The End of the Line

This is a piece about things ending not with a bang, but with a whimper, and a whimper that wasn't even the one you expected. 

Things change. Even when you know the ship is pulling away from the dock, sometimes it pulls away so slowly that, for quite a while, you can still jump back on. Sometimes you may need to jump in and swim like hell to catch it. Sometimes it may even pull away but then circle back to the dock to pick you up if it really needs you. But usually there's some point at which it's simply too far. Sure, when you see the ship heading over the horizon, it's long gone, but you may wonder where in all that blank water the actual point of no return was, because it's usually marked by nothing.

And then, other times, you do know, and you say "THAT? The point of no return was THAT? That's just stupid."

Forgive me amount of detail, but I'm a person to whom context is important.

I had the same full-time job for 32 years. Well, not the same job per se, but a continuum of roles at the same company. Well, not the same company; they were bought and absorbed and the buyer later split in two. But you know what I mean. I developed technology to detect unexploded shells (dud bombs) at military training ranges, and then used that technology on actual unexploded ordnance (UXO) surveys. So, yes, you can insert the obvious joke about it not ending with a bang being a good thing here.

After Maire Anne and I had moved back to Boston in 1984 from our brief sojourn in Austin, I was hired by a small Newton-based company called GEO-CENTERS. I wanted to find something interesting that wasn't Star Wars-related, and answered their small ad in the newspaper, back in the dark ages when you looked for jobs in the newspaper. The ad said something about bombs, geophysics, environmental cleanup, and image processing. I began in October of 1984. It was 35 years ago this month.

My (typed) application to GEO-CENTERS. Clearly even then what I wanted to do was write.

I was hired to use my math/physics degree and write software to perform magnetostatic modeling, to model a piece of ordnance (a bomb) first as a point dipole and later as a ferrous oblate spheroid and see how it looks in the Earth's ambient magnetic field so you could estimate its size and depth prior to digging. It was fascinating work with a great bunch of people. The modeling work was only one facet of designing and building a vehicular detection system that could efficiently sweep open areas of land. We built several iterations of the Surface Towed Ordnance Location System (STOLS). The first was a government-funded proof-of-concept which used a six-wheeled skid-steered Banana Splits-like vehicle that towed a light aluminum trailer with seven magnetometers on it. It broke frequently, but that's what you learn in proof-of-concept development.  

Left to right: Tim Schotz, me, Al Crandall, Robbie Robertson (not the one from The Band)

The second was a privately-funded robust second-generation version that used a custom-built Chenowth dune buggy with an aluminum frame to achieve a low magnetic self-signature. I became the lead software engineer, overseeing a team of programmers developing data acquisition and processing code, writing much of it myself, and modifying all of it after the other software engineers left. I spent the years from 1993 through 2001 traveling with this system, making code changes on the fly while sitting in the dune buggy, and spending long nights processing data. STOLS became so much a part of my identity that I considered getting a STOLS tattoo.

GEO-CENTERS' commercial STOLS system, looking more than a little like a lunar land rover.

During this period, I also did land mine detection technology development. We'd developed a novel energy-focusing ground penetrating radar (GPR) that had the potential to detect plastic land mines, and were in the right place at the right time when Clinton sent the troops into Bosnia in late 1994 and concern spiked about American troop casualties from the six million land mines. For about eight years we were funded to develop multiple generations of this unique instrument, including integrating it into a multisensor detection test bed. Unlike the bomb detection systems, it never saw actual field use, but it was great technology development with a fabulous team. I became project manager for both the bomb detection and the landmine detection projects. At the zenith, I think I had 15 people reporting to me.

The Vehicular Multsensor Mine Detection (VMMD) test bed with its ground penetrating radar (white boxes).

In 2001, the company decided that both the bomb detection system and the land mine-detecting GPR were commercial failures and essentially mothballed them. People were laid off. But then, a proposal that colleagues of mine had written to turn STOLS into a multisensor system (two kinds of metal detectors operating simultaneously through a novel interleaving technique) got funded. With aid from former employees acting as consultants, I helped developed the Vehicular Simultaneous EMI and Magnetometer System (VSEMS). I became skilled at proposal writing, and stretched this technology into multiple funded projects. First the electronics and towed platform were changed. Then the vehicle was replaced. In a way, it was like George Washington's hatchet—the handle was replaced, then the head, but it still occupied the same space. I loved the fact that I could still identify which components dated all the way back to STOLS (the magnetometers, one pigtail of a cable with a MIL-spec connector on the end, and the data acquisition software, heavily modified but still recognizable).

