Death of a father, and an aunt

I’ve been preoccupied this month with the death of my father, Herman Rottenberg of New York, at age 97, and his only sister Charlotte Lichterman of Oakland, California, age 94.

Dad and Cis (as he called her) were very different people who didn’t see much of each other, but they shared an indefatigable optimism and a determination to do what they could to make the world a better place— Dad as an international folk dance impresario whose company spread its slogan, “Joy in Every Land, throughout the globe”; Charlotte as an activist for gender equality and almost every other liberal cause you can think of.

(To read a BSR column I wrote in 2011 about Dad’s remarkable career, click here.)

They also shared an astonishing equanimity in the face of death. Aunt Charlotte expressed no bitterness when she learned earlier this year that she had inoperable lung cancer even though she’d never smoked; she had loved and been loved, she told her sons; and as she told me cheerfully, “I was hoping to beat Marc’s record”— her father, who went to work on the New York subway until he was 96 and lived to 99—“but 94 ain’t bad.”

Dad ran the cultural programs at International House in New York into his 92nd year, and he hung on to life even when he was helplessly and unhappily bedridden for the past year or two; the alternative, he insisted, was much worse. Three days before he died— the last time I saw him— he complimented me on one of my columns, sang along with me to “The Frozen Logger” and spontaneously chanted “Succotash! Succotash!”— the cheer of the mess hall waiters at Camp Modin in Maine, where he had worked as a teenager. In the five years since he retired he often said he had lived a fulfilling and rewarding life and was leaving it with just one regret: the premature death of my mother 32 years ago.

On Sunday, November 3rd, for the first time in years, Aunt Charlotte did not turn on her computer to check her e-mail or visit the websites of her various causes. The next morning came the news that she had died during the night. That afternoon, my brother phoned Dad’s apartment to give the news to his devoted caregiver, Gloria Francis. Gloria turned to Dad and told him, “Charlotte died.” It was the last thing he heard; he died 20 minutes later.

“The years and the miles may have kept us apart/ But my sister has always been close to my heart,” Dad wrote in a poem commemorating Charlotte’s 60th birthday in 1979. It’s comforting to think that these siblings, separated geographically for so many years, are together again at last, holding hands and seeking out their parents and respective spouses. Comforting, yes, but also devastating to lose two such vital forces in my life at the same time.