James Stockton Herzel, in memorium
As a Korean Adoptee I never thought about my birth father. I imagined my birth mother was dead and did not think to imagine the who or why around my birth father’s life. In Korea it is the fathers that carry the name, the generation, the ancestry. Children without fathers who claim them did not belong in the country and were efficiently exiled from citizenship. Some pose this was an easy way to export these babies. I don’t imagine such a policy would have become acceptable practice without a coerced consent. This is what I imagine, as a mother and an adoptee who has heard enough stories and read enough history to imagine the possibilities.
We buried my father today.
As I think about my Adoptive father, I cannot measure all the ways he has affected my life. I do not have a good memory from my childhood that does not involve him. I look at my life and the skills and qualities that bore me through the challenges I have faced, and I can see his hand. My dad, because that is more what I called him, was my first best teacher. I see him standing on the front lawn of our house looking up at the sky, searching for the first star on a Saturday night anticipating Havdalah. When I look at the stars, he is always with me. I see him with sufferable patience reading the Haftorah portion on a Saturday to six insufferable children. When I teach impatient children, he is with me. I see him coming home with the bags of groceries, and unloading them into the refrigerator or the freezer, as it was his job to pick them up. With coupons used, cut out the previous Sunday from the paper, he was the definition of frugal. And so too when I buy my groceries or spend money on anything, he is with me. Without remonstration, he simply taught by being and knowing who he was, who he could not help but be.
Without being intentional he taught kindness, gentleness, and love. He was a gentle man who I only ever saw lose his temper three times in my life. My mother told me once that when they were first married, he had told her that he was raised by his father with a heavy disciplinary hand, and he did not want any part of that. Thus, the task of discipline landed in her lap and as a mother, I can empathize with that, but when asked he would step up. He taught a different type of discipline, one of duty, one of service and love. He was fortunate to have married the love of his life and he did care and provide for her through her life without question. His love for her did not come in big romantic demonstrations, I am not sure he knew or understood the purpose of such things, but rather in singular loyalty and abidance.
My dad was a builder. An engineer by profession, he had a natural gift and desire to build whatever needed to be made. A tree house, a sukkah, an extension on the house possibly driven by frugality and know how he did it. My childhood was littered by two by fours and sheets of plywood, nails, and hammers. Regardless of genetics, all his children learned these lessons well.
He recycled before it was even a thing, soda bottles, cans, newspapers. We had a whole garage full of newspapers that eventually got recycled, but not before we dug a cave in the middle. I remember playing teacher inside, clicking the back of a pen on the walls. A ridiculous fire hazard, but we survived as we did many things in the seventies.
Dad was religious and political. A democratic committee man, though shy in nature he dutifully canvassed or did what was needed. He was devoted to his beliefs in god and his religious calling. He was a man who gave his life for service. Devotion, and a belief in the sacred. I am sure these were qualities taught to him by his parents and though we differed on the practice and beliefs I understood his questions and his desires.
James Stockton Herzel was born in 1935 to a Lutheran Pastor and his wife in a very small parish in West Virginia, likely not far from the mountains I now live among. He told me as a child he loved riding his bike, playing with his trains and getting bottles of coke from the general store. This was a treat he could not usually afford. He was not academically inclined like his brothers, he related to me with his high-pitched light laugh. He liked to play. Regardless, he graduated from Penn State, and later received his master’s from NYU. He married the love of his life and helped raise 6 children. He was a good man, one of the best I have ever known and though I know he is with me and now part of the ether he praised so much, the world has gotten so much smaller. My father saw me, as I am, in moments that are mine alone and too many memories to recount. I know he loved me as I loved him. I am so grateful he was my father, and I will miss him dearly.
