Jeffrey’s 10th Memorial: My Favorite Memories of the Past, and What It All Means Now

Jeffrey Alexander Klein, you were truly one of a kind. 

This Monday November 9^th marks ten years to the day that he chose to end his life. The impact of this is on me is amplified by the recent loss of my father-in-law, which emphasized the pointlessness and waste of suicide, and also the gift of life. So many things made Jeffrey truly unique. Dad has beautifully expressed so many wonderful memories over the years. For anyone who still may be unfamiliar with Kleinsaucer, it is the website dedicated to Jeffrey’s life in which all of these blog posts are written. I hope everyone peruses through Kleinsaucer and reads an additional blog post or two today not only because everyone’s writing has been so touching, but because there is so much to take away from Jeffrey’s life. My father has done a phenomenal job delving into the impact Jeffrey had on this world through each phase of his life, and how we attempt to cope with his passing today. Searching through Kleinsaucer, you will see categories along the side of the page; again, if any category catches your eye, please read an additional post today to not only keep Jeffrey’s memory alive, but because it may be cathartic to read and it may help anyone who is going through something similar. 

There is no experience like losing a loved one. It is honestly the most devasting and crushing thing that can happen in this life.Jeffrey and I were similar in some ways and different in others. The most similar parallel that comes to mind first between me and Jeffrey is that I think we are both natural-born introverts. With that being said, catch us under the right circumstances with friends or family, and we’ll create a wonderful moment or memory to laugh at. Jeffrey was known for making any ordinary event or situation comical and memorable. A normal night out with Jeffrey and friends may have ended with him coming home to Chappaqua and ordering 250 boneless wings to the house at 2:30am. Oh wow, he brought the party back home? Nope, they were all for him! Perhaps that was the night that culminated in him pouring a beer on a dear friend while they were dancing at a party. Whatever the case, he was just so unique, and clearly a hoot. 

Jeffrey loved Brett and me dearly, and would show his affection for us in the most unique of ways. I can still vividly picture me, Brett, my dad Rich and my mom Carey positioned in the kitchen when Jeffrey would waltz in and ask Brett and me “Hey guys how was your 155^th day of school today?” Haha, what? No, seriously, it would actually have been that number day of school – I’m pretty sure he did this from day one to day 180, rather nonchalantly. He was just the funniest. 

He definitely had some cute nicknames for Brett, most notably “Red Cheeks”, and the one that Jeffrey called me most of my life was “Freight Train”. If I gave you a guess as to how that nickname came about, you wouldn’t get it in one hundred tries. And no, it actually has nothing to do with my current sturdy build. Jeffrey happened to remember that at Breezemont day camp which I suppose would have been sometime between 18-22 years ago, that one of the camp counselors gave me that nickname, as I happened to be excelling in some outdoor floor hockey that day. How Jeffrey knows I was given that nickname that day is anyone’s guess – I don’t think I exactly came home and reported it to anyone. But the fact that he called me that for the next decade plus is truly a testament of how quirky,unique, and loving he was. 

Another equally notable quirk of Jeffrey’s, that also lasted for years upon years, was the fact that at the most random times, he would notice a sparkle of glitter on my face or neck. The fact that he would tell me this probably at least once a month so for so many years of our lives is hilarious – who else would do that?I’m not sure how or why glitter would occasionally appear on my face – I’ll let the world know now, I was not sneaking out during the day to any elementary school art classes, nor do I plan to going forward. But, if anyone notices a sparkle of glitter on my face now, or I tell a loved one that I notice a speck of glitter on their face, we immediately lock eyes and remark that it is Jeffrey checking up on us. This type of quirk seemed so natural that it would be one of Jeffrey’s, and I’m incredibly thankful that I’ve found a way to still make it relevant to this day. When Kelsey and I got married this past May, I am not lying when I say that I saw a few specks of glitter on most people’s faces by the end of that night too. It’s quite amazing that I can feel that he’s watching from above everything that’s been going on in life. 

Speaking of everything that’s currently going on, Rich has expressed in other posts Jeffrey’s intense passion for President Obama during his campaign, and I would love nothing more than for Jeffrey to be here with us now during this intense election. I know he would be keeping our family and all of his close buddies (shout out to Elon, Jack, Ryan,AB, Julie, Brooke, Thao, etc.) up to date with the latest facts, stories, and other news via phone calls and Facebook statuses (which would maybe now be Instagram posts). I know that we would have grown close, Jeffrey and me, as we lived out the prime years of our twenties together. I would be so interested to see and hear what he has to say about Trump and Biden; and, for that matter, his current view of the state of the world in general. I’m sure he’d be informing us of the latest science in regards to the coronavirus, and find yet another quirky way to make light of the intense situation of living modern day life with the virus; I know he’s looking down and appreciates that Rich got a Middlebury mask! 

Not only was Jeffrey so smart academically, politically, and socially, he was quite the athlete during his prime years. Another common thread that we unfortunately shared is that I know we both wish we had gotten more of a chance to shine on the varsity basketball team in high school. I think basketball was a natural gift of ours. We both had a natural love of tennis, too. I so badly wish you were here to play with me, Brett and dad, and I know you’re watching from above my tennis sessions with Kelsey, her cousins and Aunt. As I’m sure he can see, tennis seems to be the go-to sport during these COVID-times, as one can social distance while playing it! And I know I’ll never forget the hundreds of games of ping pong that we bonded over growing up as kids in the Charles Court basement. Hopefully he wouldn’t mind me telling everyone reading this that I frequently got the upper hand when we played. Even after his death, when Brett I played, we’d have a brief moment of silence when each persons’ scores were perfect squares, as Jeffrey would actually make us do! He was too much sometimes but something like that was just so funny, and actually very natural for him. 

Unfortunately though, as most people would attest to, life is not all fun and games all the time. Most people would agree that life throws obstacles at you when you least expect it. As Rich and Carey would attest to, Jeffrey was fighting his battles until the very end, and as dad has mentioned of course in other posts, mis-prescribed medication was unequivocally the cause of things going downhill for good. Unfortunately with medication that strong, no human could possibly ward off something like that. 

But man oh man, I so wish he could have. He was such an amazing person with so much potential. I think often of what he’d be doing with his life and his education from Middlebury College. Obviously I think the sky would have been the limit, and I think the paralegal position he took immediately after college was not the right one for him. Whether the job he ultimately took was something along the lines of a sports writer, something in politics, or something more finance-oriented or corporate, I know it would have been a job he felt passionate about, which would have led him to surpass all expectations. I really think Jeffrey was that smart and I think he had such a keen way of viewing the world. And when he was passionate about a particular subject, whether it be politics or March Madness basketball, he was completely immersed, and a clear expert.

Getting back to what I said before – unfortunately there are times when life is not all fun and games, and there is a saying that “God gives his toughest battles to his strongest soldiers”. The reason I bring this up is because I know Jeffrey is observing from above that all of us down here are still mourning the loss of Kelsey’s father Bob last month due to the awful disease ALS.Both Jeffrey and Bob ultimately lost their battles, but fought so hard. I hope it is true that Jeffrey and Bob have met and are enjoying each other’s company in heaven. Bob is one of the sweetest souls I have met. He loved his family more than anything in the world and just like Jeffrey, he loved life and was so passionate about the things he loved. The world would be a better place with Jeffrey and Bob still in it. I hope they are enjoying some food and drinks up there together and I hope they have both found peace and comfort. 

Reflecting on all of this has made me realize, again, it is so important to be kind toward one another. You never know what someone else is going through. It also makes you realize that life is so precious, and anything can happen at any time. I just know that Jeffrey would be successful and thriving today in every way. He was living up his college years to the fullest, and some months after college before things went south. And I admired Bob’s strength the entire time he was fighting versus ALS, but unfortunately it was another disease that no human could overcome. So love one another and cherish one another, because clearly life has its crazy twists and turns. Love and family are the most important of all.

– Drew Klein

Desperately Trying To Keep Jeff Alive On His 29th Birthday

 

“Today is not a funeral.  It is a birthday, and we shall treat it as such.”

            –Tarzan Tahsin Ozan Gemikonakli, Facebook post, March 2, 2013

______________________________________________________

 Jeff,

Each and every birthday, I try my best to heed Tarzan’s words. It’s extremely difficult, though, as your birthday connotes many different things, and unfortunately, the thoughts that dominate my mind are those related to what might have been. My research into suicide has been excruciatingly painful, because each piece of data that I’ve found confirms what I intuitively knew—that any number of factors could have quickly changed the outcome and tipped your fate from death to decades of life in the blink of an eye. A suicide barrier at the bridge, a traffic jam on the way there, Brett’s school bus getting home a little earlier, a call from me making plans for that night…the list goes on and on. And the knife twists.

And if any of those things had happened, the research clearly shows that the suicidal moment would have permanently passed. You’d be celebrating your 29th birthday with us and others today, and during this incredible time in our history, each of your passions would have found plenty of fertile ground for your unique means of expression.

You really came of age during the 2008 Presidential campaign, and the passion that Barack Obama elicited from you is something for which I will always be grateful to him. I can only imagine how engaged you’d have been in this year’s bizarre campaign season. I can actually hear your expressions of outrage over the utter lack of substance in a couple of the Republican candidates and the somewhat disturbing policy positions of others.

I can picture you debating Jason, the young kid you mentored at Middlebury who is now a junior in college, about his strong support for Bernie Sanders. You would have spared no effort in trying to bring him around to your view that Hillary is the best choice for our country at this critical moment. I know you would have started a separate politically-focused blog on which to spread your message that Obama’s agenda must be continued. Your booming voice and colorful writing take over my mind during quiet moments at work. Knowing exactly what you’d be saying and writing makes it easy to fantasize, but while your spoken and written words are tantalizingly close, they are a tease.

And your brothers… they were kids when you upped and left, and now they are men with whom you’d have had raucous political conversations to complement your sports banter. Brett, as Features Editor of the Villanovan, has become a leading columnist covering the political campaigns, and Drew is aligned with you in his support of Hillary. He believes that electing a woman after an African American would not only be incredibly historic but would also indicate that our country, despite its divisions, is still capable of great things.

This train of thought leads me to the unbelievable reality that you never even knew that your little brother ended up at Villanova. For someone who was so close to his brothers and so engaged in Drew’s college search, that is something that boggles my mind. Your brothers were there for you at your graduations, and you were there for Drew, but it’s egregious, quite frankly, that you won’t be there for Brett.

