Most everyone who reads this blog knows that my beloved father, Ovidiu Pasternak, passed May 22, 2011. It’s taken me close to two years now to finally compile my many disparate thoughts to offer some semblance of a remembrance and celebration of his mani-layered life. Below I offer three separate homages to him: two written in the heat of the events surrounding his death, and one written freshly, now that I’ve had some time and space to continue to let his memory steep in my evolving life.
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Written Sunday, May 22, 2011 in an email to friends and family about my father’s passing.
Dear Friends and Family,
I’m writing today with some very sad news. Ariel’s and my father, Ovi Pasternak, passed away today in a hospital in Israel. His death was very much unexpected and sudden and the cause of it is as-of-yet unknown, but we are all going to be joining one another Tuesday in Israel for his funeral in commemoration of his life.
Some of you knew Ovi, others of you only knew of him, but regardless, I’m sure you’ve heard a litany of stories about our exceptional, if not unconventional father and the tremendous life of ups and downs that he lived. I simply wanted to write you all to let you know of the situation. Ariel is already in Israel with our dad’s sister and his wife. My mom will be flying out to meet up with family tomorrow. Aeli, Carrie, and I leave New Orleans early tomorrow morning to fly to Israel for the funeral on Tuesday.
Please keep him in your prayers and thoughts. He was a tremendously loving man, beset by a lot of things in his life, and he definitely deserves love and recognition as his soul makes its transition to the next world.
Thanks for your prayers. If you’d like to read any more about him, I’ve shared a few favorite memories below that have come up throughout today’s musings.
Love
-stefin
PS Not in my best space to remember everyone who this might be relevant to. Feel free to forward to anyone that I’ve forgotten.
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I remember being roughly eight years old when my family took its first (and only) trip to Universal Studios Florida, just in time to catch the opening of the new E.T. ride and experience. I remember my mom, dad, sister, and me waiting in line to be one of the first to ride. As we approached the entrance, a ride operator at a computer asked our names. Shelly, Ariel, Stephen, and Ovi, each she typed into the computer diligently before welcoming us onto the fancy roller coaster. We traveled through E.T.’s world, oohing and ahhing at the lights and surprises, and as we approached the final tunnel, I remember a huge animated visage of E.T. mounted above the ride exit. From 50 meters away, you could tell that it was waving and saying something to the car in front of us, and as we approached, the giant E.T. looked down on us and opened its prodigal mouth. All four of us looked up in wonder, anticipating what sage words E.T. would have for us. As we passed under his gaze, E.T. said “Goodbye Shelly. Goodbye Ariel. Goodbye Stephen.” And then he hesitated. My dad sat there waiting. Ovi! Ovi! I thought to myself. Goodbye Ovi! Just say it. But E.T., in his best extraterrestrial gurgle looked down at my dad and simply said, “Goodbye…friend.” Of course, my father’s Romanian name, Ovidiu (which he shortened to Ovi) was too earthly for E.T. to utter. And yet, that seems fitting for my father. A man who was, to all, a most unusual and unutterable friend.
My father grew up in communist Romania during the heaviest days of the Iron Curtain. His father was a disciplined furrier (made fur hats, jackets, etc.) and his mother was a loving and doting caretaker. Throughout his life, he moved on his own in his teens to Israel, then to London, then to the US (where he met and married my mother), then to Canada, back to the US, and eventually back to Israel after my parents divorced and he was beset by health problems. He served time in the Israeli Army, serving in some of the nation’s most daunting battles, owned and ran a fried chicken shop with my mom in New York City in the ’80s, and ran a video rental and pager store in the late ’90s before Parkinson’s Disease and a host of other ailments caused his health to take a turn for the worst. In Israel, with the help of his sister, Anca, her kids, Vered, Avi, and Shai, and his second wife, Vera, he scratched out an impressive living, always battling his body, but never losing his sense of humor or optimism.
He was certainly a man with many faults, but he will be remembered as a man that, despite his faults, cared enormously for other people and creatures. I think, though he would have never admitted this in person, that he fancied himself a martyr of sorts. Because of his hodge podge upbringing and youth, he was the ultimate wily survivor. He weathered more setbacks and trauma than most of us would have the energy for, and yet still found time to offer whatever he could to others. I remember being driven crazy by my father, who never seemed to be well himself, but who always made time for others worse off than him. Like Hernando, a friend he made during his last year in the states, whom he transported back and forth between chemo treatments while bringing him (and his new-born litter of kitties) food on a regular basis. Even up until the end, my father was known (much to the chagrin of his neighbors) to wander the area around his apartment, looking out for the various packs of stray cats and striking up conversations with forlorn passersby or cab drivers.
