Memorial

Dad's eulogy, 15FEB2020, the Atrium at Red Bank, NJ:

Good afternoon, and thanks for coming to this memorial service for my Dad, Edward M Musto Sr. During times like this, I often think back on some of the writers from millennia ago, who I think recognized the nature of our existence. Paraphrasing Ecclesiastes:


There is a time for everything,

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

So here we are, taking some time to mourn and remember, following my Dad’s "time to die" and I’ll take a little of your time today to eulogize my Dad and remember together some of those things which I think marked his life.

In a movie my wife Janet and I like, one of the main characters is searching for the right words to comfort the movie’s protagonist following the total failure of his quest to meet a woman. He observes, "You know the Greeks didn't write obituaries. They only asked one question after a man died: "Did he have passion?". While the claim is fictional, I’ve always liked the sentiment.

In the past few weeks, with Dad’s recent extended hospitalization and then his return to the medical rehab floor here at the Atrium, my brother, sister and Mom were often asked what Dad liked to do and what his hobbies were. Even after close to 24 years of retirement, none of us had a real good answer to that query (except for the occasional Dallas Cowboys game). I think truly my Dad’s passion was his family and the pursuit of those things which he thought would benefit it and I think that passion was witnessed in a number of his actions, both big and small, in his lifetime.

My Mom tells me sometime after I started walking as a toddler, we went out for a weekend walk with Dad. Dad watched with some concern as I lit out for whatever destination I could reach with my two little legs and remarked, "Don’t you think you should stop him?". My Mom responded, "Oh don’t worry, he goes just far enough so he can still see you" (a habit I should mention which continued for the next 60 plus years). And my Dad, years later, said, "We should’ve stopped you", but he never did, and, for me, it sort of defined his presence in my life. He watched, and expressed concern (and occasional disapproval), but he was always there, whether to simply make plain to acquaintances the blood bond we shared or slip me a few twenties for gas as I would depart for wherever I called home and he never stopped me.

Dad’s definition of family members deserving of his time, support and largesse was an expansive one. It included all his grandchildren, his in-laws, and the various nieces and nephews who comprised our extended family. When my cousin Artie had a rather violent nervous breakdown in his late teens, it was my Dad who helped to restrain him before my Aunt could get the necessary help. When my Mom’s mother (my grandmother) started to disappear into the soft fog of Alzheimer’s it was my Dad who provided logistical support (even when not necessarily happy about it). During one of my grandmother’s episodes, she lost her purse which held her keys and ID. My Dad replaced her apartment door locks and got the other necessary replacement items. We traveled down to her Union City apartment, and Dad presented my grandma with her new purse.

"Alright Tina, this is your new purse and keys" (holding the purse and keys in front of her). "Do you understand? These are your new ones."

My grandmother looked quizzically at the new purse and keys and protested, "That’s not my purse".

Dad (I’m guessing reminding himself this was his declining mother-in-law) responded, "Tina, you lost your purse. This is your new one."

But my grandmother reaffirmed, "That’s not my purse".

Dad, hesitated for a smidge, and then challenged her, "Alright Tina, so where’s "your" purse?" and my grandmother, not missing a beat, retreated to the rear storage closet in her apartment and returned with her purse and the old keys securely nested within it.

Dad said nothing then or after, but my brother and I often laughed about the look on his face when Grandma returned with her purse.

Dad worried about things. His childhood had seen challenges, financial and the impact of family members I’ll only characterize as "interesting", but as they say, "the child is father to the man" and I don’t think Dad ever forgot.

He worried about money, even though him and my Mom had done well. Every semester, when my brother’s and mine Ivy League tuition bills were issued, my Dad would insist at the kitchen table for a few hours that it just couldn’t be done. Of course, he always wrote the necessary check (because we were his sons), but not without our biannual kitchen table tradition.

He worried about his health and becoming disabled because he had witnessed both of those outcomes and their effect on people’s lives. We went through a time in his sixties, when he told me his philosophy was, "Find something bad, just cut it out." Of the slings and arrows due his increasing years, he would only remark (when laughing), "Well, it’s better than the alternative."

