Sammy's Story

Sammy’s Story

Nothing could have been more contradictory compared to the simplicity of Sammy’s life than the diamond and ruby earrings that the sales clerk held out to Sammy Heller’s nephew and his wife. “I knew one person from Jericho,” she said, taking the small retainers from the backs of blood red rubies set among a handful of the crystal clear stones and handing them across the divide of the glass jewelry case. “His name was Smiley Heller…what a personality…always with a smile no matter what.” Sammy’s nephew knew that smile well. On his study desk sat a black and white posed photograph of Sammy on his bar mitzvah day, smiling out at the world, his eyes turning to small slits with that smile framed by a thin face. His tall, thin frame would enhance the kindliness that that smile embodied.

Sammy was a second-generation American, the son of a textile factory superintendent from a well to do Russian-Jewish immigrant family and a mother with keenly intelligent sparkling eyes who had fallen in love with Sammy’s father for his flashing appearance as much as for his ancestry.

Sammy Heller also dealt in jewelry, but that will come later. On a morning late in December 1944, like many mornings since he and his bomber group had been assigned to an atoll in the Mariana Islands, Sammy boarded the huge B-29 and strapped himself into the seat of the forward gun turret housed in a bubble of glass on the belly of the flying behemoth, one among the other 11 other men who made up the crew. Within minutes the giant fortress would climb slowly above the verdant green of the island and rise far above the clouds where the endless Pacific below appeared to be a lake with strings of land-borne waves heading toward the few remaining islands that the Japanese still occupied. As the bomber reached cruising altitude the talk on Sammy’s headphones seemed routine by now. Occasionally he had to respond to one of the officer’s questions, but most discussion was within the bounds of the strong camaraderie as his fellow airmen called to Smiley. The war in the Pacific had already been technically won at this juncture and Sammy saw few of the Japanese fighter pilots that he had seen even a few short months earlier. Still, as he watched the bomb bay doors open and the huge weapons freefall to their island targets below he could not get rid of the fear that he would never see his parents or sister again nor would he get the chance to go to college to study business as he had intended at the outbreak of the war.

He wrote his sister Shana as he was on route back to the U.S., “I know there are people who believe that the atomic bombs should not have been dropped on Japan, but I cannot change the feeling in my heart that it was due to those bombings, however terrible, that I’m able to return home and resume a normal life.” Shana who would come to develop pacifist beliefs in the years to come said nothing to refute Sammy’s opinions about the bombings as she too was overjoyed that he would return home unharmed. Many in Jericho would not, and the small synagogue to which their family belonged would memorialize that fact with a plaque set before the women’s section of the temple that listed the four names of men who would never come home again to this small congregation.

Sammy returned home and enrolled at the state land grant university concentrating in business as he had planned to do. He graduated four years later and went to work in the burgeoning jewelry industry that was located in the city that was the state’s capital. Everything was going according to plan. Within a few years Sammy had moved up to a key position in the accounts department of his company, becoming a favorite when he traveled to meet customers in New York. How could anyone turn down an order with such an amiable young man who capped his intelligence with his ever-present ready disarming smile that greeted each customer’s representative regardless of the size of the account?

Sammy met Rebecca at the party of a friend soon after returning from the Pacific. Also easygoing and affable, they soon fell in love and were married the following summer. Though doing well financially, Sammy and Rebecca were not materialistic in the least and settled for a small apartment in an area of the city with many fellow Jewish veterans and their families who had settled in this modest neighborhood to be close to their jobs and raise families. Within three years Sammy and Rebecca were parents of two boys and decided to move out to the suburbs as so many others among them had done to seek just a little more space and a bit of privacy that was lacking in the tenements.

The 50s and 60s seemed to be passing as if by design. His marriage to Rebecca was rewarding, he maintained his status in the jewelry company for which he worked, his sons were growing up healthy, and he enjoyed the quiet and convenience of his neighborhood and he had even been elected as president of the synagogue at which he prayed, located within walking distance of his home. All that, however, was about to change in such radical ways that in just over a decade not a single dream that Sammy and Rebecca had was to be left unscathed. It was as if Eurystheus had reemerged from mythology to present Sammy with a contemporary version of Hercules’ Twelve Labors. While Sammy’s mettle had been tested in war, what he was to experience made that epoch seem puny in retrospect.

Sammy drove south from the city on less traveled roads, as was his habit, not liking the rush and traffic of the interstate. As he neared his home he noticed a headache that was unlike anything he had ever experienced. Arriving home, he took a few aspirins and the headache vanished, but over the next few weeks it was to return again and again. Although the aspirin remedy seemed to work, he thought he should check with his physician. A few days later his doctor pronounced him well with the observation, “It’s just part of living the lifestyles we do…just keep up with the aspirin and call me in a couple of weeks.”

Sammy let the weeks pass but his headaches didn’t disappear and it took more and more aspirin to get rid of them. Consulting his doctor again, he was sent to a neurologist who examined him and referred Sammy to a cardiac specialist when all the tests he ordered turned up nothing as far as his nervous system was concerned. Another several weeks passed before Sammy was able to see the third doctor in the sequence he had followed trying to solve the riddle of his ever-present headaches. Several days after seeing the cardiologist Sammy received a phone call at work from the doctor’s office. The doctor’s receptionist asked Sammy to come into the office the following day as the doctor had requested.

