The Little Prince - A Celebration of My Dad's Life

My dad loved words.  He loved words because words strung together become a story.  And my dad loved stories and story-telling in all of its different forms.  He loved books and music and theater and movies and letter-writing.  Because all of them are ways to tell a story.  And so I am going to do my best to tell you a story about my dad using one of his favorite stories and some of his own words.

One of my father’s favorite books was The Little Prince.  This is a story that he used to read to Sarah and me before bedtime.  It is a book that he encouraged me to read again when I was a teenager.  I can vividly see his copy in my mind because it lasted throughout my entire childhood.  When Alex and Allie were born, he gave them each a copy.  Inside he wrote, “When you’ve learned the magic of reading, you’ll find The Little Prince has much wisdom to offer.”   After my dad died, I decided to read The Little Prince again.  This time through a much different lens than before.  This time I read it to hear his voice.  To connect again with my father and his wisdom.

The Little Prince is a story told by an aviator who crash lands in the desert and meets a Little Prince who came from another planet.  The aviator and The Little Prince spend a year together and over the course of that year the aviator learns a lot about The Little Prince and about life and love.  The Little Prince tells the aviator about his life on the star from which he came.  That he owned a flower.  A flower that he cared for everyday by shielding it from the wind and protecting it from caterpillars and every night by placing a glass bell over it to shield it from the cold.  The Little Prince told the aviator about a fox he encountered when he landed in the desert.  The fox wanted The Little Prince to tame him but The Little Prince didn’t know what that meant.  The fox explained that “to tame” meant to establish ties.  He said, “If you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world.  To you, I shall be in unique in all the world.”

By that definition, my father tamed almost everyone he’s ever met.  He was very intentional about establishing unique ties with the people in his life.  As a father, he worked hard to know Sarah and me as people, not just as his children.  Because we went to high school 30 minutes from our house and most of our friends lived as far, we spent a lot of time in the car with my dad.  We would talk the whole time.  He didn’t just want to know what we were doing or what we liked or what we wanted.  He wanted to know what we were thinking.  And why we were was thinking it.  In a letter he wrote to me in my mid-twenties, he said, “I love you.  Beyond love I like you.  One of the great joys of being a parent is seeing a tiny, crying infant blossoming through childhood and adolescence, to become a happy, healthy adult.  One’s child will always be one’s child.  But it is the idea of having an adult relationship with one’s child that brings a sense of fulfillment to a parent.  As you were growing up, we were not only father-daughter, we were friends.  I think we always enjoyed being together and doing things together.  And I want that to continue through your adult life and as I grow old and crotchety. 

And he brought to grand-parenting the same need and desire to establish unique ties with each of his grandchildren.   My father poured himself into his grandchildren.  He wasn’t the typical grandparent who spoils his grandchildren with gifts and treats (though there were no shortage of those).  He was a grandfather who spent much time having meaningful conversations with his grandchildren.  Each year he scheduled a special day out with them. These trips included visits to The Museum of Natural History, The Nutcracker Ballet, the Liberty Science Center, Bowcraft Amusement Park and The Treetops Adventure Course at the Turtle Back Zoo.  He invested his time and love in supporting their hobbies and interests by eagerly and proudly attending their piano recitals, baseball and basketball and soccer games, and attending all of their school concerts and graduations.  He cooked for them and with them.  He visited them when they were sick.  He joked with them.  He loved them with every ounce of his being.  In fact, it was his pure love for them that helped him muster the energy while he lay in the ICU with stage IV cancer, a broken hip, pneumonia, blood clots in both lungs and tubes in his nose and all over his body to lift his head up, open his eyes wide and put a smile on his face to have one last and personal conversation with each of his grandchildren.  He asked Allie how many more times she planned on reading the Harry Potter books.  He asked Emma to write a song about the two of them with the lyrics “I love my Poppy and my Poppy loves me.” He congratulated Alex on sinking a basket at his game the day before and discussed his play practice and busy schedule.  He comforted Will and told him not to remember him like this.  To remember him cooking and driving him around and being fun poppy.  Watching these conversations happen was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.  Because it was watching sheer love between a man and his grandchildren.

