Introduction

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Excerpt

Preface:

The Journey of Your Lifetime

Closing Circles, Making Amends

When I got to work that morning I had a job—a few hours later, I didn’t. I had liked my job and most of the people there. The work we did was meaningful. And had you asked me the day before, I would have told you that I saw myself working at that place, with most of those people, the rest of my life.

So did my friends. “Sorry you lost your job,” they said. “You’ll get another one soon. For now, enjoy your freedom and your family.”

I did, for awhile. I took the kids to school, saw all of their baseball games and helped them with their homework. I could work out, lose weight and lower my blood pressure. It was wonderful to go to movies and museums with Elizabeth again; we hadn’t done that in years.

But a few weeks later, I experienced my worst identity crisis since high school. I walked around feeling anxious and ashamed. I napped five times a day. I avoided social gatherings and phone calls. I was a 54-year-old man who had spent two decades living from deadline to deadline, absorbed in his work. I had given no thought to what I wanted to do next in my life, and the realization unnerved me.

Elizabeth suggested that I spend a few days at Kripalu, a yoga retreat in the Berkshires. She said that I would be able to relax there and gather my thoughts. So on a rainy afternoon in October, I drove from our weekend home in Upstate New York through the foothills of the Berkshires to a huge, almost industrial-looking building that had once housed a Roman Catholic monastery. Most of the people wandering through Kripalu’s lobby were in their early- to mid-fifties and looked a lot like I suppose I did – stressed out and clueless. After a dinner of lentil soup, kale and sweet potatoes, I attended a drumming concert and danced with strangers.

At first I felt silly, flailing my arms back and forth like the Hindu goddess Durga. I felt even sillier when a man with a shoulder-length gray ponytail pulled me into a circle of other, mainly middle-aged men and women and we grew larger and larger until the circle split into a giant undulating snake. But then I got into it and, by the time we shed our skin, my inhibitions were gone and I whirled like a dervish until I fell into a pile of dizzy, sweat-soaked humanity. I retired to the dorm room I shared with four other men. I felt that I had made good progress that evening toward becoming the chilled-out father that Elizabeth and the kids wanted me to be and slept unusually well.

The next morning I went to a 6 a.m. yoga class and had a breakfast of rolled oats, pumpkin seeds and green tea. When I returned to the dorm room to shower, there was a note on my bed summoning me to the front office. A pretty young woman who did not empathize with me said that two of my four dorm mates had complained about my snoring, Kripalu’s cardinal sin. She sentenced me to the snorers-only floor, Kripalu's Siberia. For an hour or so my rejection by my anonymous dorm mates felt as piercing and punitive as losing my job. And then it struck me: For the past twenty years I had always had a title, role and mission. I could tell people what I did and who I was with confidence. There was a rhythm to my day and week and if someone or something intruded, my assistant would tell them to bug off.

In the eyes of many people, including myself, I had been an important man. But in Kripalu-land—no, in the world—I was just another snorer.

When I got back to New York I found myself in no hurry to look for a job. At Kripalu I had begun to realize that the next chapter of my work life would probably be my last. It might take a year or two to find what the recruiters call a “meaningful opportunity” in my field, which was undergoing fundamental change. But thanks to my severance pay, our savings and a pared-down budget, we had enough money, with Elizabeth’s income, to get by.

The truth was: Vague and uncomfortable feelings had begun gnawing at my gut. When I tried to specify them, I was struck by the fact that, in my headlong rush to build a family and career, I had left a lot of people I cared about on the sidelines. I started thinking about how sad it was that my relatives wouldn’t speak to each other. I had an urge to heal their wounds, which were also mine. Also, I had put my once-rich spiritual life on hold. The more I became aware of these emotional and spiritual loose ends, the more I wanted to address them, and to feel whole again.

It started when I found myself sorting through the accumulated stuff of my life. When I left my job, I lost the closet at work where I had stored my stuff in dozens of cardboard boxes. Elizabeth gave me a room of my own at home for it. I had boxes and boxes of stuff and she said that organizing it might take my mind off losing my job. Have you ever tried sorting through the stuff of your life? Here is some of what I found: Report cards since kindergarten; a list of friends and later girlfriends at ages 7,11,19, and 26; more than a thousand letters from my father, one per week since college, featuring his distinctive use of brackets, quote marks and red type for emphasis; eulogies I had written for family pets, my mother’s mother and a friend who died of cancer.

I found a barely decipherable dream journal from the years when I was so poor and scared for my future that I couldn't sleep at night; the black-and-yellow-striped jersey I wore when I played on GO, a sandlot baseball team that sent seven players to the minor leagues but not me (I threw out my arm); the machete I used when I harvested bananas on a kibbutz; photos of some of the French, Swedish, Italian and Israeli women I met and tried to bed there; Russian nesting dolls I bought in Moscow that featured dolls-within-dolls of Yeltsin, Gorbachev, Brezhnev, Stalin and Lenin; a diary of the year that I tried to lose 25 pounds and get healthier but failed; dozens if not hundreds of memos I wrote to move along projects and impress my bosses at all my jobs; an unpaid traffic ticket -- no, two.

There was a box containing the notebooks and memorabilia that my grandfather gave me two weeks before he died, hoping that I would write the story of his life (I didn’t), and a postcard from the Italian fitness instructor who traveled with me through one of the more remote areas of Indonesia to observe the burial rituals of a tribe of reformed cannibals. I came across a birthday card that my schizophrenic Aunt Fern sent me in 1986 that reminded me of how much she loved me and also meant to me. There were photos of her playing Debussy’s Claire d’Lune on the baby-grand piano that dominated the living room of my grandmother's apartment, and my grandmother singing along as Fern played such favorites as “Hava Nagila,” “Born Free,” and “My Yiddisha Mama.”

That same box contained a copy of my high-school yearbook. Flipping through it, I experienced dozens of where-is-he-now, why-didn’t-I-keep-up-with-him, wow-how-I-hated-him moments of curiosity, regret and the sort of bitterness that punches you in the gut and spikes your blood-pressure decades later. I noticed that the senior photo of my childhood bully was directly across from mine, reinforcing my sense that he had been born to torment me. I also came across a photo of the Rev. F. Washington Jarvis III, my favorite teacher, giving our class the finger. The thought of the good reverend flipping us a bird reminded me of just how young and hip he was—and how I never thanked him for changing my life.

I felt a similar way when I came across my friend Matt’s photo. With his curly blonde hair and otherworldly gaze, he looked like the boy most likely to become the monk and mystic he became. Matt was my spiritual soul mate in high school; so why did I lose touch with him? And why had I lost touch with Nauman, my roommate from the days when I tended bar in Cleveland? I found Nauman’s last letter to me at the bottom of a box that contained hundreds of baseball cards from the 1950s and 60s. It was dated March 15, 1982, and he had sent it from his childhood home in Lahore. Seeing Nauman’s letter reminded me of how I had stopped thinking about him until September 11, 2001, when terrorists murdered 3,000 people a few miles away from me in Manhattan, and how I had been worrying about my Pakistani friend ever since.