And honestly, what I’ll miss most about my Dad will be talking to him and his laughing when I told him some tall tale (or real one) of my life. He liked a good joke and appreciated irony. In his prime, his favorite time was having all his children and their children gathered together and simply talking with them, because, as I’ve already mentioned, his passion was his family.

Of course, toward the end, we observed in my Dad’s declining physical health, that sometimes the capability to simply continue to breathe, is not better than the alternative. Our ends are all certain, with only circumstances and timing left to be determined. I remind myself today and in the days since Dad’s passing, that he’s only gone before us. I would also observe that in so much of the Bible, one of the most common exhortation to us is God’s words to, "Fear not". More than once in Dad’s later years he told me he had worried too much and that everything seemed to work out alright in the end. I think of Dad’s final night in that light. Given his physical reality, his continuing confinement to a bed, and a life lived long and well, a quick passing in his sleep was truly a blessing.

In his last few days we all received phone messages which I was never sure were intended or just mistranslations by my cell phone voice translator. One of my last ones from Dad was, "I’ve just landed, I’ll call you tomorrow". Although I smile at his last message to me, I’m glad Dad made his last connecting flight here at the Atrium, which although not his home for as long as Mountainside, or North Bergen, was his home the night he departed on his last flight to eternity. I’ll conclude with a poem written by a pilot, but I think true of all our flights, including our last one.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air...

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark or even eagle flew --

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

The Heart wants what it wants - or else it does not care.

An interesting, chaotic couple of months (probably the last 9) and then I found an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal this past weekend entitled, "Two Sisters Bought DNA Kits. The Results Blew Apart Their Family." (URL is https://www.wsj.com/articles/two-sisters-bought-dna-kits-the-results-blew-apart-their-family-11549037904?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=2, although the article is behind the WSJ firewall). In summary, a married couple with four children where the children were all assumed the products of their parent's union was found to have other family members no one knew about (both parents were dead). The sisters (close for their entire life) were actually half sisters. The older sister had an unknown half brother (the offspring of her father and a woman he had an affair with), and the younger sister was actually the product of a liaison between her mother and an original love of hers predating her marriage to the older sister's father.  Nobody knew and with most of the participants dead, nobody really knows what anybody was actually thinking or feeling at the time any one element of this history took place. Wall Street Journal has two charts showing the "perceived" family structure before and after the DNA testing (I've left out the names because it really doesn't make any difference to the questions I'm pondering; suffice it to say there were two parents (grey) (in a "dedicated" relationship and the 4 children (orange) they raised (and from any perspective which means anything to the 4 adult children, their parents were their parents)):




Everybody was surprised (of course), some making their adjustments to their new expanded family with joy or detecting some meaning missing in their life in the new relationships, and some not. I'm assuming everybody could've gone on and simply continued to collect smiling family pictures, but knowledge has a tendency to disrupt "belief systems" within narratives we may have been comfortable with (or simply got used to telling ourselves was the whole truth) for a long time.





I suspect most of the people involved here (at least those attempting to preserve the integrity of their life decisions) were not going to ever discuss those decisions and events having taken place so many years ago. If anything, the secrecy in which they initiated these events only became deeper as time passed (the mother knew of her older daughter's genetic testing and had to at least have some suspicion of what was going to eventually be revealed).


Of course what intrigues me with these things is what were these people actually thinking (and feeling) inside? Mr. Hurwitz (like most guys), I think, was simply indulging in an opportunity (old horrible saying I once heard, "There's no such thing as a married man a 100 miles from home".). The opportunity presented itself and he indulged (with the additional benefit of burnishing what I'm guessing was probably his politically liberal "bona fides" (but again, I'm just guessing)). Now for Mrs. Hurwitz, there's an interesting question which caused quite a falling out between her daughters. Who was Mrs. Hurwitz's "true love"? Was it actually the father of her second daughter, Hy Greenberg? And after Hy informed the future Mrs. Hurwitz he wasn't really interested in being a married family man, did Mrs. Hurwitz reconnect with Hy out of a last desperate hope he might reconsider and deliver her to happiness, or was it simply a comfortable dalliance conceived (with other things) in a period of dissatisfaction and unhappiness. Mrs. Hurwitz, no longer with us, is certainly not indulging anyone, including her daughters, with answers to any of these questions. Ironically, Hy (the only surviving biological parent of this extended family) seems to be quite delighted to have been reconnected with a daughter he never desired (or at least stated he never desired years ago).


