I don’t remember when my father started to read this blog, I think it was in 2004 or 2005, but for a few years he read it every day. He especially liked the first year or so when I was writing Smartmom posts daily.

He really liked Smartmom and read the column every Saturday morning in the Brooklyn Paper. He would go to a deli at Pineapple and Henry in Brooklyn Heights where he could always pick it up.

That meant a lot to me.

Now I’m just so glad that I started this blog because it was a way my father could see my writing without me having to actually show it to him—that would be way too intimidating. He was a writer, an intellectual, and a great appreciator of literature. Needless to say, I was always too timid to show him any of my creative work, my novel, my poems.

He did love the songs I wrote when I was a songwriter in my teens and twenties.

But my writing. I was afraid to show him because he was an arbiter of taste and value in my lexicon of life and his opinion was always fraught. A random comment or criticism could really destroy me.

But with the blog I just put the writing out there. I always said that was the reason I started it. What I didn’t realize until yesterday was this: the blog and the column were my way of sharing myself with the father I so admired.

Now I’m so glad that I did.

An old boyfriend called yesterday. I called him first to tell him that my father died. We were a couple from 1979 until January of 1987 and we spent great deal of time with my father and stepmother. I knew that he’d want to know as he admired my father and really enjoyed being around him. My father liked him, too. They shared a deep and abiding interest in books and literature and both attended UCLA (at different times of course). 

I wasn’t sure if my old boyfriend would call me back. I called him after 9/11 just to check in and share what had just happened. We spoke briefly and he promised to call back but never did.

This time he called back. We had a very nice conversation. My old boyfriend is a deep and wise fellow. Ten years older than me, our conversations were often complex and far reaching. His words of comfort yesterday were comforting.

"I think we have memories because it’s so hard to vanish from one another," he said quietly.

"That’s really well said," I said.

"I guess. I think a lot about these thing," he told me.

So many people have asked me to describe my dad. For those who weren’t at the funeral I say, read the eulogy. Yet, with each passing day, I come up with dozens of memories that were not included (I mean, it couldn’t be THAT long a eulogy).

Sometimes I feel like I say the same thing over and over:

He was a brilliant, intellectual man with a great sense of humor.

He skipped out on his college graduation at UC Berkeley to see a famous race horse run.

He wrote great concepts and headlines when he was in the advertising business from the mid-1950’s to the late 1980’s (Aunt Jamima, what took you so long? Who Says a Newspaper Has To Be Dull? Quaker Oats: The Cereal Shot From Guns, Do It The French Way, Step up to Dutch Masters and smile brother smile, Quisp and Quake, Get Your Daily Dose of Dallas…to name a few).

He wrote a screenplay about the night Henry David Thoreau spent in jail, a
Thoreau calendar, an opera based on Nixon’s Checkers speech, a suite of
songs which can be heard on a terrific album by Bob Dorough called This Is A Recording of Pop Art Songs with
lyrics based on a weather report, a Brooks Brothers collection bill, a
traffic ticket, a laundry ticket and the Webster’s dictionary definition of love. There was also the best
selling book called The Couple.

He loved to birdwatch, to read and to look at his view of the lower Manhattan skyline.

He studied the New Yorker listings for art, theater, music, and films he wanted to see.

He loved his house in rural East Greenwich, New York. It was his 40 acres and a lake not too far from Saratoga Race Track.

He watched the towers fall on 9/11 and told me: "What was once the most beautiful view in the world is now the ugliest."

He told fantastic stories. My son has them memorized but I will miss the way he told them.

He was a funny, funny man who had a magnetic personality. He was a tough critic and a great person to walk through a museum with though it could be intimidating. He loved the opera,  Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet; he collected jazz and classical LP’s.

He was a loving and protective dad; I  remember he called the morning of Hurricane Gloria back in 1986 and told me to stay home and I did.

