Tag: “Sol A. Hurvitz”

The Retraction From Life

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Weaker, yet still alive, still able to speak, Louise M. Hurvitz was in her wheelchair, in the sunshine near the glistening Marina boats, when she told me she wanted to eat a steak.

That was on Monday, August 18th. She ate a hamburger that night, and a slice of pizza on Tuesday night. She was 8 months into her Stage 4 lung and bone cancer.

Nurse Linda said she was looking great.

Then on Wednesday she began to call for her sister “Millie”. She was up all night, and then asleep all day by morphine and Lorazepam. In periods of wakefulness, her glazed eyes no longer looked at me, but out into nothing.

She was no longer able to speak. I went every other day to see her, knowing she was entering death.

A blue booklet left by hospice, Gone From My Sight, explained how the bedridden dying walked out of life. We noted her symptoms mirrored in the book.

The late afternoon sun was bright in her bedroom on Friday, August 22nd. She screamed that her head hurt, her back hurt, everything hurt. She wanted me to shut all the drapes. I abided and put the room in darkness. Foreshadowing.

She was in her last days. Nurse Bertha said if she ate she would stay alive. And then on Friday, August 29th, Labor Day weekend, hospice came and said, “no more food or water”. She was given 72 hours.

All weekend were the pleasures of Los Angeles, the beach and the beer, the walks along Abbot Kinney, the barbecues, I partook of some haunted by an upcoming phone call.

And then on Sunday, August 31st at 11:30 PM we were called and told she was breathing irregularly. We got in the car and rushed down to the apartment. My brother and sister-in-law were at her bedside. A nurse helplessly held the nasal end of the oxygen tube against her open mouth.

She was gray faced.

She was gasping for breath.

I replaced the nasal oxygen with a whole nose/mouth mask. Nurse Linda arrived. The hospice nurse came. It was about 2am and we did not know how long she would live. Exhausted we left. And an hour later I was in bed when my brother called.

“I hate to tell you this but Mom has passed.”

All the fighting for her life, all the medications, the food, the physical therapy, the chemotherapy, the consultations with UCLA medical doctors, the cat scans and the other radiology, the organic smoothies packed with nutrients; all the equipment, the oxygen, the ointments; everything done to keep her alive and going. Done.

Her body was pronounced dead by a doctor. The cremation company came to the apartment to wrap up and remove her.

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We held a home service for her, almost a week later, on Saturday, September 5th.

Andreas Samson, my friend who writes Up in the Valley, attended and wrote a touching description of the bittersweet “party”.

There was food and drink, old photos on the flat screen television, a Spotify soundtrack of her beloved music (Frank Sinatra, the Fifth Dimension, Herb Alpert). Relatives who had never seen her sick, showed up to pay their respects.

And her life was presented selectively, with an emphasis on the young, beautiful, vivacious, pranking, intelligent, subversive sorority girl and network executive.

She, who died at 80, mothered a retarded boy, took care of an epileptic and ill husband, worried and fretted over children, finances, nightly meals, laundry and cleaning, her daily travails were wiped away or spoken of in one sentence salutes at our remembrance.

For 52 years, I had grown up and grown old with her. I knew her love and her craziness, her exasperating circular questions, her sparkling memory for names, faces, and events.

She, who drank vodka and grapefruit juice, and later switched to red wine, was probably an alcoholic. She was full of shame over events she had no power over, castigating and punishing herself.

But she fought hard to protect and to nurture, and daring to venture out of Lincolnwood, IL, moving to suburban NJ where she set up a new life with her family at 47, exploring Manhattan, New England and the East Coast with the curiosity and passion of a young woman starting out life.

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She sold airplanes with a male friend, a pilot and airplane broker who lead a life outside of norms, a man who was later convicted of stealing money from his customers. He flew Louise and our family, often, to Albany, Boston, Martha’s Vineyard, Manahawkin Airport, Miami, East Hampton, Nantucket, Block Island, all around the Eastern Seaboard. American life was seen from 8,000 feet, little houses and little lives across the vast expanse.

She went into the city to see plays with my father, to walk neighborhoods, to buy groceries at Fairway, see exhibitions at the Metropolitan, attend concerts and events at Lincoln Center.

She read the NY Times and Bergen Record voraciously, keeping herself informed on culture and politics. The papers piled up in wet and musty mountains stacked in the garage.