Now the occasional reader I have may simply conclude I'm going off on some wild rant again (and honestly this is not out of the realm of possibility) and simply state this is a case of a wildly dysfunctional couple whose life as a couple simply reflected that dysfunction. And yet, Facebook today has a group for individuals for which Ancestry.com has labeled their genetic testing results as NEP (I love acronyms), which stands for "Not Expected Parents" so I guess this happens more often than I would have initially guessed before seeing this article. As for the Hurwitz's, they were certainly parents of the 4 children they raised, but I do wonder about those matters of the heart, as do their children. Was their initial union conceived as a best available choice? Were they reaching for achievement of an imagined life whose probability appeared to be diminishing with time? Did they reach a point where the rendering of care to their charges was enough? Did they take comfort and meaning from their long union? Did they, for lack of any better, or sufficient, term, actually care for each other?


Sylvia Plath, a talented American poet, who suffered greatly from depression and committed suicide at age 30 (as did her son some years later as these things seem to propagate across families) is credited with authoring the line comprising the title of this entry. I was familiar with the first part (having been used by Woody Allen for justifying his pursuit of his adopted daughter), but not so much with the second part which I think is just as true. We care about what we want and the caring follows the wanting. I think that observation explains a lot about a wide variety of people's behavior (and not just the relationship stuff, and political stuff, although I figure I'll use this to return back to a draft I started on risk management and risk remediation some months ago because it all depends upon how you perceive hazards, their associated harms and what you "want" to advocate/care for because it's what you "want").


James Joyce, whose work I admire so much, had a wild set of letters he wrote to his lover, and then wife, Nora. I'm going to include a link to them here, but will note they're wildly obscene (in the best sense of the word) for those who would rather not read such private correspondence. However, in all their obscene correspondence (and you can sense Nora's very able matching responses although not recorded) there is the charming sense of a man wildly in love with his once and future wife who just couldn't wait to get home. My understanding is that passion continued throughout their life together.


https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/02/james-joyces-love-letters-dirty-little-fuckbird/


Was James and Nora's love heavily based on "eros" and perhaps not so much "agape"? Probably. Do you suspect James and Nora's caring perhaps somewhat eclipsed anything ever felt by the Hurwitz's? Ah, I think so. Rest in peace, both James and Nora, and may we all have luck sufficient to find such "soul mates" in our lives.

You're the product.

Mark Zuckerberg testified in front of the US Senate yesterday and the House today where he primarily succeeded at demonstrating the great majority of US Congress Critters have no idea how Facebook works or what it's business model actually is. Of course, US Senators and Representatives represent their constituents, who also probably have no idea how Facebook works, and primarily think of it as a place to provide visual evidence their life is a resounding, never ending happy fest, or take solace in the carefully crafted echo chamber the platform lends itself too. For myself, neither destination was an imperative, or probable, after events at my "childhood's end" and so my use of the platform is probably not in alignment with the majority of it's users.

So, I'm preternaturally loathe to embrace tech giant schadenfreude simply because it fits into "Never Trump" desires to overturn a presidential election and gives psychological relief to the losing side. I would, in addition, observe the following:

• If you haven't paid for the service (i.e. posting Gigabytes of cat videos for perpetuity), somebody is.
• If you're using the service, you're the product (which doesn't bother me simply because I like the give and take of opposing credos and ideas, it generally results in needed revisions to ill conceived first drafts)
• People put aspects of their life on-line to get social media attention and adulation. Given that "user need", it seems silly to believe anything placed in that electronic coliseum will somehow be subject to default privacy mandates unless the user utilizes the privacy tools made available by Facebook. 
• At worse, Facebook data is utilized for a more focused form of advertising, which I've been inundated with before Facebook escaped the Harvard quad. So far I haven't fallen victim to QVC addiction, or letting an anonymous poster direct any action of mine. 
• In any case, Facebook is a piker compared to folks who are really serious about meta data analysis (i.e. Google).