The mutisensor VSEMS ordnance detection system

For a number of years, the multisensor technology had an active life, and was also used for a man-portable system and an underwater system.

The underwater system (a multisensor towfish attached to the boat with a rigid boom) stowed for travel.

Then, in 2005, GEO-CENTERS was sold to SAIC, a large Fortune 500 government services contractor. About six months later, SAIC went public, and I got to witness firsthand how capability, expertise, and loyalty get sacrificed on the mindless altar of bottom line and shareholder value. The Newton office was closed and my small group (now down to four) and equipment got moved into a warehouse in Waltham. Still, though, I was writing proposals and winning my own work, so they couldn't really touch me. And the new company had other divisions that also performed UXO work, though they were spread around the country. If they ever centralized it and treated it as a core competency, they might have made something of it. But they didn't, and most of the resources slipped away.

For years I felt like I was keeping things alive by sheer force of will. The data processing software, unique to my system, ran on a Silicon Graphics Unix workstation. These originally cost thirty grand, but once they became obsolete, I began buying them on eBay for a couple of hundred bucks each. Eventually I ported the C / X Windows / Motif software to run under Linux on a laptop (first Red Hat, then SuSE). I set up two identical big heavy powerful Dell Pentium 4 gaming laptops so that if one shit the bed, I could run the other, or swap hard drives, or scavenge parts. I set them both up as dual-boot systems (Linux and Windows), as the data acquisition software on the vehicle ran under Windows XP and embedded DOS, and I needed to have the development environments for both of those pieces of software (Microsoft Visual Studio 6 and—don't laugh—Borland C V3.1 circa 1993) to be able to make changes in the field. 

At one point I tried to gauge commercial interest in the system's unique interleaving hardware. Through word of mouth, I did sell one unit. I then developed a detailed brochure and content for the corporate website so anyone searching for it could find it, but it all had to pass muster with corporate media people. I was told it was much too detailed. I explained that it contained the information that any engineer would immediately want. Someone in my division then put the kibosh on it, saying they didn't want to spend the overhead money developing and refining the content.

The slide continued. SAIC split into SAIC and Leidos. I wound up in the Leidos half. The warehouse I'd moved into only two years before was abruptly closed. I was given a month to find other space and move. I wound up finding inexpensive non-air-conditioned industrial space in Woburn that was just large enough to house the equipment and two people (me and another employee). I basically became a jack-of-all-trades one-man show, finding the opportunity, writing the proposal, developing the cost estimate, managing the technical and financial aspects of the project, driving the pickup truck towing the 32' trailer with the equipment in it to survey sites, operating the vehicular system while on the survey, fixing it when it broke, modifying data acquisition and processing software as required to deal with the unexpected vagaries of field geophysics, processing the data at night in my hotel room, and writing the final report. Since I do like to both write and work on cars, it was sort of a natural.

After 2010, my proposal win rate began to drop alarmingly. I worked on a few surveys that other people in the company bid and won, but it wasn't enough work. Even though I was salaried, I began charging less than 40 hours a week so my "time sold" stats wouldn't show as being in the red. Although we still had the storage space in Woburn, I worked (when I had work) from home on a company laptop. My chargeable work for 2013 averaged only 24 hours per week. In 2014, it was down to just 12. Of course, being the workaholic professional that I was, I worked hours far in excess of this to keep the equipment running, incorporate new features I thought were necessary, and write proposals. Note that among the reasons I did this willingly was that I was well-paid and still had benefits including health insurance.

In 2013, Bentley Publishers published my first book, Memoirs of a Hack Mechanic. They'd asked me about writing another book, but wanted it to be an electrical repair manual. I said that I'd never be able to write something like that on my own time. To my surprise, they offered me a job. In January 2015, I took it, and officially resigned my full-time position at Leidos, though I remained as a consulting employee. This was the first "a whimper not a bang" ending of my geophysics career, as I always imagined the old-school advice that gray-haired white men give about having an "I Resign Fund" so that, when you don't like the direction things are heading or your integrity is impugned, you can muster your dignity, stand up from your chair, slide it under the table, and say "Gentleman, I resign," and then walk out. The joke was that I no longer had a chair and a table, or people around it who cared. Plus, I was working from home; where would I go if I walked out?

