"Steve beat me about two thousand times more than I beat Steve."

[Remarks at my father's memorial from his friend and chess partner Bob Berman. Listen here.]

My name is Bob Berman. I remember very well when my friendship with Steve really began. I started trying to earn a living down in the Hall of Justice in 1973 or 1974, and I became acquainted with Steve as just one of the wonderful cast of characters that worked down there. But we weren't especially friendly. In 1975 I took a job at the public defender's office, and one afternoon that year I was at my desk, which was just one of many desks in this large ugly room. And Steve walked in. He was obviously done with whatever he had to do that day and was just looking for someone to have a talk with. So we started talking and at one point he innocently said, "Do you play chess?" I said "Well, as a matter of fact I do."

That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. Within a week we had started a routine, because everything with Steve ends up as a routine. On Wednesday nights I would go to Steve's apartment; he and Jean would normally have an early dinner; I'd show up after their dinner, and Steve and I would play chess. For hours. Probably for about four hours. And we would play a lot of games, because we would agree the week before what opening we were going to play. So we weren't just playing chess, we were of course learning: learning the openings and learning the variations. And this won't be surprising for me to tell you that Steve was a much better chess player than I was. I don't know if he had a superior intuitive grasp of the game, but he had two very important advantages. One, he was smarter than I was, and when you play chess, there's not a lot of luck involved, so if you are smarter than your opponent then you're going to do well. The other advantage, which was more amazing to me, is he had this incredible memory of chess games we had played - as the years went on, chess games we had played years ago, and positions we were in. Steve would never make the same mistake twice. I would fall into the same stupid opening traps over and over again -- "Oh, I'm in fried liver," you can imagine what being in fried liver is. We would be in the middle of a game, maybe twenty moves in, and I would make a move, and Steve would say, "No Bob, a couple of years ago you tried that move." And he never complained; that's all he'd say; but what he was saying was, "It didn't work two years ago, it's not going to work now."

I rarely -- and we played for forty years, played a lot in those early years, when I moved away from San Francisco we didn't play as often but we still played -- and I rarely beat Steve at chess. That's not to say I always lost; we played to a lot of draws. For Steve a draw I think was just a draw; for me it was a tremendous victory. But if I had to estimate how many times Steve beat me, as opposed to me beating Steve, I would say a conservative estimate is that Steve beat me at least two thousand times more than I beat Steve. And when you're playing a competitive game and you're losing two thousand times more often than your opponent, you have to be able to do this without letting it bother you. And it was okay, I kind of expected it, and for the first twenty years it didn't really bother me. And then twenty years ago Jane and I got together. And every day after I had played chess with Steve the night before, Jane would say, "Oh Bob, how did you do at chess last night?" Well except on those rare occasions when I actually did well, I would mumble, "I did fine." I hated that question.

Well, as the years went on, our lives changed, sometimes tragically, sometimes just in the way things change, but our friendship only grew. When Jean died, Steve and I would start going out to dinner on Wednesday nights; we'd go for an early dinner, and then we'd go back to his apartment and play a couple games of chess. We took turns choosing the restaurants. I could choose any restaurant I wanted, but Steve was a meat-and-potatoes man, he didn't want anything exotic or anything new. So my choice was somewhat limited. I chose a lot of Italian restaurants. When it was Steve's turn, he would usually choose the Pacific Cafe. I think he was very fond of their butter. And at some point, let's say just about the dinners, I still loved playing chess, but chess is a very quiet sport, you don't really talk to people. But at these dinners we would talk. And as you've heard from other people, Steve loved theater, and he loved movies; so do I, and we would talk about those things, we'd talk about books, and we'd talk about science, and the conversations were wonderful, I just had to be careful never to make an overgeneralization, or I would be suddenly attacked. But I learned that, and those dinners were really fun.

After a while we started going to plays together once in a while in San Francisco, and Berkeley, and that added to our friendship. And then a number of years ago, Steve started coming up to Ashland every year, with Jane and with me, and we'd go to seven, eight plays. The three of us we'd all have seats together, we'd go out to dinner a number of times during that week. That was a great experience and just added to our friendship. It seems like everything we did added to our friendship. And I'm going to miss Steve very much. He was a very important friend to me and a wonderful man.

But Jane, in answer to your question, how did I do at chess with Steve? ... I did great.

"You should not hate your adversary."

[Remarks at my father's memorial from his friend and colleague Harris Taback. Listen here.]

Hello everybody. I'm Harris Taback. The reason I was asked to speak here today, I'm speaking on behalf of the Criminal Trial Lawyers Association of Northern California. I am a former president of that organization, probably about four years ago I finished my two-year term. The organization started well over fifty years ago, and it started as, and continues to be, an organization that is a community of criminal defense lawyers. We would put on events, we would support each other, it was a place to have lunch, to hear a speaker, and to be part of a community. When I took over as president, I put on, over two years, probably ten or so events. Steve Scherr, who had been a buddy of mine now for a long time, long retired, came to every one of those events. He didn't miss one. He was the first guy to respond "I'll be there," send in his check. He just loved being part of the community.

But he wasn't just a part of it, and you all know this, but to family members and friends outside our community, you gotta know it's not enough to say that he was a great criminal defense lawyer, that he was magnificent at trial. I don't think there was a lawyer, let alone prosecutor or defense attorney, in the Hall of Justice, practicing at 850 Bryant Street, that was more respected by his peers; that was more respected by the judiciary. If you were having breakfast with Steve Scherr at the cafeteria at 850 Bryant, the guy couldn't swallow a bite of food without lawyers running up to him, with motions, showing him police reports, asking "What do you think? What do you think?" And he had time, he cared, to answer all of these questions.

The thing about Steve, and Jim pointed out, there was no ego involved. It wasn't like you were coming up to him and he just loved that kind of attention. But when you talked to Steve with your issue, it was equally important to know that you, also, could not have an ego. Because if you had an ego, it was going to get hurt. Honest. Brutal. There were times when I just wanted to give him my bar card, like what am I doing practicing law. He would ask questions, I would ask him for advice and he'd ask me these detailed questions, and I would say, "Well, who knows?" and he would look at me and he would say, "Well, I would hope your client's lawyer does!"