From my standpoint, the availability of the platform has more value to me than the opportunity cost of making available knowledge of my personal preferences to some third party looking for a better way to sell their goods (it's analogous to Kroger's keeping track of my purchases and offering me a 3 - 4% discount on my purchases). Is there a higher, more serious cost to the use of this technology? Probably, but I doubt it has to do with getting a better response to advertising "cold calls".

When I construct software hazard analysis for non-product software, I'm most concerned with identifying hazards associated with high severity harms (I tell my team, we can live with changes in estimated hazard, or harm, occurrence, but we don't want to miss potential high severity harms). The trickiest hazards to dig out, are associated with algorithms we don't fully understand the behavior of across all possible inputs. The danger in this set of circumstances is we get a result we trust, but we don't really understand how the result was produced. Which I guess is another way of saying we are probably ill-advised to allow "expert" systems to make decisions for us. That puts us on the path of becoming a "global useless class" as a species. I don't see how that works out well for us.

Alt-J (an alternative indie band I like) has an album called "This is all yours", which works on expanding some of the themes found in movies from the 1980's which impressed one of the band's writers. "The Gospel of John Hurt" draws from the movie "Alien" (John Hurt was the actor who played a character who birthed the first alien in the movie in a very unusual fashion (hard to forget if you've seen the movie)). That type of biological entity would be catastrophic for any species actually encountering it. Needless to say, "The Gospel of John Hurt" is not a gospel of hope. Let's hope we understand the AI algorithms we're developing better than the crew of the Nostromo understood it's alien passenger in "Alien". 

Interlude and "Girl with the crooked smile, Ask her if she wants to stay awhile"

Recently started listening to some work by Maroon 5, because some stuff just starts rolling around in my head (which happens far more frequently then I care to admit) and some of their tunes just appeal to me (along with Adam Levine's stated desire to create a well-designed, marketable music style (one which does appeal to me particularly on the hustle to the morning stand-up status meeting at 8:30)). Rather than going on at length (I do usually get to my point), I'll just post them with some minimal comments. The first is from "Songs About Jane" and titled "She Will be Loved" (I've told Janet I think of it as "Songs about Janet" during what, thankfully, thinking back, was the beginning of the end for "Night2night, the lost years"):





The second tune is from the more recent "Red Pill Blues" (Love the tucked in reference to "The Matrix") and is titled "Lips on You", because I've never been able to lose the inclination we're designed to fit together and you're missing something remarkable in the human experience if you avoid the opportunity when it presents itself, or believe it limited to the shallow depths of casual liaisons; we're capable of so much more if you'll just allow yourself to believe and be that person with someone else. The vagaries of the human heart are infinitely more complicated and varied than what can be perceived on initial meetings. I think it's worth taking the time to really come to "know" the intimate partners of our life in more than the usual sense.





Analogously (at least for me!), following years of moves, studies, unexpected detours, raising children, surviving a severe surgical accident and pursuing degrees, Janet got an opportunity this past January to participate in a long dreamed of Haiti Medical Mission Trip with a number of volunteers from Good Shepherd Lutheran. Outside of the challenges of creating a sustainable health care enterprise in a desperately poor country and under-served population (subject for another day), Janet's joy in participating was palatable in this picture; a validation of the notion of love being greatest in the service of others and also of Janet's favorite "Grand Theory of Nursing" from her MSN studies, "Nursing is Caring" (succinct, but true). Maybe, particularly following Good Friday, we need to recognize real love is not always simple, or natural (we never fight (LOL)), exists most fully in the service of others, and aspire to empower and elevate our loves to actualize in the highest possible terms those capabilities God has blessed them with.

