Dr. Ruth taught me everything I know — because she was my mom

Seven years ago, I was in the Frankfurt train station waiting for a train to Prague. As I waited for my train, I realized that exactly 80 years before, my mother had stood in this same train station and waved goodbye to her mother and grandmother, who ran next to the train as it left the station.

She remembered smiling so that her mother would not be sad. She also remembered giving her favorite doll to the girl seated opposite her, who was crying. They were two of 100 children on the Kindertransport headed to relative safety in Switzerland. It was the last time my mother would see her family. She was 10 years old.

Relationships were always very important to my mom — in part, I’m guessing, because of the loving family she grew up with until that day in the Frankfurt train station, and in part because of the tragedy and loss that followed.

She cultivated friendships and family connections like a gardener tends to plants. Because she had so little family of her own who survived WWII, she strengthened familial connections and created new ones wherever she went.

People love to ask what it was like to grow up with Dr. Ruth. Well, it’s true that there were some books about sex lying around the house. And the occasional talk about her work as a sex therapist. And I don’t know if anyone has ever before said the words “penis” or “vagina” in a eulogy, but I did, just to get it over with.

The truth is, neither my sister, Miriam, nor I grew up with Dr. Ruth, the celebrity. My mom got her first 15-minute radio show, on Sunday nights, when I was at the very end of high school and Miriam was living in Israel. Her fame happened quickly, mostly after both Miriam and I had left the house.

But her eventual celebrity was only the public recognition of qualities she always had: enthusiasm; drive; a sense of wanting to help people and the world; and an irrepressible zest for life and for people.

She took those qualities wherever she went. And she learned to speak the local language fluently anywhere she lived — including France, Israel and, of course, the United States — because that is what you need to meet and connect with people.

She knew what it was like to be lonely. This is why, before her death, she was so proud to be appointed New York State’s honorary ambassador to loneliness. Her final book, written with Allison Gilbert and Pierre Lehu, is titled The Joy of Connections: 100 Ways to Beat Loneliness and Live a Happier and More Meaningful Life. People and connections were central to her very being.

The phrase “FOMO” must have been invented with my mom in mind. She would never miss out on anything. Hanukkah, Seders, family gatherings, friends’ gatherings — she was everywhere, for every event.

And as a result, she had an impact on every person she encountered.

My mom talked to everyone, whether it was former President Bill Clinton, or the taxi driver, or the person cleaning a public bathroom. She could find an interesting story in everyone. Two days after my mother had her first stroke in August of 2023, she received a note from her exterminator, delivered to the door: “So sorry about what happened. Hope you’re ok. If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to call anytime.”

She could connect with everyone. She could make everyone feel special and heard. And her profound respect for every individual shined through every encounter.

Mind you, this was not always easy for the rest of us. Although it was a great lesson in how to treat everyone with dignity and kindness, it also meant that a nice family dinner out would be interrupted a half dozen times by extended conversations with complete strangers.

But as much as her life was lived in public, there was also an intense privacy to my mom. She did not share sadness; she did not share pain. I do not recall ever seeing her cry. But I’m sure she did, just not in front of us.

My mom also had a keen sense of justice. Even though she liked to say she was not political, she had a reflexive sympathy for the underdog, and that extended to the way she viewed current events, and the sadness she experienced when people anywhere were treated unjustly. Her progressive instincts were born not out of ideological conviction, but rather out of human connection.

One of my favorite memories of my mother is from my 10th birthday, when I was obsessed with go-karts. One morning before my birthday, I ran into my parents’ bedroom and found my mom, in bed, calling a dozen different go-kart tracks to try to find one that would allow a kid as short as I was to drive one. I don’t think that was ever successful — I mean, I was really short — but she quickly changed course to plan a birthday party with model rockets that we built and launched. Her two best friends, Dale and Al, came over and stayed up half the night putting together the rockets so that they would be ready the next day.

That was mom: She was always thinking about how to make magical moments. Once, she took all of her and my dad’s belongings out of their bedroom closet so that my friend Benji and I could build a clubhouse in it. It stayed there for months — I have no idea where they put their clothes!

My dad loved my electric trains as much as I did, while my mom was nonchalant about toy trains. But she nevertheless let them run throughout the apartment, blocking hallways and, I’m sure, any possible means of egress.

Whenever there was a party — and there were many — my mom would take bed sheets and throw them over huge piles of papers and books. She called them ski slopes, and this was her way of cleaning up.

Our house was not neat — this is an understatement — but it was always lively. There was a sign on my mother’s desk that read “A clean desk is the sign of a dull mind,” and that philosophy extended to the whole house.

What the apartment lacked in neatness was more than made up for through energy and joy.

Above all, my mother was an educator. She often paraphrased the Talmudic assertion that a lesson taught with humor is a lesson retained. My sister and I are both in education as well, I remember her words every time I teach.

This might have been one of the reasons her radio show was so successful — she paired humor and warmth with genuine concern for every single caller. Even when she knew the call was a joke from some college dorm room, she answered the questions with sincerity. For every person asking a question as a joke, she said, 20 others are listening for the answer.

Death is surreal. How does someone disappear? I think of that train that rescued my mom and brought her to Switzerland. That train was real. But trains are also metaphorical. Bruce Springsteen sings “Big… train coming down the track / Blow your whistle long / One minute you’re here / Next minute you’re gone.”

We can’t fully comprehend life’s precarity. But we can cherish what the once-living gave to us. My mom’s gifts to me were countless. Her joie de vivre was contagious; her generosity was a constant lesson in kindness; her get-it-done attitude was a daily counterpoint to my own procrastinating ways. But her love of people, and her desire to connect with so many in so many ways, was the greatest gift.

My mom, more than anyone I know, blew her whistle long. And now in her absence, I’ll try to do the same.