 

 

And when you layer on top of that the fact that ‘Nova recently attained and temporarily held college basketball’s number one ranking for the first time in its history, your not being here to see it is really too much to bear. My God, you’d have been out of your mind with excitement over this amazing development in Brett’s senior year. Instead, the only Villanova memories you left behind were your angry Facebook posts about how egregious calls by the refs handed ‘Nova a first round victory against huge underdog Robert Morris during your last March Madness tournament in 2010. If you had only known that Brett would choose two years later to go to college there, all would have been instantly forgiven.

 

The reality is that observing all these current events that are so tied to your past keeps you alive for me. And even now, staying connected to you and keeping you alive in any way possible is crucial to my maintaining a healthy state of mind. I actually fear that as the people about whom you had such strong feelings start to fade from the scene, you will somehow become less relevant in the world.

As long as Kobe, Obama, Lebron and Eli Manning are still impact players, then in my confused mind, so are you. But when Kobe retires in May, and Obama leaves office next January, I feel like you will be that much more removed from today’s world, and thus you’ll be even more dead than you already are.

 

At least March Madness is forever, so your passion will always live through the tournament. And this year’s tournament, in which so many teams have a real shot to win it all, would have taken your excitement to new heights.

Some might call it masochistic, but when I still periodically receive emails that are addressed to you, I can’t bring myself to hit the delete key. I also have to confess that I keep much of the snail mail addressed to you too. I just can’t trash it. I don’t know, man, I guess I just feel that if advertisers still think you’re alive, then maybe in some metaphysical way, you are. It’s all about keeping you alive.

 

 

The most difficult conversation that Mom and I are having now is about her strong feeling that after five years, it’s time to start taking things down from the walls in your room.  Although I totally understand where she’s coming from, when she said it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, I felt the onset of full blown panic. And as you know, I’m the most stable, least anxious guy around.

To me, beginning the process of dismantling your room would be complete capitulation, an acknowledgement that you truly are gone forever and there is really no reason for you to still have your own room. It’s too painful for Mom to see the memories, yet for me, when I walk in your room and see Obama’s “Yes We Can” poster and your bulletin boards with all your sports tickets and memories, you literally come alive again for me. When my back is sore and I sit in the massage chair in the corner of your room and look around, it feels like you’re there. Your life surrounds me, and I like how it feels.

 

 

The bottom line is that Mom and I are 30+ year soul mates, and no matter what we disagree about, we always agree on the crucial importance of compromise. And so we will do this gradually in a way that works for her and eases me into it. First, we’ll take down some of the less personal items, like the framed sports photos. And then sometime later in the year, we’ll take down Obama, the Middlebury pennant, and the bulletin boards. That day will be the second most devastating day of my life.

Through relentless searching, though, I continue to find precious memories that I thought had long ago been lost or discarded. These “finds” energize me, and the memories bring you temporarily back to life. The most incredible recent discovery was a postcard, of all things, that you sent us during the summer of 2003 when you went on that Wilderness Ventures teen tour out west. It captures exactly who you were:

“Dear Mom and Dad,

It’s the day after I left the message at home, and we’re getting our laundry done. We just showered too. Wow! It’s tough out here—the conditions are brutal sometimes. I’ll tell you ALL about it when I get home, but I just want to let you know that the kids are GREAT and I cannot tell you enough how much I’m looking forward to East Hampton.

Love,
Jeff”

Like a digital camera that takes high resolution photos, this postcard is similarly a high definition snapshot of you. There you were, out in the elements, toughing out the hot and dry conditions, but loving the experience. And of course you thought the kids were GREAT. Was there anyone you didn’t like or get along with? I admire your gift of expression—in just a few sentences, you gave us a vivid picture of exactly how you were doing and what it was like. And in the midst of all that, you had one eye looking forward to a family tradition—a summer-end vacation for the five of us. I always thought you had perfect balance in your life between enjoying great times with friends and separately with family. I just don’t know whatever became of your ability and willingness to battle through tough conditions.

I guess it’s pretty ironic that over five years after your death, on your 29th birthday today, I’m still fighting a war for your life. It’s a fight to keep you relevant and to keep the memories fresh and vibrant. You were so worried about advancing through your 20’s and assuming the responsibilities that these years would bring. It’s so sad, because Drew would be the first to tell you that the 20’s are pretty damn good, and Brett’s early read would confirm that.

Kobe and Barack may be on their way out, but we’ve still got Eli and Lebron, and your man Bill Simmons is coming back with a brand new website and HBO sports talk show.

 

With those guys still making headlines, I feel like you remain alive in a spiritual way, and given the reality of the situation, that’s the best I can ask for.

Today is certainly not a funeral. We each get only one of those, and tragically, you’ve prematurely had yours. But birthdays keep coming, and that is what today is.  It is the birthday of  our firstborn son who filled us with such pride and joy for 23 1/2 years. I promise you, I’m fighting like hell to treat it as such.

Happy 29th birthday, Jeff. I love you with all my heart.

Love,
Dad

Brought Back To Reality By A Rotten Pumpkin

On November 23^rd, 2014, I was walking our greyhound Dobi in the park per my usual weekend routine. As we strolled, Carey called and I heard immediately that she was in distress. She had just left the cemetery after her weekly visit to Jeff’s grave and was distraught to find that the pumpkin she had placed there in October had completely rotted, and the plants she had last planted were as dead as he was.

And if that wasn’t enough, Jeff’s tennis trophy that had been standing next to the headstone for all these years had finally succumbed to the weather. The tennis player’s arm had broken off from the rest of the body, just like I imagine Jeff’s body came undone when it hit the train tracks below the Bear Mountain Bridge. To add insult to injury on that day, Jeff’s dead body was hit by a CSX freight train shortly after he landed. That is the reality of what his grave represents, irrespective of Carey’s tireless efforts to make it look as good as possible, and on this day, its appearance matched the reality of the situation.

For over four years, Carey had lovingly and relentlessly tended to the grave that should never have become home to our precious son who died such a senseless death. She had kept it looking as beautiful as a grave can look, but she had not been able to get there the weekend before, and now she was beating herself up for the resulting decay that taken hold of the pumpkin, plants and trophy. I consoled her as best I could, saying that of course she would replace everything and have it looking beautiful again in short order.   But this situation did not lend itself to consolation. Jeff was dead, his demise having been completely unnecessary, and now his grave looked like crap.

A short while after hanging up with Carey, I glanced at my phone and saw a notification that she had commented on my post on the Friends of Jeff Klein Facebook page from two days earlier, when I had shared the link to my first article on Elephant Journal. Carey “likes” many of my posts but rarely comments, so I was anxious to read what she had to say. But I was horrified to find that under a long thread of beautiful comments from others, she wrote:

I got angry, and I texted her to take it down.  I told her what she wrote was disgraceful.  Carey was hurt that I would say such a thing and ask her to do that, and the following text conversation ensued with my texts in blue:

It was not until six days later, when we were out for dinner on the next Saturday night, that we gave the topic the time it deserved. Carey explained that while it’s great that I’m trying to inspire and help people, my attempting “to save the world” can come across as almost romanticizing what Jeff did and implying that his death had occurred for some greater good.  She feels that my writing portrays us as heroically dealing with the tragedy.  But the reality is we are broken and bleeding, and always will be, albeit propped up by the joy that Drew and Brett bring us every day of our lives.

And furthermore, after I had made Jeff’s and our family’s lives so public for four years, was she not entitled to make one brutally honest public comment of her own?

Of course she was.

After a healthy discussion, Carey asked if I still wanted her to take the comment down. The answer was no. Absolutely not. She was right—it was too little, too late for Jeff, and the damn pumpkin was rotten. That truly is the reality.

As I’ve said several times on this blog, I began writing four years ago for purely selfish reasons. Writing was an effective form of therapy for me and it made me feel like I was doing everything possible to keep Jeff’s memory alive. I didn’t realize for probably two years that it was helping others and perhaps saving some lives. But that was just a by-product of what I was doing, not the primary motivation for it. Once it became clear to me, though, that people were in fact being helped, I became energized by that knowledge, and I began to write more frequently and frenetically.

The desire to help others then became the driver. The more positive reinforcement I received from people about the blog’s impact, the more I was able to focus on writing alone and not dwell on the horror of what Jeff had done to initiate all this in the first place. And that is where some perspective may have been lost and why Carey injected a dose of reality back into the conversation.

Carey posted her comment that day partially as a result of timing and partially to provide perspective. She wrote it in a grief-stricken moment after driving away from the most terrible place a parent could ever have to visit. This excruciating experience was exacerbated by the deterioration of the very objects that she had placed at the grave to mask its true meaning. And so she understandably vented.

As a matter of perspective, Carey sent a reminder that, notwithstanding the fact that his final act was induced by the side effects of medication, what Jeff did was violent, devastating and a betrayal of those who adored him. He would have gotten better with time, and as Carey has come to that clear realization, it has hit her particularly hard. This makes everything all the more painful. Helping others is important, but nothing either one of us does can bring Jeff back to where he belongs.

I will keep writing, as a continuation of both my therapy and my attempts to try to help those who struggle realize that life is always worth living. For over four years, I have bared my soul in a public forum, and Carey has supported my doing so—reticently at first but then more easily after an adjustment period. Now that she has expressed her genuine grief in an honest public comment, I fully support her and admit that my initial reaction to it was impulsive and not well thought out.

My precious wife and incredible mother of our three boys lost her first-born son in sudden, violent fashion, and she has every right to tell it like it is. My heart bleeds for her, and I would do anything to take away her pain. You have no idea how much I love her.

Carey long ago replaced the rotten pumpkin and dead plants with beautiful, seasonally appropriate decorations. And the broken trophy has been replaced by another from Jeff’s ample collection that still sits on the dresser in his room.

However, there is no sugarcoating the fact that I’m talking about decorations for a grave, below which lies the decomposed body of my boy, who would have most certainly recovered had he given his life the time it deserved.

The pumpkin was rotten, just like everything about this situation. That is the harsh reality that Jeff left us with, and Carey was simply giving honest voice to this awful truth.

–Rich Klein

A Christmas Eve Tale: Using Jeff’s Spirit Above To Help Find Our Missing Dog

“Oh, they say, she died one winter,

When there came a killing frost,

And the pony she named Wildfire,

Busted down its stall,

In a blizzard he was lost.”

        –Michael Murphey, “Wildfire”, 1975

____________________________________________________________________________

It’s sort of ironic that for a family to whom Christmas has been so important, both spiritually and in terms of being a wonderful time for family bonding, Christmas Eve has not always been kind to us.

On Christmas Eve 2000, the five of us went into Manhattan to go ice skating at South Street Seaport, to see the tree at Rockefeller Center and then to have dinner at Michael Jordan’s steakhouse in Grand Central Station before jumping on the train home. It was a great day and evening.

