Eleanor and me — David K. Buchholz

In No Ordinary Time, Doris Goodwin’s opus about the Roosevelts, she concludes, “In these first months on her own, Eleanor derived constant comfort from a little verse sent to her by a friend. ‘They are not dead who live in lives they leave behind. In those whom they have blessed they live a life again.’”

By age seventy-four I have lost so many whose lives have touched me, whose lessons live through me, whose presence in my life continues to shape the person I am, even as my life shapes those who follow—my children, my grandchildren, and others whose lives I may have touched. In no particular order, Jim and Betty Carns, our next door neighbors on Grand Vista Avenue. My father died six weeks after I was born, and Jim Carns , along with my grandfather John Vincent Kennedy, were the first males in my life. “Uncle Jim” and “Aunt Betty” continued to look after me even through my college years at UC, and they often invited me for dinner, even naming (they claimed), one of their children after me. I knew my grandfather for such a short time, and I was so young. I remember cigars and limburger cheese, but John and Elsie, my grandmother, made their home mine, my brother Jack’s, and my mother’s until I was about seven, when my mother married the man I learned to call “Dad.” But “Dad” was fourth on the male list. We’ll get to him later.

Third was my Uncle Rowland, a lifelong bachelor (was he in the closet?), whose eulogy I delivered in the summer of 2000. Rowland’s presence looms large—a kind, generous, politically conservative, strongly opinionated, loving, prejudiced, and extraordinarily human sort of person who recognized his own failings and stumbled through mishandled apologies to rectify them as best he could. He was racially and religiously intolerant and did his best to dissuade me from marrying a Chinese Catholic girl, then accepted that Chinese Catholic girl with warmth and love. Family meant so much to him. After he said in front of my friend with dirty boots, “Don’t let that boy into the house!” he posted a letter of apology on the wall. He blessed me with his knowing that when he was wrong he didn’t shy away from facing it. He also had exquisite taste in design, and to this day I’m mindful of his presence when I see Apple packaging, Bang & Olufsen products, and well-designed anythings.

Good-hearted Al, who loved Alyce even when she was the most unlovable, providing for her after his death.

I was blessed with Teeny’s unconditional love, no prerequisites, no qualifications, no tests. If you were in her life she loved you. She was absent ”sophistication” and status, preferring people who presented themselves as they were, with no pretensions.

I was blessed with Pau and Gung, Jadyne’s grandparents who accepted me as the father of their grandchildren, who rejoiced in front of me one night when I finally finished every grain in my bowl of rice., and who, like Uncle Rowland, were completely human, letting their complaints air only to each other in Cantonese.

And with Jadyne’s godparents, Song and “Booboo”, whose collective hearts were broken when I told them that their goddaughter had died. Booboo said “I have no reason to live anymore”, and he died the next week.

I was blessed by experiencing unfathomable sorrow, mine, yes, but Jadyne’s, our kids, and Alyce’s, in losing Teeny. It was up to me to tell everyone. I told Jadyne. I told our three children. I had to tell Alyce. In happier times she expressed unrestrained joy for a man she didn’t know who was asking for her daughter’s hand. Alyce was loving, prejudiced, confused, and both tolerant and intolerant. I was blessed in learning and respecting in her the strength to raise three wonderful children whose qualities so outnumber their deficiencies that I love and respect her for her influence on them.

Jim and Betty Yee. Jim was a Peace Corps friend, who with his wife Betty, adopted two children from China, brought them back to Oakland, then Jim died soon after from cancer. When Jim was dying Betty nursed him with patience and love, although she knew that her metastatic breast cancer was killing her even as she was nursing Jim.. She didn’t tell Jim, and she didn’t tell us. We saw her obituary soon after Jim died.. Only then did we realize the secret of her own mortality, which she kept from everyone.

And my biological father Carl, who died at thirty-three. In my early childhood he was mostly a statistic, a healthy young man who passed too soon, that’s all, until I read his letters. In his expressions of love for my mother he came to life, a person having emotions and feelings, not a statistic.

I was blessed, too, by my mother and my stepfather, two people whose lives echoed the notorious RBG’s comment,

“I would like to be remembered as someone who used whatever talent she had to do her work to the very best of her ability”

In the photo above, this Midwest senior citizen tried her first chicken burrito at Antonio’s taco truck to the amazement of Antonio’s wife who had never seen a Midwest senior citizen.

My mother passed on her sensitivity to criticism, her love for her family; her devotion to causes greater than herself, her courage, sense of adventure; my father passed on his honesty, his hatred for war, the satisfaction he felt just being useful to others, his indifference to wealth and the trappings of consumerism, The two were sympatico because he never criticized her, and she loved him for that. Sometimes we’re blessed, too, by their failings, and in recognizing them we sympathize, knowing that those failings are a part of the whole human package, and recognizing that if we don’t have those failings, we have our own.

My father lamented that he never experienced joy; my mother, despite her many intellectual gifts, often felt insecure and unsure of herself. They both did the best they could with whatever talent they had. It’s all we could have ever asked from those who have passed, and all we can ask of ourselves. We are blessed by the lives they left behind.