We would talk, we would talk it out. I was doing a trial in Lakeport, an attempted murder case where my client shot several rounds of a shotgun, several shells through a closed door and almost killed the individual on the other side of the door, and but for emergency surgery the person would have died. So we had a defense, a heat-of-passion defense. I had forensic psychiatric work done on the client. I was a much younger lawyer at the time. Steve agreed to have lunch with me before I drove up to begin the trial, and I thought it was going to be a quick lunch. So we sit down, and I start asking him some questions about my direct examination, which you would think is simple enough, to just ask a doctor some questions: "What did you do," and "What did you read," and "What are you considering," so different than cross. I started running some ideas by Steve, and that lunch turned out to be about three and a half hours, where Steve was like, "Okay. And no. And this is how you do it." We sat down and wrote the questions out, as Jim was talking about, question by question. I just can't tell you what it felt like to have that type of wisdom shared with you by a guy who could not have been more generous. And it worked; we beat the attempted murder charge; the direct examination that he prepped me for I think helped tremendously.

I'm not the only lawyer that would come up here and tell stories about how he mentored them. I am kind of convinced that in thirty-five years of practicing the guy never picked up a check in San Francisco at lunch. Because we were always paying him essentially for his meal.

So the question becomes that I have, is, what does he leave us with? How do we process this loss? I'll tell you, Michael Gaines and I would have dinners with Steve Scherr at Alfred's Steak House, probably four times a year for many many years now. We know Steve's love of literature, we would talk books, Michael and Steve would talk books I've never heard of. I'd sit and listen to these book reports that these guys were doing. Movies. Music. We've heard of his love for the Dead, and Baez, Steve loved Bob Dylan as well, and he could talk about all those subjects for hours with great knowledge. But this was the guy who once taught me the greatest lesson. My takeaway from Steve and my relationship with him. He was taking me to a Warriors game in the 90s, picked me up, driving to the Oakland Coliseum, and we're talking about this trial that we had coming up, we had co-defendants. And at a certain point you know, this young lawyer, I was coming from a much more radicalized position than Steve, sort of the Abbie Hoffman school of thought. And I'd say to Steve, "I hate prosecutors. I hate 'em." And he looked at me like I was out of my mind, like, "What are you talking about? What do you mean, you hate prosecutors?" I said, "Well how could anybody, how could you charge someone with a crime and stand up there and try to put them in jail, anyone who can do that, you know." And he gives me this civics lesson. About how people need to do that! There needs to be a social system in place, there are people that have to take on a job of being a prosecutor. That doesn't mean they're a bad person. You should not hate your adversary.

And that lesson in civility is something that came to me the other night, preparing for a hearing on Friday. To stay civil, as I was tossing and turning. Not to go in and wrestle. You're the face of your client, you gotta be the face of reason. Take the higher moral ground. And I won't forget the lesson of civility: but I also won't forget his dedication to what he spent his adult life doing, which is standing up for those of us who are weak, those of us who have been accused by the power of the state, demanding that justice be served, that the proceeding be fair, that the defense be competent. I'll tell you, one of his clients is here today. She doesn't know many of you. But I ran into her years ago at a concert, and we started chatting it up, and she said what do you do, and I said, "I'm a defense lawyer in San Francisco." She goes "Really! Do you know Jim Collins and Steve Scherr?" I go "Indeed I do." She says, "Well let me tell you something. Those two guys saved my life." Now I have permission, I asked her if it was okay to talk about this, and she said of course. She was a doctor who was charged with murder for how the prosecution thought she handled a child making end-of-life decisions. She said that Jim and Steve could not have been kinder, could not have been more sympathetic, and could not have been there more for her. And of course the two of them put together, a brilliant, brilliant defense. She was not charged; she was allowed to continue practicing, she was able to go on with her life. But she's not forgotten what Steve Scherr has done for her. Jim always would say that Steve is the brains, and that Steve was [laughter]. But Steve would say, Steve always would say that that is not true. That Jim is by far among the smartest guys in the room, don't ever forget that.

Steve's fight for justice, for fairness, for the underdog... I'm figuring as I'm going to close my remarks, how do I tie it together with his love of literature, film, and music. And I thought of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which is an amazing novel, it was turned into an amazing film, and Woody Guthrie, one of Bob Dylan's heroes, wrote an amazing song, The Ballad of Tom Joad. Now Tom Joad was radicalized by the Dust Bowl, and his family's treatment by the powers that be. They were forced to California, where they did not find any welcoming hand, and justice was hard to come by. Tom Joad wound up killing a deputy who had killed Tom Joad's friend, Preacher Casey, who was standing up for the working man, standing up for those among us who needed help and protection. And after Tom Joad killed that deputy he knew his time with his family in this world was over. Tom Joad was leaving his family for good, as he had to skedaddle out of town to beat the deputies on his heels. But he had to say goodbye. Before he left, he went that night to the camp, and he found his mother sleeping, and he went to kiss her gently on the head, to say goodbye. And Woody Guthrie wrote these words, and this is what I'm going to leave you with.

Tom Joad run back where his mother was asleep
He woke her up out of bed
And he kissed goodbye to the mother that he loved
And he said what Preacher Casey said, Tom Joad,
He said what Preacher Casey said.

Everybody might just be one big soul
Well it looks that way to me.
Everywhere that we love, in the day or night,
That's where I'm going to be, Ma.
That's where I'm going to be.

Wherever little children are hungry and crying,
Wherever people ain't free;
Wherever men are fightin' for their rights
That's where I'm going to be, Ma,
That's where I'm going to be.

So I say to all of you, in all those troubles, in all the cases we will continue to do and defend our clients, where people are fighting; just look, and that's where Steve Scherr will be.

"It was like eating lunch with Socrates."

[Remarks at my father's memorial from his friend and colleague Ben Winslow, who practiced law with him for decades. Listen here.]

My name is Ben Winslow, and I worked with Jim and Steve for many many years. When I first met Steve forty years ago, Doug Schmidt brought him to our office and said, this guy wants to rent an office from us. This skinny guy, curly hair, horn-rimmed glasses. He had one corduroy suit that was wrinkled, we all had one suit in those days, many of them like Steve's, and Steve moved in. Webster Street is like a big family. It's an old house: Steve had an office in one of the bedrooms, Jim was in another bedroom, Doug Schmidt was in the dining room, I was in the front room, and this went on for thirty or forty years.

Steve was a mathematician and liked physics, so the other day I was thinking, what could I do mathematical. So I thought well if I had lunch with Steve twice a week for forty years, how many lunches would that be, and I know it's more than twice a week but if I claim more than that Steve if he were here would question my methodology and want to know how I got to two times or three times or four times a week. But it's something like four thousand lunches. And I don't know if you remember that Billy Crystal play "Seven Hundred Sundays" where he talked about the number of Sundays he spent with his father while he was alive; well Jim and I and Doug had four thousand lunches with Steve. That's four thousand discussions, four thousand arguments, four thousand "How do you get that?" We used to say it was like eating lunch with Socrates.