However, at about one in the morning, Drew, who was just 9 years old, came into our room in tears and in obvious pain. True to his nature, he apologized for waking us up but said that he felt extreme stomach pain. I knew immediately what it was, as it happened to me when I was 11. I asked Drew to point to the exact spot on his abdomen where he felt the pain. He did so, and it was the precise location where the scar from my appendectomy was still visible on the right side of my abdomen.

I explained that we needed to get in the car right away and get to the hospital but that everything would be fine. I told him that Santa would know and would deliver his gifts to the hospital. And so in the early hours of Christmas 2000, Drew had his appendix removed and Carey came to sleep in his hospital room while I went home to be with Jeff and Brett. Drew opened presents in Northern Westchester Hospital on Christmas morning.

I would have thought that one such dramatic Christmas Eve incident would be enough for one family, but I was mistaken. Our evening on December 24^th, 2012 was all planned out. We’d have an early dinner out together and then go to Church services. Those plans changed quickly, though, when during our greyhound Dobi’s late afternoon walk, she ran off in the woods at Dogwood Park, in the same direction in which she typically wanders off for short amounts of time. She had always come back in the past within ten minutes or so. Not this time.

At the 20 minute missing mark, Carey and I started getting nervous, as darkness was quickly settling in. Dobi was wearing a bright pink coat, but not only didn’t we see anything in the distance, we didn’t hear any rustling in the leaves either. After a half hour, we started to bellow her name, beseeching this greyhound– whom we had rescued from the racetracks of Florida when our whippet Clif was diagnosed with lymphoma just three months after Jeff died– to come back to us. Dobi had comforted us greatly in the aftermath of Jeff’s death and Clif’s ultimate death in January 2012 (see “Clif’s Coming”, 1/30/12, https://kleinsaucer.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/clifs-coming/ ), and now she was gone. The song Wildfire entered my mind. The forecast for that evening was for sleet and snow, and I panicked at the thought that Dobi could be lost in a storm just like Wildfire was.

Dobi in her pink coat

After an hour, we had screamed ourselves hoarse with nothing to show for it. It was pitch black, and the silence was deafening. Carey and I agreed that this time she wasn’t coming back. Carey speculated that she had been attacked by a coyote or a deer that she had chased. Or maybe for some inexplicable reason, she had escaped the park onto a road. Not knowing what else to do, we drove home without our precious dog.

We had texted Drew and Brett what was happening, and when we got home, the look of disbelief on their faces broke my heart. Again. As we stood in the kitchen, that all too familiar feeling that our family had suffered yet another crushing loss permeated the room. It was surreal–there we were in a warm house while our greyhound was somewhere outside in the very cold night, hopefully still alive. She had been gone over 90 minutes. At that point, Carey verbalized what we were all feeling. We were going to go back into those woods, together as a family, and we weren’t leaving without our girl. We grabbed flashlights and got in the car, all five of us including Carey’s mom.

For a brief moment, though, I stayed behind in the kitchen while they went into the garage. I pulled Jeff’s picture out of my pocket–the one that was given out with the prayer card at his wake. He is wearing a deep blue shirt with a red tie. I keep it with me at all times. I looked him squarely in the eyes, and my rage that had boiled within me for over two years surged to the surface. I screamed at him:

“You owe us for everything you’ve put us through. YOU OWE US. Bring her back, do you hear me? As your father, I’m telling you to BRING HER BACK.”

I didn’t know if he could hear me, but I guarantee you the neighbors did.

No more death. No more tragedy. Not tonight. Not on Christmas Eve.

 

We parked the car, and Drew, Brett and I got out with our flashlights and plunged into the dark woods. We each started calling Dobi’s name as loud as we could while shining our lights every which way. Nothing. We walked a little futher in, now screaming in fear, not hope. About five minutes later, Drew called out, “I heard something up there”, and he pointed up and to our right. Brett whipped around and pointed his flashlight at the spot, and we all immediately saw a flash of pink. Instinctively, Brett sprinted toward her, and Dobi started to run away from the blinding lights. I screamed at Brett to stop, and when I called her in as calm a voice as I could muster, she ran into my arms. I had dropped her leash by the entrance, but it didn’t matter. I wasn’t letting go until she was back safely in our car. It had been well over two hours since she went missing.

Clif and Dobi

I don’t know exactly how Jeff got Dobi back toward the entrance to the park while we were driving back there, after Carey and I had searched futilely for over an hour, but I do know that enough things have happened over the past four years–most of which I’ve shared in this forum–to convince me that Jeff’s spirit is alive and that he is watching over everyone he loves. While I don’t think he can control everything (if he could, all his favorite sports teams would win the championship every single year), I believe that God has given him a sphere of influence within which to operate, and he has utilized this to communicate with us periodically, to turn out the lights on occasion at major sporting events, and to guide the dog he never met back to us. I shudder to think about the emotional devastation we would have felt if Dobi had not returned.

Once we returned home with Dobi and fed her, we went directly to Church. Dinner could wait until afterward. Once there, in addition to celebrating the miracle of Christmas under the leadership of our Priest, Father Elias Villis, we silently thanked God about a million times for bringing Dobi home. And I privately thanked Jeff for stepping up for the family and doing his part.

When I opened the Church doors to leave after the completion of the service, the snow was falling fairly heavily, the cars were covered with it, and I had to compose myself while thinking about how Dobi, then safe and warm in our home, could just as easily have been out in this storm with her pink coat saturated, and with her shivering and scared in the woods or elsewhere. I was instantly overtaken, right there on the Church steps, by that feeling of parental helplessness that I was introduced to so abruptly and violently in the fall of 2010, and I was deeply shaken by it.

The bottom line is that whether it’s your dog or your child, you protect them as long as you possibly can, but when it’s time to remove the leash, your parental powers significantly diminish. At that point, all you can do is hope and pray that they are equipped to move forward productively, to make decent decisions and to stay out of major trouble. I have no idea where Dobi was or what she was doing during the two hours we were separated from her, but she somehow found her way back to us. Jeff, on the other hand, who had taken one dollar with him to the bridge on November 9th, 2010, just in case he decided to pay the return toll to come back home, chose not to. And in making that decision, he devastated the family he loved so much.

The story of Dobi on that Christmas Eve was just the latest incident that has made it quite evident to me that incorporating Jeff into our lives as if he was still here is the way to move forward most productively. That is why I made sure that he was central to our search and rescue mission for Dobi. And that is why I continue to yell at him when appropriate, talk to him daily, email and text him on occasion and call him every day to hear his voicemail greeting. I also stay attuned to his signals and will always be open to communication from him.

The path to recovery for me has never been clearer. I must continue to cherish what I do have, which is an incredible amount, while battling my loss by always carrying Jeff with me everywhere I go. Given how he sprang into action the second I called upon him to bring Dobi home two years ago, he obviously still needs me to be his father, and I will never stop being that for him. I miss him dearly, but through emails, texts, photos, videos, anecdotes and special memories, he truly remains alive for all of us.

I have learned not to look too far into the future, but for now, Dobi is home, the holiday season is beautiful, my wife and sons love me, and my friends and family are amazing. 2015 is almost here, and I’m ready to take it on. Things are bound to go awry along the way, but the events of December 24, 2012 gave me a blueprint for how to approach most problems in the future.

In many cases, I’ll pull out Jeff’s picture and sternly instruct him to make things right. And if that doesn’t work, our family will once again come together to brainstorm, and as a team, we will search for and ultimately find the answer.

–Rich Klein

From Joy To Anguish: The Handwritten Letters From Jeff

“I have no particular animosity towards emails; they are a fine way to communicate ideas, thoughts, and feelings. But they are far less personal than a handwritten letter…

Letters are intimate, words from one heart or mind to another…Letters require time and thought. They require sitting with our words before we send them out into the world. They are crafted, not dashed off; they are intentional, not by-products of passing whims; they are personal and directed at individuals; they are little works of art.

Letters allow for the beautiful ability to collect treasured thoughts and feelings. They are tangible reminders of the lives we lived, the people we knew, the places we traveled, the thoughts we had, the loves we shared. They hold a concrete space in this ever-changing and malleable world.”

 –Paige Vignola, “The Lost Art Of Letter Writing”, November 13, 2013, http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/11/the-lost-art-of-letter-writing-paige-vignola/

__________________________________________________________

The one thing about Jeff, perhaps more than any other, that made him so unique and special is that if you were part of his inner circle, any random day could turn into an instant classic for you with absolutely no warning. And so it was on a day in late January in 2008 when Jeff was at Middlebury for the glorious J-term, a month during which students took one class (usually a very eclectic one that had nothing to do with their academic concentration), went skiing, and partied relentlessly. Jeff’s favorite J-term class of his four years at Midd was, not surprisingly, “The History of Mexican Food”, especially since the course required students to taste the foods they were learning about.

So how could Jeff turn an ordinary January day in Chappaqua into an instant classic for us while he was at Middlebury? The answer was in that day’s mail.

In the middle of all the bills and the usual junk mail, there was a hand addressed envelope to us from Jeff. In the age of texts and emails, why would Jeff ever write us a letter? I ripped it open to find out, and the one and a half page handwritten letter I found was something we have treasured ever since. It was dated January 21, 2008.

Part of the purpose of this blog is to enable people to get to know Jeff even better than they did before, and his deep love of family is one of the primary things that defined his life. It is in that context that I share the complete letter that he sent to us nearly seven years ago, as it is the clearest illustration of that love:

“January 21, 2008

Dear Mom, Dad, Drew and Brett,

I’d just like to take a little time out of my evening to say how grateful I am to have you guys as family. Like most, we’ve had our ups and downs, but when it comes down to it, we are all so lucky to be such a close, unified, happy family.

Mom, throughout my entire life, it has been evident how much you want the best for me and how it pains you when I have not gotten that. You have constantly pushed me to achieve my best, and I deeply appreciate that. You work nonstop to keep the family functioning, and although it may not seem like it at times, your work does not go unnoticed. You are an inspiration to us all.

Dad, I am absolutely blessed to have you as a father. You have provided us all with such an amazing lifestyle, which I am so very thankful for. You are the ultimate example of a selfless human being who finds the greatest joy in giving to others. You have served as the perfect role model for me and have given me invaluable life lessons. I can only hope to be as good and complete a person as you.

Drew, you have really developed into a nice and successful person. Your dedication to, and ultimate achievement of, making the varsity basketball team is the utmost accomplishment, and proves how far you’ve come. Like Dad, you always aspire to do the right thing and be a good person. Keep up the good work.