In that same box, there was a doctor’s report confirming that my mother’s mother, my beloved Nana Bertie, could no longer live on her own, and a photo I took of her the last time she could remember my name. I also stared for a long time at a photograph of one of the two (or was it three?) times in 25 years that my brothers and I had gathered in the same place at the same time with our wives and children. One of those times was at my wedding, when Elizabeth was six months pregnant with our twins.

There were photos of me with and without a beard in various stages of baldness over 30 years; a jar that contained the ashes of our poodle Buster; a letter from a friend in London who had been waiting for me to travel to Paris with him to visit the grave of Jim Morrison of the Doors; notebooks from reporting trips to Africa, the Soviet Union and India; there was a photo of a Somalian boy I met in a refugee camp who dreamed of coming to America, and hundreds if not thousands of snapshots of my own kids, taken with a love I never, ever could have imagined before the day they were born.

Each artifact elicited a storehouse of memories that surprised, amused and saddened me. When I came across the journal I kept during a nine-month Land Rover trip I took from Tehran to Calcutta with two friends from college, I marveled at our naivete and daring. But I also remembered, with a mixture of shock and shame, that I had borrowed $600 from one of my travel companions 32 years ago and never paid him back.

When I found my copy of the prayer I said each night until I was 10 years old, I knelt by my bed and said: "Before in sleep I close my eyes, to thee O God my thoughts arise; I thank thee for thy blessings all that come to us thy children small; O keep me safe throughout the night, so I shall see the morning light." I repeated it over and over again. Nearly 50 years had passed since I first said that prayer, yet in so many ways I still felt like that trembling, kneeling child.

I began to hatch a plan. I would take an entire year off. I had no desire to jump out of a plane, race in the Tour d’ France or bed beautiful women who weren’t my wife. Instead I wanted to close circles, make amends and set things straight. I wanted to re-engage with my past and see if it would make me a better and happier person.

I began compiling a list of what would eventually become ten separate journeys. Each journey would be designed to complete an item of what I called the “unfinished business" of my life. All of us have unfinished business. It can be a friend we lost touch with or a mentor we never thanked; it can be a call we meant to make or a pledge we failed to honor. It can be a goal we lost sight of or a spiritual quest we put on hold. Too often, life takes over and pushes the experiences that might enrich, enlarge or even complete us to the bottom of our to-do list. We do not test our values, or our ideals. We lose opportunities to be good, kind and courageous. We end up being lesser people than we are capable of becoming. And we miss chances to connect meaningfully with the people who matter most to us, until there are no more chances left.

Before getting another job, before embarking on my next decade, before growing older and old, I wanted to identify and then complete my unfinished business. Also, I wanted to sharpen my memories so that I could leave my children a richer legacy. This was the only option that made sense to me and the only way that I could move ahead in my life with passion and integrity.

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”—Soren Kierkegaard

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” —Socrates

“Stop that nonsense and clean up your room.” —My mother, after she caught me meditating with my eyes closed when I was 17 years old.

The process of compiling my list began in early November at our home in the country. I stood on the back porch with a glass of my favorite red wine and toasted the weeks and project to come. It seemed fitting, in this autumn of my life, to begin my journeys back in time warming myself against the same chill wind that blew the few remaining leaves in our backyard into the darkening sky.

I walked into my study and began sorting through boxes. As background music to the past, I chose songs that stirred something deep inside me: John Coltrane’s “Love Supreme,” Keith Jarrett’s “Koln Concert,” Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” and anything by Cesaria Evoria, U2, Louis Armstrong or Billie Holiday. The boxes were not nearly as neat and ordered as I thought they would be: files of notes and essays from college shared the same cardboard box as a giant map of India and my bronzed baby shoes; my letter jacket from high school covered memorabilia I had collected at the 1992 Republican and Democratic Conventions and three carousals of slides from my trip to Nicaragua in 1985 during that country’s civil war.

Encountering the past this way—out of chronology and context—created strange juxtapositions of people and places and put me in a dream state where the time between now and then disappeared. My mind kept spinning through the highlight reel of my childhood: the foot races I’d won; my Bar Mitzvah speech; the summer of 1969, when I lost my virginity and helped pitch my sandlot team to the Ohio state championship.

That game had taken place on a hot summer day before a cheering crowd that included big-league scouts, teenage girls and small-time gamblers. As I replayed it in my mind, I thought about Andre, our right fielder, who was a superb athlete and even better human being. On this team of pranksters and tough guys, Andre was the only player who treated everyone—including me, the youngest—with respect.

The previous winter I had seen a photo of Andre’s daughter in the New York Times. She had been ambushed and killed in Iraq. Putting myself in Andre’s place, I had cried and cried, feeling his pain. But did I write my old teammate and tell him how sorry I was for his loss? Of course not. That’s what I mean by unfinished business.

Listening to an old audiotape of my grandmother, I smiled at her Yiddish and storytelling and longed to be sitting around her baby-grand piano as she sang to Fern and her friends. Why did I feel such a strong and sudden urge to be around the people who had known my grandmother when she was alive? Because I had missed her funeral. At the time I had considered it a nuisance; now the fact that I had not eulogized her tore my heart to shreds.

A brochure for an African safari reminded me of the visit I had made in 1994 to a refugee camp in Kenya. The camp housed more than 32,000 children who had been uprooted from their homes by the tribal wars in neighboring Somali. A boy there, the one whose photograph I found, touched me so deeply that I promised to fill the camp’s library with books.

“That’s what everyone says,” he said, suggesting that I would not do what I promised.

He was right: I didn’t. It was time to make amends.

If I had murdered someone, or committed the crimes of fraud or rape, I would have gone to jail, paid a fine or been sentenced to community service. Yet no one could prosecute me for missing my grandmother’s funeral, failing to keep a promise to a child or neglecting to send a condolence card to a friend—no one, except me.

There are acts and non-acts that prosecute you from within. They gnaw at your insides and cast aspersion on your character. They tell you that you are callous, lazy, small-minded, greedy, mean-spirited, unjust, more Scrooge and Mussolini than Gandhi or Mother T. That’s what the first three items on my list of unfinished business did to me. They gnawed at me. They said: You’re not nearly as good, kind or generous as you pretend. There was that $600 debt I owed my friend from 30 years ago. There was the thank you I should have said to my favorite teacher. There was the way I felt when I heard that the bully from my childhood died the miserable death I had wished on him.

Isn’t it strange how small these things can seem on paper, yet how large they loom in your head?

I’m sorry baby

What do you want me to do?

How can I make it up to you?

—from “Cheat,” by Marques Houston

Suddenly I had an overwhelming urge to acknowledge the hurt I had done to others either consciously or through neglect. I wanted to say: “I’m sorry for all the pain I caused. How can I make it up to you?” It was the most human of impulses and one that most religions put at the center of their promise of forgiveness and redemption.