He had this rigorous intellectual thing that he did with you. Even like Josh who's here today, Josh sits in Steve's room now, if you had a trial or something you would go in and talk to Steve about it and you'd be in there for an hour and a half. You'd go in thinking you had a great case and you'd leave thinking you were going to get killed and never get the evidence in and you might as well give up. But by the time you got to trial you'd be glad you went through that because it'd be a rigorous thing, you'd have to support your ideas and your thoughts, it would make you better.

So four thousand lunches. It reminded me, Steve was always fighting his weight. In the early days he was skinny, and then he got heavier and heavier and he wanted to lose some weight. Jim was talking about the pictures in his desk, he had another morning ritual He walked in every morning, he had a paper towel, and he centered it on his desk, and then he placed two glazed donuts on the paper. Pulled out the coffee, took off the top, and then he would eat the two glazed donuts and drink the coffee. I've always been a fit guy and I would walk through and say "Steve, it's going to be hard to lose weight with those two glazed donuts." And after about three months he said, "Maybe I'll cut down to one." And later he did lose a lot of weight.

We had a million conversations with Steve and what I remember most about Steve is that he was a big believer in certain things, and one of the things that he always talked about, he believed everybody's right to practice their religion, but he believed in the separation of church and state. He was a big supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union. A great Woody Allen quote, Steve liked Woody Allen a lot, Woody Allen said, "To you I am an atheist; to God I am the loyal opposition." Steve was the loyal opposition.

He loved to travel. The whole office when Maura got married we all went to Peru, she set up this great trip and we all went to Peru, Jean and Steve went to Peru, told me I think it was one of the great trips of his life. It was a lot of fun - went to Macchu Picchu, the valley of the Incas, had a great, great time. I know his trips with the family to Africa, when he took the grandchildren, he loved those trips, he would plan them out meticulously. Steve was very anal and liked orderly things, and I'm exactly like Steve, so we got along really well. We both line up our money by denominations, all facing the same way, and we took a lot of guff over the years for that. The only thing we didn't do was put it by serial number, that would really be sick.

Steve was a Deadhead, he loved the Grateful Dead. When you work with somebody for forty years, I remember when Rachel was young one weekend he came in one Friday, I said "what's up for the weekend," and he said "Oh, Rachel is going to go somebody's house tonight and kick back with Jack." I said, "Kick back with Jack? Steve, what do you think that means?" He said, "She probably has a friend named Jack." I said "No, they're going to drink a lot of Jack Daniels." He goes "Oh my God!" Rachel, remember this story? [Me out in the audience: "I was so grounded."] Yeah, I busted you.

When Rachel was going to go to high school, Steve got really involved in whether she should go to Washington or Lowell. He was very interested in her education and a very loving and caring father as Jim has already described. He investigated everything, and Rachel went on and did great.

Steve is a mentor to many people. I can't tell you the number of young people who came through the office, talk to him about cases, he always had time for people. They probably spent about three times as long in there as they thought they were going to be in there, but he was very happy to do that. Steve also, as was alluded to earlier, I don't think a lot of people know this about him but you know Steve spent two years in the military. He was very proud of his army service. Rachel tells me he had a great service at the National Cemetery where he's buried, had a bugler, they fired a volley, I think he would have been very proud of that, he was very proud of his service. But at the same time, Steve was patriotic, but when he didn't agree with something, he didn't agree with it. I think that's, a very loyal American but he would state his opinion in a great way.

The final thing I just wanted to say is that Rachel called Jim and I when Steve wasn't doing well and Jim, myself, Michael Gaines and Doug Schmidt went up to visit Steve, we flew up for the day and stayed and then came back, and I think Tito and Steve Eckdish had been up there for many days before. I've always been Steve's lawyer, so when this all happened to Steve and was very sudden, Steve did a lot of talking with me and made a lot of plans and I went to see him. I think when you go through life you learn certain lessons from people, you know when you're a kid you want to play sports, you see somebody play baseball and that's how you want to play baseball. When you're a young lawyer you go watch a trial to see somebody be good in trial that's how you know how to do a trial. When I saw Steve go through this, and how he did with the grace and dignity and class that he did it with, I thought to myself, I just hope that I will be half the person that he was the way he went through all this. How he did it, and how he was concerned about everybody, how they were doing, how they were feeling, how Rachel was doing, and his grandchildren. It's pretty amazing to watch how elegant he was about it and dignified. It was an amazing thing for me, I learned a lot just watching him.

Steve probably didn't believe in heaven. But if he goes there, and maybe he has, he's probably sitting there with Socrates right now having an argument.

"Steve never, that I can remember, got mad."

[Remarks at my father's memorial from his friend and colleague Jim Collins, who practiced law with him for decades. Listen here.]

Good afternoon. I'm Jim Collins; I'm one of the lawyers from Webster Street, and I've known Steve thirty years or more, practiced law together. One of the things about Steve that I have told an awful lot of people, but I would never dare tell him, was he may be the smartest person I have ever met. The last thing you'd want to do is tell him that. The fact is you could talk to Steve about all kinds of things. All the lawyers here who practice criminal law know how smart he was when it came to the practice of criminal law. But you could talk to Steve about books, about movies, about sports. You could talk to him about history. You didn't really want to talk to him about politics, but you could. He was knowledgeable, so knowledgeable on all those subjects, it was amazing.

The fact is, one of his characteristics that stands out to me, is Steve never, that I can remember, got mad. Might get agitated; I'll get to that in a second. But he never got mad. He was always calm; he was always thoughtful. The agitation, though, was something that some of us at the office could create. For instance, Steve, hard to believe, hated, really couldn't stand looking at really horrible crime scene pictures of bodies, just ghastly photographs, he hated looking at them. You would think that's crazy, conisdering how many murder cases he did, how many he second-chaired for Doug Schmidt, myself, Michael Gaines. Hated them. So what Schmidt and I and Winslow would do periodically is Steve had a ritual. When he came into the office in the morning, when he got into his office, he would open his middle drawer, and he'd put his wallet in there and close it. Then when he'd go to lunch, he would always go to the bathroom, and then wash his hands and come out, and get the wallet out of the middle drawer. Well once in a while, we would pick some of the most ghastly pictures you ever saw, and once he went to the bathroom, we'd sneak into his office, open the door, and put it right on top of the wallet. Then we'd go into my office, and we'd pretend like I'm talking business, and when he'd come out of the bathroom, "Come on Steve, we're going to lunch." Well he'd go into his office, he'd open, and you would hear something. It would be an "Anh!" or some sort of noise like "Oh my god." And we would start laughing like kids in high school. And that's really what we were. Steve would come in and he was agitated and he would see us laughing and he'd say, "Winslow," or Schmidt, Collins, and then he'd start laughing.