I initially saw very little consulting work from Leidos, but I continued to keep the work truck and trailer inspected for them in case a survey came up. In fact, I had the registration and excise tax forms sent to my house, since the multiple office closures and moves previously had these notices falling into a black hole. I still keep the truck inspected for them free of charge, and as a quid pro quo, I can ask to "exercise" the truck on personal errands, which I did recently in order to haul a recently-purchased 48,000 mile BMW 2002 back from Bridgehampton.

In January 2016, to my surprise (again), I was told by Bentley Publishers that my full-time position there would not last. At about the same time, Leidos was contacted by a geophysics firm who asked for me and the VSEMS system by name regarding a survey that could benefit from the system's unique multisensor technology. Leidos said that it was up to me whether I wanted to bid it. With their support, I wrote a proposal. It was funded, and as is sometimes the case, once funded, they wanted me there ASAP. In October 2016 I essentially triggered my own layoff at Bentley Publishers, saying that I had to take an immediate leave of absence to do this survey, and let's just both agree that the only reason I went down that path was because you told me I was going to get laid off at some point. The response from Bentley was, basically, "Don't come back." I arranged to get my health insurance through Bentley via a COBRA through the rest of the year, and headed to Denver with the equipment. I was actually in Denver on a two-month UXO survey, alone in a hotel room, when the results of the 2016 election rolled in. Talk about surreal.

VSEMS in December 2016 at the Former Lowry Bombing and Gunnery Range in Aurora CO

As part of the preparation for the Denver survey, I finally severed the cord with the Linux / X / Motif-based software I'd spent decades developing, and instead relied on an industry-standard commercial geophysical data processing package (Geosoft Oasis Montaj) and a set of command-line utilities I'd developed over the years to take the VSEMS data and ready it for importation into Oasis. I ported all this, and the three different compilers needed to support all the work, onto my corporate laptop. There was a big practical advantage to this, as a lot of work needed to be accomplished while sitting in the field in a rented SUV, and this enabled me to use a single laptop computer to modify software and process data, as well as log my work hours and answer company e-mail through the corporate VPN.

It was both professionally satisfying and great fun to do one more survey and ride off into the sunset with this equipment I'd spent my entire professional career developing and refining. I had two young techs working with me, driving the system back and forth across the high prairie out near the Denver airport, while I sat in the rented SUV with the heat on, processing data on my corporate laptop, and modifying my data processing software as needed to deal with occasional hiccups. 

Magnetometry isn't used much for UXO detection these days; it's mostly pulsed induction. There was a great moment when, out on the survey site, to answer one of the field operator's questions about something she was seeing, without even thinking, I launched into this incredibly detailed context-laden monologue about magnetometers, terrain inclination relative to north, acceptance angle, interference from power lines, and the unique interleaving technology of our VSEMS system. She looked at me and said "Wow... you're like a magnetometer mage." It was that momentary apogee where niche knowledge is so useful that it's interpreted as wisdom. I wanted business cards printed up saying "Rob Siegel: Magnetometer Mage."

At some point during the survey, the screen on my corporate laptop died, requiring me to go to a Best Buy and purchase an LCD monitor and balance that and the computer on my lap while working in the rented SUV. It was inconvenient, but it was what needed to be done. When I got back from the survey, I petitioned Leidos to have the screen on the laptop replaced. They said it was already an old laptop, but I said that, due to the amount of custom software on it, changing computers would be inconvenient if another survey came up. They had it fixed.

As the survey ended and New Years approached, Leidos said that there was actually enough geophysics work that they could offer me my old job back. I hate going backward and revisiting already-made decisions, but things were in chaos, Obamacare looked likely to be repealed, I needed to lock something up; any port in a storm, right? But when I called to say "I accept, and this is the conversation where you officially on-board me; I need the health insurance; I can't afford to drop the ball on this," it all fell apart due to a delay in the project that they'd relied on to created the backlog of work.

So I began 2017 unemployed for the first time in my life. Well, not unemployed, but not being anyone's full-time employee. I considered trying to find another field geophysics job, but most of that work is 50% travel, and I'd already done that for years. I sent around a few software engineering resumes, but my skills were laughably out of date. Maire Anne and I got our health insurance through the Mass Health Connector (the MA instantiation of Obamacare). I decided to try being a full-time self-employed writer. I ramped up my number of writing assignments for the BMW CCA and Hagerty. I began writing and self-publishing books. 

