Ben's Passion for the Mountains

Ben loved the mountains and loved flying down them, floating on a pillow of fresh powder. On days when we didn't get to meet Ben at Alta, we would laugh because the message was always the same: "You should have been there, fresh tracks, waist deep, the best day ever."  For Ben, every day on the mountain was the best day ever.  In this brief video, recorded in January of this year, Ben passes on to Ling, Daniel, and Joshua his hope that they too will come to share his love of the mountains.

A Tribute to Ben

As we came across the city to be here this morning, we saw couples holding hands and laughing and I had to ask:  “what right?”   A jogger ran to the park, bounding with vigor and strength and I asked: “what right?”  Two kids passed a basketball, in a rush to meet pals for a game of pick-up and I asked: “what right?”

The poet W.H Auden once tried to fathom his own private grief with words that speak to us this moment:

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Today, what right does anyone have to laugh, slap a back, bounce their child in joy, pause for a moment with a cup of coffee and a chuckle with friends?  Do they know the loss, what was taken from us?  Don’t they have a clue to the void created in the world we know.  What right indeed?

But the universe does not tolerate such pat assumptions.  And the enormous figure that we celebrate as Doctor Z, Ben, Benjo, Benji is proof of this incalculable paradox.

 

And so I had to think deeper about the nature of Ben’s spirit, his purpose and his passion, his training and his avocation.  Then it occurred to me.  Yes!  These people have every right to laugh, every right to brim with the minutae and joys of life.  Because that was part of Ben’s gift and calling, to uplift and multiply life in every individual that he loved, treated, amused, outraged, guided, and informed.

At some point early in his life, Ben made a commitment to live as largely as muscle, breath, and endurance would allow.  Sports, specifically skiing, biking, and squash, allowed the complete expression of the life that he loved.  These are pursuits that place enormous demands on excellence, stamina, and focus.  And he took massive pride in his achievements: his medals in international competition at the Macabbiah games, his award for amassing two-million vertical feet of heli-skiing in the Canadian mountains – no average mortal feat, I can personally assure you.

And, before his time ran out, achieving what brought the greatest fulfillment to him – that is, finding a love of epic fullness, our beloved Ling, a partnership that created his sons Daniel and Joshua, who, even in their young age, embody the traits that we affectionately celebrate in their dad:  ferocious energy and the often uncontainable spirit.

And then there is Ben’s life as a physician and caregiver.  Here he dispensed his exceptional gifts of knowledge and instinct.  And, I know for a fact, that there are fathers, sisters, mothers, friends, and children of some here who today survive and flourish because Ben functioned at a cut above the normal delivery of medicine and counsel.  So maybe we all suffer this loss with a sting of irony because the one who provided us with the decisive edge in diagnostics and care could not himself be saved by a reciprocal miracle of healing.

So Ben’s life, and the passion and flourish that he represents, demands that we rethink the whole idea of what right we have to joy and pleasure and happiness.  Ben’s life, and the way he expressed it, forces us more importantly to face the question of what right do we have to go forward, paralyzed with sadness and numbed in grief or anger.  The truth is that we not only have the right but we have the obligation.

The poet tries to tell us that nothing now can come to any good.  But more truly, the revelation is that the legacy Ben leaves us, in his story, in his life, in his family, is that nothing can come from this BUT good.