The times at Webster Street - The other thing you could do to Steve, I have to tell you this. Those of you who know Steve, his desk had to be perfect. Everything had to be absolutely straight. You couldn't move. So what you would do, when you were talking to him his computer was to the left. When he'd turn away you'd just move his books just a bit. And he'd turn back and he'd look at it, and he'd straighten it. I got to three times before he realized I did it. And he'd get agitated and he would laugh. We had an awful lot of those laughs at Webster Street. We had a great time over at Webster Street.

One of the things about Steve is he was really wonderful to work with on a serious trial. Unlike most criminal lawyers, and I include all of you here, he really didn't have a big ego involved in the trial of the case. He could sit there with you and not really want to get up there and do the cross because he could do it better, like probably most of us would. He was really wonderful to work with because he was always calm, always thoughtful, he always, I like maybe many of you when questions would come out from the jury it was oh my god, I've lost. And he would be, "You don't know what they're thinking." He was always calm. A great example, we were trying a case, and it was an insanity defense, and we're putting on a psychiatrist, guy had great credentials, he was the head of the school of psychiatry at Langley Porter [the psychiatric hospital at UCSF]. And he was on our side. These amazing credentials, but he had never ever testified in court. And so we had him prepared, and we go in there very nervous, and I start questioning him, and all of a sudden I'm realizing, "Boy this guy is really good. He's really good." and I look down and Steve's written a big note: "He's great! Keep him talking!" So I keep going, and I realize, I'm done. I lean down to Steve after a moment and I say "I got nothing else" and he says "Keep him talking" and I say "What am I going to say?" So he says, he gives me a question, as I stand up to ask the question, he starts writing in big print, questions for me to go, and for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, the ventriloquist wrote the questions, the dummy asked them, and it worked perfectly. And that was a perfect example of working with Steve. Because the witness was great; I was good; but all because of the brains of Steve, sitting there, without that ego and willing to work with you. He was just wonderful to work with.

You could go on telling Webster Street stories and talking about the law and Steve, because we all know how smart he was. But you know, to me what's more important is somebody, especially when we come to the end, it's not how good a lawyer you are. It's what kind of a person you are. And those of you who know Steve know, he cared about people. He really cared about people. He cared about his friends. He loved his sister Judith. He loved Jean, who left us way too soon, and he adored and was so proud and so proud and so loved Rachel. And the last few years Dale and the two grandsons. It was just wonderful. And to me as I say at the end it's not really about whether you're a good lawyer or not, it's what kind of person you are, and to me, to me, Steve Scherr was a really wonderful, good human being, and to me that's the highest compliment I could pay anybody. And I'm going to miss him.

"Steve was our Siri."

[Remarks at my father's memorial from his cousin Marcia, who still lives in Baltimore. Listen here.]

The last time I saw Steve was in the spring of last year, when we gathered together to remember our aunt E.T., who had passed away in January of 2015. He reminded me then that I now was the matriarch of our family, like I had to know. Little did I imagine at that time that I would be attending his memorial so soon after. I knew Steve before he was born, when his mother, my aunt Esther, was pregnant. Born in DC, he lived in Parkchester, New York as a young child with Esther and his dad Eddie. They moved to Takoma Park, Maryland, where Judith joined the family. As a baby we called Steve "Porky," because his hair always stood straight up in the air like a porcupine. He was always very precocious, and we never knew what would come out of his mouth. His mom used to tell us this story, that when she first visited him at an open house in kindergarten, he introduced his teacher as, "This is the lady I told you looks just like a mouse." Years later, when the family moved to Baltimore, the Scherrs lived not far from our family and we spent a lot of time together. Steve was always brilliant, but not the easiest of teenagers. He won a National Merit Scholarship at Johns Hopkins University, but preferred playing pool or bridge to attending classes. He left Hopkins, worked at Bethlehem Steel for a while, returned to Hopkins for a while, and then enlisted in the army. He thought this would be a good opportunity for him to travel and to see the world. But this was not to be. After taking an aptitude test, he scored so high that he was placed in army intelligence. Much to his disappointment, he remained at Fort Holabird [in Baltimore] as an instructor his entire time in the service. It was here that he first whet his appetite for studying law as a career. Most of you here today know where that interest took him, and how well he succeeded in his field here in San Francisco. And to the family back in Baltimore, Steve was our Siri. If E.T. or I had a question about movies, literature, just about anything, we'd call him and get the answer immediately. He was very especially close to my sister Linda. She was the only cousin she invited to her sweet sixteen party, and through the years they remained best of friends. When he visited us in recent years in Baltimore, he would stay with Linda and watch old movies until all hours. Linda is so sorry she was unable to be here today, she deeply misses Steve. There are so many, many things I could say about this special man - his intellect, his wit, his humor - but most of you are already aware of them. The one thing that stands out so much for me was his love and devotion to his family: his wife Jean, his daughter Rachel, son-in-law Dale, grandsons Jordan and Aaron, sister Judith and her wife Deena, his mom Esther and his dad Eddie. As a child and a young man he gave his mother a rough time, but in later years he showed her such love and admiration it brought much unexpected joy to her life. It's hard for me to think of Steve in the past tense. He will always be alive in my heart.

"Early on, I imagined I would pay him back."

[Dale's eulogy to Dad, as read at the SF memorial.]

So I’m the guy in the room who knew Steve as a father-in-law. And what a tremendous father-in-law he was!

I was a nervous wreck when I first came to San Francisco in 1989. I had driven down from my parent’s small farm in Idaho to visit Rachel in her city. Back in the early years, Steve could certainly make a green college student nervous. If he had you under cross-examination for poorly supported opinions and shoddy knowledge of the facts—well, look out. Steve always knew the facts.

Despite his gravitas and stentorian voice, he was a softie of a father-in-law. When I married Rachel four years later, I had dropped out of college and was working nightshift as a veterinary technician. These were not ideal husband-of-beloved-daughter credentials. But Steve threw us a great party in Portland and made a fine toast. He was always happy to have me in the family.

I can’t begin to count how many meals Steve paid for since I first came to San Francisco. He bought airline tickets so we could attend Alan’s seders, sent checks to me during some of the destitute undergraduate years, bankrolled family trips to Yellowstone National Park, to Hawaii, to Tanzania, to Arizona. Early on, I imagined I would pay him back. But he was certainly never going to let me write him a check.

The dollars I can tally up. What is really impossible to measure is how much fun and spirit Steve brought to the table. He sang with wild abandon when the mood struck him: a little Johnny Cash or Beatles rolling down some highway with my boys. Grateful Dead or Joan Baez back in the San Francisco apartment. Sometimes he topped it off with ridiculous dancing with his wife Jean. Steve, you had a voice for the courtroom—not so much for singing. But you never let that get in the way of having a good time.

