OBITUARY
Edith
Packer, J.D., PhD. was born on Oct. 27, 1924 and passed away on Feb. 4, 2018.
She leaves behind a husband, George Reisman, a daughter, Adrienne Packer, and
two grandsons, William Packer and Daniel Salmieri. A Holocaust survivor, she
lost both parents and an older brother in 1944, when the Holocaust came to
Hungary.
Edith
requested that contributions in her memory be donated to St Jude's Hospital for
Children.
Eulogy
Delivered at the
O’Connor Mortuary in Laguna Hills, California on February 9th 2018
As I’m sure you all know, Edith was an extremely talented
and unusual woman. She earned a J.D. degree in law and a Ph.D. in Clinical
Psychology. She was in practice as a psychologist and psychotherapist for 48 years,
and through her knowledge and therapeutic techniques greatly improved the lives
of most of her patients, in many cases dramatically. She continually sought to
inspire her patients to become the best and most accomplished people they could
be. Again and again, her practice resulted in young people who came to her
riddled with psychological problems and stuck in a seemingly hopeless life,
finding the courage to do what was necessary to break free and go on to
successful careers and successful relationships and to far more satisfaction
and happiness in life than would have been possible without her.
She was also an author and lecturer. She wrote nine
pamphlets, which were the result of lectures she delivered for the Jefferson
School in the 1980s and 1990s. (I invite you all to take a copy of each of
them, and of her interview with Jerry Kirkpatrick, with my compliments. They’re
on a table somewhere in this room. And they’ve all been put together as an
Amazon.com Kindle book under the title Lectures
on Psychology: A Guide to Understanding Your Emotions. To find it, just
search Amazon in the section Kindle books and then under the name Edith Packer.)
*****
Edith was born on October 27, 1924. At this point, I
don’t think she can hold it against me for revealing her age. So when she died
this last Sunday she was over 93 years old. I had always expected her, and
ardently desired her, to live to be at least 105. The fact that she didn’t, has
devastated me. For over 48 years her presence filled my life, and now it’s
simply gone. I feel a great void.
It’s somewhat unusual for someone to live to be 93.
What is truly unusual, indeed, amazing, is that Edith was still in practice as
recently as a few days before this last Christmas. Her practice was small—about
seven or eight patients a week—but it still existed. And she was still very
sharp. In her prime, she often saw seven, or even eight, patients in a day.
Edith was born in a small city called Ushorod. According
to her passport, Edith was born in the Ukraine. Actually, she was born in what
was then the eastern-most province of Czechoslovakia, called Carpatho-Russia. The
Munich Pact in 1938, when Edith was 14, gave that province to Hungary, which
held it until 1945, when it became part of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union
made it part of the Ukraine, which was it’s second-most important territory.
From 1920 until April of 1944, Hungary was ruled by a
Regent, Admiral Horthy, whose administration could generally be compared to
that of Mussolini in Italy. From 1938 to early 1944, Jews could still live in
Hungary, but only in an increasingly oppressive environment. They were banned
from practicing various professions; Jewish students had to sit in the back of
the classroom. Edith, who had been elected president of her class in Gymnasium,
was removed from that position because she was Jewish. Toward the end of the
period, Jews were compelled to wear yellow stars of David on their clothing.
Young Jewish men were drafted into labor battalions, where many of them died, including
one of her older brothers, who had been a lawyer and who had been prohibited
from practicing his profession. In April of 1944 the conditions of Jews changed
from bad to horrible: the Holocaust came to Hungary. Under the direction of
Adolf Eichmann, the Hungarian government began rounding up the Jews for
deportation to concentration camps and death.
At the age of 19, Edith saw the death camps coming. She
urged her parents and the rest of her family to flee. She kept hammering at
them with the question of how would the Germans feed them? Why would they feed
them? Her family, particularly her parents, had the opportunity to flee. But they
chose to stay, stuck like deer in the headlights of an oncoming truck. According
to Edith, her mother stayed because she couldn’t bear to give up such things as
the familiarity of her home, and her father stayed because he was the leader of
the Jews in Carpatho-Russia and believed that leaving would be a betrayal of
his fellow Jews.
But Edith fled. And despite his own choice to stay, her
father supported Edith’s decision for herself and had a special pair of shoes
made for her, which contained a supply of gold coins and diamonds, so that she
would not suffer want during her flight. She also found help from a Hungarian
senator, who provided her with false papers. This senator became her first
husband, and the father of her first child, Eva.