To be clear, it's great fun doing what I do now. I don't regret it for an instant. But the money is less than made as a full-time Bentley employee, and is only a fraction of what it was doing geophysics.

Then, Leidos bid and won a geophysical survey for which I only needed to sit at home and review data. The consulting arrangement worked out great, as I could still perform my writing assignments yet also be hyper-responsive to the geophysics work (which continued to pay me my old hourly rate). I made more in 2017 from this data processing work than I did from writing.

But in 2018 the geophysics work dried back up. In order to be a consulting employee, you need to work between 400 and 1500 hours annually, and I wasn't even close. I kept expecting a phone call where they told me they needed to terminate the agreement.

The industrial space in Woburn flies below the radar because it's technically storage space and not a "facility," but every January I get an e-mail from my division saying that the lease needs to be renewed and asking if we still need to rent the space. Another guy in a different division still works there doing unrelated work. Every January I answer: "As long as the company still own VSEMS and needs a place to keep it and maintain it, and needs parking for the truck and 32' trailer used to transport it, then yes we still need the space. Plus, its closure would need to be coordinated with the other division, as Gary still works there." This past January, I got the same call, and I said the same thing. I expected them to terminate my consulting agreement and close the space, but they didn't; they renewed the agreement and the lease on the space for another year.

In 2019, there's been virtually zero consulting work. But this past June, I got a call from a colleague of mine at Leidos about a two-month geophysical survey in Odessa TX. He said that this was survey work on a contract that they already had, so it didn't need to be competitively bid; we were reportedly a shoe-in. The questions were: Could the survey be done without me, and if not, was I available? I answered that, no, the survey couldn't be done without me. I had writing responsibilities, but I didn't see why they'd kept me on as a consulting employee and kept the space in Woburn and the VSEMS equipment and the truck and trailer all these years only to have me come to the water's edge here and say "no." So... yes, probably, but with caveats. I had mixed feelings, but I couldn't ignore the money. It looked like VSEMS and I would ride one more time. 

And then they weren't awarded the survey. I had the same internal conversation about relief versus regret that Elle had in Kill Bill 2.

But that's not the whimper. 

Are you ready for the whimper? It's really stupid.

It's the damned laptop.

As part of the trip to Bridgehampton to haul back the BMW 2002, I'd borrowed the work truck (with the permission of my supervisor, with whom I speak with maybe twice a year, because I, you know, have no work), using the quid pro quo of my keeping the truck inspected, not charging my time for it, and "exercising" the truck rather than having it sit for years. I do, however, get reimbursed for the out-of-pocket inspection expenses. And to be reimbursed for the truck inspection, I needed to submit them via my work laptop.

The laptop, onto which I'd migrated and maintained all my own pieces of software developed over a 35-year period, is a locked-down corporate computer with a plug-in USB token needed to set up a VPN and log into the network. As part of corporate security, they require you to change passwords every 60 days. But when you're a consulting employee without any chargeable work, in the hustle bustle of life (you know, dying mother), you forget to log in every 60 days, so when you do, you find your network password has expired. Usually this is fine; you call up the helpdesk and they straighten it out.

So when I tried to log into the laptop to submit the expenses, and found that my password didn't work, I called the help desk, thinking this was a simple password reset, but was told that the problem wasn't with my network password but my Windows password; apparently I didn't correctly remember the password the last time I'd reset it. This certainly was possible, but I do write these things down, and I had a piece of paper with a date in July and a changed password on it. I spent an hour on the phone with an incredibly knowledgeable Leidos IT guy. He initially said that I'd need to take the computer to a corporate facility and connect it to the network. The nearest one is in Newport RI, but I doubt that there's anyone there who remembers me, and my badge has long since expired. But then, when the IT guy found out that the laptop had Windows 7 on it, he said that there was in fact no way for them to back-door into it, and that unless I had a valid Windows password, the computer was a brick, and the best they could do was have me send it in and they'd decrypt the hard drive and recover the data off it. Of course, there would be a corporate overhead charge for that. Plus I'd need a new corporate laptop. The costs for all of that would need to be approved by my supervisor. The next day, he called me back, and seemed to walk back the offer of decrypting due to the age age and unsupportability of the computer.