Sammy was ready to do whatever the doctor wanted to take care of the problem. Just as life had moved along in predictable ways for Sammy, technology and good professional care would remedy this situation. Sammy was ushered into the consultation room of the doctor’s office and sat across the huge oak desk with an inlaid ebony top in a professional office park only minutes from his office. Sammy looked around at the sterile, universal white broken only by the desk of the office thinking back to the emerald green and endless deep blue of the Pacific two decades earlier as the doctor entered the room. “Mr. Heller, I’m afraid we’re dealing with a serious problem with your vascular system. The tests that we’ve run so far show substantial blockage in the arteries of your neck. I’d like you to check into the hospital as soon as we can get a bed for you for some additional tests and we’ll see where we can go from there.” Sammy left the office dumbfounded. He knew the prognosis was serious, but the doctor withheld the worst of the diagnosis. He knew from the review of Sammy’s test results that he would need surgery almost immediately or he could suffer a fatal stroke. Even worse, the surgical procedure carried substantial risk, since transplanting arteries from one part of the body to another site could potentially induce a stroke through the surgery alone.

As he had faced the last great challenge of his life in the war, so would he handle this complication. His family would be a great solace to him and his faith in a just God would carry him through this great danger.

Sammy entered the hospital and underwent hour upon hour of the risky procedure performed by a vascular surgeon. Shortly after the operation his headaches disappeared. He needed a full month of recovery at home, which Rebecca provided faithfully for him, yet another dilemma arose upon his return to work. Sammy was asked to move into a smaller office than he had occupied before entering the hospital for the operation. Despite his years of productive work for his company he was given lesser sales responsibilities in a company where his boss and his boss’s family seemed like an extended family to Sammy. Soon, in addition to his job worries, his headaches returned and he was forced into the hospital for yet another risk-laden procedure. On his return to work after his second convalescence he was called into the president’s office. David Kramer sat across a huge mahogany desk that in some ways reminded Sammy of the surgeon’s office. “Sammy,” Kramer began, “You’ve been with us for a long time and you’ve worked well and loyally for us. You know from your trips that the jewelry business has been hurt by the recession. We’re going to have to let you go, but with your track record in sales and our references for you, we’re sure you’ll be able to find something with a local competitor in the field.”

Life was no longer on track for Sammy he thought as he drove south toward his home. Rebecca had returned to work in the state’s unemployment system after Sammy recovered from his first surgery, so at least they wouldn’t starve, and, as irony would have it, he would now begin to collect unemployment benefits.

Another jewelry firm in the city hired Sammy a half year later. He slowly but steadily built up account after account for his new firm. Within weeks of reaching parity in terms of accounts in his new job he was called into the president’s office for what he thought would be a discussion of a higher salary or perhaps a bonus given his unparalleled performance on the job. Defying the common wisdom that lightning can’t strike twice, Sammy was summarily dismissed from his job. During the endless days that followed his newest forced unemployment he learned from colleagues in the business that he had been used for his contacts in the jewelry industry and dumped when his usefulness was at an end. Worse yet, his original employers declared bankruptcy and Sammy’s retirement pension was lost amid the legal wrangling of the court proceedings. Sammy thought he had reached the absolute rock bottom of hard luck as he delivered circulars for the state’s only daily newspaper when he learned that Rebecca had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Things were not supposed to go this way…Sammy had paid his dues and only wanted to remain productive and useful to himself, his family and society. He arranged for a plaque to be erected at the synagogue where he had been president only a few years earlier in hopes that Rebecca and he would be spared further suffering, believing that he could rely on God when living had torn his core beliefs to their very roots. Fate however had a different plan in store for Sammy, and now for Rebecca also.

Sammy and Rebecca’s health seemed to collide on a downward spiral spinning out of control. Rebecca’s cancer thought to be in remission angrily returned to ply its ruthless toll. At about the same time Sammy’s vascular system in his neck finally appeared to be persevering in spite of the onslaught they had endured, his heart now showed signs of angina that had plagued his mother until her death. He entered the hospital for the last time twelve years after his first surgery.

Rebecca accompanied by Shana sat outside of the intensive care unit in the waiting room of the hospital where Sammy had first come for treatment. Sammy’s cardiologist entered the room on one of the brightest and most hopeful days at the end of April, the promise of late spring waiting in the perfume of deep blue hyacinths and lilacs amid the deep-green turf below a sky crystalline in its perfect blue just beyond the hospital’s windows. The doctor spoke the words of his prognosis simply and clearly with the clinical distance of a highly trained practitioner. “His heart and circulatory system are too weak to continue functioning. It’s a matter of hours…perhaps days until they fail. The only thing keeping him alive is his determination to live. He refuses to take anything to help him sleep because he knows that if he falls asleep his heart will stop beating.”

Sammy continued to live a week after the doctor delivered his opinion. Day after day, and into each night and again into the next morning he forced himself to stay awake and for his heart to continue to force his life’s blood through his faltering veins and arteries. He was as Homer’s ancient Odysseus fighting the good fight on his seemingly endless trek back to Ithaca. He fought with all his determination and fortitude to go on in the face of what he knew was his end. He thought of the war, his once successful life as a businessman, Rebecca who he loved dearly along with his two sons and his God who he wondered if he had been abandoned by. Why had so many things in life gone so wrong for him? He could not reach a conclusion as he hovered over the abyss that he feared was so close to him now.

Sammy died on the last day of April. As Jewish custom commanded he was buried the next day, the first day of May with the promise of summer close above the granite and marble and grass of the cemetery just off the highway that Sammy avoided for the less traveled road only minutes from the wrought iron gates beyond his opened grave. As if fate were making an exclamation point of both of their lives, Rebecca died in the cold, bleak days of early December of the same year. Following the cemetery service for Rebecca, Shana pulled the calendar from the wall in a rage and tore the leaves of the months into pieces that fell to the floor much like the first snow of winter.