Tenabrae

A late night meditation on "Good Friday" following services that night, but held until today due to issues which took priority during the weekend and a day off yesterday.

From Isaiah 53:2-6 (NIV):

2           He grew up before him like a tender shoot,

               and like a root out of dry ground.

             He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him,

               nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.

3           He was despised and rejected by mankind,

               a man of suffering, and familiar with pain.

              Like one from whom people hide their faces

                he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.

4            Surely he took up our pain

                and bore our suffering,

              yet we considered him punished by God,

               stricken by him, and afflicted.

5            But he was pierced for our transgressions,

               he was crushed for our iniquities;

              the punishment that brought us peace was on him,

               and by his wounds we are healed.

6            We all, like sheep, have gone astray,

                each of us has turned to our own way;

               and the Lord has laid on him

                the iniquity of us all.

The Good Friday service at Good Shepherd Lutheran in Irvine this year was the traditional Tenebrae Service (which I've been informed is from the Latin for "darkness"). It begins in silence, continues with the gradual extinguishing of candles on the altar as gospel accounts of Christ's passion are read, and ends in near total darkness with either a door slammed shut or the lectern bible slammed shut ("strepitus", signifying the closing of the tomb with Christ's body within). Communion is never distributed on Good Friday and attendees are asked to leave in silence at service's end. Although never intended to be a joyful experience, the experience of that service always seems to emotionally resonate with me and did again this year.

I remarked on this originally back during Lent in 2010 when I was creating some early entries for this blog. At that time I mentioned some writer's observation on people easily "getting" the wreckage of Good Friday and our horror on finding ourselves periodically in circumstances where even hope seemed a luxury. I would add here, I think part of coming to faith in Christianity is coming to the recognition a fair deal of the "wreckage" we personally encounter in our lives is devised by ourselves and is not simply our "natural" reaction to circumstances which befell us. We make choices based on our desires at the time events unfold and some times those desires reflect the corruption within us. Christ, undeservedly, suffered agonies which were rightly deserved by our actions. "Tenebrae" services helps to clarify that paradigm and helps me recognize the potential for darkness within me when I look in the mirror.

I think that recognition, even within the confines of the "grace" Christ offers us, is a reminder we need agape, and in our daily lives should aspire in extending it to others even if only a weak reflection of Christ's actions for us.

"That's my secret Cap, I'm always angry."

And an even longer time since my last effort at rebooting (7 years, really?). Florida is somewhere far behind us and things worked out okay after a fair degree of effort (particularly from Gary Singer, staff and partners), but I still miss our old place. Jan's and mine children are all grown and in various stages of their adult lives, recognizable and unrecognizable.

My folks are still around, but age has encroached upon their forthright independence (which was also further enabled by both good fortune, good health and good finances). Now none is enough to reverse the receding tide and, hopefully, some choices will be made this week to best preserve functional independence for both of them to the largest extent possible. And I, alias Night2night, look back at the relationships, the places I went to which would never result in a materially successful life, the houses, the loses, the renovations, the different jobs done and skills learnt though practice and necessity, and realize I never really wanted that standard successful thing; the 3/4 acre luxury estate, the picket fence, the local girl, the single community where we all knew each other, complemented each other on how swell we look and took week long vacations in distant places staying in places that looked like upscale versions of home.

So I've been on a different journey. I truly love some of the things I've had the opportunity to do, and sometimes just the opportunity to contribute and participate in enterprises and goals bigger than me, even when the endings were not capable of justifying a social media profile which claimed, "everything was the greatest". If they always had been, I suspect I wouldn't be capable of doing some of the things I've done over the last few years, and wouldn't have had the understanding you can't step up to the edge of the stage and pull a rabbit out of a hat every time. I tell my team, experience simply means you've had a chance to fuck it up. The only real setback is quitting.