I eventually figured out that I could submit the truck inspection expenses, since it's done by a piece of third-party software into which I can log into from my own computer, but there's no way for me to charge my time, read my corporate e-mail, or do the annual corporate training without a company computer, since those are all on the corporate network.

And more to the point, even though I have all that software I've developed over the decades backed up, it was written using three different obsolete compilers which would need to be tracked down and installed. Plus, there are probably a dozen different required commercial programs and utilities on the laptop, including an expensive one—Geosoft Oasis Montaj, the main piece of data processing software for all geophysical data, whose license the company elected not to renew. So setting all of this up on another laptop will be time-consuming and expensive.

The bricking of the laptop also means a loss of archived emails dating back to 1995. Granted, if there's no work, there's no need to search through them, but I often was amazed at what memories were stirred up if I poked around. Losing these feels like taking boxes of photographs you haven't looked at in years and throwing them into the dumpster without going through them first.

So, long story short (like this was short), it could take between two days to a week of my time and the purchase of a very expensive piece of software to get another laptop in a position to be able to support another survey, if one comes along, which it probably won't.

I sent all this information to my erstwhile supervisor, along with the FYI that, if there's any work for me, I'll need a corporate laptop on which I can log in and charge my time. I have not heard anything back. I don't expect that I will. At least not until the end of this year, when all the annual corporate online training is required. At that point, I expect that, at long last, they'll terminate the consulting agreement, and my 35 years in engineering geophysics will officially be over. Likewise, I suspect that the next phone call about the space in Woburn will be different than in years past.

Sigh.

Projecting ahead, I think about how and if I'll handle helping them with the disposition of the assets in Woburn—the VSEMS survey system, the truck, the trailer, a ton of equipment on shelves I'm the only one who can identify, and the spare parts for the unique interleaving multisensor electronics. I am certain that I am the only one who cares. Certainly much of it at this point is junk, but it pains me to think of, for example, the CDs with circuit board designs for the interleaving hardware just being tossed in the trash. Rationally, its been dead for years; throwing it out would simply be the burial.

I think about people who developed real products, not this one-off white elephant geophysical platform, and how they handle end-of-product-life issues. It must feel like a death. This certainly does. I've forestalled it for years, but now it feels inevitable. 

I love being a self-employed writer. I love being The Hack Mechanic. I love being a performing songwriter even more, although there's less than zero money in it. But being the scrappy resourceful practical relentless engineer who refused to let this equipment die was a big part of my self-image. I suppose the end had to come sometime. It's a little melodramatic to pull in the Roy Batty Blade Runner "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... All those moments will be lost in time, like tears, in rain. Time to die" soliloquy, but it's not altogether misplaced.

But being laid low by a fucking laptop? Jesus. Did not see that one coming.

Eulogy For My Mother: Choosing To Be Kind

My mother was not who you think she was.

Just kidding. My mother was exactly who you think she was. But there is a twist, and we'll get to that.

I could say many things about my remarkable mother—how she was from Winthrop, how she lost her mother at age 10, how her father wasn’t around, how incredibly adventurous and brave it was when she spent the year in Israel in 1948 when she was just 18, how after she came back she worked for Abba Eban at the United Nations, how my dad passed away when she was 38, how she was present at the formation of Hampshire College, how she graduated from college at age 51, her many roles at both Hampshire and at Tufts University, how in 1982 she bought a 15-room Victorian in Boston and then shamelessly tricked her children into living in it with her and raising the grandchildren there, her time volunteering at the library at the Mozart School in Boston, her epic trips with her grandchildren and her friends Rubylee and Jody, the Seders for 40 people, her love of Scrabble, The New York Times crossword puzzle, and Agatha Christie, the fact that she built a rehearsal room in the basement of her house so the band that Maire Anne and I had had somewhere to play (I mean, who does that?)—but none of that is who she was. The defining quality of my mother was that she was, quite simply, the best person I ever met, or ever will meet. More than that, she was the best person many of you ever met, or ever will meet. I remember once saying “my mother, easily the best person I’ve ever met” in front of someone who did not know me well. It was like her title, an integral part of her name: “My mother—easily the best person I've ever met.” This fellow said, somewhat dismissively, “Rob, everyone feels that way about their mother.” I thought, “you poor schlub, you don’t know my mother.”

