To my dad

My dad passed away on May 25, 2022, after a years-long battle with kidney disease. He did not want a traditional funeral — he wanted people to gather and tell stories that made them laugh. My mom and I held a virtual Celebration of Life memorial service on June 21, 2022, gathering his friends and family from around the country, and these were the remarks I shared before opening the floor to others. The stories people told completed a vivid picture of who my dad was, as experienced through his many roles as a father, husband, friend, brother, son, salesmen, and colleague.

If you would like to make a donation in honor of my dad, please consider giving to the American Kidney Fund. The AKF assisted my family in ways no other organization has, including covering costly premiums for several years. They have a stellar rating on CharityNavigator, with 97% of donations going to patients and programs.

Dad, to you.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about what to say today. Several years ago, I saw an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond where Ray, a sports writer, wrote a eulogy for his dad, who was still alive and the classic TV curmudgeon, as a writing exercise. His dad was livid when he found it by accident, and I remember thinking: “If I did that, Dad would probably just add notes about what stories I was missing, and try to argue with me that the time he got shot at outside an adult movie theater in Detroit was totally appropriate to tell at a funeral.”

Later on at some point in the last few years, I believe while we were watching home videos at Peri’s when he was living there awaiting his transplant, there was a video where he was playing baseball with me in our condo on Silverbrook — inside, mind you, so I’m sure my mom wasn’t home — when I was maybe four or five years old. I remember thinking then, as I started to tear up watching it — “that! That’s the story I’m going to tell!”

He was holding the camera in one hand and a whiffle ball in another, announcing my at-bat like he was Ernie Harwell.

“Alright here comes Alex Schiff, the star of the team, he’s the first since Ted Williams to bat .400 for a whole season, the bases are loaded, it’s the bottom of the ninth and his team is counting on him, let’s see what he does…”

He threw the whiffle ball and I smacked it right back directly into the camera, and I started screaming and jumping up and down, because I was a kid, and he started screaming and jumping up and down, because he was my dad, and he lived for these moments. The camera was shaking all over the place but you could still make out in the audio, “Ahhhhhhh the crowd goes wild!”

In the last two years, my dad had a lot of run-ins with near-death experiences. 11, but who’s counting. I had a lot of time to ruminate about what I’d want to share at his eulogy, and I have yet to think of a better story than this one. Because this story just strikes to the very deep core of who my dad was, and why my relationship with him was always so utterly uncomplicated. Throughout my life I’ve known people with complicated relationships, poor relationships, or even no relationships, with their father, and the greatest gift my father gave me is that I have no ability to relate to that experience. I do not know what that is like. My dad was just Dad — Dad who gave me books to read and went to my baseball games, Dad who called me to ask which restaurants from the list he sent me I was going to go to next, Dad who taught me the meaning of double movie features on Jewish Christmas. It’s not that we never argued or had bad times, but as he told me when I was a kid — quite randomly and out of the blue, like most of my dad’s words of wisdom:

“Alex, the only people on earth you can absolutely rely on, without hesitation, no matter what the situation is, are me and your mother. Oh, and Nana.”

When I was younger I thought that was a statement of skepticism about others, from a lifelong salesman who was always waiting for his ship to come in, always making one more phone call to Mr Murphy, who I have no idea who you are or why on earth you warranted such obsessive persistence, but when I think of the year 2007, I think of hearing across the house, “Heyyyy Mr Murphy, Ken Schiff here from OJ Mortgage, just following up again…”

As an adult, I realize that statement wasn’t a lament of skepticism as much as it was an assertion of his own love, how central that was to his identity, and how if he was going to teach me anything, it was how to love. How to love your family, from the way he loved my mom and me, leaving absolutely no room for doubt in word or action. How to love your friends, from the way he called them and they called him throughout his worst periods, the way he had a ready list the moment I asked about who he might want to see before you went or attend your shiva, the way he tried to gather people and sought gatherings, and the way his friends were the characters in his greatest adventure stories and he was the character in theirs. My dad was never afraid to say how much he loved anyone or anything, what he loved, why he loved. Even in his darkest days, when he had lesser and lesser of himself to give, he still loved with his whole self, completely, shamelessly, and unconditionally, as if he could not even fathom the idea of any other way to love.

And because I learned how to love from my dad, I told him exactly that on his last day of life, just a few hours before he passed, followed by:

As I say goodbye for now, I will do my best to think about goodbye like the Tralfamadorians you had me read about in one Kurt Vonnegut book or another as a kid, who perceive the past, present, a future all at once. You’ll still very much be alive and with us, just not in this time, and so we’ll just visit you in another time, because you’ve given us so many good memories and stories to visit you with. I love you.