Eva was the mother of a member of our audience: Daniel
Salmieri, who is now a New York Times
best-selling illustrator and author of children’s books. Will Daniel, Edith’s
grandson, please wave or stand up, to let people see you? Eva was also a
graduate of Hunter College summa cum
laude, a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and a Woodrow Wilson Scholar. She
attended graduate school at Columbia University, and was employed as a
freelance editor at several major publishing houses. To Edith’s great sorrow, Eva
died of cancer in 1990. Her husband, Robert, was and is a successful artist and
designer.
Edith, being blonde and blue-eyed and with false papers
was able to avoid being identified as a Jew and succeeded in saving her life. She
hid out for the remainder of the war first in Budapest and then across the
border in Romania. But she felt guilty about having left her parents. I thought
she had overcome the guilt many years ago, but it came back in her final days.
I say that any guilt should have belonged to them, not to her. It was they who
did wrong in refusing to leave, in refusing not just at the last minute, when
it really was too late for them, since, not being blonde and blue eyed, they
could easily have been identified as Jews, but much earlier, when the facts
were already clear and they chose to ignore them. Edith, did absolutely right
in leaving and thus living, not dying.
*****
When I first met Edith in 1969, I learned of her escape
from the Nazis and of her experiences. Listening to her and looking at her—she
was really very beautiful—I felt like I was in an adventure movie, in the
presence of a beautiful heroine, who was radiating waves of courage and daring.
That’s when I started to fall in love with her.
Sometimes people ask where I first met Edith. I met her
in Ayn Rand’s living room. We were both students in a series of lectures Ayn
Rand was giving on non-fiction writing.
I’ve mentioned that Edith was born in a small city
called Ushorod. It was quite a journey from Ushorod to Ayn Rand’s living room.
Escaping from the Nazis was an essential part of it, but not the only part. The
journey began years before, when she was a little girl, and continued for years
afterwards. A major signpost appeared in Edith’s childhood, showing the
direction in which she was travelling. Her mother gave her a very fancy, deluxe
baby carriage. Edith rejected the baby carriage and never played with it. She
thought it was stupid.
To Edith then, and to me now, and, I believe, to anyone
who seriously considers the matter, toy baby carriages, dolls, and most other
toys for little girls are nothing more than early job-training tools for what
traditionally has been assumed to be the future career of little girls, when
they grow up and become women. That career is supposed to be motherhood, to the
exclusion of practically everything else. Edith would have none of that.
She believed from the very beginning that she was a
full-fledged person, or destined to become a full-fledged person when she grew
up, not just a baby-making auxiliary to a full-fledged person, traditionally
believed to be only men. Even as a very young child, she possessed profound,
deep-seated independent judgment and
believed that she was capable of doing or becoming anything she wanted to. She
always had the strength to stand up and fight for whatever she believed in.
One of my favorite examples of her independence and
confidence was the fact that as a child of about ten, she would march to the dressmaker’s,
select materials, and order her own dresses.
Qualities like this, almost always associated with men,
rather than women, led her father one day to say, with great pride, that Edith was his only son. (This was the
same sentiment that von Mises expressed about Ayn Rand when he said “Ayn Rand
is the only man in America,” after the publication of her article “Big
Business: America’s Persecuted Minority.”) Statements like this don’t mean that
one thinks a woman is a man but only that she has the intellect and character
values usually associated only with men.
In her childhood, Edith decided at one point that she
wanted to be a lawyer when she grew up. Her mother told her that “women are not
lawyers.” But Edith personally knew a woman who lived nearby and who was, in
fact, a lawyer. After that, she adopted the same kind of attitude toward her
mother that years later, President Reagan adopted toward Gorbachev: “Trust but
verify,” which actually meant “verify before accepting or believing.” This was
a major reinforcement of Edith’s independence. It taught her that she always
needed to think and judge for herself.
*****
Edith became an American citizen on May 7, 1951. The
name on her citizenship document is Edith Packer. She and her first husband had
divorced and she had married her second husband Max Packer, who was a physician
in New York City. She and Max had two children: Adrienne, who is an attorney,
and Steven, who was a successful businessman but unfortunately died in 1996. Adrienne is here tonight. I hope she’ll wave
to you, so that you can see her if you don’t recognize her. And Adrienne’s son,
William, Edith’s grandson, is also here tonight. Will is currently enrolled in
the joint MBA/MPA programs at the Wharton School and Harvard University. Until
entering that program, he was the Director of Educational Technology at a
network of twenty schools named Democracy Prep Public Schools. Please wave or stand
up, Will.