And as far as I know, Steve never let anything get in the way of being himself. He was the same Steve whether in a tuxedo at a wedding, a suit in the courtroom, or his sweats on the couch. In a lot full of plush lawyer cars, he had the dinged-up 1994 Camry with the busted mirror and scraped door. He always needed a better reason to do something than just because someone told him to. Let's take, for example, getting dressed. You probably don’t know this: Steve put his shoes on first, then his pants, always. It’s more comfortable to tie your shoes before your pants are on, and once your pants are on, you’re ready to go. Of course.

He had his habits. I’m pretty sure he read every single San Francisco Chronicle that landed on the steps to his apartment. And we all knew if we wanted to change his habits, we needed a damn good reason and plenty of time for arguments and cross-examination. Even then the odds were really long. In the 25 years I visited him in San Francisco, there was always Canada Dry Ginger Ale and Velveeta in the refrigerator. The butter was in the same container. The knives were impossible to cut with, the M&M’s, whiskey, and vodka were in the same cabinet. He never rushed to change. Some of the things in his apartment could have used updating, but the constancy of 1710 Cabrillo Street was reassuring.

And what was most immutable of all was his love and support. He loved his city. He loved his people. He loved his family. Everyone said they could count on Steve. He was such a rock in the river.

When Steve was living with us in Seattle early this year, Rachel invited people to write him a toast, and we read those to him. It was really a sweet time for him, for Rachel and I, and for our boys. (And let me just say he cherished those toasts.) I want to finish with words from one of those toasts. Alicia Walker and Rachel were neighborhood kids together in the Richmond in the 1970s. Alicia’s letter was one of the last things we read together. So, from Alicia to Steve:

“ I have a memory of you and Rachel that I cannot quite place in time. We had been at some event that involved balloons, and as we left, you and Rachel were walking in front of me holding hands and a balloon and then you turned to one another, said something I couldn't hear, and then let the balloon go. You both had a look of absolute delight on your faces as you watched it fly away, and were so absolutely content in each others' company. It was a really a lovely sight. As I get older, I realize how very rare those simple moments of complete comfort in another person's presence are, and how being able to have that connection with another person is really among the greatest accomplishments in life.”

Indeed. Steve Scherr connected with so many of us. We were so lucky to share our time with him, and we will always love and cherish him, and keep his joyfulness in our hearts.

"One of the most beautiful cities in the world"

[This is the eulogy I read at Dad's memorial in SF. It is about half the same as my Seattle eulogy.]

Thank you all so much for being here today to honor and remember my father, Stephen Joseph Scherr. He was born in 1940 in Washington DC and grew up in Baltimore. After two years of college and military service, in 1965 he moved here, to San Francisco, joining his sister Jes and his parents who had moved here a few years before. He married my mother Jean in 1969. They wore paisley pants in a little cottage on Telegraph Hill and I have the pictures to prove it. He was not a hippie, he was a “hippie sympathizer,” in his words (a joke I only got recently). I was born in 1971, and soon after that my parents moved to the Richmond District, where I grew up, and where my father lived until he moved in with us in January, just after his diagnosis.

He loved San Francisco. Once when I was admiring a view of the Golden Gate Bridge he said, “Your mother and I had the good taste to raise you in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.” They raised me to enjoy the advantages of living here: thanks to them I spent my childhood in Golden Gate Park, my adolescence walking from one side of the city to the other with my friends (because they wisely declined to let me drive the car), and much of high school at the Exploratorium, which eventually shaped my career in physics.

I was very aware of my father’s professional life and very much inspired by it. As most of you know, he defended some clients that non-lawyers might find distressing. My grandmother (his mother) did not see how he could stomach representing them. But I learned from him that for the American judicial system to work, everyone needs the best representation they can receive. I saw that he loved representing the underdog, being the underdog, helping to keep the system honest. I learned that ideally, the legal system protects us all from our own knee-jerk condemnations in favor of a more deliberate, more rational process – a perspective that serves me well in the sciences. My father was well aware that the system is flawed; his lifelong opposition to the death penalty was based in his knowledge that the system is racist, among other problems. But on the whole he respected social systems, and set an example of working to help us all live up to our ideals. He also set an example to me as someone who loved his work: he was grateful to have a job he enjoyed and was good at, and to have the opportunity to help individual people who needed it.

Everyone who knew my father knew him to be reliable. This might make him sound boring, and to be honest he was extremely predictable: he wore the same clothes for decades, ate the same foods, wore the same style glasses, drove the same car. More importantly, though, he was reliable in the sense that he kept commitments he made to other people. He generously invited people to rely on him, and then used his knowledge and resources to do what he said he would do. Whether showing up at the agreed time and place, supporting me through college, mentoring a junior colleague, or defending the accused, everyone knew that he would be there and live up to his word. He was solid.

His final illness was bewildering to him. It was completely unexpected, and its progress was so rapid. Every week brought new symptoms, new procedures. We never adjusted. But we were side by side every step of the way. During his illness we were able to bring him to live with us and take the best possible care of him. He and I made every decision together and were constant companions for his last two months, along with my husband Dale and our two kids, Jordan and Aaron, ages 11 and 8. Along with his sister Jes and sister-in-law Deena, we gave each other every kind of love and support and emotional safety that a family can give. You all helped too: some of you came to visit, and many others sent toasts, which we read aloud to him among family, laughing and crying and learning what he has meant to people. I will miss my father more than I can say; but I am grateful to have spent those last few weeks close to him, adding to a lifetime of warm memories.

Thank you all again so much for being here.

Memorial

We held a memorial for Dad in San Francisco, because he lived there for fifty years and had an extensive community of many dear longtime friends and colleagues. We held it at the same place he had chosen for my mother’s memorial: the Golden Gate Club, a beautiful old building in the Presidio, overlooking the bay.

Dale prepared this beautiful welcome sign, along with an incredible slideshow of pictures spanning Dad’s entire life, which played silently throughout the event.

About 100 people attended, including his beloved buddies from the law office on Webster Street, old friends from his first days in San Francisco, the author of a book about Dad’s most famous trial, and many admirers from the Hall of Justice, including lawyers, judges, and detectives.

Another bunch of attendees were dear friends of my aunt's. One said, "I've never attended an event before that was half lawyers and half lesbians," which was pretty funny. Another took all these great photos, for which we are very thankful.

Here is my dear friend Rebekah, who helped Dad (and me) so much throughout Dad’s illness, talking to Mike Weiss, author of Double Play. Rebekah and I have now seen each other through the deaths of all four of our parents.