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She loved her new home in the woods, a place where the windows were always open and the rooms smelled of rain and leaves and florid humidity. In the spring, summer and early fall, the back deck, suspended on the second story of the house, was her outdoor space, a place of reading, eating, entertaining and midnight conversations by candlelight.

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She lost my father after his long and agonizing brain disease, an illness that took 4 years to progress, rendering him an invalid.

But after he died, in her apartment in the Marina, she became a devoted grandmother and somehow earned the respect and awe of children who had once only seen sadness and burden in her exhausted eyes.

She was valiant onto the end; never giving into death, never acknowledging that life was less than the entirety. An iron dome of denial was her shield.

She was more than she ever admitted to being. She was magnificent in her life force, in her refusal to die, in her love for life.

 

 

 

 

My Father’s Wallet

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My father died April 13, 2009.
Since that day, I have kept his wallet inside a white ceramic vase on a square table next to my bed.

To hold another person’s wallet, without their consent, even when they are dead, seems a violation.

And what possession is more personal than a wallet?

Like the expired man, his wallet contains expired credit cards.

I read the business cards stuffed into the wallet pockets.

One card is The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, NJ where I saw him on the morning of October 14, 2006 after I flew into Newark on a red eye from LA. He had suffered some sort of a small stroke. And I cried at his bedside.

A Department of Veterans Affairs ID, created only a few months before he died.

A card from a Speech Pathologist who would help him pronounce words at age 75 that he once could say without practice.

He was a painter and took art lessons at The Ridgewood Art Institute. A green paper card, frayed at the edges, was valid through August 31, 2007.

AARP, Medicare, Costco, American Express, AAA, Master Card and Visa: the cards of a modern living American male. Pieces of plastic to insure, to protect, to provide, to make credit for any activity on Earth.

In his last week of life, I remember he was breathing with difficulty as he sat on a bar stool bench, at the kitchen counter in his apartment, going over his taxes, which were due in mid-April.

He was fatally and incurably ill and knew he would die from this inexplicable illness called Multi-System Atrophy.

But he was no different than any of us in his belief that he would continue to live.

My father’s wallet still seems to belong to a living person. And no amount of time or loss can diminish it.

Another Date on the Calendar

Posted in Dad, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , 2 Comments

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Dad in hospital., originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

Three years ago, October 13, 2006, I was on a plane traveling from Los Angeles to New Jersey to see my father and mother.

My father, at that time, was battling a neurological illness that was slowly robbing him of his ability to speak and walk.

There was, and is, no cure. And it eventually killed him.

But that October, back east, there was a slight glimmer of pharmaceutical hope: some drug that was given to Parkinson’s patients seemed to help my father. He was on it for a few weeks, progressing. And then he was not. One morning, he suddenly went into a stroke like condition and then into the hospital.

I took the red-eye the night of October 12th, and before I boarded the plane at LAX, my brother Rick sent me a text and said that his wife, my sister-in-law Pri, was giving birth. She went into labor that same night, the night I was on the plane traveling back east, back in time, back to Ridgewood and Woodcliff Lake and all those towns in Bergen County where my parents had lived since 1979.

When I landed around 6am at Newark, a car picked me up and took me directly to Valley Hospital in Ridgewood. I found my mother sitting next to my father, who was awake and resting in a room, in a bed, next to a north-facing window.

I broke down and cried and I think all of us were crying. I was so tired, and so happy to see my father alive, even as I was ripped up about his weakened condition.

I had just bought my first camera, a Nikon D70. I picked it up and shot a second of my father’s life in that weak and delicate sunlight that barely illuminated the room.

That he left this hospital within a few days was miraculous. Back at home, he had the after effects of the episode, and at times his hands would tremble like a post-earthquake after shock. Yet he would look down at his shaking with dispassionate objectivity and a faint smile.

In Los Angeles, my nephew Ravi entered the world and there was joy and new life on the other coast. But that October is indelibly marked on my calendar as a season of impending grief and the realization that an epoch and life and existence would end quite soon.

One Sunday, we took a car ride with my father, who could not walk, but used the walker and a portable wheel-chair. We drove across the Tappan Zee to Armonk and stopped for lunch in a town filled with pumpkins, white houses and children on bicycles.