Brett, you too are coming into your own as a big eighth grader. Like Drew, you’re doing great in basketball, knocking down shots and racking up points, night in and night out. Also, your vast group of friends demonstrates how socially adept you are and how other people enjoy being around you. Keep up the good work too.

All in all, I think each of us is blessed to be part of this family. I know I am.

Love,

Jeff

P.S. And since I left Clif out of the equation, here’s to my appreciation of the cutest and least annoying dog ever. You da man, Clif !”

After sharing so many emails and texts from Jeff on this blog, all of which were so expressive and communicated to us so powerfully, it is hard for me to say that Jeff’s handwritten letter was more powerful as a means of communication than those were. However, I do think it was special and unique, as it is not every day that you receive a letter containing such beautiful sentiments from your 20 year old son.  And this was one of only two handwritten letters he ever wrote to us as a young adult. The second and final one, of course, was the one that shattered our hearts.

To me, the striking aspect of this incredible letter is the fact that Jeff actually took the time to write to us and express such love and appreciation for everyone in our family, including Clif, our dog at the time.

In retrospect, it doesn’t surprise me that Jeff sent us such a letter in January of 2008. As with most months in his life, aside from his last two, that was a time during which Jeff was flying high. He had just returned weeks earlier from a fabulous semester abroad in London with his newly made friends who would later become the creators of Project Bald in his memory, he was thoroughly enjoying another January term of fun and frolic, and of course his emails during that month were upbeat and hilarious.

The first thing that got Jeff’s juices flowing that January was that, after being away for a semester, he was given the opportunity to resume his J.K. Rolling column for the two issues of the paper that would be published during the month.  He was fired up about that, and this was also exciting news for me, because I knew it meant that we would resume our routine of Jeff sending me drafts of his articles to critique before he’d send a final version to the editor. I found that to be such a bonding experience for us, and I absolutely loved our banter over his terrific work. And as you can see below, my suggestions were often wrong, and Jeff was never bashful about pointing that out!

Perhaps my favorite email of the month from Jeff was the one he sent me on January 14^th, after he was confused by a package I sent him containing the sports section of a recent edition of the New York Times. I have no recollection of what article I wanted him to read, but his email was classic and a perfect example of how even when he was being a bit of a wise-ass, he did it in a sort of respectful way. That’s actually a pretty unique talent for a 20 year old:

Starting the next day, though, our sports banter got more intense as the Giants prepared to play the Packers in the NFC Championship game with a Super Bowl berth on the line. I didn’t think the Giants could pull it off, but Jeff did, and he articulated his stance in classic Jeff Klein style. Even now, whenever the Giants are scheduled to play on a particularly cold day, I can’t help but think of and laugh over Jeff’s comment about Eli Manning:

January at Middlebury was a month for going out and having fun, and I knew that when I got an email from Jeff that was written in the early morning hours, there was a good chance that it would be a classic. The email he sent just after 2 a.m. on January 17^th ,when he found out my alma-mater’s basketball team had lost in overtime on a buzzer beater, definitely merits hall of fame status in my view:

For his second and final article of J-term, Jeff decided to write a recap of the NFC and AFC championship games. I always preferred it when he wrote opinion columns rather than writing recaps of events, because I literally felt his passion for his beliefs jump off the page.  When I received a draft of this one, I expressed that to Jeff.   As always, his answer was well thought out and reasonable:

And then, on January 22^nd, there was one last exchange to end another wonderful and passionate January term at Middlebury:

But those were the days when we never had to worry whether Jeff would return home after being away. He was a young man who loved his life, both at college and at home, and his texts, emails and the handwritten letter that arrived that month illustrated that. All of Jeff’s communications were so vibrant, and as Thao Lam has pointed out to me, they were always so perfectly written, including proper punctuation, even after he had been out partying. This is why I never even considered hitting the delete button when something arrived from Jeff. Little did I know that one day all of this correspondence would serve as one of the primary means by which I would help people get to know him better after he was gone.

After he was gone.

When I type those words, the enormity of the tragedy swallows me whole. The vibrant young man of January 2008 and well beyond should be here with us today. All he needed to do was live to fight another day. In fact, that’s all any of us needs to do. A winner is nothing more than a loser who tried one more time.

After graduating from Colgate in the heart of the 1982 recession, I was turned down for jobs by nearly every single bank in New York before a bank named Manufacturers Hanover made me an offer on Christmas Eve 1982 after seven months of looking. I was more than ready to quit the search by then, but I became a winner by simply trying one more time.  My perseverance back then resulted in a 31 year career in banking that continues today.

In the afternoon of November 9^th, 2010, Jeff, in a brief and impulsive moment of extreme weakness, decided to stop trying. He typed on one page individual messages to each of his closest friends. I distributed copies of that page to each of them when they visited our home the day before the wake.

He also typed a full one page letter to our family in which he both addressed each of us individually and also explained extremely eloquently—notwithstanding how distorted his logic was– why he felt he had to end his life. I have shared snippets of that letter in various blog posts over time. It is cruel irony that the format of the first part of this letter was identical to that of the one he had written in 2008, with loving individual messages to each of us. It was the remainder, containing his rationale for quitting, which made it dramatically different.

Jeff, however, must have felt that the typed letter to our family was somehow not sufficient as a final goodbye to Carey and me. And so he took a couple of extra minutes out of his final day to write us one more handwritten note, using a black pen and driven by a black mindset. I took this last act to mean that Jeff considered a handwritten note to contain a level of intimacy and love that even he, the King of emails and texts, could not convey in a typed one. After reading it hundreds of times since, I believe he was right. I feel his love and his pain so deeply through his handwritten words. With his last pen strokes, Jeff wrote:

 

Paige Vignola wrote that letters are “intimate, crafted and not dashed off, intentional”, and that “they are personal and directed at individuals.” This is all very true of Jeff’s final note. I know my son, and he clearly wanted to make this as personal and intimate as it could possibly be. And he also thought this would be the best way to ask us to forgive him.

It is not our place to forgive him or to not forgive him, but the fact that he asked for that is telling. A person asks for forgiveness when he or she knows they have done something either wrong or hurtful, and Jeff knew deep down he was making the wrong decision, both for himself and for those closest to him, but the strength he needed to make the right decision had evaporated. So often in life, people need strength just to make the correct decision. As the poet Aeschylus wrote, “Happiness is a choice that requires effort at times.” And so it did for Jeff, but at the end, he simply couldn’t muster that effort, because his ability to do so was thoroughly dampened by the effects of misprescribed medication.

Today, though, I prefer to focus on Jeff’s first letter, and so in celebration of this post and of that beautiful handwritten gift of January 21^st, 2008 which I treasure and read frequently, I have written by hand three letters—one each to Carey, Drew and Brett—and I have given those letters to them. They are letters filled with love, hope and the determination to fight together through whatever adversity that any one of us might encounter over the years. I hope and pray that they always hold these letters close to their hearts just as I do with Jeff’s, and just as I do with all the special occasion cards that I’ve received and kept from each of them over time.

And lastly, in closing, I ask every reader of this post to consider doing what Jeff did on January 21^st, 2008 when he decided to “take a little time out of my evening to say how grateful I am…”.

Take some time during an upcoming day or evening to write a letter by hand to someone you care about and fill It with heartfelt positive thoughts, uplifting messages and lots of love. Perhaps there’s someone out there to whom you’ve wanted to say certain things but couldn’t find the right words. A “well crafted, intentional letter from one heart to another” could do the trick. Or maybe there’s someone you do express your feelings to often but you still want to give them something that holds “a concrete space in this ever-changing and malleable world.”

Either way, I think you’ll find the act of writing a letter to someone you care about to be fulfilling and heartwarming. For me, it was both those things, and it was yet another way to honor the memory of my beautiful son in Heaven on the fourth anniversary of his completely unnecessary death.

–Rich Klein

Older Than My Older Brother

“I wanted you to know,

That I love the way you laugh,

I wanna hold you high and steal your pain away,

I keep your photograph,

And I know it serves me well,

I wanna hold you high and steal your pain,

‘Cause I’m broken, when I’m lonesome,

And I don’t feel right, when you’re gone away,

You’ve gone away; you don’t feel me here anymore”

“Broken”, Seether (Feat. Amy Lee)

___________________________________________________________________________________

As of today, I have lived one day longer than my older brother, who was born four years before I was. There aren’t really adequate words to describe how that makes me feel, especially since it was his choice for it to have turned out this way, but in this post, I will try.

Simply put, it is a strange, horrible, confusing and mystifying feeling that I am technically “older than my older brother.”  As for my parents, I really don’t want to even imagine how they must feel.  They tell me that without Brett and me, their prospects for going forward would have been a lot different.  Regardless, they’ve been brave and strong ever since, and they are truly special people because of that.

 I find myself often thinking about the course of events that have occurred throughout my life, and the people who have come and gone along the ride. I enjoy doing this, in fact, and I’m a big believer in the classic saying “everything happens for a reason”. However this is obviously the one instance where that is not true; Jeff leaving us could not have happened for any valid reason. The only real positive counter to this statement would be that the Kleinsaucer blog was formed, and especially as of late, more and more people are reading about the epidemic of suicide, and feeling more comfortable expressing themselves, thereby preventing themselves from doing such a horrible thing.

It goes without saying that I took Jeff’s death very hard; I had felt closer to him than ever during the fall of 2010, but I was simply unaware of any difficulties that he was going through. I had just transitioned to a new school, and while it wasn’t heaven, it was better than my previous school, so I was at least happy with that. Jeff, of course, kept in regular contact with me, asking about how I was doing and whether I was enjoying myself. And I was ecstatic telling him that it was possible I might perform at the halftime show at a Philadelphia 76ers game as part of a new dance class I was taking! Even just four days before he left us, we were also talking about our beloved Knicks, and what their season held in store. There was literally no sign of trouble in any of our text conversations.  Jeff’s texts are in gray, and mine are in yellow.

We kept in contact frequently until the end, and I’m glad, but I feel that we could have been even closer. We were both relatively restrained when it came to conversing with each other. Suffice to say, I have had funnier/more outrageous/exciting text conversations with other people. And I still am kicking myself every day over the fact that once upon a time I used to lock the door of my room during high school. I always used to hear him try and come in, not be able to, and walk away… Just unacceptable on my part.

It’s funny when I think about it, because I feel that action of locking my door is something indicative of how our generation lives today. In other words, we focus more on ourselves, interact more with our various devices, and communicate less effectively with other people. I consider what happened a completely lost opportunity to cement our relationship. He was right across the hall, and we should have spent hours together.