Like The Little Prince cared for and treasured his rose, my father cared for and treasured his family.  And not a day went by that he didn’t tell my mother how much he loved her.  Although most of us in this room, myself included, saw him as a near flawless man, the truth is that he grew a lot because of my mother.  My father was NOT perfect.  And from what I hear he made a lot of bad decisions in his younger years.  My mother shared a letter with Sarah and me after he died that my father had written to her after they had had what seemed to be a pretty serious fight.  In the letter my father thanks my mother for having faith in him, for having faith in his dreams and for having faith in his potential.  He told her that he needs her in his life.  He needs her to be with him to achieve their shared vision in life.  The letter was probably about ten pages long.  The final line of the letter read, “I love you.  My life is dedicated to you.”  And though there were certainly bumps along the way, and undoubtedly times when that dedication was tested, he lived up to his promise.  My father’s dedication to my mother and to his family became the very essence of who he is.

One of the most famous lines from The Little Prince is “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”  When we were growing up on the second floor of a two family house in North Bergen, we didn’t have a washing machine or dryer.  So on Saturday mornings, my dad would bring us to the laundromat with him.  While he would do the laundry we would go to the arcade next door and have lunch at Burger King.  But we would always help him fold the laundry.  Sometimes, for lunch we would get deli sandwiches and eat together as a family in the living room while watching American Gladiator on TV. On Friday nights, we would rent movies from Blockbuster and order pizza.  We didn’t do a lot of extravagant things.  To many they probably seemed ordinary.  But my dad loved that family time.  It was his most cherished possession. 

One of MY favorite lines from The Little Prince is when the rose says to The Little Prince, “I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”  This reminds me so much of what my dad told Allie and Alex in each of their last conversations. He told them, “In life, good things and bad things will happen.  But it’s important to always focus on the good things.”  My father was an optimist.  He loved life.  He loved his family.  And he loved that we loved him.  There is no doubt that every single person who loves him is going to miss him – his corny jokes, his delicious cooking, his reliability, and his honest love.  But as The Little Prince said to the aviator before he left, “when your sorrow is comforted (time soothes all sorrow) you will be content that you have known me.  You will always be my friend.”

Inspiration & Connection

Often people ask me why I post so many inspirational quotes on my social media accounts.  Occasionally, people poke fun at me for doing so.  I usually pay no mind to their teasing or judgment.  But I decided that today is the perfect day to respond to those who don't understand me.
Today is National Suicide Prevention Day.  While I have never been directly impacted by the suicide of a loved one, I have family members, friends and acquaintances who have been.  The truth is that life is hard.  Life is so very, very hard.  And although life can be filled with amazing experiences and wonderful people and unconditional love, it can also feel very lonely and can be extremely difficult to navigate.  People struggle on a daily basis with relationships, finances, body image, career choices, physical illness, mental illness, loss, and on and on.  Unfortunately, the pressure we experience to be productive and successful and to have it altogether has made us feel as though perfection rather than being human is mandatory.  And so many times we hide our struggles out of fear of being judged or mocked or criticized or rejected.  And so we feel lonely.  Feeling lonely is heartbreaking.  It can be so overwhelming and consuming that it can paralyze us.  It can lead us to dark places within ourselves where we can become lost. And we can become lost without anyone ever realizing it because we force a smile, we fight through the day, and we pretend.  And the more lost we feel and the more we pretend, the deeper we sink.

This is why I post so many "inspirational" quotes.  I prefer to call them "connection" quotes.  I may see a post by someone else that resonates with me.  And when that happens I feel a connection.  I feel a connection because often times these quotes are admissions that not everything is perfect in their life.  And I feel a connection because these quotes are also filled with hope and faith and love.  I believe that with hope and faith and love we can battle through hard times.  It is how I live my life - with the belief that although things may not be perfect, although things at times may feel bleak, there is always hope.  And so I share quotes and images that may fill others with the same sense of connection and hope and faith and love.  So that they know that they are not alone.

