Sam Fogel 1926-2008

My father died on Friday, January 25, 2008. He was 81. Today was his funeral. It was the mostly profoundly sad day of my life. Two rabbis eulogized him and then I presented a eulogy that I wrote this morning. Reading it was hard. By the end, I was crying so hard I could barely see the words on the page. My eulogy is below.


We are always surrounded by images of what a father is supposed to be. Movies show us the father throwing a baseball or football in the yard. Commercials show dads plunging down roller coasters next to a screaming kid. And TV, well TV has every dad imaginable. My father was not any of those people. He was the son of immigrant parents who worked hard and he worked hard – really hard. So many of my childhood memories are filled with my dad, the self-made lawyer, working. Despite this, we always felt his influence, and knew exactly how he wanted things done. His goals for us were simple. He was a product of the Depression-era generation he grew up in: he wanted things to be better for us than they were for him. And he wanted us to all do better than he did. That was all a tall order.

Sam Fogel graduated from Huntington High School as a junior and finished 7th in his class. He was 16. He finished his undergraduate and law studies at Indiana University in Bloomington in 5 years. He moved back to Fort Wayne and began practicing law. A tall order for the future Fogel children to measure up to.

Throughout our childhood the stress was on getting A’s and doing well. He wanted the best for us.

So many memories are in my head. My dad introduced me to photography at a very young age. I have such funny memories of him setting up weird lighting in my sister’s room to take pictures of us and I have the pictures to prove it. And of hundreds of boxes of slides. He was so proud of me when I was taking pictures for my high school paper and yearbook. But the camera I used, I bought. He made me earn the money myself to pay for the cameras so I would know the value of a dollar. He stressed that too.

He also introduced me to the law. I started working in my dad’s office at a young age doing odd jobs. But that wasn’t his point. He would take me to the courthouse with him, even in high school. Everyone knew him and he introduced me to everyone. In college, I started out majoring in business convinced I would never work a day in my life without it. I remember a really scary phone call I made home sophomore year after one more accounting class had taken me down. I called to say I wanted to switch majors to English and then I wanted to go to law school. Why was I scared? He was thrilled. He had double majored in political science and speech when he was at IU. And I wanted to go to law school. That summer, I worked with him again and he taught me how to read cases and he showed me how to do research. Once I got to law school he was always there when I needed help. It turns out, law school wasn’t easy.

My law school graduation was a day we shared. He never had a graduation so we photographed him in my cap and gown. And then we stood on the law school steps as I prepared to move to California and I told him I loved him. He so rarely said those words, but on that day he told me he loved me too.

Things turned out the way he wanted, all three of us went to college and graduate school. We had jobs that he was so proud to tell other people about and we surrounded him with eight grandchildren.

Two recent memories. On his 80th birthday, I came to Ft. Wayne and we spent the day driving first to Wabash to see his grandfather, Jacob Fogel’s grave. We put stones there together. Then we drove around Huntington looking for all the houses he remembered living in as a kid. There were a lot of them. And we took pictures. The other thing I did was keep a video camera running the entire time we drove. I haven’t watched the tape. I never wanted to. But now, I will.

The last time I saw my dad was about a month ago. My 7 year old son Sammy and I came in and spent a very busy day with my dad. We went out to lunch; we tried a new coffee place and later went out for dinner, a movie and ice cream. He was so upbeat that day and was having so much fun. The whole time I kept looking back and forth between my dad and my son and I just felt that it would turn out to be what it was – the last time I saw him.

Dad, I miss you, I love you and I thank for all the things you gave me that made me who I am today. I am so proud of you.

Log Jam

Next week, after the endocrinologist has her say, it will be the nutritionist's turn. To prepare, I am now carrying around a little notebook where I am writing down everything I eat or drink.

I wonder if the bone thinning mystery can be solved from today's PB&J and yogurt lunch.

Battle of the Glands

Saturday morning around 10 I sitting in front of the computer reading email and looking at bikes I'll never bid on and bike parts I'll never buy to upgrade my bike, when those scary words "Unknown Caller" showed up on my phone again. It was my doctor calling to tell me about the remaining blood test results. Everything looks pretty good he said. He used his "no obvious cause of bone thinning" language again and said he looks forward to hearing what the endocrinologist has to say. So do I.

That's the next stop on this train.

6 more days until the boot comes off. To quote the title from a favorite Replacements song "Can't Hardly Wait."

Early Returns

I'll take good news, even cryptic good news in really small doses. I called to see where my blood test results were today and reached, well, I reached the call center. Tremendous comfort in that. Just one of the obstacles on the course.

An hour or so later, my phone rang and the readily identifiable "Unknown Caller" came up on my phone's display. That always means it's my doctor or, perhaps, my friend John Kirpanos. His mortgage company uses a blocker. I guess that way the person being called will be tricked into answering the phone? Great way to start a sales call -- "surprise, I'm calling to ask you to refinance." I knew it wasn't John calling today. I answered and it was a woman calling "from" my doctor's office. Not the doctor, not the nurse. Is that good or bad?

She said she was calling with partial test results. She said the doctor told me to tell you that are "no obvious causes of bone thinning."

I guess that's good, but I am not really sure. She wouldn't tell me more. She said she would lose her job if she told me anything else. So I get a weekend of no obvious causes. Nothing is ever obvious for me. I guess I will sweat the weekend waiting for "inobvious causes" of bone thinning. Because one thing is obvious -- I have thin bones.

So Iowa and New Hampshire are in and the winner is . . . . Well, we don't have one yet -- these are early returns.

Oh, Oh, my blood don't lie

Today, I took the next step in my osteoporotic life. I met with my primary care physician (known as a PCP in the labyrinthine health care industry) to discuss my DEXA scan and all the horrible things that could be causing my low bone density. As he quickly rattled off potential culprits, I had a mental image of typing in disease names into WebMD and Google. Funny what you can cook up in your head. I used to believe the calculators on the running sites that said my 10 mile time and half marathon time would get me a sub-3 hour marathon. Thing was, you still had to run the damn thing in under 3 hours. With the medical sites, you read the symptoms and you are convinced you have the disease. No conclusions today, just lab tests.

First the always joyful visit to the bathroom with the box on the wall that has a door on your side and a door on the lab tech's side. Do you suppose that anyone ever puts something other than the jar of urine in there, you know just to "piss" them off or maybe evoke a laugh or two? I didn't think of it then because I was too wrapped up in trying to use the furnished Sharpie to write my name on the cup all the while hoping that past users of the pen wrote their name before they peed on their hand, or was that just me?

Then I got to sit in the chair with the big winged arms and watch a nurse express 8 vials of blood out of my arm. They will be testing for damn near everything. The hope is that they find everything normal and then we get to attack the symptoms. I feel lucky for reasons as varied as energy level and my recent attempts at athletic glory that landed me in the boot and this silly discussion.

The numbers are coming and they won't lie. Blood tests are more centerfold than lingerie catalog. Very revealing.

Stay tuned.