Get In: It’s Brooklyn And People Are Dying
Read more articles on Family and Life's Nuances.November 19, 2007
Posted by neillevine
November 19, 2007
Posted by neillevine
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Norman Mailer lived for a long time on the other side of Brooklyn before dying on November 10.
I never met him but his death attracted a lot of ink, part of the package of what a famous writer entails.
On my side of Brooklyn, the South side, near the Atlantic, people in my life are dying and all they get is respectful silence, none of them being in the Norman Mailer celebrity league.
The year started with Jack Diamond, a long time neighbor, in 3B, departing this Earth unexpectedly. I can’t say I talked to him much but he was pleasant enough, a retired postal worked I believe, whose wife predeceased him and whose children had moved out a long time ago. Three months later new people moved in. Russians. Don’t see them much. Don’t talk to them much. My language is English. Yet the neighborhood continues going Russian.
Then it was my mother. She had been in a nursing home since 2001 with what was probably Parkinson’s. She developed breathing problems and was being fed with a tube so she was in and out of some of the local hospitals a lot while being switched between nursing homes. Then there was a phone call.
I had been visiting her weekly at the first nursing home and in the hospital, but it was getting depressing towards the end. The funeral was quiet, just family.
Next came my Uncle Manny, my mother’s brother. He was one of the few people to visit my mother at the nursing home, being nice enough to buy her ice cream and share it with her. He drove a cab for a living until he got a job with Social Services, where he retired with a pension.
He was cremated and there was no service.
Finally, my cousin, Michael Miller, who I grew up with. I used to play cards with him and his father. We even went to the movies and gym together, amongst other things like going to Central Park to sail an electronically controlled boat in one of the lakes there.
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He went into the school system, first teaching phys ed, then becoming a chairman and, finally, a principal of an elementary school in Bensonhurst for 16 years.
He attended my mother’s funeral, which was small in comparison to the crowd of people, many in suits, who paid their quiet respects to him. I reminisced about the past with some family and a few other people there but I did not know most of the attendees. Michael died suddenly of a heart attack. Ironic, since I was told he was not seeing a doctor, unlike my visiting a cardiologist quarterly for the past many years.
The papers keep printing stories about Norman Mailer and his grand life in print, but it is my family that I will miss for sure.
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