When a person died in ancient Egypt, their heart would be weighed to determine whether that person’s soul would make it into the afterlife. If the person’s heart weighed less than a feather and was judged pure, the soul got an after-life go-ahead. If the heart weighed more than a feather, it was burdened by guilt and sins; so no-go, Mr. Soul.

In confessing their sins to a priest, Catholics acknowledge their flawed nature before God and express their willingness to make up for it. Buddhism says that we accumulate good karma from our right actions and bad karma from our wrong ones, as does Hinduism. Picture walking around with a big bag of bad karma over your shoulder; it weighs you down and holds you back like a boulder. How do you lessen the load so that you can move ahead in this life and the next? Through right actions, Buddhists say.

On Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, we fast and pray. I used to love Yom Kippur when I was a kid. At Temple I would stand next to my father, lightly beating my chest as we recited the sins we had committed before God. We would elbow each other when we thought a sin was particularly applicable. For the sin which we have committed before Thee by spurning parents and teachers. (I got elbowed.) For the sin we have committed before Thee by hardening our hearts. (I elbowed Dad.) For the sin we have committed before Thee by denying and lying. (I got elbowed.) For the sin we have committed before Thee by stretching the neck in pride. (I got elbowed, then him.) It would go on and on for another dozen sins until we would say, in unison, For all these, O God of forgiveness, forgive us, pardon us, grant us atonement.

On Yom Kippur, God forgave us for all the vows we wouldn’t fulfill in the coming year. But he only gave us absolution for the vows that involved Him. It was much harder to atone for the sins we committed against other people. First, we had to ask the person to forgive us. If he chose not to, the wrong would persist. So we needed to be sincere and persuasive in our amends.

In Judaism, as in the other religious traditions, sincerity counted more than anything else. You must cease to commit a sin, really regret it and resolve not to do it again. I have never participated in a 12-step program but I do know that making amends is an important part of the recovery process. In Alcoholics Anonymous, you are instructed to make a list of everyone you have harmed and express a sincere willingness to repair the hurt. It is not enough to just apologize. You must endeavor to make direct amends, and put your money (or whatever is appropriate recompense) where your mouth is.

Addicts are more likely than other people to lie, steal, cheat and commit adultery. Imagine how much bad karma an addict carries around in his bag. Imagine how much hard work and courage it takes for him to lessen his load. Do you or I have that much courage? Do we really need to wait until it’s fourth down and twenty in the last quarter of our life to redeem ourselves?

On my list of unfinished business, two items seemed most urgent to me. First, I wanted to find my Aunt Fern. When I was a child, she babysat me. When I was older, we confided in each other and shared our dreams. About 15 years ago, Fern was institutionalized after a fight with my grandmother. They had been living together in my grandmother’s apartment, and in their frustration they screamed and tore at each other until the police took Fern away. No one in my family knew where Fern was. Not even my father, who was her brother. And no one seemed to care. I found their lack of concern—and my own over the years—unconscionable. That’s why I needed to find Fern—to show her that someone cares.

I also wanted to have one more conversation with Mr. Jarvis, the teacher I never thanked. He changed my life by introducing me to religion, philosophy and literature when I was an angst-ridden, directionless teenager. I read Plato, Aristotle, Camus, Bonhoeffer and the New Testament under his tutelage and started to explore, in conversations with him, what it meant to build an authentic relationship with God. Now, at age 54, I felt that same urge but had no idea where to begin. Perhaps Mr. Jarvis could help.

"Man—a being in search of meaning.” —Plato

Women are said to have a biological clock, triggered by age and the depletion of their egg supply. At age 54, I was growing increasingly aware of my spiritual clock. It had been ticking since childhood —“O keep me safe throughout the night, so I shall see the morning light’’—reaching a crescendo during high school and college and on the trips I took in my 20s to Israel and India. And then the clock stopped ticking, or rather, it got muffled by the noise I made in the process of building my family and career. Now I heard it ticking again—like crazy.

I had just lost my job. Yet my first instinct was to immerse myself in my past and search for meaning in my life. It was something that people usually did later in life, when they came face-to-face with death.

Psychologist Erik Erikson, of "identity crisis" fame, wrote that there are eight stages of personality development, each marked by a central conflict. In stage one, for example, an infant feeds happily at his mother's breast until he begins teething on her nipples and hurts her. Will his mother keep nursing him, or will she push him away? How this conflict gets resolved determines whether that infant becomes a person who trusts, or mistrusts, other people.

Erikson’s eighth stage occurs in old age, when the prospect of dying prompts us to look back and reflect on how we have lived. The people who judge their lives favorably are more likely to accept death and experience it with serenity. Those who judge their lives as a failure are more likely to deny their impending death and face it in despair.

What does Erik Erikson’s theory of personal development have to do with unfinished business? Everything.

Dr. Robert N. Butler, a gerontologist, built on Erikson's work with research he conducted in the 1950s at the National Institutes of Health. Butler wrote how the group of vibrant older people he was observing "seemed to be going through a profound internal process that focused on reviewing their life and trying to come to terms with everything that had happened to them in the past." Butler was surprised by the keen and searching minds of the people he observed. They were much more interested in their remote memories than in their recent history, yet there was no evidence that they were stuck in the past or regressing back into childhood. "Instead," wrote Butler, "they were engaged in the important psychological task of making sense of the life they had lived." When his oldsters reflected on their past experience, they either revised it or expanded their understanding of it, he observed. This reorganization of their past gave what Butler called “new and significant meanings” to their lives. Also, it lessened their fears of death.

I felt a sense of comradeship with Butler's old people. As part of their life review, they wanted to make a last visit to the towns in which they were born and raised. (So did I.) And they wanted to remember the sounds and smells of their childhood and to note the landmarks that were either gone or remained.

Their other great urge was to reconcile with family members and friends. Probably the biggest hope I had was to heal my family (and myself) of the bitterness that led three generations of Kravitzes to blame and distance themselves from each other. As wrongs were amended and grudges put to rest in Butler's old people, they experienced what he described as a feeling of "hard-earned serenity." (Shades of Erikson!) They also took more pleasure in their lives. If I could bring even a fraction of that pleasure to myself and my family, I would judge my year of completing my unfinished business a success.

The people Butler observed were in their 70s and 80s; I was 54. So why was I going through the same process they did? And why was I facing the same conflict Erikson described in stage eight as Ego Integrity vs. Despair? It was obvious: I had just lost my job. Uncertain of my future, I was experiencing the same feelings they were as they neared death. And I wasn't alone. As the first decade of the 21st century was drawing to a close, millions of older, younger and middle-age Americans were losing their jobs at a record pace and worrying about whether the economy of the future would have a place for them. Some would get jobs; others wouldn't and others would need to re-evaluate their lives and careers. Wouldn't it be a good time for some of those people to close circles, make amends and seek new and significant meanings? Why wait until your deathbed to put your emotional and spiritual lives in order? In 5, 10 or 20 years, won't fewer people be around to accept your amends? Won't fewer be around to help you navigate your past?

