The summer that my dad and his brother were 8 and 5 years old, they went off to sleep-away camp together. (It was indeed a very different parenting world in those days; "parenting" hadn't even become a word yet.) My father was appointed his brother's keeper: he was told to look after Nelson, and to call my grandparents if little bro was excessively miserable or got sick. So when Nelson did in fact get sick, my dad worried his young mind over whether or not to call his parents. The camp staff discouraged it-- they told my father that it wasn't serious and he shouldn't bother the adults on their summer vacation. One night a few weeks into this non-serious illness, my dad went to the infirmary to say goodnight to his brother. The next morning Nelson was dead, of complications related to polio. The directors had been making an effort to conceal the epidemic that raced through the camp that summer. Healthy children like my father were probably fairly easy to deceive. They woke my dad in time for him to see the ambulance driving his brother's little body away.
My father Alan Rosenthal rarely told this story himself. He would usually just say he always knew he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up. But in my mind, even when I was a kid and he was an extraordinarily vibrant adult with a fast walk, a bellowing voice and a thriving medical practice, he always partly remained that tragically burdened 8-year-old boy. Knowing that story was essential to knowing who my daddy really was.
Specifically, Dr. Alan Rosenthal was a pediatric neurosurgeon. The kind who would spend the night at the hospital so he could wake hourly and go in himself to drain an abscess in the brain of a newborn he would operate on later the next day. Or who would find a way to MacGyver a life-saving fix to a malfunctioning shunt in the head of a hydrocephalic baby. He loved an audience for his surgical artistry, and he often tried to persuade my mother, my sister and me to watch his operations from the gallery above. Mom and Amy were regulars. I can remember trying it just once at about age 9; after braving the first few minutes of baby blood and brain surrounded by blue-green surgical drape, I quietly turned my chair around and my attention to my Mad magazine. (Sorry, dad.)
Above all, my father was the kind of doctor who spoke to his patients or their parents on the phone at length, on his own time, and continued to follow up with many of them through to adulthood-- much to the consternation of his bookkeeper, who couldn't begin to figure out a way to bill to the practice for these hours. Actually, he wouldn't even let her try. All this of course made him less available to me than I might have liked, growing up. But I understood from a young age that it also made him an exceptional physician. He was, to me, the smartest man in the world, and he used his brilliance to mend bodies and save lives. I worshiped him for it.
As a young girl I also adored the physical facts of him. His voice, gravelly even as a young man. The intense way he'd stare at you when he was talking, and the way that intensity would gently recede and take you in when you were talking-- the ocean in my father's grey eyes. Sometimes you'd be in one of these conversations with him for a while before noticing that he'd been wiggling his left ear at you the entire time. (Yup, he could do that. He could also draw a medical diagram on a chalkboard using both hands simultaneously, so long as it was fairly symmetrical. He loved to brag about that one.)
All these things my father loved: Man of La Mancha, the musical, and Don Quixote, the 17th century Cervantes novel it was based on, about a dreamer who's determined to revive chivalry and travels the country dueling with windmills he believes to be giants; "Greensleeves"; Simon & Garfunkel; and especially the baroque and classical music that so well matched his vigorous presence, and that he piped into the operating room while he worked. His tiny Italian sports cars-- he'd make sure Aim and I were belted into the back "seat"-- barely a ledge, really-- and we'd hang on tight as he zipped us around the rolling hills of Long Island. His stacks of pulpy paperbacks (Hammett, Elmore Leonard, the MacDonalds John D. and Ross)-- he'd bring half a dozen on a family vacation and finish most of them on the plane ride there. His bizarre food concoctions-- my dad never actually cooked, but he'd find a couple of random things in the kitchen and (alarmingly) decide it might be good to combine them. Say, chocolate syrup and mustard (actually, you know? molé-ish. And so it would begin.) Never mind that he was the only one who would dare sample most of these culinary experiments; he worked on perfecting them for months. Sartorial splendor-- he loved to pick out a few shirts, ties and jackets for a meeting or a night out and have his three girls choose what worked best. Occasionally he would exercise the veto; usually he was right. He wore a jacket and tie when none was required. On the other hand, he couldn't bear to throw away a pair of reading glasses, and he'd MacGyver those too when they broke. His night table drawer held baggies full of scotch-taped, paper-clipped, toothpicked glasses.