I think Jan and I are going to move (again, LOL), because we'd like a little larger place with some better aesthetics (it's all temporary) and we've been in this temporary place for 5 years. I think within two years we should be back in a place of our own (maybe?) and I think, at least as far as our adventures and travels have taken us, I can think of worse places then southern Cal to retire in (and who knows, maybe this "black sheep" was always intended to wander in the far pastures for as long as I could and as long as it makes sense for the security of my pack). I think it's also time to finish some long abandoned studies and finish some graduate work in applied statistics (I need the larger tool set to do those things I'm working on).

I like a movie clip from "The Avengers" which kind of squares up with this view (not that I'm a real fan of super hero movies, but I love this particular line). Dr. Bruce Banner, who due a freak accident becomes "the Hulk" when angry (at least in the MCU), reluctantly returns to join the Avengers when an alien threat arises. Although Banner initially struggles to maintain his composure following the accident to prevent his transformation, in this scene we realize Banner has accepted who he is and realizes the capability his "accident" has wrought in him can make those emotional triggers and his transformation useful under the right conditions. I may not be an angry superhero, but some experiences which changed me I'm not going to forget and that's OK because they've brought me to this place and stand today and they're of some use under the right conditions.

Reboot

It's been a while. The last nine months of 2010 were consumed with proving that where we claimed we were, was actually where we were; which was a heck of a lot more complicated than it sounds and mainly involved little sparkly pieces of plastic and a bunch of statistics. Following that we had an unscheduled end to a 3 year brawl involving some friends in high places who stuck their necks out and the leave taking of "The Nemesis" (nothing personal dontcha know), and then a really frantic push to validate about 7 test methods (validation implies adequate resolution and limiting the amount of variation due to repeatability (system noise) and reproducibility (user interface variation)) which ran for about 11 hours a day for 6 days a week for 6 weeks. And then we finished (sometime in May). The protocols and reports were filed, the PDF's were created and stored, I looked around, and took a very self-conscious and relieved breath, and, then, squinted out into the internal mental room I really live in; which, at least for me, stores my evolving identity, consciousness, beliefs, and perception.

Whenever I indulge in that exercise I always spend some time remembering the things I didn't do (or simply let slide), like this blog (which sometimes is an excuse for not attempting more serious writing with the focused discipline it would require). Still, while this exercise is a personal vanity, it helps to focus my thoughts and, sometimes, clarify my arguments. It's always, somehow, more rigorous (or maybe real) in writing. Of course, if I could develop more of a sense of myself as a "writer" that wouldn't be bad either.

A few month ago, after foregoing the opportunity to see "Tron Legacy" with "the boys" in the theatre, I finally got around to see the Blu-ray version during one of our Friday night "pizza and a Blu-ray movie with surround speakers on" at home events (Gawd, I love Friday nights). The story is silly, and yet, the movie stuck in my head due to a couple of marginal themes buried in the plot and the music of "Daft Punk" (who I never had heard of before this flick, but composed a great soundtrack). With the movie still stuck in my head (appropriately, or not), I'm attaching one of my favorite penultimate clips from the movie to conclude today's post (which, after all, is titled "Reboot"). Reflecting on a friend's question to me numerous times on "Where am I going with this?”, I'll mention a few pertinent personal themes I'll probably write about in the future as a "lead-in" to the clip:

1. We may not be able to control the circumstances of our existence, but we can choose those beliefs and responses, we believe, or desire, to define us.
2. Our largest nemesis, and ally, is our earlier incarnations.  The child truly is father to the man (or the genesis of our destruction).
3. Even if forgiven, mistakes in real life must be atoned for.  Actions have consequences, and those seeking true redemption must at least recognize the potential for self-sacrifice as the only adequate penance.  Likewise, for the granter, forgiveness implies the "debt" is forgiven without remaining prejudice.
4. Life, without love, is at best an accounting exercise, a strategy for playing a time consuming, but pointless game.  The real treasure in life is the relationships we have and the time we spend on them.
5. No one gets out alive, you might as well do the right thing.

Welcome to Wednesday.