Loss, Legacy and Faith

Eight years ago today, my father, Michael William "Brother Mike" Gural, died. I wasn't by his side. I was here, sleeping after an overnight shift at the AP, because I had a horrible boss at the time. Of course I could have insisted on taking more FMLA leave, but I didn't. I will always regret that.

I think it gets harder every year. That pit in my stomach feels as deep as it did on that train ride home to Massachusetts. I weep as mournfully today as I did when I first saw him in a casket in the funeral home, and when the monks lowered it into the ground.

The loss is daunting and profound. Euripides said, "To a father growing old nothing is dearer than a daughter." My father never got to grow old. He worked and worked and then he was diagnosed with cancer. He suffered and then he died. What stings worse is that he never met his precious grandson.

The pain is incomparable. And that's compounded by my ongoing struggle with faith. I was raised in the Russian Orthodox faith, by a devout mother and her parents, who often hosted the hierarchs and other clergy at the homes where I grew up. We made frequent pilgrimages to churches and monaserteries across the Northeast, including the monastery where my father is buried alongside my maternal grandparents.

As Aldous Huxley said, "My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing." We spent many hours on Wilbraham Mountain, a short hike from the cul-de-sac where I grew up and my mother still lives. In the early years, it was often Tex (our purebred German Shepard who had been trained as a state police dog), dad and me, and later my sister, too. As much as I love and seem to need the city to keep me sane, I do miss escaping in the mountain. Names are very important to Russian writers, and to me. (I will take any comparison I can fairly make!) My father's mother was Jadwiga Urbanski (city dweller), and his father was Wolodya Gural (mountaineer). I never met them, but in my heart I will always be a combination of the city woman and the mountain man.

In the end, my father chose to be buried by the Russian Orthodox Church. My mother asked him many times (I heard several) if he was sure, as she didn't want him to compromise his principles or make a mockery of her faith. My father went to church on major holy days and was respectful to my mother's cleric friends. He was a spiritual man, but he believed faith was practiced within oneself, not necessarily within a house of worship. Like Henry David Thoreau said, "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads." But in the end, my father insisted he wanted to be buried alongside my mother (they will share a towering grave marker in the shape of an Orthodox cross), and that he would make the required preparations through prayer and confession. Homer said, "All men have need of the gods." I question how those needs change as we get sick and grow old, and what that means to the next generation.

Like Khalil Gibran, my father respected men of all faiths. "I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit," said Gibran. It's still hard for me to reconcile that, in the end, my father chose to "pray in your church."

It's easy to use science to dismiss religion. It's much harder to use philosophy. In his last days, my father returned to many of his "life texts," re-reading them in what I think was preparation for what lied ahead. I'm struggling to figure out where my faith fits into his final decisions.

"I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is."
_ Albert Camus

Fall Fodder and Foibles

Fall is an emotional time of year. When I was younger it signaled the excitement of going back to school. As a child and teenager, I had always imagined the only career that involved going to an office (if only for office hours I set myself) that I would ever pursue was academia. My father was a professor and my mother a high school teacher, amid myriad other occupations and odd jobs. I grew up going to my father's classes, passing out Blue Books and quietly copying the text books word for word in perfect block letters. (After my father died, my mother found some. She was initially very concerned when she thought at age 4 I really understood macroeconomic theory.) I loved my father's office, where I'd sit on his lap in a distressed leather chair punctuated with rivets and surrounded by books piled from floor to ceiling. As I grew older, I never imagined there could be another office that didn't completely stifle your creativity and passion. I was right, I later learned through experience. But I also learned that academia was rife with bureaucracy that could be nearly as soul-sucking as the corporate world. When I accidentally stumbled upon journalism, I was tempted but still not ready to give up my dreams of ivory towers, or public school brick.

As students head back to school, each year becomes more complicated. I am so far removed from the life I once thought I'd embrace as mine. I was very young during my first round in grad school, a PhD candidate before I was 20. I jumped from fifth grade to seventh grade and then earned my B.A. in three years, so I was by far the youngest student. Upon graduating, I studied at Oxford, at Trinity College right across from the Bodleian Library. It was a scholar's dream to read in the same library as the dons, and it was tough returning to the U.S. system. Once back in the U.S., I was working several jobs, including one at the local newspaper. The other students were all TAs who scoffed at my toiling at menial jobs rather than devoting every second to my studies. I begrudgingly gave up to devote myself to my more-than full-time newspaper career. I returned to grad school twice again, the last time as the oldest student in the group and the only one studying part-time as I was working full-time as a journalist. After all these years and restarts, I am still ABD. I still consider going back, but for now it seems like a lost dream.