Many of you who knew my mother, who she helped through difficult times and challenging decisions, referred to her in glowing terms. Anne and Martha called her “my guardian angel.” Lauren called her “my Mary Poppins.” Many referred to her as a saint. She was legendary for dropping everything and driving to New York or getting on a plane at a moment’s notice to help a friend or family member in need. But for the record, my mother was not a saint. She was better. I doubt that saints have the humanity that my mother had. Or the patience.

My mother possessed an astonishing combination of intellect and kindness, reason and an innate sense of fairness. She was the gold standard not only for significant ethical questions, but also for trivial ones. If this sounds like “What would Bernice do,” yes, that’s it, exactly, and many of you sought her advice over the years, as did I. We once called her from vacation to settle an argument we were having while playing Trivial Pursuit. The question itself was, well, trivial (it had to do with whether the word “Arena” was actually part of the title of a sports stadium), but the point was that everyone playing the game was completely willing to accept her phoned-in judgment. And, if memory serves me correctly, she ruled against me.

Although people who knew her professionally called her Bernice, most family and old friends called her Bim. When I was old enough to spell, I decided it must mean “Bernice is my mother.” What else could it have meant?

My mother collected people her entire life. Amy and I were her biological children, but there were others: Anne, Martha, Lauren, Glenn, Abby, Lisa, and the Hampshire College students—Vanessa, Shelley, and others. Speaking of Hampshire College, sometimes it takes us a lifetime to appreciate the significance of certain events. I now understand that the steady stream of Hampshire students traipsing through our house while we lived in Amherst when I was in junior high school—people we didn’t see when we were growing up in lily-white Long Island, people of color, people of different sexual orientation—was the most significant, meaningful, and broadening experience of my life. Years ago, I asked my mother how she knew to do that, why she thought it was important to expose Amy and me to that beautiful radiant cross-section of humanity. I expected a rational explanation, but she simply shrugged it off. The fact that, when I sent out an e-mail from her account telling people that her passing was near, four of the first five people who responded were former Hampshire students from this group, moved me to tears.

(And regarding those emails, my mother, Amy, and I were astonished at their depth and breath. Amy and I read every one to my mother, and she remembered every one of you.)

Regarding having her as a mother, what can I say? Amy and I were privileged to be her children. She was every bit as good as you’d imagine she’d be, offering boundless love and support. I recall her only ever raising her voice to me in anger only once. And boy did I deserve it. I recall her punishing me to teach me a lesson only twice. And boy did I deserve it.

My mother’s wisdom was legendary. In my early years in college, she gently tried to correct the cavalier attitude I’d begun to display toward my family. The way she phrased it was remarkable. She said: “I see how much you love your friends, and how well you treat them. That’s great, but you shouldn’t treat your own family worse than you treat your friends.” It was astonishing that she had to say it, and even more astonishing that it worked. Years later, when our kids were born, she gave me the single best piece of parenting advice I ever received: “If your kids show interesting in something, treat that like a flower, because if you don’t, you’ll kill it with neglect, or worse.” So, to my children, you owe much of that to her.

My mother used to say that, no, life isn’t fair, but that’s why we try to make our own corner of it as fair as possible. Words to live by.

My mother once said that if she ever ran a personal ad, it would say—and I love this—“basically reasonable person seeks basically reasonable person.” She said that appearance, money, even political differences could be dealt with, but lack of reasonability... that was a deal-breaker.

A number of years ago, someone asked my mother why she never remarried. She replied, in an offhand way, that she’d had several opportunities. My jaw dropped, as I’d never heard anything about this. She then said, very matter-of-factly, “The question wasn’t whether I could’ve gotten married again. The question was: Would it have improved my life? I decided it wouldn’t have.” Classic my mother.

In addition to her wisdom, the defining aspect of my mother was her sense of kindness. She was the queen of kindness. She was kind before kindness was cool. She was unfailingly kind to people, both old friends, new ones, and complete strangers, but she wasn’t above remonstrating someone if she thought they were doing their job badly (that was the professional administrator in her) or abusing their position. The only person I ever heard her speak badly of was a Boston building inspector who was giving her a hard time about some trivial aspect of the planned modifications on the house. Well, and certain Republican politicians. And the physical therapist who was trying to get her to use the cane. And there was one nutritionist she wasn’t crazy about. But it was lack of kindness that drove her crazy. She’d say “It’s so easy. And it costs nothing.”

