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On the death of my father

My father, Max Prager, died two weeks ago.
[additional-authors]
September 3, 2014

My father, Max Prager, died two weeks ago. 

Here, then, are some thoughts on the death of a parent.

1. Longevity

Parents who live long are very lucky. They are lucky not only for their longevity, and not only because they get to see their children grow into adulthood, and not only because they may see grandchildren. They are also lucky to have those extra years to reconcile with their children. Had my father died when I was a teenager, we would not have had the decades since then to get closer.  

As I have gotten older, most of the major conclusions I have drawn from life have been, shall we say, sobering. The first, which I was taught in yeshiva as a child, and which life has repeatedly confirmed, is that human nature isn’t good. But the one that hit me hardest, coming as it did later in life, is how big a role luck plays in life. Longevity (assuming relatively good health) is one such example.

2. Age at death

My father was born on July 18, 1918, and died on Aug. 16, 2014. He was 96. 

When people are told that a parent has died, the first thing most ask — and nearly everyone wonders — is, “How old was he/she?”

This is completely understandable. But it needs to be analyzed. 

The age of the deceased matters only if one is assessing whether the death was a tragedy. Clearly, death at age 96 is not a tragedy. Moreover, my father was healthy for 93 of those years. Even during those last three years, he barely had so much as a cold, and his mind was perfect to the end. His one physical impairment was paralysis from the waist down, the result of a complication during surgery to open a heart valve.

All that notwithstanding, the age at which a parent dies is irrelevant regarding the hole left behind. In fact, one might legitimately argue that the more years a person has had with his or her parent, the bigger the hole. Having had both of my parents until I reached the age of 60, it is difficult to believe that both are now gone. I know it intellectually, but it has not “registered.” I keep having to remind myself that I have no parents.

3. There is no good alternative to having no parents

The only alternative to having no parents at some time in your life is to die before one or both of your parents. That is obviously not a good alternative. As my mother would always say, parents should die before their children do. We are all, therefore, fated — in the best of instances — to be orphans. 

4. Impact and legacy

Just as children can be a source of nachas (pride) or shame to parents, parents can be a source of nachas or shame to their children. In some ways, even more so.

It was my parents who made me realize this. Whenever I introduced my parents to an audience or in private settings, I was proud of them. They lived upstanding and ethical lives and carried themselves with dignity and grace. 

Upon further reflection, I came to realize that as regards shame, bad parental behavior can actually have a greater impact on children — including adult children — than bad behavior of children has on parents. If a decent person’s son commits a terrible crime, we tend to have compassion for that parent. But if a decent person’s father commits a terrible crime, that crime, completely unfairly, is deemed to reflect on the child, and the child often feels tainted. 

That is why one of the sons of Bernard Madoff, the man who swindled people out of billions of dollars, committed suicide. So did one of Charles Manson’s sons. It was as if they felt forever tainted. Yet, we don’t hear about the parent of a child who engages in similar criminal behavior committing suicide.

If your parents bring you no shame, be very grateful. If you’re proud of them, celebrate.

As I pointed out in my Jewish Journal column earlier this year, while nachas is used to refer to “pride and joy,” it literally means “rest.” It is too bad that it has lost its literal meaning — because that is ultimately what we most want from our parents and our children. We want our children to be good, productive, and emotionally and physically healthy human beings. We want them to be self-sufficient. That gives us rest. It is very difficult for a parent with a troubled, dependent or ill child to rest. 

It is virtually identical with parents. Ideally, our parents should enable us to rest. If they are healthy, happy and self-sufficient, we have this nachas. In this regard, I was exceedingly lucky. My parents were entirely self-sufficient. They had saved and prudently invested for their non-working years, and their emotional world was complete with one another. They were together 73 years and married for 69. Their demands on me were minimal. They were healthy virtually all of their lives and never interfered in my life. 

For the record, this was somewhat less the case for my one sibling, my brother, Dr. Kenneth Prager. He lived very near to them, and being a physician, he regularly heard from my mother about anything that ailed her. I realized this one day by accident. 

I called my mother virtually every week of my life. And as soon as she ascertained that it was I on the phone, everything I heard was filled with good cheer. On one occasion in just the last decade I called, and right after I said, “Hello,” she said, “Kenny?” 

Now, my brother and I have such similar voices that on a phone call, we can fool anyone into believing it is either one of us. So, as a joke, I said, “Yeah, Ma, it’s Kenny.”

And then she began reciting a list of pains in her joints and legs, and to complain about her restless leg syndrome and vertigo. I quickly told her that it was Dennis talking to her, whereupon she immediately reverted to the filled-with-good-cheer mother I had always known.

