On the Path to Humanbecoming

“You’re just like your father,” my mother would say, hundreds, if not thousands, of times, often as a back-handed compliment.

She accused me of “acting like a Communist, drinking from the same glass as others,” even though she accepted Holy Communion from the same cup as others. My father, a card-carrying Social Democrat, imparted his progressive views to me as part of a humanist education. Even though my parents were at odds politically (and, moreover, both politically active), my mother respected my father for his moral and ethical values and actions.

My father was patient (when he wasn’t brimming with the rage that comes from enduring tyranny), a professor who had to thole thousands of pages of poorly written essays which didn’t begin to demonstrate even a basic understanding of the economic theory he so clearly explained, dumbing it down to a level that made his soul quake. There were the exceptions, the scholars who were misled into studying business or finance, who truly understood the underlying value of mastering economic principles and how those principles permeate our greater (or, too often, lesser) existence in an alleged free-market economy and so-called democracy. Fewer were those who embraced Brother Mike’s teaching to better comprehend how unjust life is for the majority of humanity throughout the world. Many of his students weren’t in classrooms. A scholar by spirit and nature, he would lecture to anyone willing to sit and listen. And those who have done so have been captive for hours.

If only my verbosity were layered with Brother Mike’s depth of knowledge and prowess to connect the most sophisticated ideas across disciplines, all rooted in his primary scholarly pursuit: philosophy.

There is so much I didn’t say. So much I did say that I regret. I only hope that the sweeter side of my mother’s sentiment may eke out at an odd moment, elevating me, even for a fleeting second, to the status of “humanbecoming.” He would often say “there are so few human beings,” that to be a “humanbecoming” is an accomplishment in our grossly corrupt and thoughtless society.

We threw an intimate surprise party for my dad’s 70th birthday, where he joked “what do you all know? Am I dying?” Even his most profound and spiritual revelations were peppered with a trademark humor that was lost on some of shuttered mind. He also publicity acknowledged my mom that day as a humanbecoming, which she knew was mighty praise, never doled out carelessly.

At the time, we had no reason to suspect his 80th, 90th, and 100th birthdays would become memorials. Having never swallowed so much as an aspirin, exercising and swimming daily, laboring  every day in the yard, and working as a professor (employed at the time of his death because he had never taken a sick day), Brother Mike’s last physical revealed, in his primary care physician’s words “a man healthier than my 30-year-old patients.”

Diagnostic tests at the time of the physical included a sigmoidoscopy, which the PCP claimed “came back clear.” Just 10 days later, my mother noticed that my father’s extremities were very cold and covered him with blankets as he reclined in his dilapidated chair to read. “Mike,” she insisted, noticing a sudden decline in his vigorous physical activities along with an uncharacteristic loss of appetite. “You have to see a doctor.”

I know I am maligned by some for loathing the area where I grew up, but it had already become a healthcare wasteland, and my “healthier-than-a-30-year-old” father, who never picked up a cigarette and drank only socially, went into surgery the following day to remove “a single tumor from the sigmoid section of his colon.” The former military doctor had been applauded by the insurance-fraud-machine hospital system monopoly in the geographic area, as “precise.” Perhaps the U.S. military taught this surgeon to carefully maneuver a scalpel, but it failed at conveying any need for compassion, empathy or a basic ability to communicate with family and patients. For the record, my father served in two wars for the U.S. Army, and came out as a humanist. This surgeon, who was not approaching humanbecoming, strode into the family waiting room and briskly instructed my mother and I to “go into the private room.”

In that isolation chamber, he gestured for us to sit, and blurted out: “the good news is the surgery went well, and he’s fully conscious. The bad news is the cancer spread to all of his vital organs and he has about six months to live. I have to leave for the long weekend, so one of you has to tell him. Also, tell him he has a colostomy bag.”

As I began to hyperventilate, the surgeon shook his head in disgust and told my mother, “she has to calm down or she’ll faint.” My mother said: “I can’t tell him, and look at her, she obviously can’t do it.” He rolled his eyes and told my mother, “Like I said, I have plans for the long weekend. I’m running late. This is your responsibility.”

“What about my daughter?” my mom asked him.

“As I said, she needs to calm down. I can get someone to get her a chaplain to talk to, but it may take awhile.” Without so much as an attempt at eye contact or a tap on the shoulder, he waltzed out.

I managed to use the phone to call my childhood friend Erica, who somehow interpreted my cry-screams, found a neighbor to watch her then-young children, and disregarded multiple traffic laws to race some 18 miles and hold me.

Erica is one of my dad’s students. Not in a classroom (she and I were undergraduates together at a different school), but during countless hours spent in my parents’ home. “She’s brilliant,” he boasted. His delight was irrepressible when she changed her undergraduate from something called hotel, restaurant, and travel administration, to his primary passion philosophy. No doubt Erica was a humanbecoming in the eyes of Brother Mike.

I hope my mother is right, that I am at least the slightest like my father, save for the (occasional) rage which I fully acknowledge as cultivated on my own. I lack his deep well of expertise across subjects and have fallen so far from scholarship, not only leaving behind graduate degrees despite competing coursework, but failing to read voraciously. I do hope I impart a glimmer of his moral teachings to my son, Michael Alexander, who clearly already has achieved humanbecoming. Like a broken record, I lament every year that the pain of loss stings deeper s he never knew his only grandson or my husband, Mike (Michael Damian), who also would have earned Brother Mike’s designation of humanbecoming.