While it’s not acceptable that Jeff left us, I feel it’s quite ironic that he would absolutely hate the way the world operates today. For example, we may care about how many likes we get on a social media post more than we care about brightening the days of other people. In sports, people take shortcuts to achieve their goals faster (“Our team isn’t good enough to contend? Let’s buy better players to make us contenders!”). I’m looking at you, Denver Broncos and Cleveland Cavaliers. Jeff wasn’t a Lebron fan to begin with, and he would have despised his return to Cleveland. He would have seen through Lebron’s declaration that he wanted to come home again and would have blogged that his return was really rooted in selfish interest merely to surround himself with a better supporting cast than the one he spent four years with and spontaneously ran away from.

If been here to watch the NBA playoffs with me last spring, we would have been laughing over the disparities in attendance from arena to arena; the Staples Center packed with fans who marvel over the incredible ball movement of the LA Clippers, while fans in the Verizon Center attending the Wizards’ games apparently being more concerned with the quality and quantity of their drinks than actually watching the game. But I digress, and I don’t want to make it seem like I wrote this post to take shots at others… because I didn’t, and I don’t want to come across as someone that I’m not. I actually feel that I’m starting to view these types of things in a similar way that Jeff would have; it’s cool and interesting, but nothing could ever compare to spending time with him right next to me.

Anyway, it meant the world having Jeff as an older brother for the time that I did. Having him to look up to for anything always made me feel so secure. I will always be able to take away from watching him the diligence that he approached every aspect of life with, whether it was pursuing his studies (and his very brief amount of time as a paralegal), his work ethic towards sports, and his ability to maintain relationships, to name a few. I want to approach my life the same way he did, and also be a top-notch role model for Brett. I can’t imagine the effect this has had on him. I want to fill the void and be the best older brother I can be for him, while also approaching the rest of my life with an unparalleled sense of fearlessness and resilience. I know I’ll get hit here and there, but nothing can ever take me down.

As for myself, my brother, and my parents, we will always have each other for support and to lean on for the rest of our lives, and that is obviously quite certain.  Because of what has happened, I actually can’t picture a tighter bond possible between family members.

I am now older than my older brother was, and I am going to live out my life to its natural conclusion. Had Jeff never left us, he and I would have taken on life’s challenges, and had quite an amazing time doing so. All the more reason I just wish I could have held him high, and stolen his pain away.

–Drew Klein

The Long Arms Of Love

To us, family means putting your arms around each other and being there.”

                                             –Barbara Bush

 

 

When you looked at Jeff, his big brown eyes might have caught your attention first. Or maybe it was his trademark amazing smile that he so readily flashed. After those facial features, though, it would be difficult not to notice those long muscular arms and long slender fingers. They were longer than those you’d expect to see on someone who was just over 6 feet tall.

And over the course of his life, Jeff put those long arms and fingers to good use. As a travel team and high school basketball player, Jeff was able to use them to launch his deadly three point shot over taller defenders. When playing defense, his long fingers were instrumental in forcing innumerable turnovers by poking the ball away from opposing ball handlers.

To me, though, there was nothing better than observing the way Jeff used his long arms when posing in photos and at family gatherings, when he wrapped them around us and pulled us toward him. Under Jeff’s silent direction, it came to be almost an unwritten rule within our family that when we wanted to take a photo of our boys together, Drew and Brett would wait for Jeff to line up in between them and use that wingspan to wrap them up. Our photo albums reveal that this started when the boys were quite young and continued until the very last photo they took together.

The symbolism of these pictures is twofold. First, they are clearly symbolic of the love Jeff had for his brothers and his entire family. He delighted in calling Drew and Brett by the nicknames he created for them over the years—“Freight Train” for Drew, and “B-Man” or “Red Cheeks” for Brett—and he loved being the big brother, teasing them incessantly while alternately quizzing them in detail about their days.

The sight of Jeff with his arms draped around his brothers in nearly all of our photos is completely reflective of how much he loved them and was protective of them until the very end.

Ironically, though, in his last days, when his resolve was weakening, the big brother reached out to his next youngest brother for reassurance that they would always stick together.  This text exchange, which took place three days before Jeff made the horrific decision that he couldn’t go on, and which Drew shared in his blog post, “My Brother-Part 2”, will forever bring tears to my eyes. His brothers, as well as Carey and I would have locked arms and hearts with Jeff always.

The photos also symbolize the fact that Jeff truly was always at the center of everything that went on in our household. He was the man in the middle, the driving force and dominant personality in our family. His moods became our moods. His causes became our causes. He had me thoroughly convinced that NBA Commissioner David Stern must go. Playoff games were fixed. We could not rest until instant replay was implemented in major league baseball (it happened this year, but he didn’t live to see it). We needed to make sure every single person we knew was planning to vote for Obama in 2008. When we couldn’t decide where to go for a Sunday night family dinner, all eyes turned to Jeff to make the decision (and he always obliged). And when we were trying to decide where to go for a European vacation in ’08, Jeff lobbied hard for a Paris/Barcelona trip. He wanted to see the Eiffel Tower and walk on Las Ramblas. Guess where we went…

The picture that we took of the boys at the base of the Eiffel Tower–of course with Jeff in the middle with his arms around his brothers– is one of my all-time favorites and is my Facebook cover photo. The broad smile on Jeff’s face says it all.

After Jeff walked out on his job in August of 2010, we took a family trip to East Hampton to decompress during that difficult time. The pictures taken on that trip ended up being the final ones ever of our three sons together. It is fitting that this set of photos included that patented image of a smiling young man pulling his brothers toward him with those long arms of love. Jeff was still smiling then, because that picture was taken a little over a week before he took his first dose of Celexa, the anti-depressant that flooded his mind with suicidal thoughts for the first time in his life, just eight days after taking his first pill. As he stood on that sand mound with Drew and Brett, he had yet to have even a remote thought that he would end his own life 2 ½ months later. The phrase “life is so fragile” comes to mind.

Barbara Bush’s quote resonated with me because Jeff clearly agreed that family meant putting his arms around everyone and being there. He was always there, at every family dinner, holiday and event, and he enjoyed every minute of those times. And then, in a relative blink of an eye, he wasn’t there anymore.

It is difficult for me to fathom the brute force and sheer magnitude of the depression and suicidal wave that overcame Jeff two months before he succumbed. Those feelings must have been so completely overwhelming to have caused him to leave the family and friends he so clearly loved. I can’t relate to it, and therefore I must give up trying to understand it. It is too painful to keep ruminating over why I couldn’t prevent what happened. Since nobody in our family can ever doubt how much Jeff loved us, I need to just leave it at that and accept the fact that he was gang-tackled by a cocktail of different pills which left him defenseless.

So instead, I find myself staring at the precious images of my three boys then and my two boys now. I have observed Drew and Brett closely over these last 3 ½ years, and it is evident that their brotherly love is strong. They will always miss the long arms of love that once held them, but their shared love of family, sports and each other will always keep them close.

Jeff didn’t live up to his end of the November 6^th, 2010 deal that he made with Drew, but the photo that Drew and Brett asked me to take of them on Thanksgiving Day 2011, just one year after Jeff died, reflects their understanding that as the surviving brothers in our family’s complicated world, they definitely “gotta stay close and stick together.”

I find their resolve to be very poignant and quite beautiful.

–Rich Klein

Jeff Chose The Wrong Bridge: A Father’s Day Reflection-Part 4

“Oh, when darkness comes,

And pain is all around,

Like a bridge over troubled water,

I will lay me down.

—Simon & Garfunkel, “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, 1970

_____________________________________________________________________________________

Dear Jeff,

It is incomprehensible to me that seven months have passed since I last wrote to you in my “Let It Be” post, though I guess it’s no more shocking than the fact that it’s been three years and seven months since you left us. And so here we are, at the dawn of the fourth Father’s Day that you have spent in Heaven, and it is a day that continues to confound me more than any other during the calendar year. On the one hand, I am so blessed both to have sons like Drew and Brett, who literally make me feel like the greatest father of all-time and also to have had you as a son and dear friend for 23 ½ amazing years. On the other hand, this day never fails to conjure up the memories of all my failures and missed opportunities to keep you here with us. These terrible thoughts are debilitating, because they almost make me feel unworthy of even celebrating this day, though I know deep down that such feelings are unfounded.

I get so confused sometimes when I think about my current relationship with you. I mean, I wrote above “to have had you as a son”, but aren’t you still my son? Of course you are. You just happen to be in Heaven. I still take care of you and your memory by writing on Kleinsaucer and by maintaining the Friends of Jeff Klein facebook page. I still call you every day and listen to your voicemail greeting. And I don’t devote any less time or energy to my relationship with you now than I did when you were here. It’s just much more complicated now.

Hanging with Jeff at the beach, August 2005

My confusion causes me to stumble frequently when strangers ask about my kids. Mom got angry with me in December when a 20-something year old car salesman asked me how many kids I had, and I answered that I had two boys. Later, she wanted to know how I could say such a thing. I don’t know, I guess I just shudder at the thought of the inevitable follow up questions about where you all are and what you’re up to in life. That happened once at a big client dinner when I mentioned to a colleague across the table that my oldest son graduated from Middlebury in 2009. The guy asked me what you’ve been doing since, and I stammered and said something like “it’s a long story, I’ll tell you some other time.” It’s brutal, Jeff. It really is.

I try to keep you alive in every way I possibly can. We still receive mail addressed to you from time to time, and I never notify the sender to take your name off their list. I also receive a daily email with an inspirational quote. It’s quite strange, because I never signed up for this, and yet it comes to my email address with the subject line “Your Inspirational Quote Jeff”. Why are they sending a daily email to my mailbox that addresses you? In any event, I will never unsubscribe from this, because seeing emails with your name on them makes me feel like you are still part of this world. And how ironic it is that they contain inspirational quotes that could have really benefited you.

In addition, we constantly get emails from Carepackages.com asking us to send you care packages for midterm week, finals week, Valentine’s Day and all sorts of other occasions. We will never stop these emails either, because if this company thinks you’re alive and still a student at Middlebury, then maybe in some metaphysical way, you are. It somehow makes me feel as if you are closer to us and to this world than is actually the case.

Last Father’s Day, I wrote about the most egregious mistake I made as your father, which was neglecting to take you far away to a beach for a week when you were at the peak of your struggles, with no job and no real plan, in October 2010. There is still no question in my mind that if I had done that, your head would have cleared, we would have strategized about and agreed on a viable plan of attack for your future, and you would have come home a new and revitalized young man. And you’d be alive today. Instead, I went to work and left you home to flounder.

