A Celebration of Life

This blog post is about Lenny. It is in memory of Lenny. While not about me, it is also for me. It is part of the recovery process from grieving. He was my best friend and like a brother to me. We experienced and enjoyed life together.

Lenny and I met when we were ten years old, at summer camp in the Catskill Mountains in New York. It was a time like now of health care fears; then it was polio. Parents wanted to get their children away from New York City for the summer.

We went our separate ways when each of us went to college. By chance in 1973, when I came to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), I found out through a mutual friend that Lenny had also ended up in Gaithersburg, MD. We rekindled our friendship and have been best friends for almost 50 years. We spoke on the phone almost every evening at 10:15, talking about the news, our families, and our work. We spoke every evening while he was an inpatient at NIH, and I spoke to him every evening when he was in hospice and no longer able to speak to me. He was Deputy General Counsel (and frequently the Acting General Counsel) of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) until he passed away from an aggressive cancer about two months ago. When he passed away they flew the flag at half-mast above the Washington, DC headquarters of GSA.

Friendship Core Values

As part of grieving, I wondered what makes a friendship such as ours so special. I came across an article in Psychology Today about the 13 essential traits of good friends. I see them as the core values of friendship. They are divided into three groups: group 1 – trustworthiness, honesty, dependability, loyalty, and being able to trust others (being comfortable with vulnerability); group 2 – empathy, non-judgmental, good listening skills, being supportive in good times, and a defining trait of being supportive in bad times; and, group 3 – self-confidence, fun to be around, and the ability to see the humor in life. While no friend ever practices all of these traits all of the time, I would say Lenny and I clearly worked on all of them, without even knowing they existed.

Psychology Today calls the group 1 traits, traits of integrity; group 2, traits of caring; and group 3, traits of congeniality.

Integrity

We trusted each other implicitly. We solved financial issues together. He was my lawyer and I was his scientist. When I had any legal documents to sign, he read them first. When his pregnant daughter accidentally broke a mercury thermometer, I helped with the disposal of mercury. He could depend on me and I could depend on him. When he ended up on the auto train on New Year's morning at 6 am, without an auto (a story for another time), I was there to get him and his family. When we moved into our current house and were panicking because we still had items to move and only a few hours until closing on our old house, he organized things and hauled valuables.

Caring

We cared deeply for each other. When family tragedies occurred, we were there for each other. When celebrations were in order, we celebrated together. When the Baldrige Program lost funding in 2012, he was there to listen and support me. When he upheld legal and moral principles and was accused of not supporting political decisions (a story that reached the national press), I was there to listen and support him.

Congeniality

And we certainly knew how to have fun; in good New York fashion, we teased each other for the entertainment of others. People always wanted to sit at our table at weddings and any get-together because they knew they would be entertained by our banter. For his last birthday, my son and his wife did a brief video that mimicked the banter on our old nightly phone calls:

• Either of us: And how's your lovely spouse?
• The other: Just fine.
• The first one: Oh, did you remarry?

Good-bye for now, my friend

Despite COVID-19 attendance restrictions, I had the privilege of being a pallbearer at his funeral. And, his family buried him with a phone, so we could talk at night. I miss the discussions, but I do talk to him.

I hope all of you have the opportunity to have a friend like Lenny. If you haven't been in touch with an old friend for a while, why not make contact today? And remember the core values that will make each of you a better friend. Personal core values are a source of ethical and practical guidance.

Rest in peace, my friend and brother!