It was really a beautiful afternoon. It was a gift to me to receive condolences from so many people who loved and respected my father, some of whom are as close to me as uncles and aunts, and some of whom I had never met. It also felt good to give all of these people the opportunity to remember and mourn him together. They loved him, and they needed a chance to embrace each other in loss. Several people spoke from prepared remarks, some of which I will share in other posts.

Estate business

My father’s affairs were simple and orderly. His estate has four items: a checking account, a savings account, an IRA, and a loan to us for the house that we live in. I know everything about all of these items (including account numbers and passwords) and have access to every piece of documentation, current and historical, because my dad was a perfect archivist. I am the executor and the sole beneficiary, and no one is going to contest anything. The business of his estate could not possibly be easier.

Even so it’s not very easy. To start, I went down to the bank where he had his checking account with the will and the death certificate, expecting them to transfer his funds to my account. Nope. Did you know that a person’s will is not the kind of legal document honored by a bank? I did not. Turns out the will is an expression of the deceased’s wish that I be the executor and beneficiary; it takes a court to establish that as a reality. The bank was not able to tell me exactly what documents they need, other than “court documents”; that was up to me to figure out.

With some online research I was able to determine that I needed a “letter testamentary,” and I also found instructions for how to do this without a lawyer. The actual experience down at the King County Superior Court was Brazil-like in its absurd bureaucracy: various documents with long names had to be filed and stamped and notarized and signed and copied, all in a very specific order, on two different floors of the courthouse, some with this clerk, some with that clerk, and some with the judge. There were specific associated rituals – for example, the clerk stamps these, but you stamp these yourself, using the clerk’s stamp. Why? Who knows. Stamp stamp. It all went pretty smoothly except that the will did not appear to some people to be original: it looked to them like a “very good Xerox.” I said it was original. They looked askance. I waited. The clerk ran her fingers over the signatures and said, “We’ll see what the judge says.” The judge looked at me over his glasses and said it looked like a copy. I said again that it was an original. He asked me if I had any siblings, or if my father had a life partner at the time of his death. I said no. He signed the order, and I took it back to the clerk, who said, “The judge accepted this will?” Yes he did. Thus I obtained my letter testamentary, stating that I am the executor. What about my being the sole beneficiary? Apparently that is not the court’s business – that’s just up to the executor, to dispose of the assets properly. I would never have been able to predict which of these things would need court orders and which are left to me. At least it didn’t take all day – in fact I was in and out in an hour. I even found street parking.

I went back to the bank. They accepted all my documents but said they can't give me the money directly; instead, in about three weeks their central processing department will issue a check "to the estate of Stephen J. Scherr." I will open an estate account, deposit this check into it, and then withdraw that money into my own account. This seems supremely pointless to me (why take a perfectly good bank account and put its contents on a paper check made out to the estate that already owned the account?). But I guess it creates a clearer paper trail for the IRS.

Case manager

While Dad lived with us I was not only his companion and primary caregiver much of the time, but also his case manager. This is a job I’ve never had before and good lord, what a job it is. I had no idea. For example, before he moved to Seattle, we had to get his insurance figured out. I heard from a friend that Kaiser Permanente, his HMO, had a strong reciprocal relationship with Group Health, a big HMO in Seattle. I learned all about this from scratch. I made all the calls to set him up as a “visiting member” of Group Health. I learned how long he could be a visiting member and what to do when his membership ran out. I collected brochures comparing benefit packages. Dad took care of having his records transferred, with the assistance of some fantastically helpful people at Kaiser.

In the first several days that Dad was in Seattle he and I had an extraordinary run of medical activities: we saw five different oncologists in three different hospital systems to consider a range of cancer therapies, scheduled a feeding tube insertion, scheduled an evaluation for an esophageal stent (which he did not get), obtained and administered new medications, and went to urgent care multiple times. And it continued from there. Early on, Dad and I did this together, but as he got sicker, it was mostly me. (Less often but crucially, Dale or Jes was in charge.) Over the ensuing weeks, every time we interacted with new medical personnel, someone had to explain exactly what was going on with Dad and what we were there for, then keep track of whatever information, recommendations, and prescriptions were generated by the visit. At home, there were medications and symptoms to track, so that we could report to his other caregivers. (Below is a picture of the whiteboard we used early on.) We were always trying out new things to make him more comfortable, like a heating pad, and a light switch he could operate easily even when he was very weak and confused, and a call button.

I’m saying these things in a long list because there were a lot of them, but in many cases just one of these things was quite taxing in and of itself. For example, the first time Dad was in the hospital, we were approached by a social worker who informed us that Dad now qualified for palliative care, meaning that nurses would come to our home instead of his having to schlep in for doctor visits. We gladly accepted, because his mobility was getting more limited. However, nothing happened after that. I didn’t know how to reach the person that had spoken with me at the hospital, so I did a bunch of online research and calls to customer service trying to figure out how to reach her, remembering only her first name and her general role. The situation was complicated by the fact that Group Health’s relationship with the hospital Dad was in was brand new (they used to partner with Virginia Mason, but had moved to Swedish just ten days before), so no one knew the systems yet. I finally got that person’s number and left a message - on Friday, and again on Monday - but she did not return my call. I made more calls to get the number for the palliative care office (not a number that is readily shared); when I eventually reached them, they told me that we would need a referral. They said the discharge papers from the hospital should have included that referral. I found our discharge papers, but there was no referral there. So I contacted Dad’s primary care provider and asked him to make the referral. He did so; palliative care called me back right away, and made the first home appointment. Whew. Almost everything required this kind of negotiation.

Dad felt lost a lot – disoriented in Seattle, because we were always driving around to some new place, and also confused by the complexity and uncertainty of his medical situation. He felt bad about being such an imposition on us, especially me; but he also trusted us completely, and recognized that he couldn’t do this on his own. Fortunately, I turned out to be an extremely good case manager, if I do say so myself. I learned everything, kept track of everything, and followed up on everything. I helped Dad negotiate difficult decisions. I knew what he needed and made sure his ever-changing lineup of medical personnel and administrators knew what he needed. I created systems to make his care more consistent and easier to coordinate among the different parties involved, like medication spreadsheets. Medical bureaucracy is very frustrating and I was relentlessly pleasant (thank you Sheryl Sandberg), except when I cried, hopefully at strategic moments in the negotiation.

When I’m dying, I want my help. :) Everybody got that?

It was a lot of work. But in our day and age, when medicine is a mosaic of specialties coordinated by a large business, this is a big part of what it means to take care of someone.