He reached for my hand when I crossed the street until I was well past 30; he almost didn’t let me go on a bike trip with two girlfriends from North Carolina to West Virgina when I was 17. Finally he relented; he wouldn’t let me take a semester off from college afraid I’d never return; he visited me every day when I was in the hospital with pre-term labor with Henry…

I cherished every word he wrote me in Birthday cards. I especially loved his doodles of elephants and airplanes.

It was easy to take care of him the way we did at the end. Our love for him abundant and overflowing.

Shiva means seven in Hebrew and it is the term for the week-long period of grief and mourning for one’s father, mother, son, daughter,
brother, sister, and spouse. During that week, most ordinary activity is suspended and the family is meant to sit shiva at home. Shiva is just one of the bereavement rituals in Judaism.

We decided to receive shiva calls on Thursday and Friday at my father’s apartment with its incredible view of Lower Manhattan. I knew Thursday would be incredible because the Tribute in Lights would be in full view at dusk.

My father witnessed the events of September 11th from his window and was never able to wash those terrible images out of his head. He told me once that he took pictures with a film camera but has never looked at them. I’m not sure he even had them developed.

At that time seven years ago and after he said, and I paraphrase, "What used to be the most beautiful view in the world is now the ugliest."

At the shival tonight, friends filed into the apartment with bags of delicious food. It seemed to be an unusually delicious array of cheeses from Balducci’s, desserts from Sweet Melissa’s, fruits like figs, peaches and plums, homemade quiche and a beautiful fruit tart.

And of course, there was much wine. I brought the bottle of Balvenie single malt scotch, which my father gave to Hugh on his birthday last June. Somehow the deep and woody aroma of this scotch is more evocative of my father than anything. My father loved to add to Hugh’s collection of interesting scotches and he’d always ask for a sip when he came over.

At dusk, the two beams of light did shoot up into the blue night sky. Friends watched in awe as the sky got darker and the lights more vivid.

My sister’s eulogy at my father’s funeral was heartfelt and poignant. I will try to summon up as much of it I can remember:

Although the last few months were very difficult, there were moments of grace and joy that I was able to recognize.

When my father left the hospital after a week-long hospitalization in January, I came to pick him up and I assumed he’d want to go home. He asked, "What are you doing now?" I said, "We’re taking you home." But my father had other plans. "Lets go see the Pissarro show at the Jewish Museum."

I will always remember that.

Last fourth of July when we all gathered to watch the fireworks from his window, I remember when his grandson Henry came in with a group of his friends. My father’s face lit up. Later I saw them sitting next to each other on the couch and I was very moved by the site of the two generations talking.

I will always remember that.

My father was, in his own words, "crazy about Sonya" my 4-year old daughter. He loved to be around her and in recent months kept a picture of her near his bed so that he could see her face first thing in the morning. That eally cheered him up.

In the last weeks my father was in and out of consciousness. We brought him home on Friday and on Saturday he whispered "I love you" to me. That is something I am so grateful for and will never, ever forget.

What I’m going to read is what we think my father wanted us to read at his funeral service.

My sister then read the last three pages of The House at Pooh Corner, the end of a chapter called, Christopher Robin and Pooh Come to an Enchanted Place, and We Leave Them There.

She read it slowly and beautifully, which allowed the humor and poignancy to shine through. It’s a difficult section to read because it’s a halting dialogue between two of the most famous characters in children’s literature. My sister’s voice was appropriately childlike and sweet for Christopher Robin and cute and slightly confused for Pooh. This excerpt works on so many levels of interpretation. It really was an amazing reading of something, we think, my father would have enjoyed. Here it is:

Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was sill looking at the world, with his chin in hands called out "Pooh!"
    "Yes?" said Pooh.
"When I’m—when—Pooh!"
"Yes, Christopher Robin?"
I’m not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not so much. They don’t let you."
Pooh waited for him to go on, but he was silent again.
"Yes, Christopher Robin?" said Pooh helpfully."
"Pooh, when I’m—you know—when I’m not doing Nothing, will you come up her sometimes?"
"Just me?"
"Yes, Pooh."
"Will you be here too?"
"Yes, Pooh, I will be, really. I promise I will be, Pooh."
"That’s good," said Pooh.
"Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred."
Pooh thought for a little.
"How old shall I be then?"
"Niney-nine."
Pooh nodded.
"I promise," he said.
Still with his eyes on the world Christopher Robin put out a hand and felt for Pooh’s paw.
"Pooh," said Christopher Robin earnestly, if I—if I’m not quite—" he stopped and tried again—
"Pooh, whatever happens, you will understand, won’t you?"
"Understand what?"
"Oh nothing." He laughed and jumped to his feet. "Come on!"
Where" said Pooh.
"Anywhere," said Christopher Robin.

A friend at the shiva tonight told me something he was told when he was sitting shiva for his father, who died not long ago.

"He told me I was going to be alright but that the hardest thing will be the firsts. The first birthday, the first holidays, the first…"

"New Yorker," I said.

My friend laughed.

On Wednesday I stared at the table-of-contents of this week’s New Yorker Magazine and realized that it was probably one of the first New Yorker’s in the last, say, forty years (at least) that wasn’t perused by my father.

The thought gave me a chill. The idea that life goes on after the death of a loved one is hard to take at a time like this.

The fact that the Talk of the Town and the listings will continue on after my father—a man who studied the New Yorker’s listings closely for theater, music, and art he wanted to see—is gone was, for a moment, deeply, painfully sad.

This was the first funeral my friend has attended since his father’s funeral and that was hard for him. But as he stood out on the roof deck of my father’s apartment building staring at the Tribute in Light, which sent two beams of light into the blue night sky he said, "This is a miracle, isn’t it? This view."

Rabbi Andy Bachman officiated at my father’s funeral on Wednesday. He spoke beautifully and we were blessed to have him with us at the funeral chapel and the cemetery. A friend wrote to me about  something he said.

    My favorite moment was when the rabbi said "your father was a fortunate man…to have such daughters."  I came home telling Max that I’d heard one of the most poetical and powerful motes, really the most holy nugget of any sacred sacred syllables I’d ever heard in my life in any liturgical moment.  It was a kind of reversal of patriarchical biblical. Power of the female.

My sister is a member of Congregation Beth Elohim, which is Bachman’s synagogue. A fellow blogger, Andy’s blog, Notes, is a thoughtful and thought provoking journal about the  thoughts and daily practice of a raibbi. Before joining Beth Elohim, he founded a group called Brooklyn Jews. He had this to say about my father’s funeral:

    I learned a very simple and profound lesson today while helping friends with a funeral.

    A beloved man died at age 79 and the structure of mourning and remembrance that was so carefully set in place by his daughters was so perfectly attuned to his wishes and to his abiding influence on them as a parent so that even as they were choosing on their accord how to remember and honor him, his touch and voice could still be heard.

    I was so cognizant at that moment of the particular blessings of death–paradoxical as it may seem but it’s true. Love sometimes is so keenly felt at the foundation of a relationship that even when one dies, their presence remains and in real time, one “sees” their soul gently yet radically alter in form.

    Today at the funeral their was exquisite music; humorous and heartfelt stories, delivered with great craft and robust love; and, the most devotional of eulogies displayed by two daughters of a father that I have ever seen or heard.

    It’s a bitter lesson to have to know that even dying is a gift that the dead give to us; but it’s true at times. And it was certainly true today.

    May comfort come speedily to all those who mourn and may the presence of those who’ve gone last forever and ever.

My friend Amy Burton, who I’ve written about often on this blog, and her husband pianist John Musto were kind enough to agree to play a song by Schubert at my father’s funeral. Amy wrote this the day before:

John and I played through a bunch of Schubert and Schumann, and
Schubert’s Du bist der Ruh (the one playing in my head this morning)
was the best for length, feeling (moving without being morose) and
non-religiosity. 

