100 Interviews

Words in Death: My Father Was a Writer

by: Tasha Kaminsky

My father was an author.

His name was Stuart Kaminsky. He wrote over 80 books, including mystery novels, biographies, graphic novels, text books and even a collection of interviews. In addition to books, he also wrote screenplays for film and television.

His list of credentials and honors is impressive, perhaps his greatest being the given the Grandmaster award of the Mystery Writers of America. My father died two years ago last month.

This is my father’s beginning: He was born on September 29, 1934 in Chicago, Illinois. I will tell you what he told me about himself and his upbringing since it seems empty for me to tell you what you can Google or find in the back of one of his novels.

My father was raised Jewish and grew up poor. A great deal of his self-image was born through antisemitism he experienced at a young age. He frequently told me that I was a fast runner because he was a fast runner. He learned he was a fast runner because he had to outrun other youths who wanted to beat him up for being Jewish. At the same time he recalled his Bar Mitzvah as being a less than meaningful experience and I know he struggled with faith.

He identified as ethnically Jewish, and went on to play for a professional Jewish soccer team, and later write what could be categorized as Jewish literature. In his adult years he was a Zionist, which is to say he supported Israel, and I think a great deal of that stemmed from the belief that Jews need to take care of other Jews, a mentality which I theorize came from growing up in a neighborhood where he feared being seriously hurt because of his ethnicity.

My father also identified as an athlete from the time he was young. He played basketball and soccer for his high school, and went on to play soccer for the University of Illinois. In his senior years he played softball with men his own age, and coached youth basketball and soccer. He stayed up until late at night watching the Cubs and the Bulls play (he was a diehard Cubs fan, never failing to dig up his Cubs hat as he watched their games).

When I look at pictures of my father from his teen years it’s easy to see he was handsome and he also took himself seriously. There’s one picture I have in mind, I think he’s sixteen, and he’s wearing a leather jacket (collar popped) and looking quite surly.

I had the pleasure of meeting one of my father’s high school friends a few years ago. He described my father as both popular and a loner, painting a picture that said my dad was indeed “too cool for school.” He was a troublemaker (some things never change) and aloof. I think he often took on the role of leader amongst other Jewish boys at his school, and I think he acted like he didn’t enjoy that role but secretly did.

“There is no such thing as writer’s block.” My father told me this from the time I was too young to understand what writer’s block was. When I did finally understand what it was I asked my dad when he started writing. I wanted to prove there was a time that he had writer’s block or had stopped.

He wrote his first story when he was 12. It was a mystery and it had characters based on the tenants of the apartment building he lived in. He showed his parents the story and they didn’t seem to really get it. This embarrassed my father, and for a long time after he hid his obsession with reading and writing. I don’t think people who knew my father growing up could have anticipated the direction his life would go in. He was a rare instance of a child who could really keep a secret.

This is my father’s end: He died on October 9, 2009. The official records will say he died of Hepatitis C while waiting for a liver transplant that never came. My father actually died of a stroke. This is something my family is still struggling to grasp, something that we can’t really talk about and I think the reason for that is not just because it’s too painful to talk about my father’s death. I think the reason is because he was a writer.

My father woke up at 6 every morning, made me breakfast, took me to school, and then he wrote. He didn’t skip days. He didn’t run out of ideas. When he wasn’t at a computer he had a notepad in his back pocket which he would whip out at various intervals and record something he had observed or something he overheard. This is a habit I learned from him. He loved stories and he saw them in everything. He saw characters in everyone. Nothing gave him more joy than reading or seeing a story that was beautiful and true. That’s not to say that it had to be a true story, it simply had to be true to the condition of humanity.

I eavesdropped on a conversation he had with adult company over dinner (I think I must have been younger than 10 at the time) and I remember this excerpt clearly. He was raving about a scene in a film where the protagonist paused in a take and touched his hip. There was nothing slick or preconceived about it. It was entirely human. That was what he was smitten with. He didn’t care much for themes and metaphors. What he cared for was that something true was depicted, something true about people.

The stroke which ultimately killed my father occurred at the beginning of March 2009. He had just finished moving from Sarasota, Florida to St. Louis, Missouri where he had been accepted on to a liver transplant list. The stroke left him paralyzed on his left side (he was left handed) and struck him with aphasia.