As if that crucial mistake wasn’t bad enough, I recently came upon an email, during one of my ongoing searches for precious memories of you, that highlighted yet another terrible error I made at a critical point in time. For context, you remember how nerve-racking it was for me during the financial crisis in 2009 when Bank of America was laying off people left and right after our merger with Merrill Lynch. As it became clearer over that year and into 2010 that I was not going to be one of the casualties, it was a tremendous relief for me.

And I guess that is why on August 2^nd, 2010, at the very height of your suffering at your own job, when you were completely buried with work and could barely come up for air, I thoughtlessly sent you an email containing a snippet of my very positive 2010 mid-year performance review. I know that your beautiful response below was genuine and heartfelt, but looking back on it now, the level of insensitivity I displayed by sending you such a thing at that time is appalling.

I actually don’t know how I could have done such a thing, and knowing you the way I do, I am quite certain in retrospect that my email accelerated your downward spiral. Nine days later, you walked out and quit. Under more normal circumstances, my email could have reinforced your view of me as a role model, which is what every father wants to be for his kids. But being unfair to yourself, you felt as if you were failing under the weight of grueling hours and demanding attorneys. I was not nearly sensitive enough to that reality, and as a result, my email highlighted a contrast that likely made you feel worse about yourself, rather than prouder of me. It was a disgraceful lack of judgment on my part, and although it is too late now, Jeff, I apologize from the bottom of my heart. I don’t err all that much, but when I screw up, I seem to do so in a big way.

So many people have said to me over these last few years that you must not have thought about the amount of pain that you’d be leaving behind, because if you had, you never would have gone through with it. But sadly, you and I know the truth about that.

I know that you damn well remember the night, about two weeks before you jumped, when I came in your room with the clear intent of addressing the consequences of you ever acting on your horrific thoughts. I knew how dire the situation was then, and I decided I needed to look you in the eyes and tell you straight up. I also knew that I would never forgive myself if, Heaven forbid, I hadn’t had this conversation, and then you ended up doing what you ultimately did. And so I decided to go for the game changer and lay it on thick. I will always remember my exact words to you that night, because I prepared extensively for this conversation, and I felt certain these words, along with The Napkin I had already shown you, were my best shots to eradicate suicidal thoughts from your brain once and for all:

“Jeff, you may think that you’d be putting yourself at peace if you ever acted upon your thoughts, but the devastation and carnage you’d be leaving behind would be unimaginable. Mom and I would never be able to withstand the pain of losing you. You would scar both your brothers for life. I would need to quit my job and sell the house. We would never be able to walk by this room. Would you EVER do that to your family?”

Naturally you said you wouldn’t, but I remember feeling that there was a lack of total conviction in your voice, and the brief conversation did not put me at ease. But what else was I supposed to do? Put you under surveillance and have you followed 24/7? Honestly, if I had thought of that at the time, I would have done it. You’d still be here if I had, because you would have been stopped before ever getting to the bridge. Believe me, I torment myself with those thoughts every day.

But I can imagine what you’re thinking now:

“Well Dad, let’s see. You didn’t quit your job or sell the house. You all walk by my room every day, and you go in there all the time. Drew and Brett are doing great. You and Mom seem fine to me. So what was up with all those things you said to me that night?”

All I can say to that, Jeff, is that you will never know the feelings that Mom, Drew, Brett and I live with every single day. You will never know the pain that comes from losing a child or a brother, especially in this way, and you will never know how deep the pain runs from simply missing you. And you will never understand how it feels when everywhere I go, there is something that reminds me of you and of how you should still be here with us. Yes, we opted for stability in not selling the house, and I would never have compromised my ability to support our family by quitting my job, but the fact remains that you did leave unimaginable devastation and carnage in your wake, just as I said you would. You may not be able to see it, but it exists in our broken hearts.

My egregious mistakes notwithstanding, I was the one who could have led you to a better place, but with a mind altered by anti-depressants, you were simply not a willing partner at the end. The real tragedy is that your despair was temporary, and all you needed was a temporary bridge over the troubled water you saw to get you to that better place.

I was that bridge, Jeff, and you knew it.

I have never encountered a weight that I couldn’t carry, and your 190 pounds of muscle would have been no different. And like all fathers would have, I tried to lay myself down and carry you on my back. But you wouldn’t let me. Instead, you chose the bridge at Bear Mountain as a permanent ending place, rather than me as the bridge to a future filled with happiness and stability. I guess it all gets back to that imaginary trip–to a beach in Florida– that I never thought to take you on until it was too late. That is where I should have taken you to change the outcome. I will never live down my failure to do that. Even without that trip, though, I was still there trying to advise you, guide you and motivate you. I just couldn’t get through to you.

As a father who adored you, I was the bridge you should have chosen. I was the bridge that would have taken you from your troubled present to a very near future when your body and mind would have been free from the meds once and for all. From then on, you would have found your path, and the Bear Mountain Bridge would have represented nothing more than a scenic route to take when traveling to Rockland County. I was the only bridge you would ever have needed.

In the years before the meds attacked your brain, you knew that life was full of great moments that made the tough times seem trivial.  I recently came across your Facebook status from July 23rd, 2009.  Remember this one from when you were in Florida with Jack, Ryan and Elon?

Rubbing my eyes.

Life is good?

LIFE IS GOOD???

Life is good.

OF COURSE LIFE IS GOOD, JEFF.

How did you ever forget that?

Why was I unable to get you to understand that, despite the struggles we all go through, we must forge ahead on our journey and live for the good moments.  Especially when you have the type of support network that you did.

Despite the failures and mistakes that Father’s day conjures up, I intend to enthusiastically celebrate it. Drew and Brett have so many of your best traits, especially those of warmth and kindness, and they give me love and support every day. The closeness of my relationship with each of them is such a blessing, and I can’t imagine what would have happened to me if I didn’t have them. And whether we just play some tennis, go play pick-up basketball at the gym, or throw the Frisbee around at Gedney Park, it’s going to be a great day.  And I know one thing for sure–the three of us will end Father’s Day by watching Game 5 of the Heat-Spurs series tonight.

In the final analysis, I know that even the best of fathers make mistakes. The problem is that mine were made during the crunch time in your life and were so completely avoidable had I applied even a modicum of common sense to the situation at hand. For what it’s worth, I have learned so much from what happened and I should be equipped now to be a better father and a wiser man going forward.

The inner peace that I have started to feel recently comes from my having used the last three years and seven months as a time of deep reflection about my 27 years of fatherhood, which you initiated. During that time, I have come to realize that you, Drew and Brett have given me nothing but positive reinforcement for the job I’ve done as your father all these years. Even in your final notes, you cast all the blame upon yourself and told us we were “the best parents a son could ever ask for.”

And so it’s time now to enjoy the type of family day that you lived for. As with everything, we will do so with your spirit in our hearts and your photos all around us. I am a blessed man with two special sons here and 23 ½ years worth of amazing memories of my time spent with you.

Perhaps the most touching and, in retrospect, poignant thing you ever wrote to me was in the last birthday card I ever received from you, on August 12^th, 2010. You had quit your job the day before, but you didn’t tell us because you didn’t want to ruin my birthday. At your lowest moment, you wrote:

“I feel happy and safe when I am around you, and I realize how much you care about me.”

 

I guess a father can’t ask for much more on Father’s Day than to know that he has made his kids feel happy and safe, and that they know how much he cares. It begs the question, of course, why those feelings weren’t enough to keep you here and why you didn’t use me as your bridge. It is a question that I will ponder for years to come, but not today. It is my special day, and I’m quite sure you would tell me that I deserve to celebrate it with a mind unencumbered by such difficult thoughts.

Love you always,

Dad

Here Comes The Sun – Part 2

“As of this past week, I guess it’s safe to declare that the infamous winter of 2010-11 is finally over. Here comes the sun. Unfortunately for our family, unlike in previous years, the sun does not bring with it the same restorative powers that it used to. It is unable yet to thaw our grief over losing a special and precious young man who was lost in a senseless tragedy that simply did not have to happen. All I can do is hope and pray that there will some day come an April when I can once again welcome the return of the sun and say with conviction, like the Beatles did,

‘It’s all right.’ ”

 

   –Kleinsaucer, “Here Comes The Sun”, April 29, 2011, https://kleinsaucer.wordpress.com/2011/04/29/here-comes-the-sun/

___________________________________________________________________________

It was almost as if the restaurant’s management knew when they seated us that, on this particular night, Carey and I needed to sit side by side on the banquette at our table to celebrate not only another birthday but also a 34 year love. But there was even more to it than that. We didn’t know it when we walked in, but it was also going to be time to again acknowledge the pain, and this fortuitous seating arrangement ensured that we would be close enough to literally prop each other up. After a wonderful dinner, when the check arrived, Carey leaned in close, and I felt her heartache and sensed her tears before they appeared.

“Don’t you just miss him SO MUCH”, she whispered with an emphasis on the last two words and a heartfelt passion that moved me to the core.

Dear God, do I miss him. I held her hand while the check was taken care of, and we held each other tight during the short taxi ride to our hotel.

“I would give anything to touch him again, to hug him,” she whispered in the taxi, through the tears, and then I lost it too. And then she asked the unanswerable question that we’ve repeated ad nauseam for 3 ½ years, “How could he leave us?” Back at the hotel, we quietly cried ourselves to sleep in each other’s arms.

It was time. On March 29^th, nearly 3 1/2 years after his death, the guttural grief needed to be released again, and it was cathartic. I have learned that grieving is an unpredictable process. You just never know when the waves of sorrow will arrive or what will trigger them. On the night of our dinner out to celebrate Carey’s birthday, the trigger was ironically how close we were, both physically and spiritually as we enjoyed another beautiful evening together. That bond, of course, is what reminds us of all that we have enjoyed and all that we have suffered together, and the latter part was the genesis of our emotional release.

We are blessed beyond words with not only the two most special sons any parent could ever want, but for 23 1/2 years, a third. But the hope I expressed for the month of April in part one of this post three years ago will need to be put on hold for at least another year. It’s not all right. And maybe the reality is that it never can be.

The ironic thing is that April, for Jeff, was replete with things he loved the most–the March Madness semis and finals, the opening of the baseball season and of course, the start of the NBA playoffs. Jeff’s last April was perhaps his happiest of all. He was clearly “feeling it”, and it was evident in everything he said and did. April 2010 was downright raucous for him.

