On dad

A guest essay from my husband

This is a guest essay by Max Kling (my husband!)

I once asked dad his favorite part about being a doctor. I wanted to understand what made him work so hard, what drove him to care so deeply about his practice. If you ever saw the stacks of patient charts he'd lug home or on weekend trips, the late nights hunched over his microscope examining slides, you'd know what I mean. This was a man who lived and breathed his work.

For a man who spent weekend afternoons reading medical textbooks with a ruler in hand, I expected his answer would be something about how intellectually stimulating it was. Or maybe his sense of duty. I never heard him tell a lie, and his "unmitigated integrity," as one of his friends once put it, made me think he just took his Hippocratic Oath very, very seriously.

When I finally asked him, he looked at me and chuckled, "I just like yakking with my patients."

I laughed and asked him to be serious. "I just like yakking with my patients," he repeated with a sweet, earnest chuckle. The more I thought about it, the more I knew it to be true. Some of my friends who were also his patients told me he would handle the medical issue in ten minutes, then spend the next fifty just yakking. I'm sure the patients waiting in the waiting room weren't so happy, but that was just his way.

One former patient told me that in the exam room, my dad made you feel like the most interesting person in the world. That he had this rare ability to lock in, to listen closely, to ask real questions. He'd ask about your life, your garden, your wines, your travels, your take on music or art or food.

That same patient wrote to me: "He had such a big interest in everything ...and he did take notes ...all over my records...across, down the sides, in the page corners...notes about a restaurant I liked, or a beautiful city in Spain, or the type of boxwoods I had planted...I was always astounded as he wrote down everything. Copious notes. All over my medical records about nothing medical!"

Any other doctor looking at those charts would have been baffled. They looked less like medical records and more like character studies, little documentaries on each patient's life. That was my dad. To him, you were never just your illness. The way he practiced medicine said everything about who he was—someone genuinely fascinated by the lives of the people in front of him.

It’s heartening to hear that other people got to experience some of what I did. That he was the same yakker with them that he was with me. "Yakking" was a big part of our relationship.

A lot of father-son relationships are built around some shared activity. A favorite sports team. Golf. Fixing things in the garage. Fishing. That wasn't really our thing. My dad and I didn't bond through hobbies or rituals—we just liked to talk to each other. That was our pastime. Yakking was our sport.

We tried playing catch a few times when I was a kid, probably because that’s what fathers and sons do in the movies. But Dad had this very mechanical throwing motion, like he was following instructions from a manual titled How to Throw a Baseball (For People Who Have Never Thrown a Baseball). I think we both understood pretty quickly that this was not our natural medium. No need to pretend to be a father-son duo we weren't.

We were conversationalists. And unlike other activities, we had nowhere to go and nowhere to be—no tee time, no tip-off, no movie schedule breathing down our necks. When we were together, time wasn’t something to beat. Time was our ally. It was something to stretch out, to settle into. The two of us would talk for hours straight about anything and everything: family stories, books he was reading, school, gossip, random poems he had memorized during his two-hour commute to school as a teenager, a patient's story that reminded him of something, our memories and our dreams. The conversation would start in the living room, drift into the kitchen to pick at some leftovers, loop around to the bedroom, and pick back up the next day over email or on the phone.

Sometimes we'd talk in the middle of his workday until I'd hear his secretary's voice in the background: "Doctor, your patients are waiting." He'd hurriedly tell me, "Max, I gotta go!" and hang up, only to call back that evening to finish the thought, as if no time had passed at all. Because he was so deep, so intelligent, so reflective, so genuinely loving, my hours-long conversations shooting the breeze with him were always the highlights of my day.

So when he was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021, it felt like our greatest pastime was being quietly ripped away from us. Suddenly, the man who could talk for hours about anything and everything was struggling to find the right words. It was like watching a master painter lose control of his brush, or a quarterback injuring his throwing arm. I didn’t grieve all at once. It was too much to process. I grieved slowly, in pieces, as the nature of our conversations began to change.

In those moments of silence, it was as if his diagnosis had suddenly turned up the volume on life's big questions, the ones I pushed to the background amidst the day-to-day bustle. His illness made those questions inescapable, like a persistent knock on a door you're not quite ready to open. After his diagnosis, I found myself dwelling on things I hadn’t given much thought to before. I’d always known, in theory, that my dad would one day die. But memento mori—the Latin phrase for “remember you must die”—had always felt like an abstract philosophical idea. And now it was real. I found myself trying to etch every moment with him into my memory, to be fully present, to soak up every second, every conversation, every comfortable silence. Our yakking took on a new urgency, a preciousness that comes when time is no longer your ally.