Part of life

During Dad’s illness, people frequently asked us how the boys were doing. I think people were concerned that it would be very frightening for kids to be near someone who is dying. This was not our experience. There’s no question that it was sad, for them and for all of us, but it would have been sad no matter where Dad was. 

We were completely honest with the boys about Dad’s condition, starting with the day he was diagnosed. They knew all along that he was dying. But most of the time he was not dying imminently, and they just enjoyed his company in the ways that were available. As he got sicker there were fewer and fewer things that they could do together. But they could watch Warriors games with him, and give him hugs, and tell him their rose and thorn for the day. They knew that their hugs were a special kind of essential medicine that only they could provide. Aaron said, “The medicine that he gets from the doctors and nurses helps with his body, and my hugs are to help heal his soul.” Absolutely right, darling. 

Dale and I were open about our sadness. When I was overwhelmed by my emotions I just went ahead and cried. This made the boys nervous, especially Aaron; but it helped a lot when I explained what I like people to do when I am sad. I said I like people to just be with me, and not change the subject, and maybe give me a hug or a little pat. I said I didn’t want to be cheered up, because when I have big sad feelings I need to just feel them. I called it a “sad attack.” I explained that when I have a sad attack, I will cry for a little while, and then it will pass and I will feel okay again. Once I said what I wanted, both boys carried out my wishes to a T, which was very comforting for me (and I think helped them, too). 

Sometimes Aaron was overwhelmed by sadness, and Jordan less frequently. How not? But after a streak of sadness they would go back to their normal selves. Their teachers, who all knew what was going on, reported that they were fine at school. When we talked to them about Dad’s condition we used nontechnical language, which was better for all of us. They were fascinated by all the science stuff, especially the IV nutrition, which was a complex daily medical ritual involving a lot of interesting gear. They were friendly with all the visiting nurses, and thanked them profusely for their care. When there was something going on that they didn’t want to be close to, they just went to their room and played together. They slept through the toughest stuff – Dad’s worst pain and waking nightmares were in the wee hours, and their room was far enough away that they were not disturbed. Their routines were disrupted because Dale and I were often busy taking care of Dad, and that was a drag for them. But they understood, and managed well enough.

Dad died in our home. Aaron did not want to see his body, which of course is perfectly fine. Jordan, however, wanted to say goodbye, so we sat together in Dad’s familiar bedroom, observing that his body was still and pale and peaceful. Jordan said, “It looks emptier.” After a few minutes, he was ready to leave.

It is easy for me to imagine circumstances that other families could be in that would be traumatizing, for the children and for everyone. In our case, we were sad together, because it is so sad that Grandpa is not with us anymore; but we were not traumatized. We knew we had taken the best care of him that any family possibly could take of their beloved grandpa. We gave him every kind of dignity we knew how to give. We could not keep the cancer away, and he died of it. It is a difficult truth that everything that lives, eventually dies. Our hope is for the kids to experience death as a part of life; heartbreaking, and also the inevitable end of every person’s story.

Coloring

Life with Dad involved many doctor appointments, regular trips to urgent care, and several days in the hospital. I was with him almost all the time. Fortunately, a perceptive friend had given me a beautiful grownup coloring book for my birthday, and this turned out to be the perfect way to while away all that medical downtime with my dad. It took just the tiniest bit of cognition, enough to occupy my mind but not enough to really require anything of me. It was a great conversation piece with all the doctors and nurses. And it engaged me in making something lovely.

Now I’m back to reading books, which I think is a sign that I have more cognition available. (When I tried to read in the hospital I just read the same sentence over and over.) But I really appreciated the coloring when I needed it.

Dad in March

In the seventh week, Dad finally had a feeding tube placed. However, feeding him through it didn’t work: his digestive system was not functioning enough to take the food. In the middle of that week he was overcome with pain unlike anything he had experienced before and went into the hospital. He had multiple dramatic events, including atrial fibrillation. The hospital did a few days of detective work to try and sort out what had caused the emergency pain, but didn’t find anything that they could treat. He was unconscious a lot, his pain was difficult to control, and when he was awake he was delirious, paranoid, and agitated.

In the eighth week, he again rallied from that low point. When we brought him home on Monday, March 7, he was lucid and comfortable: still very weak (barely ambulatory), but able to enjoy our company and the early signs of spring through the living room window. During the day we had precious conversations about what he wanted and did not want, medically. The nights, however, were very hard, with a lot of pain and waking nightmares.

After just a few days, he didn’t wake up anymore. He was at peace when he died, and I was with him.

Dad in February

The third and fourth weeks that Dad was here, he had radiation treatment every day. And he got more and more weak and tired. He was still able to get around the house on his own, but other than the radiation treatments, he just stayed home. He didn’t read or putter on his laptop. He didn’t talk much. He napped a lot. Sometimes he talked on the phone to friends. He was nauseous and in pain, and his medication options were limited by his inability to swallow; we used dissolvable zofran and concentrated oral morphine. He was cold most of the time, so he sat by the fire and dozed.

His fatigue may have been a side effect of the radiation, or the morphine, or a symptom of malnutrition, or cancer – or all of the above. I stopped feeling comfortable leaving him alone for more than maybe an hour, because he was so weak. I sat with him, and did stuff around the house, and did the work of managing his care. Every day was structured by medical events: the radiation treatment, the IV nutrition, nurses visiting to check up on things, equipment being delivered.

We had a ramp built in front of the house. It seemed obvious that he would need it.

On Friday of the fourth week, he had a drastically bad day, involving not only radiation treatment but also a bone scan and some terrible traffic on I-5. He missed his regular dose of pain meds and became extremely exhausted. When he finally got home, he got into bed, and barely woke up for days. His vital signs were poor (low blood pressure, low blood oxygen, rapid pulse, shallow breathing). The visiting nurse warned us that he might be near the end. At some point when he was awake, I told him what the nurse had said, and he asked me to send an email to his friends to come and visit him. They did, and in the fifth week nine beloved friends came to see him. He rallied, and was able to enjoy his visits with every one of them. It felt like a triumph.

Those who could not visit sent letters and video messages, and we read or played these aloud to him. This was awesome; he was very touched, and we all got to learn more about what he had meant to people. Also during this week, his throat got better: he could swallow his own secretions and no longer suffered from nausea. However, he was still very weak and very disabled, needing a lot of physical assistance to do anything, and a lot of active pain management.

In the sixth week, we hired home health aides to take care of Dad 40 hours a week (during weekdays), to relieve me from much of the physical care that I had been doing. They were wonderful with Dad, and I was so grateful for their help. Dad accepted their care, and tried to get a little stronger by doing things like getting out of bed for a little while each day. His throat continued to be better, and he was even able to drink a little water. He was still receiving IV nutrition around the clock, so the drinking was recreational. But it gave him tremendous pleasure. No one can appreciate a sip of cold ice water like a person who thought they would never have one again.