How fitting it is that Jeff’s last April began with him finishing 2^nd in what our town affectionately calls the “Domershick Pool”, a March Madness pool organized by our friend Mitchell. It was the best finish of Jeff’s life, not because he wasn’t a great sports prognosticator, but rather because he historically went out of his way to pick upsets instead of choosing who he really thought would win. If you had told me in April 2010, that it would be, by his own choice, Jeff’s last March Madness tournament, I would have laughed in your face. This kid was having the time of his life.

For Jeff, April 2010 was a month in which he expressed his passion for all his interests and beliefs with a force that was compelling and energizing to everyone around him. For example, on almost a daily basis, he sent us links to all sorts of provocative articles about things like the biased officiating in the NBA playoffs and the failings of then Knicks coach Mike D’Antoni.

My favorite emails from Jeff that month were the ones with subject lines that said “Must Read” or “Another Must Read”. He was passionate about making sure that everyone in our family appreciated and agreed with his very strong opinions on these matters. And I loved how these emails often led to some great banter between him and Drew.

Perhaps nothing stoked Jeff’s fire that month more than the articles that came out about Myron Rolle, the outstanding Florida State safety, who was not coveted by NFL teams in the draft (he was chosen in the sixth round with the 207^th overall pick) presumably because he chose to skip his senior year to take advantage of a Rhodes Scholarship and study at Oxford. This caused NFL teams to question Rolle’s “commitment to football”.

Jeff, who placed a high value on intelligence and academic interests, was irate when he read about teams questioning Rolle’s decision. He couldn’t believe that an outstanding player was being penalized for also following academic pursuits. On April 29^th, he found an article entitled “How Dare NFL Teams Question Myron Rolle’s Commitment To Football”, which echoed his views, and he immediately sent it to me, Carey, Drew and Brett. Check out the passion that oozes from Jeff’s words insisting that we read every word. I also loved the subject line, which read “Life Lesson”. My son was fired up, and I was as happy and proud as a father could be:

Jeff knew that Carey wasn’t much of a fan, but he still wanted to engage her in his passion for sports. And so he went out of his way to find sports articles that had an angle that would appeal to her. He found this one, which dealt with society’s reduced tolerance for male athletes who have committed abuses against women, on April 21st, and he encouraged Carey to read it:

Jeff was not a one dimensional guy, though. During that month, he made sure to also keep me up to date on the latest world and political news. I loved getting emails like this from him (not the tragic news, obviously, but the fact that he was so engaged in world news as well as sports):

And in April 2010, Jeff wasn’t just sending articles to us—he was writing his own on his Talkin’ Sports blog that he had created the month before as a vehicle through which he could convert a broader audience to his point of view on a range of sports issues. Not only did Jeff build a reader base among his own friends, but he was so excited about his new venture that he even reached out to my best friends!

I loved how Jeff solicited my advice for blog post ideas during that time and how we’d bat them around together. Then, whenever I’d critique a blog post draft, he would immediately write back and either accept or rebut my points.

In the middle of all this, Jeff was still working hard at his job, and even though there were times during that month when he had to work some really long hours, for the most part he was able to achieve a healthy work/life balance. At that time, he was content with the job. It didn’t get ugly there until late July.

Jeff’s passionate April became downright raucous during the last week of the month when he headed down to North Carolina with his friends to visit Duke and UNC for a long weekend of partying. Or, I should say it was supposed to be just for the weekend. Unbeknownst to me at the time, since I wasn’t a Facebook member, Jeff partied so hard the night before he was supposed to come home and go straight to work that he decided to stay longer and call in sick. I have since found out that Drew and Brett knew what had happened, but being loyal brothers, they honored Jeff’s requested code of silence and did not tell Carey or me. And Andrew Becker (A.B.) and Ryan Williams, Jeff’s friends and partners in crime, were the ringleaders back then in trying to protect Jeff’s secret.  They urged Drew and Brett on Facebook not to tell us.

There was no way to know then, though, that there would be one crucial decision that Jeff would make in April that, I can only say in retrospect, might have cost him his life. Through a referral from a family friend, he was given the opportunity to interview for a Risk and Compliance position at a U.K.-based law firm’s New York office. Such a position would have taken him away from the grueling and volatile deal environment in which he worked as a paralegal. The hours would be regular, and such a position would not entail pulling all-nighters or working on weekends.

As with every major decision in Jeff’s life, we discussed it as a family, and in the irony of all tragic ironies, Jeff chose to stay where he was because he felt that his then current position would afford him the best opportunity to spend more time working on his blog. I cannot help but rehash the following conversation and wonder if Jeff would be alive today if he had pursued and obtained this other job.

And with that decision, the glorious April of 2010 came to an end for Jeff, and both the sun and his future were bright as could be.  Beautifully, that month was followed by three equally happy and passionate months.  It all came crashing down at the very end of July. There are so many reasons that Jeff’s loss is so excruciating for our family, but perhaps more than anything else, the fact that this young man could not have been any happier than he was for the first seven months of 2010 is what tears us to pieces.

I have tried, through all the emails above, to convey the level of joy that he felt exactly four years ago this month. To this day, it is inconceivable that someone who lived so passionately in April could end his own life in November. It illustrates the powerful truth of the saying, “life is so fragile,” and that is why none of us can ever take the emotional well-being of our friends and loved ones for granted. We must be vigilant at all times and never assume that everything is ok.

It was as if salt was poured into our wound when, the month after Jeff died, a winter began that turned out to be perhaps even more brutal than the one we just endured. The length and severity of that winter was what prompted me to write the “Here Comes The Sun” post three years ago. It was the combination of another rough winter and the beautiful memories of April 2010 that prompted me to write part two today.

The change of season from winter to spring will always be bittersweet for me. There is no way around that.  Sadly, the restorative power of the April sun remains inadequate.  And so I guess it’s just not practical to pray that the return of the sun will convince me that “it’s all right”. That was a naïve hope in April 2011.

However, there is a viable alternative way to approach the dawning of spring, and it is one that I intend to follow beginning this year. I will welcome the return of the sun by allowing its warmth to remind me that nobody’s life is completely all right and that I am blessed with so much, including an amazing wife, precious sons, and the best friends and family anyone could ever ask for.

And I will celebrate the sun’s return by remembering not only Jeff’s last amazing April but also the 23 ½ joyous, passionate and raucous years our family had with him. We packed more into that time together than most relationships do in twice as much time.

Sun, sun, sun, here we come.

And when the waves of sorrow come calling again, as they invariably will, at least I know that I have a beautiful and special partner who I can hold in my arms while we ride out the storm together. That is one thing that does enable me to say with absolute conviction:

“It’s all right.”

–Rich Klein

Why I’m Feeling Stronger Every Day

“And knowing that you would have wanted it this way,

I do believe I’m feelin’ stronger every day”

                –Chicago, “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day”, 1973

________________________________________________

The torrential rain pelted the bubbling water of the hot tub in which Brett and I were standing, outside our hotel in Grand Cayman.  Carey had fled to the fitness center, Drew to the business center to scour the internet for the latest sports news, and Jeff was certainly smiling down on us from Heaven.  He was there, of course, only because instead of heading to the fitness or business center, Jeff fled to the Bear Mountain Bridge when he perceived that the rain in his life had become torrential.  I looked across the tub at Brett, who while holding our nerf football, first broke into a broad smile and then completely burst out laughing as he contemplated the beautiful absurdity of the moment.

Just minutes earlier, the four of us were lying on our beach lounges when a cool light drizzle began to fall under a hot sun.  Carey remarked how refreshing the misty drizzle felt, and no sooner did she finish her sentence than the skies opened up and it began to absolutely pour.  Almost in unison, each of us blurted out the same thing.

“Jeffrey!”

There was no doubt in our minds that Jeff had opened up the spigot in response to Carey’s comment.  He was the king of weather, a storm tracker to the very end, and when you consider that he was a premier prankster too, the evidence clearly pointed skyward to him.

It was January 6^th, and our JetBlue flight home had been cancelled earlier that morning, allowing us to spend an extra day and night in Grand Cayman.  After Jeff had pulled his prank and we had all scattered to our respective destinations, Brett and I sat in the hot tub, on opposite sides, and tossed the football back and forth for a solid half hour waiting for the rain to stop.  But it only got heavier, and so we tossed and laughed and talked, and it hit me right then that it had been well over three years since I had felt this happy and strong.  I told Brett that this half hour was a unique “moment” that we would each remember forever, and in response, he walked across the tub, hugged me for a second and told me that he knew that was true.  The rain continued to pelt us, but we stayed there, undeterred, because for me at least, it didn’t get much better than this.

I had a similar moment with Drew the day we arrived.  At around 3:30 that afternoon, he and I plunged into the sea, swam out a bit, and started to tread water.  And we just started to talk while treading.  We covered everything from the philosophical differences between Republicans and Democrats to the Knicks’ prospects for making the playoffs to the Yankees’ chances of signing Masahiro Tanaka (two weeks later, they did!).  When we emerged from the water, I checked my phone, and it was 4:45.  We had been out there over an hour, and I wasn’t the least bit tired.

Treading water out in the Caribbean while talking with Drew, who was away at school on November 9^th, 2010 when our lives changed forever, I could have stayed out there well into the night.  I derive so much strength from the time I spend with Drew and Brett, and from the very fact that they want to spend that time with me, that there is no ambiguity as to why I’m feeling stronger every day.

In the early days after Jeff died, well-intentioned friends and acquaintances would see us in town from time to time, and in their struggle to find the right thing to say, would come out with something like “I don’t know how you get out of bed in the morning.” While not the most consoling words, there was a great deal of validity to the sentiment.  After all, how could we possibly withstand this devastation?  The primary answer is that the family bonds that we worked so hard to cement all these years since the boys were small have not only prevented our family from disintegrating in the wake of this tragedy, but they have also helped us keep each other strong while continuing to move forward productively.

We do this by continuing all of the family traditions that began when Jeff was here with us, and our vacations to the Caribbean for so many years were where many of them were spawned.  In places like St. Thomas, St. Maarten, Barbados and Aruba, we rode jet skis and kayaks, swam, snorkeled, hiked, and tossed every type of ball and Frisbee in existence.

The more things change, the more we make sure they stay the same, and that is why now, in the sea at Grand Cayman, Brett drops back to pass in the shallow part of the water, with the nerf football in hand.  He simulates a fake handoff to an unsuspecting passerby, and then I begin to blitz while shouting, “Here comes Reggie White!”  While Brett is too young to remember Reggie, a Hall of Fame pass rusher who played in the 1980s and ‘90s, he acts frightened enough to thrash frantically through the water to evade my rush.  As I dive toward him and scream, he heaves the ball 20 yards out into the sea over my outstretched arms.