Related Reading

A Letter from Your Dziadek/Dido in Search of the Empyrean

Lament, Regret, and the Eeriness of 14: In Loving Memory of Brother 
Mike
An Unlikely Soldier: In Memory of Michael William “Brother Mike” Gural

The Shifting Emotion of an Immoveable Feast

To the modern American, or global citizen, the notion that for the last 11 years I have begun contemplating what to prepare for dinner on October 18 weeks in advance may seen obsessive or silly, unless of course, I am a caterer or planning some fabulous fete for the beautiful people. (The latter, of course, would require my hiring the perfect caterer.)

My father was born on Oct. 18, 1926, and died in 2002. Planning what to make for dinner, generally one of his favorite old world meals – the old world being some mix of what was born of my Ukrainian, Polish and Russian roots.

Call it comfort food, but most certainly not in the mainstream America-meets foodie way of indulging in the food itself. It comforts me to commemorate his memory by creating and serving something he would enjoy. Of course, growing up dirt poor in the slums of Newark, N.J., my father learned to appreciate – or at least to never waste – any food.

My father was not religious in the go-to-church-every-holy-day-or-feel-really-guilty-about-it-way, like my mother. There are 13 major holy days in the Russian Orthodox Church and a much longer list of secondary holy days to commemorate various events in the lives of prophets, apostles, fathers of the Orthodox Church, martyrs, saints and others who have aided the propagation of Christianity and the Orthodox religion, as well as certain events in the life of the church. Those days are divided into movable feasts, which have no definite days or even months appointed for their celebration, and the immovable feasts, which are always celebrated on definite days of the year, by the Julian calendar.

Suffice it to say, commemorating the dead, both on their death days and birthdays, is an immovable feast.

My father, who felt more kinship with Buddhists and Sikhs, practiced meditation mostly at home (though sometimes he’d visit a gurdwara with his best friend, a Punjabi Sikh). He attended Russian Orthodox services on the highest holy days, namely Pascha, and of course always for funerals and other services for friends of the family. In the end, my father, who died of Stage IV colon cancer metastasized to the liver, requested to be buried alongside where my mother will be laid to rest and in the plot next to her parents, at one of three cemeteries at Holy Trinity Monastery in the hamlet of Jordanville in central New York State’s Herkimer County, northwest of Albany and east of Syracuse. Blink or sneeze while driving on remote winding roads past sprawling farmland and nothingness -- save for the monastery with the cathedral’s imposing gilded cupolas and bell tower -- you will miss Jordanville. Founded in 1928, the monastery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011 and is the first Google hit for Jordanville.

Family friends who have made what most call the pilgrimage to the monastery and cemetery have alluded to the mystical, otherworldly qualities of a place so alien from any America (or present time) they’d ever experienced. This includes hardcore atheists and agnostics.

Why my father chose to be buried there will always elude, even haunt, me. Most people closest to me say it’s because he wanted to be besides my mom, at least in the end. Those who have witnessed the terror of Stage IV colon cancer know what it does to the brain. Those who have read Russian literature know what happens to men facing their own mortality. The deathbed confession is not fictional in my world, if not quite as dramatic. My father was a philosopher and intellectual, and in many ways was like Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (the character in Dostoyevsky's “The Devils”), although my father cared deeply and dutifully for his children while Stepan put his own interests first and was a scumbag to his son. And I doubt my father picked his final resting place because he considered himself immortal since his love for God will never die.

Why my father chose the church burial and ongoing mourning process, with all their ancient and elaborate rituals, I will never know. I do know that his decision impacted me deeply and profoundly and rattled my own beliefs – or lack thereof. If I am not compelled to follow the church rules as a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, I can at least provide a fitting memorial tribute – just twice a year – to commemorate his life on the dates of his birth and his death.

This all now sounds even sillier to most Americans, or global citizens, I’m sure. But I do derive some comfort, some closeness to my father’s legacy and my ethnic heritage by making a special meal.

Along with the menu planning comes an annual bout of profound sadness, if not deep depression. My therapist, who is far removed from this old world where I dwell emotionally, says I need to overcome this depression and to create a celebration where I invite friends over for a feast without telling them why. That’s funny, as Russians (the Russians who raised me, not the people hail from there now) never tell other people about their own birthdays and would never, ever, invite other people out with the expectation of others paying any part of the bill. It is equally wrong to not prepare and present a meal in honor of the dead on “their day,” religiously on the day they died and culturally on the day they were born.

I do not know where I stand in this cultural framework – trapped somewhere between the vast divide of a bygone Russia and a hypersocial world where people celebrate themselves on any and every platform, posting old photos of departed loves ones as a substitute for traditions they have shunned. I'm not eager to revert to a world where the closest women come to heroism is martyrdom in the form of Nastassya Filippovna. I’m also not ready to embrace a soulless world where the number of characters you're allotted dictates the depth of your musings.

I think I’ll make piroshki, to start.  

--- NOTE: This entry is the first in a series of ideas, themes or stories that will eventually appear in a novel based largely on my mother's life. Working novel title: Lubachka