Chapter Seventeen:
My Father’s Death
I was in Florida when on Friday, February 24, 2017, I got a call that my Dad was not doing well. I flew up to Hamilton immediately after Sabbath ended.
He lived another four days. My father died on February 28, 2017 (the second day of Adar 5777) of heart failure.
My relationship with my father
My father and I had a very close relationship. Ever since I was a young kid, I worked for him after school. People used to joke that I could finish his lines. I would say to him, why don’t you call such and such a person, and he would already have picked up the phone and was dialing that person.
When I was eighteen years old I began a hand-written correspondence with my father which continued back and forth for many years. These days one does not have such correspondence, but now I read the letters over often and I am grateful to have them.
My Dad was truly a man to be admired. He came to Canada not knowing a word of English and built an empire that sustained his parents, his grandparents, himself and his wife and his children (and perhaps beyond if I do my job right!). Because Opi came to Canada at the age of thirty-nine, and thus could not learn the language fluently, it was really my father who spearheaded the business growth. He worked day and night from the time he was nine years old up to four days before his passing in February 2017. I miss him terribly.
Note to reader: There are not many people in the world who will jump on you to put you out if you are on fire. Your parents are two of those people. Appreciate them and nurture your relationship with them as long as they are alive. After they are gone, you will savor every moment you had with them, every photo you have with them, and every video you have of them.
I strongly suggest that if one or both of your parents is alive, to video them and ask them to talk about the details of their lives, to talk about their grandparents, their parents, their childhood, their upbringing, and all other details of their lives that they can remember. In working on writing this book, I approached several friends and asked them to tell me about their parents’ lives and histories. Almost without fail, the response I received was that they knew very little about their ancestors and their parents’ childhoods because it never occurred to them to video their parents. I strongly suggest doing this before it is too late.
Last 48 hours of my father’s life
I got a phone call that my Dad had had a heart attack and I jumped on the first plane after Sabbath. I went straight to the hospital and did not leave for the next forty-eight hours, which were his last forty-eight hours alive. I told him how much I loved him. I was fortunate that my father had had the foresight to prepare a living will and a DNR.
Note to reader: Make sure everyone in the family has a living will and a DNR, and know where everyone’s living will and DNR is in the house for that unanticipated moment when you will need to bring it to the hospital.
My children all flew up as well. My oldest son Jacob said to my father, “My wife is expecting. We’re going to have our first baby!” My father responded softly, “Mazel tov”! He took a few more breaths, and that was it, he died at 1:15 p.m. on February 28, 2017.
Next 24 hours after my father’s passing
I never left my Dad for the twenty-four hours between the time he died and the time we buried him. I went in the car that transported him from the hospital to the funeral home. I stayed there with him until the members of the Chevre Kaddishe came in around 7 p.m. I stayed and did the tahara with them. I had never done a tahara before. I wanted to be there with them doing the tahara because I knew how important it was to my father to do the tahara exactly correctly for those many years that he performed the tahara, at least sixty times, as head of the Chevre Kaddishe in Niagara Falls. The tahara on my father would have been done exactly correctly whether I had been there or not, but I still wanted to be there to make sure. We wrapped him up beautifully in his tachrichim (burial garments).
People said to me that it must have been freaky for me to do the tahara on my own father, but absolutely, it was not. I treasure those moments up to now, making sure that he was taken care of as he would have wanted.
I know that when I go to the cemetery to visit him, which I do quite often, I know that inside there he is wrapped so beautifully and that he would be so happy with the job that we did on him.
Shiva
My parents had, and my mother still has, an unusual living situation. They lived, and my mother still does live, on a compound in a forest in southern Ontario. They have no neighbors, you can’t find it on Google Maps, the Uber driver cannot find it. That is where we sat shiva. I made the mistake of telling all my friends who lived far away not to fly in for the shiva. I did that because I did not want to inconvenience them. I thought I was doing them a favor, because to get there, one has to take two airplanes, and then figure out how to get to the house from the airport; it’s a big to-do. But I now realize that that prevented them from fulfilling the mitzva of nichum aveilim, comforting the mourner.
Of course Ted, Phil and Warren were there. They are always there when I need them.
One day during the shiva, I was sitting there, on the low chair, it was the middle of winter, snow everywhere, reading over some various papers of my father’s, and all of a sudden, the door opens and it was Rabbi Jonathan Kroll at the door, my close friend from Boca Raton. I could not believe it, I could not understand it, I said, “Rabbi, what are you doing here? I mean, we are in the middle of a forest in Canada in the middle of winter, what are you doing here?” And he responded, “I came to make a shiva call”. I balled my eyes out. I never forget that moment. Having Jon and Jen in our lives has truly been a blessing.