The ball is wide of its intended receiver, but Drew dives left, snags the pass with his long reach, and falls beneath the water.  When he emerges, he and Brett raise their arms in a touchdown signal.  They have beaten me again.  We continue to play this game, the same one we have played for well over a decade, until the skin on our fingers is completely shriveled.  And we howl with laughter all the way.

Of course, it is painful to reminisce about the days when Drew was not the lone receiver out in the water.  In days gone by, Brett would have thrown the ball up for grabs, while Jeff and Drew battled for position to make the catch.  We remember Jeff’s unique lefty throwing motion and also how he loved to catch a pass and time it such that he would then dive head first into an oncoming big wave.

But I can’t cry about what once was, because I have these two amazing boys who still want to play beach football with me.  And as we scream and howl while we play, we laugh about all the things Jeff used to say and do, and it is cathartic.  On this most recent trip, I saw how much fun my boys were having as we played, and I swear, they could have been 12 and 9 again, instead of 22 and 19.  And they make me feel like a 30-something young Dad again.  Stronger every day.

But when Drew is working and Brett is away at school, I’ve needed to find my own motivational tools and ways to stay strong.  I have always been committed to working out every day, both for the obvious health benefits, and also because I believe in Thomas Jefferson’s quote, “A strong body makes the mind strong.”

Since college, the cornerstone of my workouts has been to do 300 sit-ups each day.  I have to be honest, it sucks.  It’s hard and it’s time consuming, and since Jeff died, I’ve been tempted on many nights after work to just bag it.  But I know that taking days off can be a slippery slope, and so I figured out a slight trick to help me stay focused and motivated.

I simply changed my goal for the nightly number of sit-ups.  Instead of 300, I now do 302 in honor of Jeff’s birthday of March 2^nd (3/02).  This way, when sit-ups are the last thing I feel like doing, I think of Jeff and tell myself that he’d be disappointed in me if I didn’t honor his birthday by doing them.  I immediately hit the floor.  Though I don’t really believe he’d feel that way, I need to play these mind games with myself to make it work.  And it does.  I surround that regimen with weights, cardio and my weekend tennis league match, and I feel both my physical and emotional strength increasing consistently.

DOBI KEEPS ME COMPANY WHILE I DO SIT-UPS

And I have Carey.  I know that weaker marriages have often, in the aftermath of losing a child, completely fallen apart.  Ours has gotten stronger if that is even possible, because I knew 28 ½ years ago that I married my forever girl.  Carey’s devotion to our boys, to me, to her job and to her charitable work and community service is inspiring.  And as I’ve articulated in other posts, she has been the leader in our recovery process.   I could not have gotten through this without her.  She too has derived great strength from Drew and Brett, and she has given it right back to all of us.  She has tapped into her faith and has allowed her love for us to overcome everything else.  And when we’re not out with friends on weekends, we never miss a date night.  Carey has been the driving force behind every good thing that has happened to me, and so it is no surprise that she has been critical to my recovery process.

Carey is a happy, upbeat person who laughs easily and smiles regularly.  But she worries about how people perceive her when they see her in public simply being herself, and this breaks my heart.  Carey is an amazing mother, wife and person and deserves to be happy.  I pray that she ultimately allows herself to enjoy life fully and without guilt.  Jeff certainly would have wanted it that way.

SONOMA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, JULY 2013

The holiday seasons have been tough, going back to and including 2009.  Jeff started his paralegal job in November 2009 and immediately began working brutally long hours.  It was hard for us to relax, never knowing when in the early morning hours Jeff would get home, how early he’d need to go back to the office the next day, and we were deeply worried about how little sleep he was getting.  And in the years since then, of course, adjusting to going through the holidays without Jeff has been extremely painful.

But this holiday season was a turning point.  On Thanksgiving Day, we went to the gym prior to heading to Long island to be with our family.  Drew played basketball, while Brett proceeded to take me through his grueling weight workout.  In the middle of it, I was overcome with emotion at how amazing it was that I was lifting with my son on Thanksgiving Day, that he wanted me to lift with him and that Drew was simultaneously down the hall in the gym playing the sport he is passionate about.  I texted Carey to let her know how thankful I felt, and her response will stay in my phone and in my heart forever.

It has always been critical for me to live in the moment, but never more so than since Jeff died.  For example, if I’m watching a Knicks game on a weeknight with Drew, and we’re screaming at the TV, having a great time, or if we’re actually at the game, I will not allow myself to think about the fact that each of us has to get up early the next morning for work.  That game and our time together isn’t over till it’s over, and I milk every last moment with him, because it is precious.  Tomorrow comes when it comes, and not a minute sooner.

Likewise, when we got home from our trip in January, and I began to fret that Brett would be returning to school five days later, I cut those thoughts short.  Five days is five days, and I’ll be damned if I wasn’t going to enjoy every last day that he was home.  And I did.  To cap it off, on the day before we drove Brett back to Villanova, he and I went to see ‘Nova play St. Johns at Madison Square Garden, and we screamed ourselves hoarse as they came back to beat St. Johns in a great game.

WITH BRETT AT VILLANOVA-ST. JOHNS GAME, MADISON SQUARE GARDEN, JAN. 11, 2014

I have learned that I can’t allow myself to think too much about a good time being almost over.  I have to stay in the moment for as long as it lasts, because that’s how to gain maximum enjoyment from it and create the best lasting memory.  As a result of taking this approach, when I hugged Brett goodbye the next day after dropping him off at school, I was able to look back and say that I enjoyed every last second of his three week Christmas break.  Living in the moment makes me stronger.

And then there is this blog.  I don’t think Elon Rubin can ever truly know just how critical the blog that he created out of his love for Jeff has been to my emotional well-being and to my ongoing ability to get stronger.  Writing about Jeff and about all the issues related to what happened has become a core part of my life that, at least for the foreseeable future, I now know I cannot live without.  But while writing is fulfilling, it is the extremely large number of supportive responses that I receive to each post from so many of you that literally fills me with both physical and emotional strength.  When I read your heartfelt feedback, it makes me feel as if I can overcome any obstacle.  I thank you all so very much.

To be clear, though, the agonizing pain of losing Jeff has not subsided, not even a little.  I understand now that it never will.  The key for me is to manage the pain, in the same way that you’d manage a serious chronic illness or severe injury.  The same holds true with the post-traumatic stress disorder that has plagued me since he died.  It’s still there.  As an EMT, Carey gets a text every time there is an ambulance call in our area.  On December 30^th, when she received a text that there was a car accident right near our gym to which Drew could have been heading at that time, I feared the worst rather than acknowledging that the odds were that it wasn’t him.

But this is part of the lasting damage that Jeff left behind, and that’s why, for over three years, I have not been able to reconcile what I perceive to be two conflicting facts:

Jeff loved us, genuinely and completely.

Jeff took his own life and devastated ours.

To me, those two statements are not separable.  How could he have loved us and then do what he did?  He was a brilliant young man and analytical to a fault, so how could he not have thought about the devastation and pain that he would leave behind?  Yes, I know he was not of right mind when he made his final impulsive decision, but if you read my post about Jeff’s last two months, you know that he was completely self-aware until the very end.

To Jeff, though, the above two statements were completely separable and they coexisted harmoniously in his mind.  Yes, he loved his family immensely.  But to Jeff, the fact remained that he was in great pain, which weakened and debilitated him to the point of no return, and so he left us.  Neither statement had anything to do with the other.

Jeff began his final note to our family by writing:

“Dear Mom, Dad, Drew and Brett,

I love you all so much, forever and always.  Each of you will always be a part of me.”

That’s one heck of a way to start a suicide note.  But it was Jeff’s way of helping us understand that his decision was completely separate from his love for us.  Though I still fault him greatly for not thinking it all through to the aftermath of his action and the extreme pain he would inflict on those he loved the most, gradually letting go of my anger has been a key to getting stronger.

As I continue to type, though, It is becoming clearer to me now.  When he cranked up the rain to a torrential level after his mother he called Pote commented on the delightful drizzle, and he watched us scamper away, I like to think that Jeff was sending us a message.  He was letting us know that we are still and will always be a family of five, and that he was there with us participating in our fun and in our healing journey.

And even if this fantasy that I’ve concocted about Jeff and the rain is not actually true, the fact that funny things like this immediately make us think and laugh about him is precisely why we are, in fact, still a family of five.  He is in our minds and hearts every second, and we carry him and his hilarious personality with us everywhere we go.  His presence is always palpable.

WE WILL ALWAYS BE A FAMILY OF FIVE

And as he watched us thrash about the sea playing football without him, and as he watched Brett and me in the hot tub under the pouring rain, and as he listened to Drew and me talking about life as we treaded water, Jeff was no doubt smiling to himself.

That’s because he sees that it is playing out exactly as he intended.  Just in the last few minutes, I have come to the realization that I was wrong to believe he hadn’t thought it all through to the aftermath.  Of course he had.  Jeff knew there would be excruciating pain, but he also knew from being a part of our family how strong our bonds were to each other and that we would get each other through it.

At the end of my September 26^th, 2012 post (“Jeff’s Passionate Support Of Obama In The Days Of ‘Yes We Can’”), I wrote,

“And while I may no longer be Superman, I am still pretty damn strong…”

Brett took exception to that statement, and in a highly emotional email to me three days later, he wrote:

When I read that, I felt like Popeye does after he eats his can of spinach.  Even after the mistakes I made in my failed attempts to save Jeff (those mistakes have been well-chronicled here on Kleinsaucer), my boys’ faith in me has not wavered.  Nor has Carey’s. That is both humbling and beautiful, and it is why I feel like the most blessed man on earth, even now.  It is also why I am starting to feel like a rock again.

FROM JEFF’S FINAL NOTE TO OUR FAMILY, NOVEMBER 9, 2010

And so the bottom line is that I will continue to focus on doing all the things that make me feel stronger. I will spend every minute I possibly can with Drew and Brett, I will cherish my dates with Carey, I will hit the floor every day and do my 302 sit-ups, and I will stay in the moment every time I experience a time worth savoring.

I will also do my best to get the four of us together later this year for another family trip to a warm climate where I can be Reggie White again and continue my quest to sack Brett in the water before he throws yet another touchdown pass to Drew.

And as much as anything, I will allow myself to continue to get stronger, because there is no doubt that Jeff would have wanted it this way.  In fact, writing this post has helped me come to the realization that it was part of his grand plan all along.  He too had great faith in me, and Jeff knew that regardless of how severe the pain was, I would figure out how to manage it over time, and no matter what, I would never let our family down.

–Rich Klein