Chapter 1
Grief Like a Torn Dress Should Be Left at Home
I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.
—Carl Jung
OPENING MONTAGE: Camera descends through the delicious mists above a pot of simmering chicken soup at 4639 N. 10th Street—the house where I grew up. There I am, having just been born into an idyllic Jewish family unit smack-dab in the middle of the twentieth century, with a working father, a beautiful, house-wifey mother, and a strong handsome three-year-old brother. I started life in the North Philadelphia neighborhood called Logan, in a row house with mortgage payments my parents considered affordable.
When Mom and Dad brought home their bouncing baby boy from St. Joseph’s hospital, my mother pressed her tender ear to my tiny chest and heard a heartbeat that was anything but regular.
The next day my mom called the delivery doctor and told him she’d heard something strange when she put her ear to my chest. The doctor had already detected a loud murmur associated with a bicuspid aortic valve disorder. The doctor didn’t want to tell my parents right away about my defective heart and ruin the family’s first night home with their new beautiful baby boy.
There was an operation available to repair said defect, but in the 1950s, 1 out of every 10 kids who went under the knife to repair the errant valve never made it back home to watchHowdy Doody.
In those days, there was no heart-lung machine. The surgeon would have had only three-and-a-half minutes to replace the little piece of shit valve in my heart. Mom was not about to playBeat the Clock with a life-threatening experimental surgery. But she was willing to bet that operating room technology would advance faster than my valve’s health would retreat. Mom was certainly right on that estimation.
Three weeks after I took center stage, my daddy dropped dead of a heart attack on his way home from working the night shift at the post office. He was 34 years old. Suddenly there was a gap
