The Jukebox of Life (ePub)

This memoir was written because it has been in my head for most of my adult life. All of my hopes and dreams and fears were secrets. When I finally realized this, they had to come out, and I began to write.

Some of this started in 1977 when I worked as an assistant professor in anesthesia and surgery at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, FL, which is where, more importantly, I spent more than four months with my 31-year-old brother in an intensive care unit before he died from a car accident. While with him, he taught me much about life's sudden and tragic consequences.

Years later, I had the opportunity to give a presentation about what I would say if I only had 30 minutes to live as part of a "Last Lecture Series" at Nova Southeastern University, where I was also teaching. Through this opportunity I began to confront many of my life's unresolved issues that I had hidden from myself because I could not cope or did not want to understand them.

At this pivotal moment, I realized that when I was three years old, my sense of my place in my family had been from the outside looking in; it was if I did not belong. I realized that I had struggled with the fear that my father, a World War II veteran, did not love me, but also wanted to get rid of me. Never gaining his approval or love completely disconnected me from my parents, my brother and two sisters for 15 years. Family separation and dysfunction were followed in later years by the death of my brother and by being rejected for marriage several times by the only woman I thought that I truly loved - creating unrelenting cycles of loss, devastation and recovery.

This memoir is not a continuous narrative but rather a series of vignettes that describe my life stories both anecdotally and allegorically. Other stories describe how I competed to become a world-class hurdler in the Olympic trials of 1964 and gave me an independent identity; how working with schizophrenic patients at Philadelphia State Hospital gave me a sense of my calling; how earning my Ph.D. reinforced the value of my intelligence; how working in the Jackson Memorial Hospital intensive care unit gave me a sense of purpose, respect and humility; and how by asking the woman who rejected my first marriage proposal finally after two more proposals married me 14 years later.

Each story stands alone. The title of this memoir emphasizes the idea that, like a jukebox, life is about choices. As each jukebox selection is separate but part of a whole, each decision has its own set of consequences - both negative and positive. This is a personal journey with many beginnings and endings.