It seemed to me that completing our unfinished business 25 years early could only result in our living the next chapter of our lives with more wisdom and joy. So let us be the first generation of snorers to complete our unfinished business while we can still enjoy it. As my list of ten took shape, I wondered: Why is it so easy to let our unfinished business linger and fester? Why do we bury it in boxes, then pack it away? "Because we are afraid that it will stir anxieties, muddy waters and open wounds," I wrote down. "Because, of all our life’s business, it is the toughest to face, the hardest to navigate, the trickiest and most important to resolve."

The most intimate and anxiety-producing unfinished business involves our families. Three of the to-do’s on my list concern the people who conceived me and raised me. They include my parents and grandparents, my uncles and aunts and the other near-and-distant relatives who shared in the good times and savaged each other when things went bad. Family, the core of who we are, comprises my first category of unfinished business.

The second involves seven people I am seeking in order to either right a wrong or close a circle. Once upon a time they made a big impression on my life, or played an important role. They include four old friends, a former rival, my first mentor and a boy I barely had a chance to know.

My third category of unfinished business is harder to define. Or is it? It is motivated by a fear of death and a longing for God, and it is part of every journey I will take. As I begin this journeying, I have no idea whether I will be able to find my Aunt Fern or anyone else. Also, I have no idea how the people on my list will respond when I find them. Will Andre accept my condolences? Will my travel companion forgive my debt? Will the Somalian child who predicted my failure judge my latest effort a success?

Will my father and his brother and cousins speak again? Will I feel more whole when they do? Will my friend the monk, who cut off ties with his past, welcome my intrusion into his life? Will the Rev. F. Washington Jarvis III be willing to help me jump-start my relationship with God? To whom will I turn if he is not?

I have given myself one year to set things straight and take my soul’s measure. My hope is that the readers of this book will be inspired by my experiences to look deep inside their hearts and take care of their own unfinished business, too. I am aware that most readers will not have the luxury to spend an entire year closing circles and making amends, as I did. (Nor will I have that luxury, after this year ends.) But my experience has given me a perspective I want to share with you: that nothing is more liberating, rewarding and energizing than taking care of the emotional and spiritual to-do's we accumulate due to our laziness, avoidance and fears. The hurdles in tackling our unfinished business can seem impossibly high, but the first step in clearing them is usually quite simple: Write an e-mail, make that first or return phone call. Each step will be rewarding in itself, and you can never tell when the weight you've been carrying around will slip from your shoulders and leave you suddenly feeling more compassionate, happy, nimble and able to love.

“Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky. . .” —T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Chapter Three

I’m So Sorry for Your Loss

Making a Condolence Call

Did you ever intend to do something because it was the right thing to do, and then fail to do it at all? Have you ever procrastinated to the point of no return, or let doubt stand in your way?

On the morning of January 18, 2007, I came across one of the saddest newspaper stories I had ever read. On page two of The New York Times, next to the headline, “Ambush Kills an American Teaching Democracy in Iraq,” there was a photo of a beautiful and vigorously alive young woman. As a young man I would have fallen in love with her at a glance – with her blond pageboy, her blue eyes and her smile as bright and innocent as a summer afternoon. It was easy to imagine this idealistic young woman teaching democracy in a war-torn country but impossible to imagine her dead.

My heart quickened even more when I saw her name. Andrea Parhamovich was the daughter of Andre Parhamovich, who had been the star right-fielder on the baseball team I helped pitch to an Ohio state championship more than 40 years ago. Comprised of pro hopefuls from all over Cleveland, the GO team was full of cocky tough guys; except for Andre, who made miraculous catches in the outfield and banged out game-winning hits without boasting. You could never imagine Andre dogging it or picking on a younger player like me; he was too busy hustling from the dugout to the batters' box, from first base to second base, from the bench to his position in right field, joyously playing the game he loved.

I had not seen Andre since our summer of glory. But when I realized that the 28-year-old woman in the photo was his daughter, I couldn’t stop crying. I cried and cried as if my own daughter had been ambushed by Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Before that day I had no idea that Andi, as she was called, even existed. Now everything sad, raw and unresolved in my life—my grandmother's death, 9/11, the cancer ravaging a friend's body—seemed bound up with her death. And that feeling worsened when I sat down to write Andre a condolence card and could only summon up excuses not to write him: How could I say 'I'm sorry' to someone who had suffered so great a loss? Wasn't it selfish to intrude on his grief? Would Andre even remember me?

Elizabeth didn't buy any of my reasons for not reaching out to Andre. “Just write something,” she said. “And send it. He'll appreciate the thought.” My wife spoke from experience: Her brother had been killed by a drunken teenager just as his life was starting to make sense to him. Elizabeth also spoke from her knowledge of me. “You always find an excuse to procrastinate,” she said, listing the five things that day I'd promised but failed to do. “It's a huge problem. Get over it.”

For the next three days, while riding the subway, watching television, editing a story, playing with the kids and trying to fall asleep, I composed condolences in my mind that I either forgot or discarded. “Dear Andre: I don't know if you remember me. . .” “Dear Andre: When I read about Andi's death. . .” “Dear Andre: It has been nearly 40 years since I last saw you. . .” Everything I wrote felt either stilted or trivial; I couldn't even decide whether to use blue ink (too cheery?) or black (a downer?) in my new Cross pen. Have you ever let such a small and insignificant detail block your way?

By then, the story of Andi's death had been broadcast around the world. Ann Curry of the "Today" show said that Andi represented "the best of America." CBS News' Kelly Martin said she "seemed to have rocket fuel in her veins to make her life count.” Andi’s ambitions had been far larger than the small Ohio town where she was raised. After graduating college, she worked for Governor Jane Swift of Massachusetts, then for Miramax Films and Air America, the liberal radio network. Her goal was to become White House press secretary and eventually to run for Congress.

It was Andi's relationship with Michael Hastings, a Baghdad correspondent for Newsweek, that made her death even more tragic. They had planned to elope to Paris on Valentine's Day; just days before she died, Andi had e-mailed Michael her specifications for a ring. In interview after interview, Michael described Andi with the same adjectives everyone else used: “She was beautiful. Funny. Intuitive. Really brilliant. And a bit of a nut.”

"She was a little girl with big dreams," said her sister Marci.

And she was Andre's little girl. According to several news reports, Andre, a high school baseball and football coach, would break down and cry whenever he heard Andi's name. In a press conference outside the Parhamovich home, Marci’s husband Joe said that Andre couldn’t understand why 30 Sunni insurgents had targeted his peace-loving daughter with all that hatred and deadly force. Throughout that press conference, Andre stood sobbing in the background, his head hung low.

I grieved deeply for Andre's daughter; I really did. So why, nearly 18 months after her death, did I still include a condolence card to Andre on my list of unfinished business? There was my litany of doubts, of course, and my life-long tendency to procrastinate. But there was also Ira. In almost everything that went wrong in my life, Ira, the magazine's bully of an art director, played a starring role.