At various times my father walkedtoofast, talkedtooloud, talkedtoofast andthenwouldsuddenlypause in the middle of a sentence while the words caught up with his thoughts, staring intensely the whole time... beforecontinuingasbefore. Worked too hard, worked out too hard, played too hard, drank too much, drove too fast, argued politics too much too long too loud. God did my father love to argue, and he was really, REALLY good at it. I often thought that it wasn't so much a political opponent as his own demons he was sparring with, which at times made it very tricky and unwise to become that sparring opponent. But I did. Frequently. I think probably for the intimacy with him it afforded me, I picked up that bluster that sometimes lingered in the air around him, and spun the windmills for his Don Quixote. He had a few that he particularly liked to rail against, and they conveniently enough played right into my instinctive, inchoate adolescent political sympathies: liberal healthcare reform, dove-ish foreign policy, Robin Hood (he defended the 'unfairly maligned, misunderstood' Sheriff of Nottingham), Gloria Steinem for god sakes. This, from a man who insisted that our dinner conversation eschew teenage gossip and fashion in favor of the worldlier matters that he felt befitted our intelligence. That same man who insisted I apply to his beloved alma mater, Yale, despite my protestations that it was completely out of my league, who sat by my side on the beach during one family vacation as I completed the application while everyone around us was catching rays and body surfing, could also be the poster child for 70's-style male chauvinism. As a hormonally-ruled teenager in a halter top and platforms (or an Edwardian blouse and ballet slippers, depending on my mood), I only vaguely sensed that defending my gender's right to a voice and equal pay was the right move there. Now, as a parent myself who knows something about the power of reverse psychology, I sometimes wonder what my father was really up to. But perhaps it was just that, like Don Quixote, he wanted his chance at chivalry, even as he wanted his daughters to not need it so much.
Chivalry. He called Amy and me his raisons d'être, but if we were in fact the why of his existence, my mother was the indispensable how-- the lifelong partner through whom he grew into his best self. One of the many strange contradictions of my dad was the fact that, despite his ability to engineer those spectacular surgical feats, he was completely, mind-bogglingly incapable when it came to most modern technology. He needed my mom to dial a push-button phone for him. Touch screen? Forget about it. Computers? My kids at age 4 had things to teach him. My mother packed his suitcases, managed the family finances, and looked gorgeous on his arm whenever they went out. He showed his deep appreciation and gratitude to her generously, unhesitatingly. He'd often turn to whomever was nearby and just tell them how much he loved her, or how beautiful she was. He never passed a flower stand without buying a bunch for her; on her birthday he'd get her a bouquet for each decade and then some, so that the whole house bloomed. He wrote the most heartfelt, pithy, perfect messages on greeting cards. If he wanted a gift to be a surprise, he'd ask my sister, whom alone he trusted to understand my mother's sense of elegance, to pick it out for him. I believe that my father tried to protect my mother from pain and suffering until the day he died. He died of pneumonia. He survived lung cancer for almost five years. He complained as little as possible, and held on as long as he possibly could.
Close to two hundred and fifty people attended my daddy's funeral. That seems like a lot for a man who could sometimes be socially awkward and hated to schmooze. Some were people he had operated on, and who traveled long distances to be there. A precious handful were friends who had known and loved him since grade school, and before. I think he might have looked around at all of them in surprise, and said something like "they all came here for me?" It would have been genuine humility. It's not that he didn't have pride-- he did boast about his many medical accomplishments, and it wasn't unlike him to work Yale into the conversation within five minutes of meeting someone. But he never rested on any of his achievements. It seemed he never could rest. He always saw how much more there was to do. Even a typical day off for him was a frenzy of near-manic activity. He might start with 18 holes of golf, then on to three sets of tennis, a light lunch (followed perhaps by what was left of your light lunch), and then he'd top it off with back-to-back 45-minute spinning classes. And if he wasn't actually doing neurosurgery, well he could talk about it incessantly-- the intellectual challenges, the manual dexterity, the opportunities for quick-thinking inventiveness that so thrilled him. But even my father's boundless energy and brilliance combined with the best of modern medicine couldn't work miracles in every case. He couldn't save every life. And sometimes-- too often-- he had to sit down with desperately exhausted and frightened parents and tell them that he could likely save their child, but that the child would live with some degree of impairment, maybe severe. I don't believe that kind of conversation ever got any easier for my father. What he definitely was not, what he never became, was coldly intellectual or hard-hearted. But again and again, this deeply sensitive, shy man put himself on the line, in that agonizingly difficult place, for the good he could do.
Alan Rosenthal was a Healer, and he was a true hero. May he rest, in peace.
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