By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO — He died suddenly and dramatically on March 2—thirty six years ago today, in 1976. At 59, I am fourteen years older than my father was when he succumbed to a massive myocardial infarction while playing handball at the Cincinnati Jewish Community Center. My young mother and I were called to come over and we saw his lifeless body on the court, covered uncomfortably by a white sheet. His feet, in sneakers, protruded from underneath.
People stood around, some ghoulishly curious, others in shock, most not knowing what to say. The situation was larger than virtually all of them. The police and rescue squad workers did their work in silent futility and my immigrant father’s body was removed. Documents and releases were signed in painful submission. Mom and I went home to a stark new reality and to inform my younger brother and sister that our world was inexplicably changed forever.
He had fallen so hard that his eyeglasses lacerated his forehead; a small pool of blood stained the floor adjacent to the covered mountain of a man. Having fought valiantly and been wounded (ironically, above the eye) in Israel’s War of Independence, my father, Jeff Kamin, died of a weak heart and a spirit that could never really make peace with his own identity, his professional journey, and his obsession with disproving his own mortality. He had heart issues and wasn’t supposed to play handball. So he did.
He was brilliant and hot-tempered, cultivated and edgy. He wrote elegiac poetry in Hebrew to his many fallen comrades in war; he gave dissertations in impeccable English about the physics of aerospace. He did everything right but come to terms with life and its vicissitudes.
We buried him in a lonely cemetery in Cincinnati, light years away from his roots, his friends, his land, and the mulberry tree that my grandparents planted in Israel on the day of his birth. Just a couple of years ago, the family gathered his bones and reinterred him, at last, at home in Zion. My mother, after over fifty years in America, returned home to Israel not so long ago as well.
Next week, I will journey to Israel and share in Mom’s 80th birthday—along with visiting my adult daughter Debra, who lives now and thrives in the happening, cosmopolitan city of Tel Aviv. Alas, my mother has recently been unwell and the birthday is truly going to be a milestone both bittersweet and tender. I will visit and say prayers for the first time at my father’s final resting place, knowing that after a short life of restless wayfaring and conflicting emotions, he is home in the land of our birth.
I will celebrate my mother’s life and fete my daughter’s great happiness and success as an international journalist and a joyous partner with a fine and sensitive young man. Under the biblical sun, along the blue Mediterranean, beneath Tel Aviv’s skyscrapers, and beside the Judean hills, I will consecrate life’s meaning, and realize that I am lucky to understand what is good and distill what is bad. And I will again pledge to myself to take none of it for granted.
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Rabbi Kamin is a freelance writer based in San Diego. He may be contacted at ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com