I am not suggesting that sharing quotes on social media is a way to prevent someone from taking their own life, it is simply one way that we can acknowledge to each other that life is hard.  That we are all in this together.  That we need to act with kindness and compassion and love.  We have no idea what others are struggling with.  So we need to be gentle with one another.  We need to be forgiving and understanding.  We need to have patience.  We need to stop judging.  Life is hard enough already.  Let's not make it harder on each other.

Constants and Variables

The only constant in our lives is ourselves.  The only thing that we can control is who we are, who we want to be, and what we want to put out into this world.  Everything else in this world is a variable.  They are the things, people and circumstances that are constantly changing and of which none of us has any control over.  The only thing that we can control is how we react or respond to the variables in our lives.  This is why it is so important to have a very strong sense of self - to know exactly who we are and to remember, on a daily basis, what we want to put out into the world.  Knowing who we are and what we want to put out need to be very intentional.  Being in touch with ourselves has got to be a daily practice.  So many of us fall in to the trap of defining ourselves by certain variables in our lives and we plan our lives by trying to achieve certain variables without taking time to really and truly know who we are and what we want to put out into the world.


For example, my life has been, and was intentionally planned to be, achieving different milestones over time: go to college, start a career, excel in said career, meet a man, get married, buy a house, have children.  I will call that my "Roadmap for Living".  We all need a roadmap for living, especially in a society that places many expectations on people.  However, the problem is that many people mistake their roadmap for living with their roadmap to happiness.  They are both essential tools to have with you on life's journey but they are very different and they are definitely not interchangeable.  The "Roadmap to Happiness" is our constant while the "Roadmap for Living" is a collection of variables.   I believe that most people try to achieve happiness by setting goals to achieve certain variables for themselves.  We treat life like a checklist and assume that checking off all the boxes on the list will make us happy.  In reality, this checklist, this "Roadmap for Living", is just that -  a plan for how we will make a living, how we plan to spend the days of our lives and who we plan to spend them with.  Its really like a life long time management tool.  While it may have some bearing on the joy and satisfaction we experience from day to day, there is ultimately no correlation between a successfully checked off list and a person's actual happiness. We need only to look at people who have faced serious struggles in their lives to know that this true. 


I am certain that we have all met someone or have heard stories of people who, despite facing major unexpected and unwelcome obstacles in their lives, have become an inspiration to someone, or in some cases to thousands of people.  Perhaps we have heard stories of an athlete who lost their legs to a vicious infection and went on to win gold at the Paralympics and become a motivational speaker.  Or the single mother who works several jobs to send her children to college and never resents or feels bitter.  Or the parents whose child requires constant medical attention but who are the first to lend a helping hand to friends in need.  There are countless examples of people whose human spirits have carried them through challenging and painful circumstances.  I truly believe that these people, these individuals who have a seemingly unbreakable human spirit, all have one thing in common.  They know who they are and they know what they want to put out into the world.  They know that happiness is a choice.  They know that how they respond to the variables that they encounter will ultimately determine how happily and fully they live their lives.  This remains constant.  Their human spirit remains constant.  They have control over who they currently are, who they want to be and what they put out into the world.  They have chosen to be positive and strong and dedicated and persistent.  They have decided that rather than putting bitterness and anger and desperation and sadness into the world that they want to put love and compassion and joy and optimism into the world. Yes they are human beings, and I am sure that they experience moments of anger and bitterness and desperation and sadness.  But they don't linger in those feelings because it is not true to who they really are and who they want to be.  That is not their constant. 


It is tempting to get caught up in the notion that if "this thing" happens, then I will be so much happier.  If I get this new job.  If my house was nicer.  If I was thinner.  If my husband was more romantic.  These things are all variables.  Unless we can truly get know who we are and what we want to put out into the world we will spend our days feeling defined by our variables rather than feeling in control of who we are and how we want to respond to the variables in order to remain true to ourselves.  Unless we make a choice everyday to be who we want to be and to have our actions follow suit, then we are simply going through the motions of living and waiting for happiness rather than creating it on our own.