One of the reasons I chose to live in the Village is the proximity to NYU. For more than a decade I essentially lived on the campus, in rent-stabilized walkups haunted by students. Now we live in Union Square, where plenty of parents shell out a small fortune for their adult children to live in a luxury doorman building. I guess after footing the $40K-plus tuition bill, a few more grand a month isn't so much. I love being around students and professors, but sadly the banter that I miss from my days as a student is as elusive as my doctorate. Sadly, it seems most NYU students spend more time sifting through the racks at Banana Republic than the pages of Plato's Republic. I'm sure they think really deep thoughts while shopping. You know, like "No discounted thing is of serious importance." Translation: Always pay retail. Daddy's platinum card will cover it. Or, "If one has made an accessorizing mistake, and fails to correct it, one has made a greater mistake." Of course I know there are plenty of very bright NYU kids who work their way to a sub-minimum wage assistant's job in their chosen field. I'm merely complaining because I miss the debate that I had always expected to be a part, if not the bulk, of my daily life. Alas ... I shall take comfort knowing college students still maintain at least one Platonic ideal: "He was a wise man who invented beer."

Even in a cultural mecca, the conversations center on the mundane and the maddening. Nonetheless, I do enjoy eavesdropping as sport, and it's so much easier to do it with a baby in tote. You can get away with a lot as a "new" mommy, lingering to listen to less-than-enlightening exchanges among the unthinkers or our time. Much of what I hear makes TV seem like an academic platform. What's more troubling is what people say to strangers. Fall days like today are made for long walks soaked in the 62-degree sunshine. More people are out, making for more unsolicited comments. Note: Unsolicited comment is a synonym for harassment. If I want your opinion, I will ask for it. Yesterday, a woman who appeared a little disheveled yet suitable for the general population asked me: "Can I look at your baby?" Firstly, madam, you are looking at my baby. Secondly, what is it that you've been banned from and by what authority that prompts you to make such a request? Crazy, maybe. But hardly among the worst offenders. I am befuddled by those, predominantly older women, who feel entitled to offer their insights into infancy. Odder yet is that many of these self-anointed sages have never raised children of their own. Their own experience, or lack thereof, aside, their meddling can be maddening and I have yet to meet a parent who isn't equally annoyed. Does my child look healthy? Yes? Happy? Yes. Then perhaps I am doing a decent job of caring for him. As for the students I slammed (again, this was a generalization and NYU is singled out only for its proximity and prolific real estate ownership), at least most teens and 20-somethings, even those who don't know their epistemology from their ethics, are respectful of mommy and me time. They hold doors when their parents' and grandparents' peers push past strollers only to amble at snail's pace hauling their grocery carts and dragging their lapdogs.

Come fall, if I can't be in a classroom, at least I can (try to) learn from my everyday experiences. When the rude intrude, I strive to shake the snark and "Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." My battle just happens to be fending off ignorance and intrusion.

10-18 and "The steak at Barney's is rather nice"

Oct. 18 is one of the toughest days of the year. June 21st is the worst. That's the day my dad died, in 2002, of cancer. Oct. 18, or 10-18, is his birthday. I try to make it a day of celebration, but the joy is not without a profound sadness, both over his suffering and my loss, but now more so because my son, Michael Alexander, will never know his namesake grandfather, dedushka (DED-oosh-kah)or dziadzia (JAH jah). Michael William Gural was best known as Brother Mike. He wasn't a monk, though he spent much of his life living like one. Brother refers largely to his true humanist belief in democratic socialism. My dad was the consummate scholar-athlete-worker-artist-humanist-teacher-philosopher-storyteller. He would love his grandson unconditionally and make him his most important student, since his daughters.

(Look, Mike, paragraph breaks! Apologies. Inside joke.)