On the Wednesday after Andi’s murder Ira barged into my office and reminded me, as he did every Wednesday, of my failure, in his eyes, to meet the magazine's deadlines. “The designers don't have headlines,” he shouted. “Without headlines, they can’t design.”

As always, I thought, “This isn't a Monet, Ira, it's a fucking magazine. Who on earth needs three weeks to design a two-page spread on migraines?” But before I could make that point, the bully— did I tell you that he weighed nearly 300 pounds? —said, in his lowest, most threatening voice, “We need those headlines NOW,” and stomped out of my office.

A beleaguered editor walked in. “Ira's screaming at me for headlines again,” she said, with the look of someone who feared getting crushed by an elephant. “The problem is, the story isn't due for another two weeks.”

"I know, I know. It's a total waste of time to write a headline for a story you haven't read," I thought of saying to the editor. But knowing the consequences of raising this or any other common-sense point with Ira, I said, “Just write him a headline. We can change it later.” Do self-important colleagues and their same-old, same-old craziness loom far too large in your life, distracting you from the things that truly matter? That was the case with me in the weeks following Andi's death. One deadline crisis after another pushed my staff to the verge of an Ira-induced nervous breakdown. And I never sent Andre a condolence card.

When I heard about Andi's death, my daughter Caroline was 10 years old. On June 17, 2008, the night I finally saw Andre, she was a year-and-a-half older. Much had happened over the intervening time: Caroline had reached puberty, discovered e-mail and just that week been the recipient of a goodbye party at the school she'd attended since kindergarten. She had been looking forward to her new school—"It will mean more friends and more e-mail addresses," she said—but all of a sudden her typically cheery nature seemed to sour. At her going-away party, Caroline’s two best friends had made a big deal out of not signing her yearbook. I had never seen my happy-go-lucky girl so sad.

It wasn't hard to decipher what was really going on: Caroline’s friends felt rejected because she was about to leave them, and Caroline was more nervous than she could admit about changing schools. Elizabeth and I knew that pointing this out to our daughter would have made things worse; Caroline needed a hug from us, not a lecture. Also, she’d be over this particular hurt in a few days. Still, as I walked into The Cupping Room Cafe to see Andre, I thought: I’d do anything I could to absorb my daughter's pain; what must it feel like to be Andre?

The club was buzzing with celebrities and activity. Andi would have turned 30 that day and her friends and family were using the occasion to stage a benefit for the Andi Foundation, which gave out scholarships and internships to young women who were interested, as Andi had been, in pursuing a career in politics or the media. It wasn't hard to find Andre in this crowd of artists and activists. Andre was the conspicuously pale and paunchy fifty-something who was wearing what was clearly a knock-off Polo shirt. He sat alone in the back of the club, hunched over a table, staring down at his folded hands.

When she was 32, the woman who had been my high school girlfriend was killed in an auto accident just days before her wedding. Those of us who had come to see Joyce married ended up burying her. I'll always remember the look on her father’s face as they lowered her coffin into the grave: distracted, empty, devoid of feeling. It was clear he would never be okay. And that’s how Andre looked sitting alone at the table, like a man broken beyond repair. I walked over to him and put my hand on his shoulder.

"Hi Andre,” I said, “I'm Lee Kravitz. You knew me years ago as Ricky."

"Ricky Kravitz," he said. "From the GO team. I remember your fast ball," he said, without looking up. “Thanks for coming.”

"I brought you something," I said. It was the one news clipping I still had from the summer of our shared glory. It was dated Thursday, July 31, 1969, and titled "GO Wins Connie Mack.”

Andre took the article and read it aloud: "'GO is a storied name in Connie Mack circles, with a long list of present and past stars,” he began. “Its graduates include this season's American League All-Star third baseman, Sal Bando of the Oakland A's.”

“Says here we won 24 of 25 games that season,” he said. “Not bad. Not bad at all.”

Then Andre pointed to the man who stood in the middle of our team picture. “What a mean-assed mother-fucker,” he said with a scowl.

Rich Liscovec was GO's dictator of a manager. He had a crooked grin, shifty eyes and a suspicious, calculating mind. Picture Julius Caesar played by Roddy McDowell watching a lion devour a gladiator and that was Richie. If you were late by even a minute to practice, he’d make you run ten laps. If he saw you walking and not sprinting from the parking lot to the field, you’d be off the team. And heaven help you if you missed one of Richie’s fabled signs. Richie was the only coach in America who used colored cardboard squares for signs. He'd stand like a Navy signal-corps officer in the box at third base, flashing red, blue, green, blue, blue, which meant steal on the third pitch, or red, red, blue, green, red, which meant bunt and steal. If you missed a sign or got one wrong, he’d scream and kick dirt at you for the rest of the game.

During my best game that summer, I struck out nine players in a row, including Mike Easler, who would later star with the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox. During my final game, I threw out my arm on a curve ball—an injury that ended my pitching career. What made my disappointment even worse was Richie’s response to it. He told me to take off my uniform and give it to a player he'd just drafted for the regionals. For the rest of that game, with my dreams shattered, I sat on the bench in the new player’s baggy street clothes.

After I shared this memory with Andre, he offered his own Richie story. “In the state championship game I went two for three and got the winning hit,” he said. “Know how that bastard thanked me? He benched me.”

"What an asshole,” I commiserated.

By then the festivities had begun. Rachel Maddow, an Air America anchor at the time, got knowing laughs when she described how Andi would use her small-town charm to get everyone at the station, including Al Franken, to do her bidding. Andi's two nieces talked about their aunt in the present tense, as if she were still alive to play with them and twist their hair into braids. Ann Curry noted how the Parhamovich family was representative of the sacrifice that so many American families were making as the Iraqi war raged on. And Andre, getting more and more glum, just stared at his hands.

To cheer him up, I reported some information I’d uncovered earlier that week when I googled everyone on the GO team to see if any of them had done anything of interest with their lives. They had. Five of our teammates had been drafted into the big leagues, four had become coaches and one had become an ump. I also had information on some of the guys who didn’t go on in baseball. Al Zdesar, our star pitcher, became a college football referee, and Tom Dybzinski, our leading hitter, was a letter carrier.

“Wasn’t Tom’s brother Jerry the guy who lost the 1984 American League championship for the White Sox when he ran past second base?” Andre asked.

“Yup, same guy,” I said. “And you wouldn’t believe what Mike Gaski is doing.” Mike was by far the worst player on GO; the rest of us couldn’t understand how he made the team. “Mike Gaski is head coach at the University of North Carolina and he’s president of USA Baseball.”

“No kidding,” Andre said.

“Mike runs the U.S. Olympic baseball team. And his son Matt was drafted this year by the San Diego Padres,” I said.

“No kidding,” Andre said again.