If you’re interested, here’s a link to the translation:

http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=18177

Also, I called the funeral home to ask about the piano, and it sounds like a nice grand – very elegant.

Amy spoke briefly before she sang about all the time she’d spent with me in the Riverside Drive apartment during high school and after and her memories of my dad and "that record collection" which she said was a part of her musical education.

Then she and John played and the music made me feel emotions I haven’t been able to access during the last, most difficult weeks of my father’s illness. A combination of joy and loss, the song was a powerful evocation of, as Amy said, the illumination of love. I  actually sobbed during the piece and partly it was out of  satisfaction that my father was being honored in this way. I know my father hadn’t heard Amy perform in more than 30 years but he followed her operatic career with great interest, always asked how she was doing, and somehow knew if she was performing in New York City.

At the end of the service, pianist Alvin Novack, a noted concert pianist and teacher on the South Fork of Long Island, played a Chopin Mazurka, which he said was something that reminded him of my father. He told those assembled that he and my father "were friends as boys in Los Angeles,"  where my father spent his high school, college and post-college years. I found this article about Novack, who like my father, moved to Los Angeles as a teenager, in the East Hampton Star:

As a teenager in Hollywood in the 1940s he was in the midst of a European community. His friends were the children of Thomas Mann, of Bertolt Brecht, "and I got the picture early on. It rubbed off on me."

When his father died ("It was probably the shock of the warm weather"), the teenaged boy stayed on alone and put himself through college.

"Then I was 25 and I suddenly realized I was old for California. So I came to New York City, where 25 was young."

Listening to Novack play I again experienced a crushing and formidable combination of joy and grief. I also felt strongly that we were honoring my father with the power, the beauty and the lyrical melodics of the music. The piece ended on a non-resolving note of such hopefulness and mystery that it made me gasp inwardly.

Afterwards the rabbi spoke briefly and beautifully and we played a piece of music chosen by a friend of my  fahters; she was sure it was one of my father’s favorites. It played as people filed out of the chapel. Pastor Daniel Meeter of Old First Church sent me a translation of The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from the opera Nabucco, by Verdi and his own feelings about my father’s funeral:

Fly, thought, on wings of gold,
go settle upon the slopes and the hills
where the sweet airs of our
native soil smell soft and mild!
Greet the banks of the river Jordan
and Zion’s tumbled towers.
Oh, my country, so lovely and lost!
Oh remembrance so dear yet unhappy!

Golden harp of the prophetic wise men,
why hang so silently from the willows?
Rekindle the memories in our hearts,
tell us about the times gone by!
Remembering the fate of Jerusalem
play us a sad lament
or else be inspired by the Lord
to fortify us to endure our suffering!

This chorus is sung by the Hebrews who were carted off to captivity in Babylon by Nebudchadnezzar. This chorus earned Verdi his greatest early fame. Every patriot in Italy learned to sing it. At that time, northern Italy was under Austrian rule, and the Austrian censors were very strict on stifling any Italian patriotic songs. So this chorus became an Italian patriotic song, a song of liberation, freedom, and aspiration. I love this chorus. I was thrilled as soon as I heard the opening chords. It was as perfect a choice as the others: Schumann Kinderszenen, Rabbi Bachman, The House at Pooh Corner, and the Chopin Mazurka.

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.

Friends called all day yesterday. One helpfully stopped by my apartment to pick up an envelope that needed to be driven over to my stepmother’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights.

Another friend called and said she’d made an appointment for the three of us (my sister, too) to have mani/pedi’s at Dashing Diva in preparation for the funeral.

Other friends came down from Kingston to attend the funeral and presented me with a bouquet of  flowers—eucalyptus leaves, green flowers and a very delicate flower I can’t name. We ate dinner with them at Rachel’s.