Aphasia is a condition which leaves a person without the ability to speak, not because they are incapable of making the sounds but because the ability for their brain to send the words to the mouth is disabled. My father, a great author, could no longer speak. He knew what he wanted to say and he could not say it. He understood everything, all the knowledge he had amassed was still in tact but he could not speak, read, or write. He fought until the last days of his life to regain his words.

I saw him struggle to type on his computer. I saw him observe and marvel at different human transactions which played out before him (things he wanted to put in his notepad). I saw him frustrated to the point he wanted to scream.

I think his fear in all this was that with this loss, the memory of who he was before the stroke would be lost as well. I think he feared this so greatly that my mother, my siblings, and I went on to internalize this fear as well. If people knew just what this stroke entailed then somehow my father’s memory would be marred. Words were his identity. How could we allow him to ever be imagined as being wordless?

I think it’s important that people know what happened to my father because I think it’s important that they know how grave the loss was to him, how important words are, but also so that they know how he coped in the last months of his life without his words.

The first way he communicated after the stroke was through nodding, but a few weeks after this he began to hum. It wasn’t prompted. No one suggested that he try to hum songs that could be the answers to questions, but that was what he did.

My mother was trying to identify a movie that was on the television in his hospital room and my father, the former head of Northwestern University’s Television, Film and Radio department, knew the movie immediately (and he knew the names of all the actors and probably the writer and director). He hummed the answer to my mother: Wouldn’t It Be Loverly. It was an earlier film, a precursor which My Fair Lady was based on, Pygmalion.

He participated in renditions of songs by the Beatles, Beyonce, Cole Porter, and the Rolling Stones. But the point is that he participated. The point is that he was not going to miss the opportunity to show off his borderline obsessive knowledge of all film.

My father was a show off, yes. Extremely opinionated. Extremely confident in his memory and beliefs. Extremely confident in his ability to express himself. To debate my father was a futile effort. He was a dangerous combination of stubborn and intelligent, capable of recognizing when he had lost a debate and still finding a way to grandstand his way to a win.

He was also charming. Able to indefinitely avoid admitting defeat while still being dear to his opponent. Without words he charmed the nursing staff at the rehabilitation facility he was placed in after the stroke. He charmed his physical therapists. He charmed his speech therapists. Dare I say, I think he found a way to flirt with them all and garner favors. Without words he elicited laughter. Without words he managed to grandstand out of defeat.

As his speech therapist tried to explain to me: “Stuart is the star of group therapy.” I came to realize what she meant to say was: “Stuart is the class clown of group therapy and somehow hijacks the session while still neglecting to actually participate in the exercise I’m trying to run.”

This is how my father lived: He wrote every day. He never stopped telling stories. There are some people who repeat stories without realizing it. They tell the same story again and again. My father was not one of those people. On a daily basis he shared new stories with me. A detail from his life. Something about my grandmother. Something about my brothers or sister. Something he had observed another driver doing in traffic. Something he saw in the army. 

But it wasn’t just the words he had that commanded everyone. His celebrity came from his great talent in writing, but his popularity arose from something else entirely. I know he was still the surly, aloof teenager in a leather jacket somewhere deep down, one that locked himself in his room and wrote while his parents wondered just what it was that was going on in there.

But he was also a man with a massive designer tie collection, a man who was interviewed on Good Morning America and claimed to not be nervous. A man who took control of a discussion, regardless of whether he was supposed to be leading it. A man who delighted in asking difficult questions of presumptuous people who would falter in response.  He never spoke down to anyone, and he never censored words or ideas because he didn’t think a person could handle or understand them.

The great tragedy here is that a writer was deprived of his words at the end of his life.

The great story here is that my father so excelled at expressing himself that he retained his identity even after he was separated from his first and life defining love, words.

He still had stories to tell people, but I’m not sure that’s a reason for me to cry anymore. He would have always had stories to tell people. He could have lived until he was 120 years old and even then he still would have been hijacking discussion panels, calling me to tell me about the couple he watched at coffee shop and outlining the next novel in any of his series.

I think that’s something that people with great passion can relate to. Just as I can’t imagine waking up one morning and no longer caring about what I study in grad school: the greater fight for human rights, my father never woke up one morning and stopped having stories to tell. And he never would have. I think he wanted people to know that he could have kept writing forever.

How wonderful to be human and to have passion that outlives our bodies and our limits.

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Tasha Kaminsky is a MA candidate at Brandeis University. She received her BA in Creative Writing and Religion from Florida State University. For more Tasha, go here.

Photo courtesy of Tasha Kaminsky.