Obscurity

While returning home from a medical procedure, still not quite at baseline following IV sedation, as my wife drove along the highway I scrolled my cellphone.  To my credit, I've largely given up doing this.  When traveling this route, I am invariably the one behind the steering wheel, usually driving alone.  I decided to update an old friend, truly a mentor who shaped me professionally and to a lesser extent personally.  I typed his name in Google search.  First link, his obituary.  Apparently, he had died about eight months earlier.  I opened the entry, one of legacy.com.  Just his name, the funeral home, and about five subsequent tributes.  A link to the funeral home gave no additional information.  Florida would provide me a copy of the death certificate on request, but those accessible to the public only indicate date of death.  Information on cause or address or survivors requires documentation of kinship.

I read the five tributes.  They ranged from high school friends, early career medical colleagues, and more recent professional colleagues.  All had a similar theme.  Walter was a unique person, had towering medical skills, and helped a friend when he could.  I became one of those friends.

We met when I started internship.  Walter directed the Internal Medicine Residency Program.  He had a commanding presence, weight likely exceeding 300 pounds but mobile, booming voice, no hesitation whatever to belittle us or put us on the spot.  He showed no hesitancy, though, to make accommodation to me by altering the residents' vacation schedule to allow me two weeks honeymoon time in August while saving the third week for the spring.  Residency's three years passed quickly.  I transitioned from a timid newcomer with limited knowledge but reliable work ethic to a more dominant senior resident, highly regarded in the job market for new graduates.  He never took credit, nor did he help me find the position that I got.  But his guidance on how to secure a position and assess the offers that I got made a permanent imprint.  Even more so when his values clashed with my own.

Settled a plane ride or long drive away, we kept in touch, mostly by phone, though in person with his wife at his home on a long weekend back in Boston.  I could always value his advice.  When my job reached a dead end, he made the best sounding board.  Absolutely would write a recommendation.  Our children arrived at about the same year, my daughter first, followed by his first son.  We exchanged gifts.  Letter writing still existed in the 1980s, though he preferred phone calls.  Periodic updates on the travails of parenting and the insecurities of physician employment.  He had been involuntarily terminated from the hospital where he supervised the residency.  Boston has a lot of medical opportunities.  He found a safe landing at the university system where he had attended school and done part of his residency.  While his medical skills focused on pulmonary disorders and intensive care, his new position offered different opportunities.  He never abandoned his place in the ICU, but he saw a trend emerging where hospital systems had to negotiate payment contracts with insurers.  He became the expert for his health system for doing that.  It paid considerably more than billing patients for ICU time.  He also sought the financially lucrative in another way.  As I search his name on Google, after the brief obit, the search  identifies him as a medical hired gun.  He reviewed charts and testified for plaintiffs in law suits.  I knew about some of this, as he presented his first assignment during on of my residency Morning Report sessions.  From every conversation, whenever money or medical economics arose, it became clear that his compensation, from salary to speaking honoraria, far exceeded mine.

Our kids got to their teen years.  Mine did the college circuit, including a tour of Boston's options.  It would be our last personal meeting.  We met at a supermarket parking lot, then headed someplace else for lunch.  Walter looked different.  He had slimmed down to normal weight.  I didn't ask if the surgeon had enabled that. Bariatric surgery was a novel option at the time.  For all his wealth, or at least my perception of it, he drove a very ordinary car, one within my budget.  His home in a town halfway between Boston and Providence had appreciated considerably, though it was far from a McMansion.  My daughter had entered college, as had his son, each to top programs.  His younger son lacked the academic discipline.  All his life, my son had heard quips from me about Walter, mostly including remarks about his girth and bluntness.  He seemed much more ordinary in person.

I returned home, updated him on the ultimate college choice and my daughter's activities after graduation.  His older son had entered a business career.  We spoke a few more times by phone.  He had purchased a second home in a tony area of South Florida.  I remembered that my friend had been born in pre-Castro Cuba.  He left for NYC as a child but with the ability to speak native Spanish and Brooklyn accented English.  On our last conversation, or the last I remember, he told me about his Florida home.  At least one member of the Dolphins lived in his neighborhood.  When I ultimately visited Florida, I checked out the town.  A place of McMansions.  I never learned Walter's exact address.

Despite my efforts to keep in touch, the Boston contacts disappeared.  The marvels of Google Searches could not recapture a phone, address for a letter, or an email.  Nor did I find any references to his employment or practice in Florida.  Doctors usually have a searchable office address and phone number.  He must have retired.  My last exchange with him, from my own email records seems to have been about ten years earlier.  I knew his son had gone to Stanford for his MBA.  He knew my children had entered medical school.  But exchanges stopped.  As did my quips to my children about Walter.

I don't know why I chose to look him up on my car ride home.  His passing did not surprise me, though I knew nothing about his health other than morbid obesity the first half of that life.  He lived to his latter 70s.  What surprised me, though, was the low profile.  I might have expected a long obit in a Florida paper if not a Boston one.  Maybe a legacy.com summary containing more than a funeral home contact.  The other Google search info took me to a variety of look up anyone sites.  I found a series of relatives, most of whom I recognized.  The surprise came in the addresses.  That swank town in Florida was not his most recent.  His last address had him in a more ordinary place, one where my father lived his final years.  With much to celebrate in his adult life, if not his childhood, I found only five tributes. Not even a photo on an imaging search.  All five memories not much different than mine of my mentor turned friend.