This morning, my sister and I met with Rabbi Andy Bachman in his large office at Congregation Beth Elohim. He asked a lot of questions and we got a chance to tell him much about my father’s life.

It was easy to talk to him and sometimes it felt like my sister and I were rambling on and on. But he listened intently and even laughed at some of my father’s jokes.

Rabbi Bachman seemed to enjoy the story about the time my father went to work at a shoe store. My father, then 19 or 20, assured the store’s owner that he had plenty of experience in the shoe business but when he was caught inexpertly trying to force a shoe onto a large woman’s foot the owner replied: "You’re no shoe man, Ghertler."

That’s definitely one of my favorite stories. My sister told Rabbi Bachman what a funny storyteller my father was. It felt sad to have to describe it knowing that we’d never again see my father rub his hands the way he did when he was warming up for a great punchline.

Afterwards we waited under the scaffolding at Beth Elohim for a fierce downpour to die down. We ran into a friend who is now working as a teacher at the school and she assured us that our father had lived a good, long life. But it was no consolation at all and did nothing to appease the hollow feeling in my stomach and the dizziness I’d been feeling all morning.

When the rain let up I started to walk toward Seventh Avenue but the sudden feeling of wet and cold made me rethink my plan. Then I saw a black Eastern Car Service car and I hopped in the back.

"You got lucky," a man, who was standing on the corner of 8th Avenue, told me as I got into the car.

Today the grief was a fog around my forehead. I was here but I wasn’t here at all. I had the sense that the world was moving on and I wasn’t part of it. I wanted to say, "Don’t these people know that Monte Ghertler is gone?"

I talked to some neighbors on the street, bought paper towels and groceries but I felt distant and in my own head.