It was clear that all this unsolicited information was putting Andre in a better mood, as was the music of a young singer/composer from Texas named Carrie Rodriguez, whose jazzy country tunes got him tapping his fingers. Carrie’s band ended the set with a song called “St. Peter’s.” “I wrote it for a friend of mine who was killed while riding his bicycle,” she said. “His name was Andy, too.”

Then she sang: "It's been not...not yet a year/Time goes by and disappears/As for me, I'm doing fine/ Just need some help from time to time."

I looked over at Andre. His fingers were still and his body was shaking. He was not—would he ever be?— okay.

As I rode the subway uptown to 110th Street, it struck me that my encounter with Andre had been far more important than I'd imagined it would be. I couldn't articulate exactly why or how but it was clear that a powerful intimacy had taken root. And it was strange. Andre had been shattered emotionally and probably forever by the same bullets and grenades that had ended his daughter's life -- and yet, we never said anything profound or revealing to each other; we just talked baseball.

"How did it go?" Elizabeth asked as I walked into the apartment.

"We talked baseball," I said. "I didn't say how sorry I was for his loss. In fact, we never even mentioned Andi's name. The only thing we talked about was baseball."

"How did that make you feel?"

"Weird," I said. "And good. I can't put my finger on it but I feel close to Andre."

"You gave each other what you needed," Elizabeth said.

"I guess so," I said.

"That's great, honey," Elizabeth said as I leaned over to kiss her. "Now walk the dog."

The next day I wrote Andre what he probably already knew: "Dear Andre: I was deeply honored to spend so much time with you at the benefit. When I first read of Andi's death and realized that she was your daughter, I felt sad for days. I wanted to reach out to you but didn't know if you'd even remember me. Then life and the pressure of putting out the magazine took over and I never followed through on what I'd intended. That's why it was so important for me to attend the benefit."

Literally hours after I sent that e-mail, I received a heartfelt note that Andre must have written just after the benefit: "Hi Lee. I really enjoyed talking to you! You helped me to keep control of my emotions and to get through the evening in a positive manner." Andre’s sign-off —“Remember to keep sports enjoyable” —struck a particularly resonant chord.

That’s because my father had been one of those dads who believe that sports is the be-all and end-all, life’s great teacher and motivator. When I was five years old, he threw a ball ten feet into the air so that it fell directly on my head. While I was crying from pain, he said, "See, son, it hardly hurts," which made me cry even more. In the world according to Harry, pain built character. Even the sadistic Coach Richie (whom he admired) chastised my father for being dangerously over-involved in my sports career. Whenever I took the mound for GO, he would stand behind the backstop and signal the pitches he thought I should throw. If I didn't throw a pitch he'd ordered, say a slider, and the batter hit what I did throw, say a fastball, he'd broadcast his rightness -- and my stupidity -- to the crowd: "See, he should have listened to me. He should have thrown a slider."

In one game I got so unnerved by my father's commands for me to throw "The Big One," by which he meant a curve ball, that Coach Richie banished him to the parking lot for the rest of the game and season. The lesson was lost on my father. If you looked toward the parking lot while I was pitching, you would have seen him sitting on the hood of our Chevy, motioning for me to throw "The Big One"—"The Big One," he'd gesture again—then shaking his head disdainfully when I did not.

I detail my father's zealousness at length because, shortly after the benefit for Andi, I felt compelled to share an e-mail my father sent me with Andre. The context for the e-mail was this: Ben had made his league's all-star team but the game wouldn't be played until two weeks after the season was over. My father, who lives 1200 miles away in Florida, otherwise he would have told me this to my face, was concerned that his grandson wouldn't be sharp for the game. So he wrote: “It is ‘very important’ that you do not allow Benjamin to ‘lose his desire to perform well’ during this ‘waiting period’, Lee! 1) You should "practice his ‘Form & Control Regimens’ when it is ‘not raining’; also his ‘Fielding Regimens.’ 2) You should ‘keep him loose’ both in ‘Body’ and ‘Mind’ so that he will take the Field ‘believing in himself’ and not be ‘worrying about any rumored abilities’ of the ‘Opposition’ that he will be facing. 3) This is Benjamin's ‘initiation’ into the ‘Real World of Athletic Competition’ and it is ‘very important’ that he emerges from the experience in the proper frame of mind."

“Wow! Your Dad sure takes baseball seriously," Andre e-mailed back. But instead of joining me in my mockery of my father’s excesses, he wrote: "I bet he'd get a big kick seeing you coach a team." It was the first of several insights from Andre that would challenge my view of myself.

I had always wanted to coach Ben’s team but I had dismissed that idea for two reasons. First, I had a high-powered job, which gave me an excuse to avoid committing myself to anything that might be seen as an "extra-curricular" activity. Second, I remembered what it was like to have a father as a coach. Mine was extraordinary, probably the best I ever had, but there was always the sense, among my teammates and myself, that he was either favoring me or being harder on me, which was an uncomfortable burden for me to shoulder. The more I thought about Andre’s suggestion, however, the less these excuses made sense. So, I volunteered to coach Ben’s team.

“Dear Andre,” I wrote him. “Thanks to you, I’m the proud manager of a team of 11-year-olds. It strikes me that I have forgotten how to run a practice, much less a team. I could use a refresher course on drills and also a pre-game warmup that will keep my team focused and motivated. Can you help?”

"Hi Lee," he wrote back. "Your e-mail brings a smile to my face -- and there have not been many smiles since Andi's death. I am eager to teach you some drills and a warmup.”

That week I headed to Cleveland.

I took my glove to the Parhamoviches. I also took Jaime Horn, Andi’s best friend, who had been visiting her ailing mother in Dallas. When I greeted her at baggage claim, Jaime seemed distracted, as if her body had arrived but not her mind. She was taller and blonder than I remembered. And with her hipster eye-glasses, flowing skirt, ankle tattoo and sandals, she struck me as an appealing mix of New York career girl, wild child and lost soul.

"Andi was my best friend. . . ever," she told me as we headed eastward on I-90 through downtown Cleveland and along the shore of Lake Erie.

Jaime said that she and Andi would talk about politics and boyfriends but also about stuff that would have struck many of their Air America colleagues (for instance, Al Franken) as odd, including angels. They were certain that they had been sisters in at least four previous lives. They also believed that the spirits of the dead communicated with their loved ones. "We were always imagining the other side and then, all of a sudden, Andi was there, on the other side herself," Jamie said ironically, and softly, as the fast-food and auto-repair shops along I-90 gave way to corn fields. "I remember times when I had the feeling that Andi wouldn't be on earth very long. She was so fearless and courageous and good. Sometimes I get signs that she's watching over me or reaching out to me."

