to me and hugged me.  For so many of my peers, this moment has shaken us.  Lori’s stupid, senseless, statistically improbable death made them face their own mortality and ask what would happen to their loved ones if the unthinkable came about.

What I know is, I’ve been helped by so many already.  And so many people are waiting their turn.  And I believe this isn’t because people pity me, it’s because I’ve worked hard since I became an adult to practice the politics of love everyday.   It’s one of the reasons I’ve had so much support already.  And it’s one of the reasons I can face the hard tasks ahead with more fortitude than fear.

Hug your loved ones, mend your fences, do some good.  I love you all.

It’s been a week since she died. I’ve picked up the ashes from the crematorium, gotten the death certificates, and had myself made the custodial parent on the kids’ bank accounts. My awesome friends and relatives cleaned my house hauling away years of junk, and maybe the snow shovels. If you know where the snow shovels are, please leave a note in the comments.

Other than the snow shovels, I seem to be handling things pretty well. We’ve moved back into the house. Stuff is getting done: big stuff like – the cremation – and little stuff – like the laundry. The kids are coping in their ways. People keep asking me what they can do for me, and I keep answering that I don’t know yet. People also keep telling me that I seem so composed and that they cannot believe that I can write and think through all of this, but I can. Indeed, I’ve been training my whole life for it, for it’s times like this that the value of a liberal arts education is revealed. Since boyhood, I’ve read and watched Shakespeare and Rostand’s Cyrano and The Bible.  I’ve studied history and art and literature.  I’ve done science in the labs and in the woods and I’ve stared into the deepest recesses of the universe in the dark of night with astronomers and I’ve stared into the darkest recesses of my own soul with philosophers.  So when the unthinkable happened I was ready.  I have 10,000 years of human history providing me examples of how to handle myself in the worst times.  It’s a handy thing to have on your side.

This, then, is the true purpose of education.   We are, again, in one of those moments in history where the liberal arts is under attack for being irrelevant.  The calls for job training and “useful” majors is on the rise again.

Majoring in business cannot teach us how to deal with the unthinkable.  It may be a path to money, but it will leave you forever poorer.

Historians are inquisitive people. We ask questions and we try to answer them. Some questions are fairly mundane. Why did Washington commit so many troops to try to keep New York City, even though it was obviously a losing cause? Sometimes the questions are harder to answer. Why did so many apparently good, upstanding people commit treason in defense of slavery? Sometimes we can find the answers. Sometimes we can only guess. But we are always driven by questions. Why? How? Why? My own research tended to be more of the how questions. How did uranium mining and the building of Interstate 40 change Western New Mexico. How did uranium miners live? How did they die? The why questions were too difficult for me. I suppose that is why I have always had a difficult relationship with religion. I am the proto-typical bad New York Jew who grew up belonging to a synagogue but attended infrequently. I did not achieve Bar Mitzvah but I did reach confirmation. I found the confirmation classes interesting, but I was more attracted to the history lessons than the doctrinal ones. I can still sing “The Golden Age of Spain” song (which for Jews is the 8th to 13th centuries). But I’ve always had a touch of the mystical about me. I dreamed my wife before I met her. In my dream, I did not see her, but I knew I was dating the woman who had my friend David’s distinct grey Kelty frame pack with MCKEE written in large black Sharpie marker. After I met Lori, and fell for her, when she opened that fateful jar of pickles that magical summer in New Mexico, I was floored to learn that she had borrowed that same backpack for the summer. I never asked Why or How it happened that I dreamed her before meeting her. I just accepted it. The universe had plans for us. We fell in love immediately (well it took her a little longer, but not much). On our first official date, a wedding at the end of that wonderful summer, the bride asked us if we were the next wedding and we scoffed, but it must have been obvious even then. The universe had terrific plans for us. A short term move to Philadelphia turned into a permanent stay in a city that we loved deeply. I took a one-year high school teaching position and it turned into a career. We had the first of our two careflly planned children. Lori’s day job as a Realtor’s Assistant, became her career as she got a license. We had the second of our two carefully planned children. The universe gave us a third child despite all reasonable precautions, and we accepted him and loved him and never asked Why? Tonight, Lori left me. She left the kids. She left the earth. Because she is so young, the Medical Examiner will eventually tell us how she died. Or maybe they won’t. But I will never know why she left tonight, November 17th 2017. It’s not a question I can answer. I accept your thoughts and prayers. They ease my pain. The universe has been very good to me. I was lucky to born into a loving family, well cared for, my basic needs met and then some. Most people in the world, will never have what I have had. Most people in America will never have what I have. But the universe can be cruel sometimes. If the Hindus are right, I’ll perhaps meet Lori again in some new incarnation. If the Buddhists are right, her energy is nourishing the world in all the good things; if the Christians are right perhaps we’ll meet again in heaven. We Jews are unsure about heaven, but we are willing to entertain it, as with most things, as a possibility. I am not really concerned with the how of it all. The question I want answered is the unanswerable one: Why?