Edith was an ardent believer in education. Even in her
flight from the Nazis, she still managed to carry with her a copy of her
transcript from the Gymnasium from which she had graduated. Now, settled in the
United States, Edith decided to go back to school. She enrolled at Hunter
College in New York City, and graduated as a member of Phi Beta Kappa. She then
decided to go to law school. She was accepted at Fordham University School of
Law, which is a well-respected Roman Catholic institution. But she wanted to go
to the NYU School of Law. Even though
her grades at Hunter had been outstanding, she was initially rejected by NYU
because she had not done sufficiently well on the multiple choice questions on
the entrance exam. She called the Dean of the school and challenged her
rejection. She got him to change his mind and was admitted. At NYU her class
was divided into two sections, in each of which there was one woman and 99 or
100 men.
Even though, within a few years, after working both for
a law firm and then in private practice, she came to dislike the practice of
law, largely because of the corruption that prevailed in the New York City
justice system, she always believed in the value of studying law. Again and
again, she said how much it had improved her ability to think, and implied that
it should be a part of everyone’s education.
*****
When Edith’s husband Max made house calls, Edith
sometimes went with him. On one such occasion, a woman she had come to know
somewhat, offered her a book to read, while Max was busy with his patient. The
woman said she thought Edith would like it. The book was Atlas Shrugged. Edith loved it. Max’s reaction was that there would
now be “no way of holding her.”
She and Max became part of the Objectivist “scene,” so
to speak. Alan Blumenthal, an MD and a first cousin of Nathaniel Branden, then
Ayn Rand’s designated “intellectual heir,” was conducting a series of workshops
on psychology and psychotherapy for physicians. Max enrolled. The physicians
were allowed to bring their wives. Edith came with him. She was fascinated.
In the workshops the physicians were often given the
opportunity to perform psychological diagnoses and to hold mock therapy
sessions. Edith was invited to participate. She performed better than the
physicians. Alan Blumenthal was so impressed with her that he urged her to go
into the field of psychology, which she did. She earned a master’s degree in
personality theory at NYU. She gained hands-on experience by working for a year
or more at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, widely regarded as the leading
psychiatric hospital in the world. Then, with patients referred by Dr.
Blumenthal, she entered private practice in 1969. In the same year, Edith and
Max divorced.
In 1979 Edith obtained her doctorate from Florida Institute of Technology. But a substantial number of her classes were held in Switzerland, where we spent two of the
most beautiful summers of our lives. We would wake up in the morning and see
beautiful hills and mountains, and across the street a few cows with cowbells
on.
I moved into Edith’s apartment in October of 1973. We married
on November 19, 1978. In all the years thereafter, we always celebrated two
anniversaries: not only our wedding anniversary but also the anniversary of our
first-date, which was on September 13, 1969.
*****
As I’ve said, Edith’s passing has
left a great void in me. And my knowledge and commitment to reality and
rationality have only made it worse. I know that Edith no longer exists as any
kind of actual being. All that physically remains of her is a small pile of
ashes. She no longer has eyes and so she cannot see me. She no longer has ears
and so she cannot hear me. There just is no longer any “she.” But nevertheless,
I pretend that in some way, she still exists and that she can still see and
hear me, and so I still talk to her every day. And when I’m alone, out of
anyone else’s hearing, I talk to her out loud. So I now need Edith more than
ever—as my psychotherapist, in addition to everything else.
But you know what. Until just this
last Sunday, I did talk to Edith out loud, in reality, practically every day,
for almost half a century. And so it feels much more normal to go on talking to
her, even if only in pretense, than to slam into the brick wall of the fact
that she simply is no more. So what I think I’m doing is trying to tap the
brakes gently, so to speak, and come to a smooth stop, if that’s possible. I
don’t think that’s actually unreasonable.
*****
I want you to know that the
beautiful music you’ll hear before this service concludes was chosen by Edith
herself. Many times over the years, she told me that her favorite opera was La
Traviata and that I must be sure to play it at her funeral. The final aria in
the opera, the death scene, certainly expresses the way I feel and have been
feeling since Sunday morning, when she died.
*****
I want to thank a number of people
who’ve contributed to this service: Bob and Bita Klein, friends of Edith for
many years, for preparing brief audio excerpts from a few of her lectures. Monique
Vallier, who was Edith’s principal health aide for the last two years and who
has helped to organize the service. Dr. Linda Reardan, who also participated in
preparing the service and who will be a speaker in the program. Linda was a
close friend of Edith’s for many years, and was designated in Edith’s Advanced
Healthcare Directive to be in charge if Adrienne and I were unable to be. And Linda’s husband, Dr. Jerry Kirkpatrick, a
friend of Edith’s since her days in New York, and who will now take charge of the
remainder of this service, first, by expressing his own memories of Edith; next
by introducing the remaining designated speakers, and then by recognizing
whoever else is here who has known Edith and wishes to make some brief comments
about her.
Jerry, please take over.