All in all, my father lived anything but a conventional life. My memory of him will be one of both profound frustrations and enduring love, sage lessons, and anything unexpected. He loved his family, and his family loved him, even when we struggled to show it to one another. May his passing to the next stage of his life be easy and full of incredible joy!
I have had many images of my father that have flashed through my head today. Many memories. Many emotions. Many acute feelings, snapshots, and vague recollections. I rejoice that he is finally free of the pain and hardship that characterized so many of his final days, yet I am so profoundly upset that I hadn’t seen him for a year and a half, that I never got to say goodbye, and most upsettingly, that he never got to meet his first grandson. I wish you all could understand the profound transformation that would happen in my father’s eyes and body when he saw Aeli over Skype. In the past ten years of his physical decline, I have never seen anything truly shatter the pressures that weighed on my dad like his first interactions with Aeli. Aeli, too, loved looking at the abstract, fuzzy image of his Sabah, and they were to meet each other for the first time in just 11 days.
Abba, I pray that today, you are smiling. Truly rested, comfortable, and happy for the first time in a very long time. I hope that your departure from this world to the next was one of peace and completion. You taught me many, MANY things in my life, most of which you never even realized you were teaching me. I pray that your charm, wit, humor, and diversity of spirit and experience are honored wherever you are. You were and are an incomparable being…a most unusual and unutterable friend. I love you.
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Written, Monday, May 23, 2011 on the plane from New Orleans to Tel Aviv for his funeral.
If idioms make the man, then my father was a man of abundance. He was a tacit idiomophile. It was somewhere between a hobby, a habit, and a livlihood for my father. I guess being a career immigrant, self-educator, and perennial survivor formed the board my dad’s life played out upon, and consequently, language was one of the most volatile and formative boundaries that defined and colored his each and every move. He was born speaking Romanian with a patent Iron Curtain awareness of Soviet languages. In his teens he picked up Hebrew when he moved to Israel, and slowly found his way into Spanish, French, and especially English–which he polished when he met his newly-wed sister in London. He was only schooled until his early teens, and even then, his doting mother enabled bad habits by bribing teachers to pass an otherwise undisciplined student. Suffice it to say, as a drifter, an ex-communist ex-pat, an unskilled, undereducated immigrant kid, it was my father’s ability to be a lijnguistic acrobat and chameleon that served as his only tool of expertise. And an expert he was. He mastered each language he spoke–not academically, linguistically, or literarily, but he mastered its common identities, its wit, its edge, its humor, and its power to communicate.
And that was so characteristic of my father. He was a master of the human condition in so many ways. He had lived through, for most of his life, what amounted to nearly the worst of the worst on this Earth, and he had reached and tasted from the cup of the most indulgent and privileged, if only for a fleeting moment. He truly knew and understood from experience what it was like to be human in its most exalted and its most torturous. And though the vast majority of his life fell on the lower part of that spectrum, my Abba never lost the taste or joy for the upper crust. And he NEVER missed an opportunity to dip a finger in and taste it. Even up until the end, my father relished with glee the finer flavors, textures, sights, sounds, and feelings, of life.
So much of my father’s suffering late in life stemmed, in one way or another, from his many human shortcomings: he never earned a living, he was nearly never on time, he got frustrated easily, he was quick to temper, he held on to grudges, he nearly never took responsibility for neither good nor bad, he didn’t exercise, he ate too much, and he had an obsession with material things, just to name a few. And it should not be looked over that he suffered. He was very depressed and lonely. He was a prisoner of his own deteriorating body. He would oscillate between being stuck and being diskinetic (moving wildly and uncontrollably). Each day, 8-10 time a day, he took a toxic cocktail of drugs that his body both depended on and suffered from. He slept fitfully and sparingly in the night, but fell asleep unexpectedly and uncomfortably during the day. He often could not use the toilet or shower properly, or at least get there in time, which meant a life of frequent embarrassing accidents and exposure.
Yet, even through one bad break after another, he would always say when asked how he was that we was, “Fair to midland.” I spoke to him in the morning, the day before his death. He was laid up in the hospital, feeling about as bad as he’d ever felt in his entire life, and yet, when asked it was the same, “Fair to midland.” I will never forget that. I struggle with whether or not he earnestly believed it when he said it, but nevertheless, it was just as much a part of his charm–his craft–to not let the truly bad feelings in.
