Remember Their Kindness

Samantha Irby is the master of the sentence. I read two of her books, Wow, No Thank You and We Are Never Meeting In Real Life, and she made me laugh out loud. Books don't usually make me laugh until I drool. 

To clarify, these books are completely and totally UA, but her curse words are strategic as opposed to lavishly applied, and I appreciate that sort of consideration. There are a few graphic sections—OK, I had to skip an entire essay—but I found her humor to be quite definitely worth it. 

At one point, when she is recounting the death of her parents, she gets (appropriately) somber. Her father was not a good man. He was a deadbeat, an alcoholic, and hit her if she didn't do dinner properly. But he was her father, and she loved him. 

He had heart problems, and there was a doctor who cared for him until the end, Dr. Ira Weiss. She refers to him as "an angel." He was an Orthodox Jew, she writes (record scratch), who kept kosher. 

This man fought to keep her father's heart going. When her father went to a different state, he paid money out of pocket to bring him back to be under his care. When her father disappeared after a number of cardiac episodes, Dr. Weiss biked through the streets looking for him. 

Her father's funeral was attended only by his good-for-nothing friends, his daughter, and Dr. Weiss. Dr. Weiss, Irby recounts, sang "the Lord's Prayer in Hebrew" for her father—Kel Malei Rachamim. 

I certainly did not expect a passage like this in a book like this. 

Irby did not have an easy youth. Her parents were both gone by the time she was 18. She uses humor to deflect from emotion—she admits this freely. 

And 20 years later, she expresses gratitude to the Jewish doctor who went above and beyond for his patient, her father, in her book. She didn't have to. He wasn't a necessary part of the story. 

His kindness and selflessness was not forgotten. 

I still remember the lovely woman who was my labor nurse—Christina. She was so kind. I remember the off-duty nurse who talked me through my airsickness after I had disembarked on shaking legs. 

They're remembered, and we are grateful for them.