He remained extremely weak and disabled. Getting out of bed was an achievement. His pain was significantly worse, and we were always chasing it. To some extent this is just how it is with cancer, and with opiates – the pain is a moving target (in his case mostly due to his bones crumbling), and the body adapts to the morphine. Nonetheless it was very stressful and worrisome. The goal is to keep the person both comfortable and awake, and it is an elusive goal. By then he had not been out of the house for weeks (since the end of the radiation treatment), and only got out of bed once or twice a day.

During this period Dad lost his sense of time: he would wake up with no feeling for whether it was day or night, Tuesday or Saturday. To be fair, the life of an invalid is not so different from one day to the next, and he was sleeping off and on without regard to the time of day. But my dad was a man who kept meticulous daily routines and a detailed calendar, and the disorientation was very distressing for him. He always wanted to know what time it was, what day it was, whether he had any appointments that day, who was coming to the house, whether there were any visits from friends in the future. He was always looking for his phone, even though he had lost the dexterity to manipulate it and couldn’t read the screen anymore. Eventually we hung a large-print calendar by his bed and wrote his appointments on it. This was very reassuring to him, and useful for all of us.

During this same period Dad had a lot of very weird dreams that felt very real to him. When he was awake, he mostly understood that they could not have actually happened, but not always. Sometimes he dreamt that he didn’t have cancer, but it always turned out that he did. Once he dreamt that there was a giant bar fight and he was “perched in the rafters with his Group Health gun” (Group Health was his HMO). Many of his dreams were violent or threatening, involving war scenes or international espionage. As the weeks went on, his dreams intruded more on his waking life. Once he wanted me to arrange a meeting with the secretary of state because he thought he was going to be kidnapped by the Russians, who secretly had a cure for esophageal cancer; they were going to take him hostage to demonstrate the cure, and demand payment that would compromise national security. One night when Dale was taking care of him he understood himself to be in a bad restaurant, one with very poor service. “Aren’t there any servers in this place?” he complained. “Can’t we just get a cab and get out of here?” Dale, who was providing the best service possible under the circumstances, said “Man, I really wish we could.”

Dad in January

Dad was diagnosed with metastatic esophageal cancer on December 30, after a months-long period of increasingly severe gastric reflux. He spent two weeks closing up his affairs and saying his goodbyes, then flew up to Seattle to live with us. He was comfortable and mobile and very much himself; it was no problem for him to do things on his own. His main symptom was difficulty eating or drinking.

The first week he was here we visited five oncologists to try and form a treatment plan: two medical oncologists (those are the chemo doctors), two radiation oncologists, and one surgeon. Each of them suggested a different course of treatment. The only unanimity was that surgery would not be any use, because the cancer was too widespread (not only deep into the tissue of his esophagus, but also in his bones, liver, and lymph nodes). We came to realize that for Dad there was really no right answer, or put another way, no wrong answer. The argument for radiation treatment was that it would be short, localized to the major problem area, and not hard on your whole body at once the way chemo is. The argument for chemo was that it treats all the cancer everywhere in the body. The side effects of either were expected to be manageable.

Dad liked the radiation plan better and we would have started the radiation treatment right away, but in that same first week (four days after he arrived here), Dad’s throat closed completely so that he could not swallow anything at all. This was both uncomfortable (he couldn’t swallow his own saliva and needed to retch it up often) and urgently dangerous (he had no way to take in fluids or nutrition). We scheduled a feeding tube insertion for the following week, and brought him to urgent care every other day to get fluids and sometimes glucose. What with the oncologist consultations and the urgent care visits, I did a lot of coloring.

At the beginning of the second week that Dad was here, he was supposed to have the feeding tube inserted, but unfortunately his throat was closed so completely they couldn’t do the procedure (it normally involves snaking a 1-mm endoscope down your throat). They checked him into the hospital, expecting to insert the feeding tube with a different and more invasive surgical procedure. The boys came and made come-home-soon signs, and played chess.

Instead of the anticipated surgery, we wound up choosing for Dad to get IV nutrition at home. At the end of that week he started the IV nutrition, and started having nurses visit him at home almost every day to monitor his various medical needs.

During this period Dad’s primary reaction to his illness was bewilderment. He could hardly believe how sick he was – he had been taking good care of himself and monitoring his health actively for many years, including regular doctor visits and blood tests, and yet there was no warning of this extreme condition. He was also bewildered (and annoyed) by the uncertainty of his situation: no one could tell him how long he had, or what symptoms he was likely to develop, or what exactly a particular treatment would accomplish if anything. But we traipsed together to all of his doctor appointments, and weighed his options, and made the best decisions we could.

Burial

About five years ago Dad arranged to be buried at the veterans’ cemetery nearest us, Tahoma National Cemetery. He appreciated that burial is a veterans’ benefit (he was passionately opposed to burial expenses) and he wanted his gravesite to be convenient for us to visit. (Mom was cremated and her remains are in various places, some in my garden.) He arranged all of this in advance, and gave us all the information and documents we would need to carry out his arrangements, which basically consisted of the name of the cemetery and his discharge papers. It was very simple. I wish I had realized in advance that we would also need mortuary services; I had to figure that out the day he died. But I managed it.

This National Cemetery conducts burials with a brief military service. Pallbearers (some military, some family) conveyed the flag-draped casket from the hearse to the front of a shelter in the cemetery. Patriotic words were said, there was a three-volley fire, and taps was played. There was a beautiful ceremony for folding the flag and presenting it to me.

Then the military people left (with the casket), and the rest of us stayed in the shelter for our family service. About twenty of our friends and family were there with us, which was very meaningful to me. (It was a long way to drive, and in the middle of a weekday!) Alan spoke, and I spoke, and Dale spoke. The boys had intended to speak but were too overwhelmed in the moment, which is fine. We said kaddish. It was beautiful and meaningful.

The one part of the ceremony that was a little rough around the edges was that we wanted to put dirt into the grave, and the National Cemetery does not officially allow this. So we figured out where the gravesite was, and drove over there, and surprised the workers who were doing the actual burial. They didn’t argue with us, and we were able to fulfill our ritual.

We opened our home for three days of condolence calls (shiva), and were extremely touched by having people gather around us like that. Some were friends whose support had been crucial to us all along; some were community members who just wanted to show that they cared; some brought food, cards, and donations to Dad’s preferred charities. It was meaningful and heartening to have people fill our house (and our fridge) in this way. I am grateful for it.