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By Root 483 0

only other memory I have of her. She is in the hospital, dying. She may already have died. It is a Sunday morning. My parents and I, accompanied by my aunt Esther, have driven to the hospital from our house. Another aunt is home with my brother. The car is suffused with an aura of grim resignation; there is only one inevitable conclusion to the events of the morning. I am too young to be admitted to the hospital, so I sit outside in the car alone. I do not to this day understand why my parents even brought me. I remember a black steel fence and a massive yellow brick building visible from where the car was parked on the street. I remember Aunt Esther coming to the car, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, to say that Susie had died.

In the house I grew up in, there was only one picture of Susie to be found — just one picture for as long as we owned the house, which was another twenty-three years. It sat on the piano along with a number of other photos of different family members, events, gatherings, and occasions. This one photograph showed a beaming little face with dimples and two long, golden braids. I would look at the picture for minutes at a time, trying to get to know the girl in it, but it never felt like anything more than a picture. The little girl had been my sister, but the photograph could have been of anyone. There was no connection.

My parents seem to have assumed that my brother, being older, could deal with Susie’s death, and I guess it was also thought that, as young as I was, the event wouldn’t have an impact on my life. Each of these assumptions demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding about the capability of young children to understand events that are happening around them. At my mother’s insistence, no one talked or reminisced about Susie, so why things had happened and were happening was never clarified. Nobody was ever asked how he or she felt about Susie’s death. We were never asked if we wanted to talk about it. My mother’s way of coping seemed to have been to pretend that Susie had never lived. If she had never lived, she could not have died.

My father must have been a brash young man. At sixteen, he was the youngest-ever graduate of the most academically elite of the city’s public high schools and finished Wharton by the time he was nineteen. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, played semipro basketball, and was heavily involved in local politics at the street level (which takes a particular kind of toughness) — first as a committeeman, then as a ward leader, getting out the votes for the Democratic machine. He rose through the ranks and eventually became the lawyer for the city’s Democratic Party. This suggests a confidence and focus that no doubt enabled him also to successfully woo my mother, a noted local beauty. Ultimately, the party awarded my dad the judgeship he had coveted his entire professional life.

My father had a keen intellect; his interests were diverse. As a lawyer in private practice, he argued and won the first case in Pennsylvania to hold that a man who had committed murder was not guilty by reason of insanity, and every year until that man passed, he sent our family a Christmas card. My dad loved history and language, was an avid golfer, gardener, and fisherman, and was an ardent Zionist. He played the piano regularly until, in old age, he couldn’t read sheet music anymore. In my favorite photograph of him, he is sitting at the piano, glasses pushed all the way up on his forehead, squinting at the notes swimming before him. As both a judge and a lawyer, he was recognized for his honesty, humanity, and candor, and he was much beloved by many, a mentor to countless up-and-coming attorneys.

I would not describe his relationship with me in the same way. Perhaps he embraced the opportunity to nurture those who were not his children because he was unable to understand his own. After Susie died, my father’s need to be in control seemed to have, understandably, increased. He judged me, and I did not satisfy his standards. From my perspective, he was