Note, July 15, 2009: The recent untimely and controversial deaths of actor David Carradine, mega-star Michael Jackson and football great Steve McNair beg a re-reading of a column posted in October 2003. Stellar professional careers, as well as ordinary lives, can be sullied, overshadowed and devalued by circumstances surrounding our deaths. It’s essential that we end well.
In death, Justyn Rosen was caught with his pants down. An alleged adulterous affair erupted and killed him.
Few would have suspected his dalliance with Teresa Perez, 40, had she not reacted so murderously when the 79-year-old Denver businessman tried to end their 7-year-long relationship. Perez carjacked him and then shot him when he escaped and dashed toward help at a police station.
Scandal undoubtedly commandeered the thoughts of mourners while Rosen was being rightfully eulogized by Rabbi Stephen Foster as a respected, philanthropic “businessman with a heart.” The ancient edict: “Be sure your sin will find you out,” crystallized at Rosen’s death.
And now an ugly addendum stains an otherwise sterling legacy. Before embarking on this reckless entanglement, it is doubtful he surmised so public a reckoning.
He’s not alone. Many an illustrious life has been overshadowed by a deplorable exit, leaving loved ones behind with tandem grief – for the personal loss and for an unexpected and often embarrassing final exclamation point.
The late four-term New York governor and U.S. vice-president, Nelson Rockefeller, was a personally engaging art aficionado, successful politician and beneficiary of one of America’s great success stories.
But, according to Dr. Michael M. Baden, former Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, at age 71, Rockefeller suffered a most inglorious departure during the passionate throes of a sexual encounter. It took his female “staff assistant” – 45 years his junior and possibly concerned about political repercussions – an hour before she called in vain for emergency help.
“Rocky” never foresaw the fatal interlude as part of his biographical sketch, yet there it is. He was survived by children, grandchildren, an angry wife and a diminished dignity.
Palm Beach socialite Liza Pulitzer was blind-sided last month by a post-mortem triple whammy bequeathed by her husband Philip Roome. Roome, whose business was plagued by an SEC investigation, jumped to his death from a New York City building. Then his obituary read “beloved husband of Anne.” Roome was a bigamist who never divorced his first wife before marrying Liza.
Life-long family friend, Dr. Francis D. Moore, was described by Atul Gawande, M.D., in the New Yorker magazine (May 5, 2003) as “one of the most important surgeons of the 20th century. He discovered the chemical composition of the human body … [He spearheaded] experiments that established, among other things, organ transplantation, heart-valve surgery, and the use of hormonal therapy against breast cancer.”
“His findings probably saved tens of thousands of lives a year – an impact on the scale of vaccines and antibiotics,” says Gawande.
I never knew Dr. Moore as this trail-blazing medical giant, but I do remember his Christmas roast carved into paper-thin slices. And shortly before my mother’s death, he respectfully stopped by to “check on your mum’s progress.”
In 2000, chronic heart failure eclipsed Dr. Moore’s active lifestyle which, over 88 years, included horses, sailing, hunting, fishing, music and theatre. But he chose not to face his decline with the steadfast courage that distinguished his career. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving 2001, he put a gun in his mouth.
He was the patriarch of a large thriving family and left behind a medical legacy of incalculable value, but, with it, a final image impossible to erase.
“He shot himself with his wife in the house – to hear it, to find him with his brains sprayed all over the study,” writes Gawande. “There was … a characteristic degree of obliviousness of the pain he could and did cause others.”
And so it must have been for Justyn Rosen at the outset of his marital transgression, obliviousness to the potential for pain he caused family, friends and his wife of 60 years.
“I hope that the lasting memory of Justyn’s life will be the way that he tried to live and not the way he died,” said Rabbi Foster.
Sorry, that’s not the way it works. The same human nature that enticed Rosen into moral compromise will side-trip memories and auto-focus on his indiscretion, if only momentarily.
As a prosperous businessman, Justyn Rosen undoubtedly left a hefty financial estate, but he denied his family the one thing they would have valued more – a legacy undefiled by an appalling footnote.
We need to end well. The most generous bequest of all is the sweet, untainted recollection left behind with loved ones.
