Grief

I lost three old friends this week, all of whom were woven into the fabric of my life. Their loss leaves that fabric a bit more shredded and tattered then it formerly was, although it is still intact and I am still able to wrap myself in what remains of it and keep warm.

The first was the brilliant and handsome Dr. Ted Dietrich whom I met when I served on the Institutional Review Board for what was then Humana Hospital. “Ted Terrific” was pioneering innovative cardiac surgery techniques, and he needed to come before our board almost every month to obtain our permission to perform his “experiments” on the patients –who came to him with every other alternative exhausted.

Our job was to make sure that before he performed his surgeries, his patients gave what was called “Informed Consent.” This was a complicated way of saying that we read the forms his patients had to sign to make sure that they were written in a language that was comprehensible and truthful–that they knew they might never wake up.

At the time, Dietrich was experimenting with the first stents, and soon after the first medicated stents. He was a very innovative man, but he was always being asked why he had such a high level of mortality as a surgeon. He would always reply, “it’s because no one else would have the guts to perform surgery on such sick people.”

He always taught me a lot, and he lived his life on a high wire without a net all the way through to the end.

The next man, Art Ehrenreich, was the lifelong attorney and advisor to my friend and mentor Ed Robson. Art and I used to talk about how Ed, another brilliant entrepreneur and former Olympic hockey player often needed to be protected from his own worst impulses. As his attorney and friend, Art saved Ed repeatedly, and there was a bond of trust and friendship between them — not the least of which was that they both had had polio as children and had to battle post-polio syndrome as they got older.

I last saw Art at Hillstone last week, waving a rolled up sheaf of papers he was taking home with him at the end of a dinner he had had with Ed. He was in the middle of trying to facilitate another one of Ed’s big ideas, this one personal. Art was 83 and still hard at work when he had a massive heart attack last Thursday.

The last words he said to me were, “if there’s ever anything I can do to help you please call me.” That’s how he was. He was physically little but intellectually and emotionally mighty.

The last death occurred just this morning London time. It was Woot, my daughters 15-year-old black cat, who succumbed to leukemia. We called him Worldwide Woot because he traveled with her through law school, her sojourn in tech marketing for a start up, and then her work as an attorney — moving from San Francisco, to Amsterdam, Half Moon Bay, and finally London. Woot knew her before she knew her husband and my grandson Dashie. She called him her spiritual teacher. Poor Woot, she wore him out, but he lay on her chest this morning for hours saying good-bye and purring to her before taking himself off into a closet to die.

I had given him to her as a kitten for her birthday, because she seemed incapable of commitment, and I thought it might be time for her to commit to something.

She committed to Woot with a fierce loyalty until the very end. Until, as Dashie said, he left his earthly body.

I can’t lie. I am deep in grief. Fortunately or unfortunately, I grieve in writing.