Collecting my recollections
Memory preservation in the wake of childhood loss
There’s an old video of myself that I just love. I’m posing and smiling while twirling around the beach. I’ve got my hair in pigtails and I’m speaking to the camera as if I’m a host of a special show of sorts. Nowadays, I’m able to view this video on my mama’s old Mac laptop, which is overloaded with filtered Photo Booth selfies and a backlog of unread spam emails. But when I put the DVD into the computer’s player, I can slip back into my early childhood.
The outstanding tragedy of watching these videos is that the videographer, my Papa (that’s what I called him), died when I was 9. It’s painful at times to hear Randy Geller’s voice in the dozens of home videos he shot because the reality is that they’re a fading artifact of my youth. Randy was 45 when he passed away after treating his stage four glioblastoma for almost two years. When my parents broke the news that he had cancer in January of 2008, I was only 7. Today, I’m 22. The memories hover closely to me: hearing “Mrs. Robinson” by Simon & Garfunkel reminds me of when it would play during long-gone car rides from elementary school, and smelling raw fish reminds me of watching him debone sunfish for hours in our backyard.
He’s been gone for 13 years and I’m now ready to understand who he was, his life and the people he had relationships with who were unknown to me as a child. To many, he was the life of the party, the prankster, the optimistic father, the caring husband, the kind of person to purchase a luxurious suit from Nordstrom but insist on pairing the outfit with beaten-up Timberland boots.
I’m fascinated by the place – both physical and digital – in which Randy occupies my life.
My search started by poring over hundreds of journal entries and well wishes from his old Caring Bridge site. And after months of interviews with family, Randy’s old friends, acquaintances and experts on grief, allow me to walk you through a journey of my understanding of Randy Geller.
Randy became a dad in July of 1998 when my older brother, Jack, was born. He took on the role of videographer while my mama was our family photographer. Photo albums, CDs and framed images filled the bookshelves and halls of my childhood home in Mendota Heights, Minnesota. And in the corners of my mind, I can hear the click of Randy’s camcorder.
4:00 a.m. It was a quiet and dark Saturday morning in October. My mama knew I would be born that day, motherly instinct I suppose. She woke up and carried her 42 and a half weeks pregnant self into the living room. She was careful not to wake Randy or her 2-year-old son. The pines outside the windows stood still, but she was restless. Mama opened the cabinet and frantically rushed to fill Jack’s photo album with the 4x6 photos that had been printed, just not yet organized. Now, she was faced with a challenge: she needed to finish pushing the glossy prints into the plastic sleeves before pushing out her second child. On her hands and knees, she spent about four hours accumulating hangnails, ignoring the reality that her water had already broken and, instead, focused on racing to sort the photo album chronologically.
“Because you were coming, I knew I was soon going to be focusing on different books,” she told me.
Such was the role that my mother took. She was the photographer and made herself a promise to be the creator of these photo albums for her children.
And even as she had her role, sometimes Randy’s efforts to capture video were just too much, remembers my mama, Jennie Ettinger.
“A lot of times, it was annoying because he [Randy] would maybe have us repeat something,” she said. “And then sometimes it would be like ‘oh God here he comes with a video camera,’ which I'm forever thankful for now, but I was always in front of it. I had zero responsibility for even getting [it] charged.”
Randy’s interest in photography can be traced back to his childhood home. His father, Ron Geller, had a darkroom built in the corner of the basement in 1982. Ron used the darkroom to develop the photos he took of construction sites – a job he took up on the side for extra cash. But he also took photos of people.
As Randy’s younger sister put it: “He [Ron] would order the map boards and order the frames and he would construct them together and put them around the pictures of different people that he took pictures of,” she said. “I think that trickled into Randy wanting to also take pictures and get into photography as a little hobby,” Dana Beth Weisman said.
Randy shared many hobbies with Ron, photography was just one of them. Ron inspired Randy’s love of cars, his business savvy and his Judaic endeavors.
For those who knew Randy as a child, he was anything but typical. He had a close circle of neighborhood friends who would spend hours with each other in Sunday school. And in middle and high school, his involvement with USY, a national Jewish youth organization, prompted him to continue those friendships, which lasted into his his adulthood.
To put his friend group in context: they were a group of close-knit kids that belonged to the Temple of Aaron, a conservative synagogue in St. Paul.
“For the most part, your friends are Jewish because the burnouts and the stoners didn't want anything to do with you. And the super jocks didn't want anything to do with you if you weren't a super jock. So, we kind of kept to ourselves,” Lisa Katsman, a childhood friend of Randy’s, told me one afternoon over the phone. We were speaking two weeks after I had tracked her down after finding her name on Randy’s Legacy page, where she mentions his photography.
