I also saw in David, to mention one more quality, an amazing grace under pressure. Despite his great wealth and influence, David had experienced severe pressure as well as reverses, yet had not hesitated to turn to others simply and unpretentiously for help and support. He had a highly developed sense of honor, which I have found worth emulating, and he respected all manner of people, high and not so high. I have tried to absorb his ability to carry himself with dignity but at the same time modestly. And here is a man who could throw his weight around almost without limit. (I’ll add here that David was one of the people who urged me to share my experiences, in the belief that to do so might help others.)
One further note here. For many years, David was said to be the richest man in the world. For me, he was richest of all in wisdom, a substitute father for the two I had lost along the way. David was already 101 years old when I visited him in late 2016 at his home at Pocantico Hills. We had taken some years earlier to hugging when I left. This time, he asked me to kiss him on his cheek. When I did, he offered me the other cheek, too. I’m sure now this was his way of saying a final goodbye.
Another person who became both an example to me and a friend was former justice William Brennan of the United States Supreme Court. He came onto the bench in 1956 as a recess appointment made by President Eisenhower and would in time stand out as one of the most humane justices to sit on the modern Supreme Court. Our friendship grew into one of the great treasures of my life. He would invite me to his office, where we would order in lunch and discuss issues of jurisprudence and other abstract ideas, as well as the law school we had both attended. Which was the best legal document ever written? The Bible? The United States Constitution? The Talmud? There was always something valuable in his comments, but of even greater value was the guidance that flowed from his personality and from his outlook on life and how it should be lived.
I have often speculated on why these supporters at all levels showed such generosity toward me. Has it often been just sympathy for a blind guy? Could be. But perhaps, I sometimes think, it is because I myself am open with others—as I so often must be. As noted earlier, I need a lot of extra help in living my life. In the process, I necessarily offer my trust to people, which may trigger a correspondingly generous response, especially from good people who happen to be imbued with the spirit of helping others. In other words, I suspect that a reciprocity is established. Whether that is so or not, the fact is that my reliance on so many people has greatly enriched my life. Yet another compensatory balance, perhaps.
A few people in one’s life stand apart from, and in some way above, one’s community, and even one’s friends. In my life, those people have been my late mother and grandmother and now, after the half century or so we have been together, my wife. In this account of my life, Sue stands alone—not just for the usual sentimental reasons, although I harbor a lot of those, but in ways practical and rational.
There were a multitude of things Sue did not have to do. She did not have to wait for me or worry about me when I was in college, not feeling well, my prospects extremely doubtful. She worried so much that it made her sick. She lost twenty pounds, this from an already slender young woman. I had diminished her, and it seemed unfair. And then she married me, another thing she did not have to do.
She was still young and might have had a number of suitors. I might have seemed like a catch at one point, but when I returned from college and then Detroit, my eyes shot, I more likely resembled a man without much of a future. She waited out that period, read to me, and stayed with me. What does that say about her? It says she is persistent, she is hopeful, she has faith—even though she is not especially religious. She has faith in the human spirit.
She definitely did not have to stick around with me during the horrid graduate-school years when, as clear as day to anyone, I was headed nowhere but straight into professional studentdom and perpetual debt. Her father would say to me, “When are you going to get a W-2?” and I would tell him, weakly, that the longest way around was the shortest way home.
As powerful as that old bromide was to me, Sue’s father found it less explanatory of our immediate circumstances, and Sue almost certainly would have agreed. She did not want to give me care after I graduated from college, but she did it anyway. She did not want to make my dinner; she did not want to stay up when I had to, reading to me in our shabby graduate-student apartments; and she did not want to record tape after tape after tape for me. She wanted none of that, but she did it.
They say there is no truly selfless act, but I believe that Sue has lived an essentially selfless life, doing for others, not for herself. I cannot account for any aspect of Sue’s commitment. Oh, I could say I was a kind man, an excellent lover, and a terrific companion in those hard years, and even if all that was true, it still would not have made sense for her to choose to endure the difficulties of being with me the way she did.
I do not know why Sue