This made me realize how important it is to make a shiva call, wherever it is, whenever it is, even if you have to take two airplanes. It is much more important to make a shiva call than to attend a wedding or a bris.
Shloshim
Thirty days later we had a gathering in Boca Raton to commemorate the end of the first mourning period of thirty days. Now that a few weeks had passed, I had come to realize that my grandfather and my father, the patriarchs of our family, the ones who made the decision to escape the Nazis, to whom we owed our entire existence, do not exist anymore. All of a sudden, it is me. The weight of it is enormous. I wear two cufflinks, the one on one side is my grandfather’s, it says FM and the other is my father’s, it says HM. It reminds me of my role in the chain of our family from my ancestors to my progeny, the link for which I am now responsible.
Year of saying Kaddish
I used to use the time when people were saying Kaddish to catch up with the people sitting next to me. Now that I spent a year saying Kaddish, and now that I had that feeling that that moment was the most important moment of the day, the time I most connected to my father, I do not chit chat with my neighbor any more. I am quiet, I listen to the people saying Kaddish, and I respond at the appropriate times. I am sorry for all the times I did not do that. Now I go up to people and ask them who they are saying Kaddish for, and I ask them to tell me a little about that person. I know that it is comforting for them to be able to talk about their loved one.
A man named Jay Garfinkel wrote the following letter after my father’s passing:
I met Henry more than 25 years ago. He was the most generous man I ever met who placed his trust in me on just his instincts. It was momentous as no one before that or since had done so to so high a degree.
In 1992 I was a documentary filmmaker contracted by the Library of Congress to produce a one-hour program on Harry Houdini. The Library is the repository of many documents and paraphernalia of the famed Hungarian-Jewish illusionist and escape artist Erik Weisz a.k.a. Harry Houdini. After Houdini’s death many of his artifacts became part of the Houdini collection in the Library. However, the collection was incomplete with dozens of items scattered in the hands of private collectors. I interviewed a dozen magicians to find out who had the more interesting pieces the Library was missing. The name that kept coming up in all my interviews and conversations was Henry Muller. Penn Jillette (Penn & Teller) told me that there was a man in a small town in Canada who owned many parts of the collection and who had created a Houdini Museum. For some reason I became fixated on the idea that this Muller fellow was a ‘German’ with whom I would have a difficult time. The name ‘Muller’ sent a wave of flashing amber signals to me; “enter with caution” I thought.
Then there was the issue of having to fly to Buffalo, renting a car, hiring a U.S. camera film and audio crew, drive to Niagara Falls Canada and staying overnight for a two-day shoot. What if this was dry well and this German Muller didn’t have the goods? My loss on the contract would have been substantial as my margins were thin to begin with.
I called Henry who arranged for us to stay in a motel at a reduced cost and closed parts of the museum for several hours so we could film without distraction. We hit the motherlode of artifacts…but I could not imagine what would come next. While my crew took their lunch break, Henry invited me to his house to have mine. What a house it was. Collections of cups used for washing bodies in a ‘tahara’, a courtyard with citrus fruits growing in the bleak Canadian north, paintings on the wall that only museums could own. Henry was an avid collector. Then the most remarkable thing happened. He opened his safe and took out a reel of film what was so rare that not even the Library of Congress knew about much less owned. Henry explained that Houdini wanted to break a world record so he could be in the record books. To that end he decided to be the first person to fly a plane and do an aerial trick on the continent of Australia. He had a bi-plane taken apart and shipped by to Australia then reassembled. The film was of that ‘historic’ flight which ended in disaster as Houdini crashed the plane in less than two minutes. After only having met me for a few hours Henry agreed to let me take the priceless film to the US, have it duplicated and then FedEx it back to him. It was an act of generosity, kindness, faith in his fellow man and confidence that people are by and large honest and true to their word. There was not a single document or receipt that he made me sign. It was completely based on trust.
Over the years that followed I spoke to Henry many times about many business issues. He introduced me to his contacts in the Canadian TV Evangelical community. It was an odd group of people all of whom including me had one thing in common; we belonged to Henry Muller fan club.
Your father was one of a kind. Everyone who met him was better for having him in his life.
May his memory be a blessing.
Jay