Jaime was traveling to Perry to celebrate Abby's ninth birthday. Andi had been the fun, cool aunt who brought Abby and her sister gifts from exotic places. As Abby and Kayla grew up, Andi would have been the one who empathized with their hurts, listened to their dreams and prodded them to make the most of their lives. This would now be Jaime's role. I could appreciate how Jaime felt. In the months following 9/11, one of my dearest friends died of stomach cancer after a cruel and dignity-destroying illness. Elizabeth and I never articulated it to Phil, but as soon as it was clear he would die, we knew that we would watch over Tracy and his three kids for the rest of our lives. We wanted to make sure that Phil's memory and spirit remained strong. It was one of the few ways we could come to terms with Phil's death and make peace, one day, with our own. Now that Phil’s kids are older, though, it makes me sad that he isn’t around to celebrate the remarkable convergence of his genes with their emerging selves. I wondered aloud whether the sight of Abby and Kayla, who Jaime described as being a “mini-Andi,” would make her sad.

"Not at all," Jaime said. “What worries me, sometimes, is seeing Andre and Vicki. Grief can be competitive. If you've loved someone as much as I loved Andi, you can’t imagine anyone being sadder at her loss or grieving her more deeply.

“I used to resent Michael, Andre and even Vicki for their grief. But I’m getting over that. I’m learning that we each experience grief in our own deep way, which makes it easier for me to both comfort and be comforted by them.”

A mile from Perry, two huge white towers came into view. They were shaped like hour glasses and billowed white smoke. They reminded me of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center, how they dominated the cityscape before 9/11. Yet the towers looming over Perry looked out of place, like rockets that had just crashed into a corn field.

"That's them," Jaime said as she saw the towers. And then I remembered that these god-awful structures were the reason Andre had moved to Perry in the first place. Because they created nuclear waste, their construction had spurred protests that made the national nightly news. Consequently, the state of Ohio funneled millions of extra dollars into Perry's public school system, which became one of the best in the nation. Andre didn't like living so close to a nuclear power plant, but when it came to raising his kids in Painesville, with its decrepit and crumbling schools, or in Perry, the choice was clear. We turned right down Townline Rd., which separated Perry from the town of Madison, then took another right back toward Perry. The road was lined by hundreds of acres of flowering nurseries. My GPS said, "Destination ahead," and I turned left into the driveway of a wooden farmhouse. Three generations of Parhamoviches converged on our car: Andre and Vicki, Marci and Joe, and the two girls, who ran up to Jaime for hugs. I started to say "hello" but before I could say anything Andre took my arm and pulled me into the yard. "Let's get to work," he said.

Over the next two hours, Andre taught me a pre-game warm-up, several fielding drills and a variety of ways to build hitting skills using whiffle balls, fungo bats and plastic golf balls. Abby and Kayla wanted to join us, but Andre shooed them away. His 'singular focus'—a polite term for 'rigidity'—was also apparent at dinner, where he only showed interest in topics like baseball, that "jerk of a reporter" who had savaged Michael's book and the lack of work ethic in today's youth, and scoffed at other points of view. Both Jaime and his family indulged Andre and avoided any mention of Andi, as did I. My friend Andre, it turned out, was a great baseball mentor, but he was an emotional mess, which saddened me.

When I returned to New York, I began to prepare what I'd do and say at our team’s first practice. I wanted to get across the importance of hustling, being alert and playing to the best of your potential. We were going to stress fundamentals, I would say, and we’d play our hardest to win because winning is a lot more fun than losing. I rehearsed my spiel in front of Ben and Caroline, who liked the general drift but said I needed to be more concise and smile more. To drive the point home, Ben said: "Don't be Grandpa Harry."

"I've given keynote addresses to a thousand people before and this is making me way more nervous," I wrote Andre.

"The reason you're nervous, my friend, is that you're coaching your own children," he wrote back. "I felt the same way when I coached my kids. You're concerned what the other players and their parents will think, so you become tougher on your children. It never works. Treat them like you would any other player."

After our first game—a 5-1 victory over Rhinebeck—I gave Andre a detailed report: "Our pitching was great but our hitting was abysmal." The next game didn't go as well, and we lost. "I know it's only Little League," I wrote Andre. "But I'm depressed."

"That's the nature of the beast," he wrote back. "No matter what level you coach, a defeat feels like you've personally failed your team. You can’t let defeat consume you."

The fact is, it did consume me. I must have spent two hours compiling every conceivable statistic about the first two games—runs scored and batted in, slugging percentage, on-base percentage, strikeout-to-walk ratio—as if these numbers, like tea leaves, would reveal the future path to victory. One statistic stood out. In the first two games the players on my team struck out a total of 29 times—almost 2.5 times an inning. As Ben and Noah like to say, we sucked.

In an e-mail to Andre I offered my own analysis—the best hitters were swinging too hard and the worst hitters weren’t swinging at all—and asked for his advice. He wrote back: "Your sluggers just want to crush the ball. Ask them: ‘What’s more important, swinging s hard as you can and missing or making contact and getting a hit?’As for the second problem, the players who aren't striding into the pitch are afraid of it. Remind them to stand close to the plate and on the ‘balls’ of their feet. And be sure to show them exactly what you mean; otherwise, they'll never get it."

In our 25-5 win over Poughkeepsie, the kids who were over-swinging made contact and felt great after they got hits. So did some of our more timid hitters, who swung and eked out singles. Only one player, our starting pitcher, got rattled -- and I noticed how he kept looking at his father after every pitch, as if he expected to be reprimanded. “What should I do?” I e-mailed Andre.

"Shower that young man with praise," he wrote. It was exactly the opposite of what this son of Harry had been doing.

It is three months after my last trip to Perry and I’m here to see how Andre is dealing with his grief. Our friendship has deepened—I e-mail him more than any other male friend—but I still feel that I can’t speak honestly with him about Andi. “Is it getting any easier?” I wrote him in a letter. “I’d really like to know.” When he wrote back that he and Vicki would love to share what they’ve learned about themselves and each other since Andi died, I was overjoyed.

We drive to a small park on a hill overlooking Lake Erie. A chill wind scatters the last of autumn's leaves along the walkway. "This is my special place," Andre tells me. "I come here every day to be alone with my thoughts and," he adds softly, "to talk with Andi." Andre's confession startles me; in the five months we've been e-mailing each other, he has barely mentioned his daughter's name. Now, it turns out, he has been talking with Andi almost every day and having what Jaime and Vicki call "Andi moments"—encounters that defy reason and surprise them with joy.

"You'll never believe this," he says as he pulls me toward a bench facing the lake. "A few weeks ago I found out that I could dedicate one of these benches to Andi. It drove me crazy because I couldn't figure out which bench it should be, under which tree? And guess what?" he says, pointing to a word that's barely legible. "No, closer," he commands. The word, etched in blue ink, says "Andrea," Andi's birth name. "I have no idea who put it there," Andre tells me, "but I'll bet that Andi had something to do with it."

To explain why he’s so sure, Andre describes another cloudy day, in September, when he came to the park feeling defeated by life, hopeless. Then all of a sudden the sun broke through the clouds and he was enveloped in what he calls an "indescribable" warmth. "It was a feeling of complete contentment, bliss, serenity and peace of heart, all wrapped into one," he says. "Vicki likes to think it was Andi giving me a hug. I like to think it was Andi saying, "Don't worry. I'm still here, Dad. I'm okay."