I will forever remember my Abba who would sit like the captain of his ship, listening to Neil Diamond and Andrea Bocceli, the whole while exclaiming its virtues and beauty. I will forever remember the complete and total focus and satisfaction that he gave to the art of consuming food from beitzim and shakshoukah, to tiramisu and high tea. I will forever remember his bold, unapologetic nature from our haircuts and Tony & Allen’s to his interactions with my adolescent peers. I will forever remember his more mobile self, lumbering to try to satisfy my childhood desires to learn American sports that were just as alien to him, but important, he felt, to my development.
I also will never be able to fully explain all that I learned from my father. He was one of my two greatest teachers, and he became synonymous with my greatest fear. He taught me courage in the face of others’ judgment; he taught me that the squeaky wheel gets the oil; he taught me that love and humor each have the power to conquer all ills; he taught me most of all, all the different things that we have to offer, regardless of income, health, station, or language. He taught me to live life–period. To not be afraid of it. To do what you want, how you want to, when you want to. And he taught me, by his lack thereof, to value limits and at least a minimal amount of discipline.
Abba, I hope that where you find yourself now, you are relishing all that you used to love, and discovering all that you should have had.
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Written between Monday, February 11, 2013 and Monday, June 10, 2013 as a compilation of thoughts and memories that have occurred in the 2 years since his passing.
It’s been over 24 months since my beloved and unusual father passed from this world. It’s been a busy and unusual 24 months for me: months in which I have struggled to carve out even meager reflection and meditation time in which to pray for, convene with, or remember my beloved dad. Yet in the midst of this business and living, his memory has had the habit of flooding into my psyche and being in powerful, humbling ways at times both important and mundane. He is certainly still with me, and I know he is ever proud and critical of me.
I got the call about my father’s passing on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in New Orleans, the school year having just ended after my first year at a new, demanding school. Before the call, I was preparing to leave the next day on the end-of-year trip with my students to celebrate the culmination of a challenging and important year in both mine and my students’ lives. The call having arrived, I obviously abruptly relayed the news to my team and shifted my travel plans from North Carolina with 6th graders to Israel with my family and 5-month-old son. But it wasn’t until the first weeks of school the following school year that I started to make the connection between my relationship with my dad and the relationships that many of my students share with their dads. (I preface this with the understanding that, though there are some prominent parallels, there are also significant differences; but in the eternal pursuit of seeing the full half of the glass, I choose here to emphasize our similarities, rather than analyzing our differences.)
As a writing teacher, I always tell my students stories about my own life with the dual purposes of teaching them good story writing and trying to cultivate deep human connections and sharing in my classroom. Thus, I try to choose stories that both have the elements of good storytelling, and that will engage 11-year-olds in 2013 New Orleans in a way that makes them begin to draw connections to the stories I tell. I was still feeling the freshness of the wound of my father’s passing, and decided that it would be a cathartic story to tell in my first unit of the year with a new group of kids. Little did I know what I would uncover about my own fraught relationship with him.
Over the course of the first 3 weeks of school, I told my students the story of my relationship with my father up until his passing that past May and invited them to write their own stories in response. I told them about my father’s struggles to provide for his young and growing family, about his fiery breakup and eventual divorce with my mom, about his burgeoning health and socioeconomic problems, about his struggles to simply show up for my sister and me as we grew, about his move to another country, and about my once-a-year visits that constituted our relationship for the last 7 years of his life.
This sharing unleashed a maelstrom of reactions both from my kids and myself. Kids, of course, feed off of authentic interactions with adults, and now knowing some intimate facts about my life, burrowed in to build their own nests of connections to my story. I, as a teacher, writer, and young man, got to live the catharsis of writing one’s own story in front of my kids. They both gave me the love and affirmation I was needing by telling this story, and got to witness the effects that their own love and affirmation had on me because I had summoned the courage and creativity to write about my life. My class was certainly full of challenges, but getting kids to write their meaningful stories was rarely one for the next two months. And sure enough, with each story I read from these 11-year-old New Orleanians, I was able to seek refuge in my own nest of connections in their stories, and therin I got to converse and convene with my Abba.
I certainly learned the power of telling stories from him and my mom. The two of them combined weaved fantastic, wild narratives of our families around my curiosities and insecurities as a child. I was challenged, enthralled, and encouraged by their tales of the obstacles and accomplishments of my ancestry, right up through them. I suddenly felt connected to–even entitled to, at times–many lands and trophies well beyond my own experience. My father, particularly, was a master of the craft of honest storytelling and earnest embellishment–an oxymoron certainly, but one very necessary to have survived the live that he lived.