Still another friend sent a bouquet of roses with a very sweet note.

I feel overwhelmed at the thought of seeing a lot of people today.  feel so inside myself and I don’t know if I will be able to connect with anyone. I’m nervous about my eulogy and keep thinking of all the things I didn’t say in it.

At this most introverted and painful moment, one is required to be social and outgoing. But it’s a distraction, too. And I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be doing. Overall, I’m just nervous about the day ahead.

But I am looking forward to seeing my friends.

Last fall Hugh bought me a digital camera for my 49th birthday. Actually, I’m the one who shopped for it at J&R while we talked on our cell phones. I’d identify a camera in the case and ask Hugh to look it up on the computer. I’m not sure where he was looking but he seemed knowledgeable about all of them and finally encouraged me to buy the SONY.

Almost immediately I fell in love with my little, easy-to-use white digital camera and I tried to have it with me as much as possible. Truthfully, too often it seemed like I didn’t have it with me when I needed it most. Still, I was grateful that I took the few pictures that I did.

Today Hugh discovered a great picture I took of my father in his living room last fall. A beautiful shot, it was taken just weeks after his first hospitalization and he looks healthy and strong. Staring right at me like we’re in the middle of a conversation, he is sitting in an Aalto chair and wearing what looks like a freshly laundered white shirt. His hands are folded and the expression on his face make him look "curious, skeptical, humorous and fully alive."

Seeing the picture I started to cry, which is something I’ve been wanting to do but haven’t done much of since Sunday. Instead I’ve been feeling very knotted up, achy, spaced-out and like I have a bad case of indigestion.

But when I saw that picture I connected for the first time in weeks with my real father. Not the one who was lying in Mt. Sinai Hospital in an unflattering hospital gown; nor the one in the borrowed hospital bed at home.

No. This picture of my father looking right at me was the real deal. And that was enough to make me weep.

(I will put up the picture up later on.)

My father was a great reader and a constant library goer. He always had a big stack of books out from the library. Especially from the Crandall Library in Glenn Falls, New York near his country house in East Greenwich.

People have been asking if they can make a donation to something in my father’s name. I know he valued libraries and really loved this small one in this lovely upstate town.

Make your donation in Monte’s name:

Crandall Library
251 Glen Street
Glen Falls, NY 12801

In the 1970’s, my father, Monte Ghertler, wrote the lyrics to a suite of songs with jazz performer Bob Dorough and Dan Greenberg, which can be heard on a terrific album recorded by Bob Dorough called This Is A Recording of Pop Art Songs with lyrics based on a weather report, a Brooks Brothers collection bill, a traffic ticket, a laundry ticket, and my favorite, Webster’s dictionary definition of love. That song was also recorded by Spanky and Our Gang and Chad Mitchell.

Sitting in the funeral directors plush office at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel was surreal; one of those situations you dread your whole life but is much more normal than you expect.

We had to choose the coffin and discuss my father’s emtombment in the family masoleum. We even looked at a layout of the masoleum. We want my father next to his dad, Dewey.

is there a piano in the chapel, we asked. Because my friend Amy Burton will sing Schubert’s Du bist die Ruh" and a college friend of my dad will play Chopin on the piano.

"How many limousines will you need?" they asked. A discussion of getting to the cemetery ensued.

"Flowers or no flowers?"

"Jews don’t do flowers," my stepmother said.

"Actually it varies," the funeral director told her.

My sister wanted flowers, my stepmother did not. No real stalemate. We decided against because we couldn’t really think of a flower that represented my father. A big naturalist and birdwatcher, he wasn’t really a flower guy.

It all felt very ordinary. The secretary typed up the New York Times death announcement that I wrote down on a piece of paper.

We proof read it.

"It needs a comma here," I said reaching for a pen.

It all felt so ordinary.

The funeral will be on September 10th at 11 am at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue at 81st Street.