Then we drove up some wooded road, lined with stone-walls, passing horse farms and parkland preserves. We were heading up to see where Bill and Hillary Clinton lived, in Westchester County, just as we once had stalked Nixon in Saddle River, NJ.

I apologize to Los Angeles, where I now make my home, but despite the efforts of “Mad Men” to create a fictional pathology of life in the suburbs on New York, there is still a sublime and natural beauty there, historic and meaningful towns and an un-crowdedness that soothes souls in pain. When you are sad back there, you can take a drive in the country past reservoirs, farms and fields. And that is just what we did that Sunday afternoon.

Those days, spent in autumn with my late father, were among the most meaningful of my life. I meant something to him and I will never ever have the time to spend with a living father again.

Tragedy in Lush Surroundings.

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For the past 30 years, my parents and some of us children, have lived in Bergen County, NJ. We moved here from Chicago into an area of small towns, woods, farms, and historic homes.

Some of the charm that once existed here has been replaced by the sweep of corporate headquarters or in the robotic commercialism of strip malls. But there is still an old fashioned human feeling in the day-to-day interactions.

I have come back here from Los Angeles, almost yearly, and now the reasons that I return have to do with medical emergencies. The latest has been my mother breaking her hip. My father is disabled, so I flew in to oversee his care. And most heartbreaking to me, to put their house up for sale and move them to the “safer” confines of the badly named “Golden State”.

I wish that Northern New Jersey were not so lovely. I drive my father to physical therapy past vast green lawns and little towns with flag draped streets. I pass the barn where he once sat in art class; I stop at the Ridgewood Library to return a book; I take him for a walk in the park. We cut through country lanes and those suburban roads where one still may see the occasional horse and where vast forests of maple and birchwood keep homes cool even when the humidity is 80%.

Once upon a time this region was my promise of a glorious future. I would live in Manhattan, and when it got too stressful, I could come back to Woodcliff Lake and my parents would barbecue on the back deck, surrounded by hundreds of trees…never planted but spontaneously growing and enveloping the house. Down there, along the property line, an old stone wall stood as a border.

I guess I am one of those who went West, more out of escape than adventure, and landed in Los Angeles as one lands in a prison. I tried to convince myself that the friends who never showed up for lunch and the hours I sat on the 405, were somehow just small inconveniences and not evidence of a larger pathology, a geographical cancer that grows and grows each year and devours more of America and the world and calls itself…Hollywood.

Here in the waning days of the New Jersey chapter, the neighbors are still here to wave hello; the local handyman is working on three different houses on this street; and someone at the Town Hall owes my mother $100 as reimbursement for joining another town’s library since this one is too small to have its own.

Was I spoiled? Yes, I think I have been. I haven’t yet bought into Charles Phoenix and his paens to the junk and kitsch of the Southland. I still admire the stone houses of the Dutch settlers, and think it looks nice when men in gray flannel suits board a train to go work in the city. I love a thunderstorm and look forward to waking up everyday in New Jersey and knowing that the weather is unknowable. I don’t need sun everyday.

But mostly what I need now is what’s gone. I dream of a restoration of a lost time, but each day this summer is one step closer to the end of the best years of our lives.</p

Dad and Me in Rustic Canyon.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , 3 Comments

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Dad and Me in Rustic Canyon., originally uploaded by hereinvannuys.

In the past few years, a degenerative illness has overtaken my father in his brain. It affects his speech and balance. Countless specialists from UCLA to NYU to Columbia have diagnosed it as either Ataxia, Multi-Symptom Atrophy, or OPCA. There is no general agreement on what it is, or how to cure it.

He now can only stand up and walk with a walker. He has to hang on to walls and door handles and when he takes a shower, there has to be another person in the room. Last year, the neurologist briefly prescribed a Parkinson’s drug to help his speech. It worked for two weeks until he started having uncontrollable shaking in his hands and seizures in his face. He went into the hospital and “recovered”.

He came home to the occupational, speech and home health care workers who gave him lessons, at age 74, on how to tie his shoes and ask for a glass of water clearly. Chronological maturation is a return to infancy on some levels, it seems.

Through it all, he has not complained. He still manages to smile and conduct his life with grace, honor, politeness, dignity and bravery. You wonder, how human beings, having lived and struggled their whole life, still manage to surmount the moral and physical strength to conduct one more battle on Earth.

He is leading his children in an example of how to live with illness, and still maintain a healthy outlook.