In these past 6 months, I’ve finally been able to talk a little more about him and his passing with my wife, peers, and family. It’s been hard sometimes, but deeply helpful and nourishing to remember him with those who make up the fabric of my life these days. Even speaking his name brings up a flood of emotion and stories, doubts, regrets, anxieties, and missing.
These days, my dad still comes to me at night sometimes. It happens most often when I’m really tired in those moments right between awake and asleep where you’re only halfway aware of the physical world whose tangible atoms begin to leap and bound into the whisps of string theory and dreams. All of a sudden on those tired nights, I’ll get a strong sense that he’s somehow with me.
The first few times this happened I found it alarming. I was unsure of what it meant, what the feeling was, why he might be there. It made me squirm and try to slip away into my “normal” dreamless sleep. But recently I finally began to understand why he comes on these nights: these are the times he’s most worried about me, wanting to check in.
I know now that all he wants to know are the stories. The stories of everything that’s going on in my life. How I’m living. So now, when he comes to visit…I tell him. First I tell him about my work. I tell him about how damn hard I work, and how much I absolutely love it. How I work 70 hours a week at a job that I love, that’s meaningful, that’s seeking to make the world better by making just a few lives better. I tell him that I get paid enough to do it. Enough to feed, house, and clothe my little family wonderfully and that’s it. My father never did hold a steady job for the entirety of his life. He loved to work, he was great at many things, but no job ever fit right. I tell him that I just finished year 5 and am eagerly diving into year 6. He tells me to work a little bit less, spend more time with my family, get paid a little bit more, make sure I’m taking care of myself, and he smiles.
Next I tell him about my friends, my family, and my community. I tell him about our little Compound in New Orleans, about my brothers and sisters in Virginia, California, and abroad. I tell him about how I stay in touch with my relatives on both sides, near and far. I tell him about my new and growing relationships with my step family. I tell him about the love and time spent with my mom and sister. My father always was faithful to his family, but often found himself on grating terms with different folks. He initiated much contact, but often struggled to maintain it. I know my dad tells me who not to be so nice to and who to call more often. I know he tells me to treat my sister and mother even better and to spend more time with them, and I know he smiles.
Next I tell him about my beautiful Carrie. My father was always enamored with the female species. I tell him about the homes we’ve already shared together, and the home we’re currently looking to buy and build. I tell him about our joys and our struggles, our caresses and our callousness, our most magical moments and our most mundane. I know he makes some mildly inappropriate comments, tells me to treat her to more dates, make sure she’s always right, and give her plenty of massages. And I know for sure that he smiles big.
Finally, I tell him about Aeli. Aeli, who on the way to visit his Sabbah’s grave the other day for the first time asked about where he was and if he was okay. Aeli, whose many talents are only outshined by his insatiable middle school sense of humor. Aeli, who is a spitting image of his Sabbah except with bleach blonde hair instead of ink black. I tell him about the infinite joys of the past 2 and a half years with Aeli. I tell him about picking him up, tossing him, tickling him, speaking gibrish and many other languages to him, about feeding him from my own garden, about walking, talking, singing, and dancing with him, and about so many other things that he would enjoy so dearly. I know he tells me to feed him more, to make sure he goes to bed earlier, to wipe his mouth and wash his hands more often, and to trim his hair. But here is where I actually feel him smile.
Aeli is most often asleep or wrastling with the covers next to me when these encounters tend to happen. He doesn’t seem to acknowledge that they are going on. But I have no doubt that his Sabbah, my Abba, is there in the bedroom with us, ever so proud of the life we are living on without him.
We visited his grave yesterday. He is buried in the Cholon Cemetary just south of his home in Bat Yam, Israel. I walked the mile to his grave from the car all the while with Aeli in my arms, just as I had left it last the day we buried him. Aeli eagerly lit the yartzeit (mourning & remembrance) candles to go on his grave and tenderly placed stones (a Jewish tradition) on the grave as we said the blessing over it. We stood and talked for a few minutes while the flame flickered before walking back down the path where we had come to return to his old apartment for dinner with his widow, Vera. The day was beautiful, the type of weather he never failed to appreciate until his last day, the company was everyone we needed, and as we walked away, I felt that same smile warming the cavern of my heart.
growinggoodness 