One of the little-known facts about Randy was that he won a photo contest for USY, according to Katsman. This was news to me. Katsman posed in an image that sought to conjure a "shtetl" feeling, she said. Upon learning that Randy developed photos, Katsman graciously snail-mailed the photo to me. It’s the photo Randy developed himself in the darkroom at his childhood home.
“He took that photo, I want to say in my garage or his garage for the lighting,” Katsman said. “There was no wallpaper behind us and there was no chatter of our moms around.”
Lisa Katsman in 1981 or 1982 lighting the Shabbat candles. Photo taken on 35-millimeter film and developed by Randy Geller in his darkroom at his childhood home.
John Wolf, Laurie Goldfarb’s brother. Photographed in the late 1960s by my grandpa, Ron Geller.
Paramount to my memory of Randy is his work life in downtown St. Paul.
After earning his master’s in finance from Columbia University in New York, Randy joined the Marshall Financial Group in Minneapolis. He left that job and then began working at the family business, Victory Parking , in 1993. It was more colloquially known by my family as “the ramp.” As a businessman, Randy made himself known by familiarizing himself with community members.
One such connection was with Joe Kimball, the Star Tribune’s St. Paul beat reporter. Kimball would meet with Randy to share updates on downtown business news. Sometimes, these meetings would take place in “the bowels of the ramp,” as Kimball recalls.
“I was always looking for little tidbits of information. And, you know, he was always interested in doing things himself, but he also had his ear to the ground,” Kimball said.
Kimball wrote Randy’s obituary in MinnPost, where he began working after the Star Tribune in 2007. In his writing, he mentions Randy’s importance to Minnesota’s capital, writing that he “never lost his sense of optimism and belief that downtown St. Paul could be a better place.”
Longtime employee and general manager of Victory Parking Jim Hayne says that he remembers Randy as a child running through the office, all those years before he began working there. Hayne watched Randy grow into a young professional.
“His business mind was remarkable. I mean, he just thought things through from a different perspective or from all sides,” he said.
In January 2008, Randy learned of a stage four glioblastoma diagnosis. At that time, I was beginning to learn how to read chapter books (the “Magic Tree House” series was my favorite). Following the news, Randy underwent brain surgery and nearly two years of chemotherapy and radiation. His cancer was a difficult backdrop to my early childhood life. But despite the uneasiness of that period, Randy constantly tried to embrace his cancer. In a Caring Bridge site that was set up after his diagnosis, Randy wrote frequently about how his cancer changed his perception of life. In February 2008, he wrote that “more and more life does seem to be about the journey, scattered with destinations and not in a major way about the distant past or distant future,…….. but about the present and near future……….”
While he was sick and I was finishing the first grade, Randy never shied away from visiting my elementary school. Laurie Goldfarb, admissions counselor and family friend, remembers Randy’s quirkiness to this day.
“He knew everybody in school. He could walk around and talk to everybody. He'd come and eat lunch and he even knew the chef. He came on his favorite food days. I mean, no other parents did that,” Goldfarb said.
Even I can remember the times he visited and dined with me and my school friends. He always came on Fridays, when the lunch chef regularly served sloppy Joes.
From Randy’s death, new discoveries about my life flourish. There’s the story I learned about Randy who, in the last weeks of his life, insisted that he eat my mama’s Thanksgiving leftover puff pastry (a hallmark for my family) at his old childhood home. There’s the story of his secret taekwondo lessons. There’s the story of him showing up to housewarming parties in a bathrobe. The stories never seem to cease, even in his absence. These stories, some of which are thrown at me unwarranted, undoubtedly influence my perception of Randy, and by extension, myself.
When interacting with media that features our lost loved ones, there are a variety of outcomes. Mary-Frances O’Connor, author of “The Grieving Brain” and an associate professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, studies grief’s long-term effects. She explained to me that when interacting with old photos, for example, there are both positive and negative psychological effects that impact a grieving person.
“One of the things that can happen is people will look at photographs or engage with objects that belonged to the loved one who died as a way to be back then when the person was with you. And this sort of time travel means that you're not really in the present moment, there's a very different way to engage with them, which is to be in the present and recognize that you are revisiting these wonderful memories or even terrible memories of a person who is no longer here, and that's very different than imagining that you are with them again,” she said.
The photos that my mama was scrambling to organize still live in the same photo album. Boxes of our old life sit in a storage unit in Inver Grove Heights. And I suppose those boxes have been there all along, but I wasn’t ready until now to dig deeper. All I had to do was inquire.
And memory is not just physical. There are the memories that exist in the cluttered boxes, but there’s the memory that plays most vividly in my mind – where Randy and all my love for him will continue to live.
