Enough

In the process of preparing my application for German citizenship, I am uncovering documents that I never knew existed. One of them is my grandfather’s U.S. Naturalization Certificate from September 7, 1933. What captivated me when I saw this document for the first time a few weeks ago was the photo, a black and white passport type picture of my grandpa as a young man, just 29 years old. But it was not my young grandpa that grabbed me. It was the fact that in the photo he looks exactly like my Uncle Steve, his youngest child and only son, who was born on that same day nine years later, in 1942. Then viewing another document, I also recently saw for the first time, I had cause to giggle. Box 15a on my grandfather’s 2001 death certificate lists his ‘usual occupation’ as “efficiency expert & poet.” No doubt this description was supplied by my uncle who cared for him in his final years, a little Easter egg he dropped, not knowing when or if it would be discovered by a family member or perhaps just to amuse himself or because he thought my grandfather would have liked it.

My uncle, Steve Kohn, died Wednesday night after a decline of several years into dementia. You deserve to know something about him. 

As is often the case with the generation ahead of us, Steve was simply a constant presence in my life, my mom’s younger brother whom we saw a few times a year. A bit childlike himself, he was a man who related easily to children. He was always interested in what I had to say and was never patronizing. Not surprisingly, he chose teaching as a profession and spent his entire career teaching English to junior high school students in gritty New Rochelle, NY. I have no doubt that he was very good at it. Relaxed, funny, quick to laugh, and, like his father, an unrelenting and unrepentant punster and teller of corny jokes. He must have been a natural in the classroom. He loved his students and often told stories about them. He loved words and language (again like his father). That love came through in his conversation, his humor and, I am sure, in his teaching. 

Steve practiced Theravada Vipassana Buddhism and was serious about it, meditating every day and as a member of a sangha for decades. Buddhism and care for all life turned him toward vegetarianism. However, like the Buddha himself, to avoid offending his host, my uncle would not refuse meat if it were served to him. This principle often extended to finishing the meat dishes of family members in restaurants though he would never order it. 

In spite of (or perhaps because of) their physical and intellectual similarities, my grandfather and my uncle didn’t always get along. But as my grandparents aged, they moved into a Jewish senior living facility across the street from where my uncle lived and he saw them nearly every day. My grandfather and he grew closer and my grandfather told him things that he had shared with no one else about his life in Germany before the Nazis came to power.  

My grandmother adored my uncle. Once when I was visiting her with him (my grandfather had already died), she asked him if he believed in God. At this time, she was in advanced stages of dementia herself and Steve was the only person she knew and consistently recognized. He replied, “Tell me what you mean by God and I’ll tell you if I believe in God.” My grandma just laughed. 

Steve did not strongly identify as Jewish. He certainly did not embrace the religious aspects of Judaism in any way, but he could be generous with his identity. Sometimes when he would visit my grandparents at the Hebrew Home in New Rochelle he would encounter a group of nine men who wanted to pray Mincha, the afternoon service. They would ask him to join them so that the full service, which requires at least ten Jews, could be read. Though he couldn’t read the Hebrew prayers, much less understand them, and perhaps didn’t even think of himself as Jewish, he joined so that those old men he didn’t know (my grandfather would never have been among them) could fulfil their obligation to worship a diety he didn’t believe in. It says much about who he was.

Like my grandfather, my uncle would do anything for anyone. Not to be kind or virtuous, but because human beings need help from each other and helping is just what one does. My grandfather’s later years after he retired at age 85 were spent running around his apartment building fixing things for other residents or picking up groceries or medicine for folks. Steve was the same way.  One felt that there was no assistance or act of service he wouldn’t render when asked. Usually he did so without being asked. 

After he retired, he moved from New Rochelle to the beautiful Hudson River Valley in upstate New York to be near his son and his grandchildren. Quickly he found himself on the board of his community association and shortly thereafter its president. If you know anything about such volunteer positions, you know that they are thankless, yet he performed his duties as if it were a paying job that he loved. 

Steve’s marriage in the 1960s had been brief and he never remarried but he found a partner in his new home, the kind of relationship that had eluded him for much of his life with a lovely woman named Halema. They were inseparable until Steve’s illness and Covid pried them apart for a time. I suppose it goes without saying that he adored his grandchildren and spoke of them all the time. 

The last time I saw my uncle in full possession of his faculties was at my mom’s 80th birthday party in July of 2018. He and Halema had taken the train down for the celebration. He was his usual funny self but already starting to complain of memory issues. By October of that year, he was already unable to make the trip for my daughter’s wedding. We corresponded after that and I am grateful that I thought to ask him to send me copies of some of his poems. I had to remind him a few times, but finally a thick envelope arrived at my apartment in Rochester. I still have the envelope on which I scrawled, “Contains Poems!” in light blue fountain pen ink so that I would not accidentally throw it away. 

Last April, after the first round of vaccines opened things up, my mom and I drove up to see him in the memory care unit of his residence. We had a few nice meals in a nearby diner with Halema and saw my uncle twice. He was like himself but with no short-term memory. My mom brought pictures from their childhood and he knew exactly who everyone was. He took great delight in seeing them. A few minutes later she showed him the pictures again and though he didn’t remember that he had just seen them, he enjoyed them all over again. He laughed and joked as he always did and gave little sign of being distressed or even aware of his situation.  I read some of his own poems to him and he finished the lines before I said them.

That was the last time I saw him.

Steve Kohn was, what we might have called in earlier times, a man of letters and so we will let him have the last words this week with a poem that he wrote in 2014 and that was in the aforementioned envelope. It is appropriately titled:

Last Words

I remember my father’s last three words. 

When I told him that my son had contacted me

after eighteen years of silence

to tell me his daughter had been born, 

Dad’s aphasia could not stifle

that first word in months, 

“Wonderful.”

Two weeks later he died,

two months short of ninety-seven,

never having met her.

Two days before dying he told me,

“It’s enough.”

Mom had no trouble speaking. 

I don’t remember her last words to me,

but I can guess.

Each time always the first time for her, 

“How old am I?”

“98, but you don’t look a day older than 97 and a half”

“What day is it?”

“It’s today.”

When I took her for a car ride, she would ask, 

“Where are we?”

Each time I would answer, “Here.”

Each time first time for us. 

When I took that last picture of her

holding her infant great-granddaughter, 

she didn’t know who I was, nor the baby. 

Her smile glowed. 

Then and now it was and is today and

we are here and

wonderful. It’s enough.