What Remains
After the Palisades Fire, a eulogy for my hometown becomes one for my father.
I have been thinking about what to say here about “what remains” after the California wildfire, the destruction of my hometown, and my home. I have tried to write about discoveries under the rubble, a lost half-filled journal found in a car trunk, and even a whole guesthouse still standing (though likely that will need to come down due to toxic ash). I want to explore what it means that, for the most part, the things that survive are what we gave away. That’s not only true for the mundane — a purse, some furniture, loaned books — but even more so for the meaningful, like the love we give away to create relationships that sustain us.
I may yet write about those things, but I have not been able to yet because one of my most sustaining relationships did not survive. Or maybe it is more true to say that the relationship has irrevocably changed.
Four weeks after the fire, my father’s unexplained and increasing weakness was given a name by a visit to the ER: he had a rare, aggressive, and inoperable mass throughout his abdomen. Three weeks after that, we gathered to bury him.
Today marks four weeks exactly since my father took his last breath, in a body that bore no resemblance to his buzzing-with-life existence, and far from his home of fifty years. So today I share my eulogy for him.
In a sense, it is what remains. My father’s memory, alive in me.
When I was a kid, whenever we came home from a family vacation, my dad would say, “Let me tell you about the most beautiful place in the world. You’re gonna love it. It’s a Spanish-style home overlooking the ocean, with cool breezes, everyone has their own room…” Home was his favorite place on earth, and the center of gravity for our family.
Let me take you there. I’m eight years old, on the sofa after ballet class, reading Nancy Drew, and he comes home from work and sits down next to me and asks me about the book, and tells me how he loved all the Hardy Boys books when he was a kid. Or I’m fifteen, in my bedroom doing homework, and the sound of the back screen door closing with its bump-bump means all is well, he’s home.
I’m an adult with my own kids, my house only a mile away, and when I come over he’s waiting for me, standing in the driveway in front of the garage where he kept his orange cones for the Sunday football game, his bike, and his file cabinets filled with briefs from every former case. He’s wearing a baseball cap from one of his grandchildren’s colleges, sweatpants, an L.A. Clippers or UCLA t-shirt under a sweatshirt, ready to play a ball game or go for a bike ride if the opportunity arises.
Enter the house through the back door, pass the laundry room and the cleaning supplies he never touched, up the back stairs, and into his office.
See a composite of the man:
- A permaplaqued Bill of Rights, his sacred text.
- A cartoon of two people on a park bench, one saying “Mind if I smoke?” and the other replying “Mind if I blow asbestos dust into your face?”
- A computer that doesn’t turn on.
- Next to that, yellow legal pads filled with notes about his cases, and one with his touch football team’s phone numbers, a call list he ran through every Wednesday trying to get commitments for Sunday, until an email mutiny took over.
- Before a remodel put more cabinets and closets in my parents’ bedroom, above this desk were hundreds of sports programs he’d been collecting since childhood, and in this office closet were dozens of family photo albums he meticulously annotated with names and dates, which I loved spending hours paging through.
- On the closet floor, a duffel bag with six or seven leather footballs worn to softness and replaced annually for his birthday.
- On one wall, a signed poster from the 1972 cast of Hair, at the Pantages Theater. He’d read in the newspaper that they’d been disinvited from the Palisades July 4th parade due to some censoring concerns, so he figured out how to reach them, said, Hey, we live on the parade route, so come over after your show, build your float in our driveway the night before, and slide right into the parade, which is exactly what they did.
- On another wall, a proclamation from the City of L.A. on the occasion of his being honored as Pacific Palisades Citizen of the Year for stopping oil drilling on the bluffs.
- A large black and white photo of the Sunday football crew, with him in the center, white sunscreen not rubbed in all the way because he thought that was most effective, beaming.
After the fire, all of those touchstones are gone from the physical realm, as is he. But they are in me, and what I learned from my dad remains.
Most of all, he taught me that I was beloved. He made me feel special, talented, important, unstoppable. Whether it was coming home from Back to School Night raving about what my second-grade teacher had said about me, to proclaiming I was the star of every high school musical I was in (when I objectively was not), to his reaction after reading a first draft of my novel, holding it aloft in one hand and running around the house screaming, Pulitzer! Pulitzer!
He taught me to follow my moral compass, by his origin story as a lawyer. Two months before I was born, at a time when Los Angeles skies were perilous with soot, he quit his first law firm job the day he filed a class action against dozens of its clients, on behalf of “everyone in Los Angeles who breathes.” The defendants were polluters like GM and Union Oil. His retelling always included that he drafted the lawsuit in what would become my bedroom, and that my birth displaced him, but he told that story with a twinkle in his eye.
He taught me to help others with the tools you have. Every night at the dinner table, he talked about his cases and asked us our opinions about closing arguments. He spoke of the nobility of law, and the power of being able to change laws and society without even being elected. And, of course, he noted with pride that Brown v Board of Education had been decided on his birthday, May 17, 1954.