It was a double-edged sword. On one hand, I felt driven to cherish our time together, while on the other, the pressure to "do it right" was sometimes overwhelming. Being completely present isn't easy when you're also grappling with the weight of what's to come.

In an effort to hold onto as much of him as I could, I started to re-read some of his old emails. Just like his patient charts, Dad documented everything in his emails to us. Every little detail. If he had an interesting talk with a patient, he'd share it. If he read something thought-provoking, he'd write about it. When it was either of his parents' birthdays or anniversaries of their deaths, he'd share their stories and what they meant to him. When he traveled, we'd get detailed reports of each day. I can tell you exactly what he ate for breakfast in Paris on day 3 of his trip in 2016, and the rating he gave it. These emails were basically a personal diary he shared with his family.

One email that stood out contained an obituary he'd sent over a decade ago. "Vanishing of the old way of practicing medicine," came the subject line. It featured the story of a small-town pediatrician who had passed away at 92. He had dedicated his life to his craft, working 80-hour weeks alongside his wife, a nurse named Patricia, at their humble home office, and still finding time to conduct research at a nearby university.

"He was a still-life of a romanticized and personalized world of medicine which has gone past," my dad wrote. "What he was doing was the ideal of so many people in my generation. We all thought we were joining a heroic cottage industry of individuals who were ready to work hard and change the world, a little bit at a time.

I'd always known my dad wanted to be a doctor since he was thirteen. He told me this more than once. But reading between the lines of that email, and knowing him the way I did, I think I understood the real reason. That line about "changing the world" made for a nice retrospective fable, but I think it was simpler than that. He liked people. He liked talking to them, learning about them, helping them when he could. Medicine happened to be a profession where you could do all of that while making a good living. It suited him perfectly. He even loved to treat my friends with cortisone shots on weekends in Bridgehampton. Again, his only real hobby was yakking. There was nothing else on his schedule. Not even on a July afternoon.

As I continued reading many of his emails and anecdotes, I couldn't help but smile. I pictured him as the studious and earnest thirteen-year-old, riding the subway from his home in Jamaica Estates, Queens to the Bronx High School of Science, memorizing poems and the periodic table during his commute. It was such a sweet and charming image, a glimpse of the man he would become.

Now, I found myself watching my dad's life shrink in real-time. The man who had once read voraciously and written dozens of thoughtful emails a week was now limited to shuffling between rehab appointments, doctor visits, and long naps. As his world grew smaller, the lessons he had taught me loomed larger in my mind.

I couldn't help but reflect on the wisdom he'd passed down, often without realizing it. From the yellow sticky notes he'd leave on newspaper clippings, to the heartfelt emails, to the quiet ways he showed up for our family—always without a shred of self-consciousness. These weren't grand gestures, but they stuck with me. Small, ordinary moments that turned out to be the building blocks of a life well-lived.

I miss him every day. I can’t talk to anyone else the way I talked with him. He was my sounding board, my moral compass. Nobody else has the patience for those long, winding conversations that go everywhere and nowhere. Nobody else shares our particular sense of humor about the small absurdities of life. Nobody else remembers the same stories or finds the same random details both funny and important. He had a way of drawing out parts of me that nobody else could. That meant a lot to me. I don’t have it anymore. And I’m very sad about that. No other way to put it.

It’s like losing a language you only spoke with one other person. Suddenly all these thoughts and observations have nowhere to go—no one who’d quite understand why they matter.

But even in my grief, there’s one thing I take comfort in: I never took him for granted. Even before his diagnosis, I knew how lucky I was. My father-in-law once remarked to my wife (then-girlfriend) how much he’d noticed my family loved our dad. And we did. That gives me real peace of mind, even now, a little over a year after his death.

It reminds me of that line from Dazed and Confused: “Well, all I'm saying is that I want to look back and say that I did the best I could while I was stuck in this place. Had as much fun as I could… played as hard as I could…” That’s how I felt with my dad. I really did appreciate him while he was alive. I knew what I had.

And even though, at the end of my days, the majority of my life will be lived without him, I know I have been given a precious gift: the gift of his example. Through him, I saw what a Truly Honest and Good person looks like. At least I have that. And I know what it means for someone's memory to be a truly enduring blessing, because that's what dad's is to me.