On this day, as I attempt to smile more than I cry, I offer a few quick quotes from the many tomes my father read and re-read until his dying day. Even as his once strong, athletic body crumbled and the cancer spread to his brain, my father was able to do what he loved best, "commune with the Great Minds through reading books." I am blessed with a wonderful, brilliant husband who will be as committed to his son and my father was to me, to ensure that Michael Alexander engages with the Great Minds through the great books. I often go to these Great Minds for inspiration, for solace, for support, for guidance.

Today, I'm turning to some of the simplest ideas my father shared with me when I was a young child. While my son is a genius, he's still just a 6-month-old genius.

Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.
Aristotle

Life must be lived as play.
Plato

I am not a Marxist.
Karl Marx
OK, That one's not so simple without explanation, but I'll save that for when I get a gig teaching Marxian Philosophy 101.

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
Fyodor Dostoevsky

I agree with no one's opinion. I have some of my own.
Ivan Turgenev

Coming generations will learn equality from poverty, and love from woes.
Kahlil Gibran

I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
Joseph Campbell

To be is to do.
Immanuel Kant

I could go on and on, but I'll stop at one more. This last one is not like the others. It's not likely to come up in any Intro to Great Minds class.

The steak at Barney's is rather nice.
Paul Edwards

Of course the Barney's quote is absurd out of context. Edwards is an Austrian-American moral philosopher, who lived from 1923 to 2004. It's quite likely that Brother Mike and Edwards met at some point in their academic careers. I don't ever recall my father mentioning Paul Edwards, but Brother Mike was such a prolific re-reader, a true scholar, he communed with many, many Great Minds. It seems that Edwards was a similar type of scholar. While writing his doctoral thesis he contacted Bertrand Russell to discuss scepticism about religious belief.

I digress. The Paul Edwards quote comes up today because it is from a hardcover textbook, "The Logic of Moral Discourse," published in 1955 with an introduction by Marxist philosopher Sidney Hook. That book comes from a very small section in our home library. My father left behind a scholarly library carefully compiled over seven decades and meticulously organized. My mother sold the entire collection when he died. I was angry for awhile, but I understand how keeping thousands of books was too much for my mother to bear, especially on an emotional level. She'd already taken care of him, like she did her own father and mother, who also were bedridden and very ill for many years. My father died at home, with his books. When I told Mike about the books, he immediately began investigating, contacting rare and used book dealers throughout Massachusetts where my mother lives. Mike found one dealer who had a couple dozen books he chose from the collection my mother gave away. Mike didn't tell me until the books arrived. It was early in our relationship, and I was living in the Village, on MacDougal between Bleecker and Houston, just blocks from Forbes magazine's offices, where Mike worked at the time. We used a handcart to haul the re-found treasures back to my modest walkup. That night, Mike and I communed with those books. My father and my husband never met. That is unfair. They share so much passion for the Great Minds and would have had epic debates and discussions. Back to the books. My father often made notes in perfect cursive using the very light touch of a No. 2 pencil. He'd never deface a book other than to imprint his name, MICHAEL W. GURAL, in block letters on the inside front cover. My father made very detailed notes in Chapter V, "The Steak at Barney's is Rather Nice," in which Edwards examines the philosophical meanings of the word nice.

The Barney's at 660 Madison serves a Certified Angus Sliced Steak at lunch for $34 (meh, at best), and a Dried Aged Grilled New York Strip Steak at dinner for $42 (I'd still prefer a steak at Strip House, or a natural beef or buffalo steak that Mike dry aged at home. Yeah, you can do that. Alton Brown taught us how.) Again, I digress. Eating at Barney's wasn't the same in my father's (and Paul Edwards') days in New York. And I doubt they would have have met at Barney's, if they met at all. In any case, I'm sure the steak at Barney's in the 1950s was "rather nice." But that whole business has changed a lot over the years. In 1977, Barney's in-store restaurant was renamed The Cafe and started selling salads, soup, and sandwiches to cater to tourists. I'm sure there are at least a few Park Avenue ladies-who-lunch who are even older than my dad, would be 84 today, with perfect coiffes and vintage furs, who could recite the menu from 55 years ago. For the record, my dad would have ordered the Fish of the Day, even though he'd prefer the Grilled Veal Chop.