He taught me to work hard, but smart. When I spent five weeks as a summer associate at a BigLaw firm, he wanted to know, incredulous and offended, “How do they justify billing so many hours? It takes 20 minutes to draft a lawsuit!” For him, with his dictaphone and his law books spread out across the table, he found the principle or sentence he needed, then dictated it and Judy typed it up. He did not waste time. There was too much to do.
He taught me to be kind, respectful, and to always stand up for the underdog. When my sister and I were kids, he told us a story about a kid being picked on in his junior high school, the whole cafeteria chanting a mean name at him, and that he stood up for him against the crowd. In his retelling, I could see him reliving it with horror. It took courage to align himself with the uncool kid, and without a lecture, he told us who to be in the world. My kids get aggravated when I reflexively come to the defense of someone they have a problem with, and I see how that can be irritating, but I come to it honestly as my father’s daughter.
He taught me to be myself without apology, that there is freedom and joy in not trying to fit into a mold. When you are raised by Roger Diamond, the world is a place where you can be yourself without compromise.
My dad taught me to ride a bike in the parking lot of Corpus Christi church in the Palisades, which had a nice little incline to help you get started. Together we’d ride our bikes up Via de la Paz, over to Pampas Ricas, and do a few laps around its little grassy islands before heading home. Maybe because he spent so much time driving every freeway in southern California to reach courts, he aimed to travel only by bike within the Palisades, a promise he kept until he became too tired, last year.
Last Father’s Day, he wanted to get on his bike, but he was still recovering from a February surgery and felt wobbly. He’d asked his neighbor Tripp to help fill the tires with air, but still needed encouragement. I wavered. What if I helped him do it and he fell? But even worse, what if I discouraged him and broke his heart?
He stood in his driveway, with its own perfect little incline, put on his helmet, then got on his bike in his special way that I could never do and which terrified me: placing his left foot on the left side pedal, stepping up, getting the bike rolling, and swinging his right leg over like he was mounting a horse. Muscle memory won the day, and off he went, down the driveway, then uphill to the stop sign, back and forth a couple times. I joined him and we rode for 15 minutes up Via, down Friends toward Mount Holyoke, and back home again. He was tired, and that was enough.
In high school, my friends sometimes teased me that I started so many sentences with, “My dad said this” or “my dad did that.” But I had the kind of dad who made an impression. In fact, one of those friends, on hearing of his passing, shared a story about the impression my dad made on him throughout his childhood, including in high school:
A bunch of us were up at the Park. We had all just seen the move “JFK” by Oliver Stone. Of course, we bought every element of the crackpot conspiracy theories hook, line, and sinker. Roger was at the park that day, with a football under his arm. He asked us to play — and we did — but first he heard us talking about the Kennedy assassination and the movie and he began to challenge us. Debate us. And we loved it. And it was like four or five of us — teenage boys from the Palisades — hurling one argument after another and he fielded each one with argumentative grace. I never knew any adult who could handle a pack of opinionated teenage boys so well. He was calm, centered, and happy to go back and forth with us. It was deeply fun. And, yet again, it made a huge impression on me: look at how this incredible man behaves! This is how a solid, steady human being discusses something! Without losing one’s temper or attacking one’s opponents’ character. Instead, just stick to the facts. And keep a football under your arm.
I am comforted that I was with him when he took his last breaths, holding his hand. I am comforted that his other hand rested on a football I’d gotten just the day before, an early gift for a birthday he would not see. And I am comforted to see so much of him in his four grandchildren: their brilliance, their playfulness, their complete and utter knowledge of sports (surpassing even his own, by his admission), and their belief that Pacific Palisades is the greatest place on earth to live. Mostly, I see in them his kindness, humility, and devotion to family, especially to my mom.
I never asked him if he had any regrets in life, but I think the only thing he might have said was that he never had a chance to argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court, though he tried many times, seeking a writ of certiorari on any case with a novel issue or a circuit split.
What a life, to regret nothing. To walk into the center of every day with a heart wide open. To tell the joke and get the laugh. To marry the girl of your dreams, “getting winning ticket on the first try.” My father got the winning ticket again and again, even if he sometimes had to choose to see it as a win. Did he know disappointment? Well, sure: he lost every election he entered.
But here’s the thing. For so many Sundays, he played all-time quarterback. And when you throw an incomplete pass, what else is there to do but go right back to the huddle, call the next play, and look for who’s open?
Of all the lessons my father taught me, this is the most lasting: to look for the light, the goodness, the possibilities. To find what is salvageable, to make something beautiful, to be filled with gratitude for the blessings you have at arm’s reach, to call the next play with full faith that it will be for the win.
For those who have asked, donations may be made in Roger Diamond’s memory to the ACLU, defender of civil liberties.