People say that they want to have their wits about them when they go, but I can tell you how heartbreaking it was to see her aware of her end. That was, however, what she wanted. About six weeks before she died, when I came to the house, she joked, as she often did, “Did I know you were coming?” I said, as I often did, that no, she didn’t; I was just checking in on her. She didn’t mind talking about her death. She was alternately matter-of-fact and deeply philosophical about it. On this visit, she began by saying that it wasn’t her intent to involve Amy and me in her death. Then she launched into this incredibly detailed description of a book she’d read in her 20s, “The 40 Days of Musa Dagh,” a piece of historical fiction about the Armenian genocide in Turkey. She described the story, about a town had relocated itself to a mountain top to escape the Turkish troops, and how the social situation in the town decayed. But she had the most passion behind the description of a young man, a resistance fighter in the town, who became sick. When he was captured, he was so sick that he wasn’t even aware that he was about to be executed, that this was the end of his life. She said that she’d remembered the story and this character her entire life, and how profoundly sad it was to her that he wasn’t cognitively there for his own death, and how glad she was that she was there for hers. This must’ve been very important to her, because she told Amy the same story. I sat there, astonished. What do you say to this?

I said “Well, ma, regarding the first issue (being sorry to involve Amy and me in your death)… what did you think we were going to do? Stick you on an ice floe and leave you to the polar bears?”

“And regarding the second issue… when your son comes over just to check on you, you can just chit chat or play Scrabble; you don’t necessarily have to go on for 15 minutes about how you want to be there for your own death.”

But it was a microcosm of my mother—deeply practical, deeply philosophical, and worried more about her family than herself.

A number of years ago, my mother put together a little hand-assembled book for Amy and me. It was called “Your Father and Me, and You and You (by me).” It described their individual histories, their courtship and marriage, how he came to the marriage largely fully-formed while she was still coming into focus, his sickness and death, and her regrets. Obviously, it was sad. But it was more than that. It made me realize that my mother, who showed a relentlessly cheerful presence to everyone, carried an undercurrent of sadness beneath the surface for her entire life and didn’t show it to anyone, not even to Amy and me. She and my dad had only 13 years together. While she moved forward from his passing in July 1968, and did brave amazing things, raising Amy and me as a single mother, moving us from Long Island to Amherst and then to Lexington, expertly balancing all of our needs, a part of her always remained with my dad.

When my mother went in the hospital in April, she took a photo of my dad with her. As we talked about her mortality, she said “I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I do believe that, when I die, I’ll be reunited with your father. And if that’s self-contradictory, I don’t care.” I loved that her rationality did not extend to this.

About a month before she passed away, my mother wanted to go to a specialist appointment, even though she was in hospice. She was weak, and getting her in and out of the house was logistically involved. But she really wanted to take the appointment. She explained that it wasn’t false hope. She said “I’ve thought about how and when to take risks my entire life. Now, I have only one more risk left to take. Why wouldn’t I want to take it?” So she did. Genius, that woman.

My mother wasn’t in pain, but was very tired. She had periods where she’d be completely lucid and carry on detailed conversations with Amy and me, but with her eyes closed, and talking slowly and softly. Remarkably, she could still be very funny. Once she said “Call my friend Rubylee… and tell her… she should skip this part.” She also said, with a touch of Erma Bombeck, “If you write a book about me, call it “I always thought I’d die of something I knew the name of.””

As we were waiting for her to be discharged from the hospital for the last time and come home, she was fighting through the exhaustion and the disorientation, her fine mind trying to make sense of it all. She quietly asked me “Am I dying?” Remembering her passionate attraction to “The 40 days of Musa Dagh,” I told her the truth. “Yes, ma, you’re dying,” I said as I gently kissed her forehead. An anguished expression passed over her face, lingered for about three seconds, then left. What she said next was shocking. I was the only one in the room, so you’ll just have to believe me. She said, and I swear I’m not making this up, “Now, I can be nasty.” I literally laughed right in her face. “You’ll never be nasty, ma,” I said. “You’re the kindest person I’ve ever met.”

