The Life Affirming Gift Of Unapologetic Love
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By Harvey Blumenthal May 15, 2017
Roxanne was happily married to Benjamin Hart, a successful stock broker and a golfing buddy in my group of friends. Ben’s parents had escaped the Holocaust, and they had shortened their name from Hartstein when they arrived in America.
Roxanne Hart had worked as a hair dresser before she married Ben, and although he made a nice living, she continued her job simply because she enjoyed it. Some of the wives in our group thought Roxanne was a bimbo because of her bleached blonde hair, breast enhancements and her awkward social interactions. It always seemed to me that Roxanne just never quite fit in.
Although I never heard it spoken openly, I knew that some of our friends also thought of Roxanne as a shiksa, a not so nice term for a non-Jewish woman, often one involved with a non-Jewish man.
Because of these interrelated circumstances, the comedian wise guy in our group dubbed Roxanne as Roxie, likening her to the Roxie Hart character played by Renee Zellweger in the movie Chicago.
Ben and Roxanne left Tulsa in 2001, sixteen years before my wife Sandy died, and I have no memory of her having any communication with them within the past twelve or fourteen years.
Somehow, Roxanne recently learned that my wife, Sandy, died in February 2017, and she sent me a condolence card with the following handwritten note: “Dear Harvey, I am devastated for you, and I am so sorry for your loss of Sandy. She was my dear friend. When I graduated from TU (Tulsa University) and Ben and I returned home after the graduation ceremony, there was a gift wrapped box waiting on our porch at the front door. The graduation gift came from Miss Jackson’s (a high-end gift shop in fashionable Utica Square). That soap dish gift from Sandy and you still sits on my coffee table and I glance at it through my tears, while writing this note. This was the only gift I received for my graduation, and Sandy was so kind. She was the only one who congratulated me or recognized my accomplishment. Those days were not easy for me, and Sandy was a true friend. God bless her memory. Love, Roxanne.”
I did not even remember that Roxanne had attended TU or that Sandy had bought her a gift. While writing this story I can hardly stop crying because this anecdote is perfectly revealing and characteristic of Sandy, my Sandy. She had a natural and inexhaustible sensitivity for making people feel valued and respected.
Rob Bell is a New York Times bestselling author, speaker and spiritual teacher. About one year before Sandy died, Bill, Sandy’s and my youngest son, gave me Bell’s 2016 book, How to Be Here. Bell explained the Japanese word, Ikigai. He wrote, this is “…what gets you out of bed in the morning…. Your Ikigai is that sense you have when you wake up and know that this day matters…” On page 66 Bell wrote, “To be here is to embrace the spiritual challenge of your Ikigai, doing the hard work of figuring out who you are and what you have to give to the world.”
On page 85 Bell described how he watched two city workmen at the beach early one morning: “They were standing over a trash can, and the older one was teaching the younger one the proper way to change the plastic bag.”
Then Bell wrote about craft: “Craft is one person showing another at 6:45 in the morning the right way…to change a garbage can liner.” Bell described “that same dignity and honor when I drop my daughter off at school in the morning and the principal…is standing out front , greeting the students as they arrive for another day.”
A year before she died, I wrote in the margin of Bell’s book, on page 88, “Sandy’s craft is giving. Giving love to her children and grandkids—-and to me. Giving her full measure of devotion. Sandy knows true love—-giving everything and expecting nothing in return. Her craft is making her loved ones, and many others, happy. Sandy intuitively knows how to make people feel good. And that goodness flows naturally from her. There is nothing phony about Sandy. If I have only one ounce of her craft, I have learned it all from her.”
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