While she was never much of a burden, even to my brother, I can only say that, as in many families, children do not experience the same parents. I am not a physician, and I lived a continent away. I only had rest from my parents. My mother was somewhat of a different mother to my brother and me.

Having said that, my brother also had the joy of having parents for virtually every Jewish and national holiday. And that gave him a measure of “rest,” especially given their love of my brother’s children and grandchildren (my parents’ grandchildren and great-grandchildren). Living in California since 1976, I did not see them nearly as much. I visited them in New Jersey about four times a year, and they visited me every few years. Their visits were extraordinarily pleasurable for them and for me. My mother always cried when she left. And, remarkably, my father, too, was emotional about leaving.

So my brother had both the challenges and the joys of having our parents always in his life. But I can say that my parents, for most of my life, were only sources of nachas, in both of its meanings.

5. What is more important than closeness

My father loved my mother. He loved her more than anyone or anything in life. Growing up, my brother and I were more or less emotional afterthoughts in my father’s life — and even to a surprising degree, given that she was a “Jewish mother,” in my mother’s as well. Emotionally speaking, my brother and I were sort of tenants in our parents’ house. That is why, as I said above, it was a blessing that our parents lived so long. They had all those years to express love to us when we became adults, which they did.

But I had something in my father more important than emotional closeness. I had a strong ethical/moral model. I have always worn an invisible but powerful bracelet with the letters WWDD: “What Would Dad Do?”

The ideal for a son is to have an emotional bond with his father, who is also a strong ethical model. But, if you can only have one, the latter is more important than the former.

Most blessings in life come with a price — the proverbial sting that comes with a bee’s honey. Many adult children with deep emotional bonds to a parent also have in that a parent someone who is too heavily involved in their lives. Or they might suffer an emotional roller coaster ride.

I would have liked a more emotional bond with my father — he called me once in his entire life. I believe that if I had not called for a year, he still would not have called (my mother would have — and berated me for not calling more often). He believed that children call parents, not vice versa. (I did not inherit that rule. I call my children, and my children call me.) But the lack of honey also meant a lack of stings.

Moreover, not being coddled as a child (let alone as an adult) led to some positive consequences. It made me grow up, and it made me grow strong. I have fought for what I believe all my life — and received my fair share of opposition, even hatred. Had I not been forced to be emotionally strong, I am not sure I could have taken it.

It also forced me to seek love from others — from grandparents and other relatives, and especially from male friends. These friendships have been emotionally deep and satisfying and have sustained me throughout my life.

When I worked with college-age young people, and in my later work as a talk-show host, I came to see the consequences of the opposite of what I had — emotionally overbearing mothers (and sometimes fathers) who produce “mama’s boys,” boys who don’t become men. 

There exists a happy middle road, but if you have to grow up on one side of that road, it is far superior to grow up on the never-coddled side than on the too-coddled side. Better for you and infinitely better for everyone who enters your life.

6. No longer a child

No matter how old you are, as long as a parent is alive, you are still a child. It is only after both die that you cease being a child. And then, all of a sudden, not only are you no longer a child, you are also next in line. Again, this is the way it needs to be. But it will take getting used to. I have no way of knowing if one ever does.

7. On writing an autobiography

Late in his life, after five years of cajoling, I convinced my father to write an autobiography. He never stopped thanking me. You can read it at maxprager.com, where you can also see photos of my quite-dashing father. He was, among other things, an Orthodox Jew who served as an officer in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He was not drafted because he had a young child, but he nevertheless enlisted. He said he found it repulsive that there were fellow Orthodox Jews who avoided serving in World War II by setting up yeshivas and thereby obtaining a clergy deferment. “They let the goyim go and die fighting Hitler while they stayed home,” my father frequently, angrily, told my brother and me.

My father has a compelling story, but the truth is that everyone does. An autobiography is one of the greatest gifts you can leave. Everyone should write one.

8. Where is my father now?

Has anyone ever lost a loved one and not wondered where is he/she now?

This is the ultimate question. Is it really all over after the last breath? Was my father a vibrant, thinking, feeling, imbued-with-meaning human being one minute, and then a bunch of inanimate molecules — no different than his equal weight in sand — a minute later?

If there is nothing after death — absolutely nothing for eternity — we have to acknowledge that, for the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived, life is a bad joke. And for many, a horrific joke. 

I have always recognized what is a logical imperative: If there is a God, and God is just, there is an afterlife. And if there is no God, the material world is all there is. To deny the afterlife, you have to be an atheist.

Both positions make sense. What does not make sense is that there is a God but no afterlife.

It is inconceivable to me that Bach came from inorganic material and that inorganic material came from nothing. So I find atheism logically untenable and, therefore, assume that my father is with my mother.

Good-bye, Dad. You did well. And I miss you.

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