She was, of course, joking (at least I think she was joking), but my mother did not have an easy life, and I began wondering where she came by this well of kindness. I consulted The Book of Bim, looking for clues. This was the closest I got: “[Your father and I] were driving somewhere, and passed a house that had been painted a deep shade of pink. I commented on how awful it looked, and daddy asked me why I cared; why I needed to say something negative about another person’s decision that didn’t affect me at all and wasn’t harmful to anyone. This has become very much part of how I think, and I am bothered by the need that people have to criticize that which is completely unconnected to them and whose comments can be hurtful to others.”

Then I found it, the diamond in the dust, the life-long lesson extracted from something trivial: “Your father and I rarely argued, but we did occasionally get angry at each other, almost always it was me angry at him. I probably told you this story, but it’s a good example of his ability to get at the essence of an issue. Once we were expecting friends to come for the evening. I had a head cold and was feeling lousy. Daddy was sitting in the living room reading the paper and I was busy vacuuming in that room, while sneezing and coughing at the same time. He didn’t offer to help. Finally, I said “How can you sit there while I’m busy and feeling so lousy?” He immediately got up and started to vacuum, but said something to me to the effect of: why are you cleaning up; you feel sick; these are just our friends who are coming; they don’t care what the house looks like; what do you want to be remembered for—being a good housekeeper? I was furious. For at least two days. Partly I was furious because, although he was helping me, he was also criticizing me, and partly because I knew he was right—at least right in his philosophy, but wrong in his approach. It took me years for this powerful idea to become part of the way I looked at things. What is it we want to leave behind when we die? Our afterlife is in the hands of our children, but the memories we leave them, [those] are in our hands.”

Wow, right? It gives “Thanks for the memories” a whole new meaning. I think that, as someone who knew so much pain, she not only came to understand the value of salving other people’s pain with kindness, but also the value of the memories this would leave. Is that why she did it? Administered all that kindness over all those years? I don’t know. But I think this shows that this was who she chose to be. Sure, some of it she was predisposed to, and some was underpinned by her Judaism, but I really think that she chose to become the superhero that we knew and adored, and that makes it all the more remarkable.

When I was a kid and was honest to the point of being hurtful, my mother would sometimes say “you sound just like your father.” When she said it in this way, this was not a compliment. I have certainly become more like her in the second half of my life, absorbing the elixir of kindness through her ceaseless examples. She lived by something a friend of hers, Norman Kotker used to say: “The highest value is kindness.”

My mother used to say that she’d inherited the gene to function under all circumstances. I thought I had too, until the final few days. My sister, Amy, on the other hand, displayed a combination of grace, love, and fortitude that was stunning, though not in the least surprising to those who know her. Truly our mother’s daughter.

My mother would scoff at the idea that she has something as weighty-sounding as a legacy, but we all know that she does. And it’s not only the dissemination of kindness, but of “tikkun olam” (repair the world), and of performing mitzvoth. My son Ethan called my mother “the Ted Williams of mitzvah hitting.” If there’s a mitzvah hall of fame, she’s a shoe-in to get in on the first round. Choose to be kind. Choose to do good. If she could instill these teachings in me, the wicked of the four Passover children, she can, even in passing, instill them in anyone.

I’ll leave you with one final story. During one of her hospital stays, I wanted to bring Scrabble, but all I could find at my house was Junior Scrabble, which had a board with large squares with pictures on them, no double and triple word scores, and no points on the letters. Nonetheless, we played, one point per letter. It was a beautiful way to spend a few hours in the hospital. And I was aware that it might be my final opportunity to beat her, which I had never done. I thought I had her, but then, even on this junior board with no points, she did one of those moves with putting in one letter that made three words, and zoomed ahead of me. I steadily caught back up. At one point, I had to take a phone call. I came back to see that she’d put a word starting with “S” at the end of the word “pink” to make “pinks.” “PINKS?” I said. “Yes,” she said, “reds, greens, blues… pinks.” What, you think I was going to argue with her? Again I caught back up, but only because twice she pointed out opportunities I’d missed that were still there on my next turn. At the end of the game, I’d edged her out by two points, but because she’d pointed out those two words to me, I wasn’t sure I deserved it. We discussed it, folded in the controversy over “pinks,” and agreed to call it a draw. It was the reasonable, kind, and fair thing for both of us to do. 

[Bernice Siegel, ETBPIEM (easily the best person I've ever met), 2/28/1930 - 7/12/2019]