Which is not to say that the pain is gone; far from it. And Andre is still angry. Don't get him started on how NDI sent his daughter into one of the most dangerous sections of Baghdad during one of the most violent months of the war. Or how NDI hired Iraqis (who were vulnerable to blackmail) and not Blackwater (the U.S.-owned private security contractor) to protect her. If Andre came face to face with any of the 30 Sunni insurgents who ambushed and murdered Andi, he would strangle them until they were dead. I wonder: Does Andre ever blame the man who presided over the U.S. war effort for Andi’s death? Is he angry at George W. Bush?

"No," Andre says. "It was Andi's choice to go. She knew exactly what she was getting into."

How about God? Does Andre, a Catholic, ever blame or question God?

"Yes. I do."

He tells me about an encounter that occurred less than ten feet from where we’re standing. Pointing to a barren tree, he says, "Right there I shouted, 'God, why have you forsaken me? Why have you done this to me?' Then a voice inside my brain said, 'Andre, I haven't forsaken you. I've been by your side the whole time.'"

That response quieted Andre for a couple of months. Then a week before my visit, he lost faith again. He bolted from a church during the wedding of a family friend. "The bride had blond hair, just like Andi," he explains. "And I remembered how Andi was going to marry Michael in Paris, on Valentine’s Day. And so, I couldn’t bear it. So I ran out of the church and fell to my knees. I shouted, 'You took away my daughter, my precious daughter. Why, God? Why?'

"And then I heard that voice again. It said, 'Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.' And I said, 'I don't want your riches, I want my daughter back. I was really peeved.'"

By temperament and by necessity, Vicki, has had an easier time coping with Andi’s death. "After Andi died, I had to be strong for Andre, I had to be strong for Marci, and I had to be strong for the boys,” she explains. “The boys were only 17 at the time. They could have dropped out, got into drugs, or even taken their lives because they didn't want to deal with Andi's death. I had to be there for them, day and night. I couldn't break down."

Vicki was especially worried about Andre. "Even though there are four thousand other fathers who have lost sons and daughters in Iraq, I knew that Andre would take Andi's death the hardest. He would be full of this why and that one and experience Andi’s loss as though he were the only person in history to be in so much pain. That's why I urged him to get into therapy and join a support group."

Andre still rages against God; Vicki, on the other hand, has remained steadfast. "I wouldn't have been able to be as strong as I’ve been if I didn't have faith in God." she says. "But I must admit that I talk to Andi more than God now. I talk to her all day long.

“And right now, she's telling me that we better get back to Marci's house for dinner."

As we walk toward the parking lot, Andre tells me how he dreams of traveling to Iraq. "I want to go to Baghdad with Michael after the war ends. I want to be there on January 17, the day Andi died. I want to stand as a free American on the street corner where she was killed and know that Andi didn't die in vain." And Vicki?

"If that ever happens, if the war ever ends, I'll stay home," she says. "Seeing where Andi died would just upset me. What comforts me is the fact that my daughter felt strong and confident enough while she was alive to live her life the way she wanted. Andre misses his little girl. I miss the woman she would have become."

Whenever I fly in an airplane there’s a moment at take-off when I contemplate the possibility of my own death and the impact it will have on my wife and kids. (Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience.) It’s an unnerving thought, and I put it to rest by tightening my seatbelt and taking a deep breath. This time, though, it wasn’t my own death that concerned me as we took off from Cleveland to New York; what worried me was the possibility that Ben, Noah or Caroline could be killed while I was airborne. That thought -- the possibility of losing the only people in the world whose lives meant more to me than my own -- filled me with a sorrow so deep that it took my arrival home and the sight of my kids to end it: “Daddy, Daddy. Did you bring us any gifts?”

The next day I received a note from Andre that said: “Please read the attached letter. It means a lot to me.”

The letter had been written by U.S. Senator George Voinovich after Andi died. The Senator and his wife had experienced their own terrible loss. In 1979, a month before he was elected Cleveland’s mayor, their 9-year-old daughter Molly was struck and killed by a van.

"We know that there will be difficult days ahead as you adjust to the loss of Andi,” Voinovich wrote. “Janet and I have never completely adjusted to Molly's death. Every so often, without warning, a flood of memories will return. You will think that you cannot make it through another day. Trust me,” he concluded, “you will."

Why did the Senator’s letter mean so much to Andre?

"When I think I can't go on,” Andre said, “I remember the phrase, 'Trust me, you will.'”

A few days later Andre told me about a woman in his bereavement group whose oldest son had been killed five years earlier in a car accident. “She was just learning to live with his loss,” Andre said. “So guess what happens? Her youngest son gets killed in a car crash. I feel terrible for her. For weeks I’ve been wallowing in self-pity. Now I’m going to stop. I bet if you look around the room— look around any room—you’ll find a person with a bigger problem or in worse pain.” For the last few months Andre had been looking for an answer to his grief; now, it seemed, he had found it.

"When you grieve for a child, it’s like you’re always swimming through a sea of sadness," he explained. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

From the publisher:

1. Why does the author embark on his year-long project? What does he hope to accomplish by tying up his life’s loose ends?

2. The author lists several reasons why he lets important matters slide: not enough time or energy, his tendency to procrastinate, his fear of doing the wrong thing. What are some of the reasons that you accumulate unfinished business?

3. The author writes that his family is the source of his “most intimate and anxiety-producing” unfinished business. Do you think that's true for most people? Is it true for you?

4. The author goes on ten journeys to close circles and make amends. Which of his journeys -- for example, paying back a debt, finding a long-lost relative, thanking an old teacher -- resonates most with you? Why?

5. If you had one year to tie up your loose emotional ends, how would you spend it? What items would be at the top of your list of unfinished business?

6. Shahid believes that it's important to address your unfinished business because "we need to make an accounting of these things before we die, so that our souls can rest." Akmal says, "It's not about resting in peace. It's about moving forward. It's about optimizing your human potential." Who in your opinion is right?

7. Think of all the people you cared about who have passed away. Did any of them die without knowing what they had meant to you? If you had one more conversation with each of those people, what would you say?

8. The author says that he wants to live "a more connected life?" What does he mean by that phrase? Rate your own life. On a scale of 1 to 10, how rich is it in terms of human connectedness?

9. Mr. Jarvis challenges his students by saying: "After you die, what would you like people to say about you? Your answer to that question should guide the way you live." What would you like people to say about you after you die?

10. Has this book given you a perspective on your life that you find useful? What ideas are you likely to take away or apply from it? Can you think of any steps you can take in your own life to keep yourself from accumulating unfinished business?

Weblinks

»	Book's Official Web Site
»	My Unfinished Business Facebook Page
»	Follow Lee Kravitz on Twitter
»	Lee Kravitz Interview on You Tube
»	Lee Kravitz on Library Thing

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