The Survivors' Daughter, 1.1

Fear, Uncertainty, and What it Means to Be Alive (funnier than it sounds), Part 1.1

Jun 22, 2023

You will one day give reckoning for everything your eyes saw which—although permissible—you did not enjoy. —Jerusalem Talmud

In which case, I’m totally fucked. —Mindy Greenstein, Ph.D.

Energy in an isolated system can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one form to another. — 1^st Law of Thermodynamics

Part I: A Random Walk Through Time and Fear

Why I’m Like This

The phone rings on Avenue U in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, on a cold October night in 2016, as I’d promised it would.

Ma answers, huffing and puffing, though, at 81, she’s doing well for two weeks after her first stroke. “I’ve been trying to call you all night! We were worried.”

“I just got home,” I say, “plus, your phone was busy. If you want me to call, you have to stay off the phone.” I explain in a calm monotone, as if talking to my sons circa age 5.
“The phone doesn’t work!” Ma yells. “It’s always busy.”

            “Ma, it was busy only because you were on it.”
            “Should I give you to Daddy?” she asks.
            “No, that’s okay, just tell him I got home fine.”

Ma screams into the phone, “ARCHIE, MINDALEH IS ON THE PHONE. HERE.”

“No, Ma, please. He can’t hear me anyway. Just tell him I’m home.” Jesus, every time. I’m fifty-three years old.
“ARCHIEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

“Ma, please, don’t—“
A gruff male voice speaks into my ear. “Hello, is this Mindy?”

            “YES, DADDY, I’M HOME.”
            “Yes, she’s home,” answers Ma in the background, simultaneously.
            “I didn’t ask YOU,” the gruff voice answers her back, “I asked Mindaleh. Be quiet.”
            “YES, DADDY, I’M HOME, I’M HOME!!”
            “Mindy? Are you home?”
            “YES, YES, YES, I’M HOME——I’M AT HOME——I GOTTTT HOOOOOOMMMMME.”
            “Yes, she’s home,” repeats Ma’s disembodied voice in the distance.
            “Be quiet, Clara! I asked her, not you. Mindy, are you home?”
            “YES, DADDY, I’M HOME. I’M HOME!!!”
            “I can’t hear. Are you home?”
         “FOR FUCK’S SAKE, YESSSSSSSS.”
            “What?”
         “DADDY, I’M HOMMMME!”
            “I can’t hear. Are you home?”

I close the living room window so that the neighbors will be less likely to hear my bloodcurdling scream, and take two deep breaths before letting it out:

“YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!”
“Thank you for calling.”

Click.

****

PROLOGUE

Weird place for a Prologue, I know. But, believe it or not, this book isn’t a memoir. Or, rather, it isn’t only a memoir of how a Psychologist daughter of Holocaust refugees who were also compulsive gamblers copes with living a medicalized life. It’s also a book about science, gambling, survival, and faith. By which I mean little-f faith, rather than Faith! There are many things in which we can have (or lose) faith in life, including—but not limited to—religion. This book is about all of them.

Then why did I start with a self-indulgent scene that seems to mock my parents-who-have-already-suffered-enough?

Because, like many moments in time, it was torture to go through, but, in retrospect, I found it hilarious. And if we’re going to go through the torture of thinking about life at its deepest levels, it’s good to sprinkle in a bis’l hilarious. (I could have written a little bit of hilarity, but a bis’l hilarious sounds funnier). The person who taught me that first was Ma. It took me a long time to learn her lessons.

And cancer’s lessons. And life’s lessons.

And I’m going to share them with you for the reason many people share their lessons. Because it helps me transform the prickly bits into something meaningful and tolerable. Nietzche wrote, He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” Sharing these thoughts with you is one of my whys. I hope you find it worth your while.

LOL (Lesson on Living) #1:

Don’t leave your sense of humor at the door. You never know when it will come in handy.

LOL #2:

Beware of people offering life lessons.

LOL #3:

But don’t let that stop you from listening. And don’t let the listening stop you from critically evaluating the lessons.

Let us now return to our regularly scheduled program.

***

At the time of the phone call, neither of my parents knows that I have metastatic breast cancer. Not that I lie. I simply fail to inform them. I don’t lie. It’s one of my more unattractive traits. Ma calls me a Yeckie putz. A straight-laced stick in the mud.

Ma has bet everyone she knows a cup of coffee that The Loudmouth is going to beat Her in the upcoming presidential election. Everyone but me. Unlike Ma and Dad—who maintained to the end that the only reason he gambled was to win back the money Ma lost— the Yeckie putz never gambles. The only wager I’ve ever placed was when I bet my toddler a million billion gajillion dollars he’d forgotten to zip his fly again. (I won.)

None of us knows that one month and two strokes later, Ma and I will find ourselves in a Brooklyn ER having our final conversation about how beautiful Rita Hayworth was in Gilda—oy, how she danced with the long black glove when she made like she was going to strip and Glenn Ford went banana— or that, soon after, I’d whisper through tears that everyone now owed her a cup of coffee, wondering if she could hear me behind her closed eyelids while the fingers of her right hand picked at her sheets as if running on their own motor. Until the motor ran out.

Or that, a few weeks later, while trying to find vital documents for my newly widowed 95 year old father—poring through disheveled boxes of social security and immigration papers mixed in with twenty year old address books, five-year old gas bills, and Atlantic City casino ID cards—I’d come across a $5 poker chip she’d saved.

It was round and red, the words TRUMP PLAZA printed in black, a casino now as dead as she was.

Or that, two years later, Ma would still manage to save my soul.

Or that, one year after that, Covid would make gamblers of us all.

***