To Sam, With Love: A Surviving Spouse's Story of Inspired Grief

By Vicki Paris Goodman

In To Sam, With Love, Vicki Paris Goodman recounts her surprising experience of insights and inspiration after the death of her beloved husband Sam.

Expecting despair, instead she was blessed with an influx of optimism. She felt the strong presence of a "helping hand" guiding her to circumvent the "cycle of grief.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Writers Publishing House
• Release date: Oct 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781648732928

Vicki Paris Goodman

Vicki Paris Goodman lost her beloved husband Sam to cancer in 2019. While navigating her profound grief, she was astonished when the tragic event unexpectedly opened up a world of possibilities, filling her with gratitude and optimism. Sheer inspiration motivated her to write To Sam, With Love in the hope others might benefit from her experience.Ms. Goodman was born in Los Angeles, California, and grew up near the hub of the Hollywood entertainment industry. After marrying Sam Goodman in 1997, the couple resided in Long Beach until retirement prompted a move to Prescott, Arizona, in 2016.She is a retired mechanical engineer and real estate appraiser. She plays violin semi-professionally and served a Long Beach-area newspaper as theater critic for over twenty years.Presently she is writing her second book, Speed Bumps.

Book preview

Chapter One

Sam’s Life Before We Met

The childhood shows the man, as morning shows the day.

– John Milton

If there is one thing I’ve learned, it is that memories are fleeting and distressingly inaccurate. Take me, for example. I thought my entire family had been gaslighting me for years before it occurred to me I just don’t recall many things the way they happened. I remember them all right, sometimes quite vividly. But friends and family never hesitate to set me straight on even the most critical details.

I try not to dwell on the fact, as the implications are sobering. Essentially my recollection of my past life is a mild distortion of reality at best, or something akin to the unrecognizable images in the mirrors of a carnival funhouse at worst. I may as well have suffered a bout of amnesia for all the good my memories have served me in piecing together my past.

I bring this up as a cautionary qualifier before delving into Sam’s life before we met, lest one or more of his many cousins, former co-workers, or friends should read this and object to something I’ve recalled. Not to mention the fact that this is Sam’s life as told to me in snippets during our years together, all subject to my memory’s usual distortion tendencies and added to the inevitable misinterpretations that arise when one recalls pieces of a life that is not one’s own. I can only promise to do my best.

~ ~

Sam was born in 1946 to a good, loving family in Brooklyn, New York. His dad was still serving in the army when he married Sam’s mother. Even in her 70s and 80s, my mother-in-law was one of the most stunningly beautiful women I’ve ever seen.

Sam’s beautiful mother

Sam’s parents back in the day

Sam’s brother Larry is five years younger, and as an adult close to twice Sam’s size. Today Larry lives on Long Island.

I could detect little discernable dysfunction in Sam’s immediate family. Although my own family fell short of that characterization, I felt an abiding satisfaction in knowing I was married to a man with such a solid foundation. It inspired confidence and trust.

Sam as a young boy

Sam spoke of an ordinary childhood punctuated in large part by his family’s move into a duplex owned by another family, with children similar in age to Sam and Larry. They are close friends to this day.

Larry (left) and Sam (right) before Larry

grew to 6’2" to tower over Sam

He talked about playing the usual New York City street games like stickball and ringolevio. I also seem to recall something about a game involving a stump…

Sam (right) with his parents and Larry

Sam said in those days his family lived on the same street as brothers Frank and Joe Torre, Joe of course destined to become the long-time manager of the New York Yankees. Not every kid can boast of having played stickball with the likes of Joe Torre.

I was so impressed I repeated the story to friends on several occasions, to the point where I’m pretty sure Sam regretted having told me about it.

He’d say, Sweetie, it only happened once!

Once was good enough for me.

Like most kids, Sam described school as an exercise in undeserved compulsory torture. (I can’t relate to that, but I was an unusual child.) As such, he was a mediocre student and thought himself to be of average to sub-par intelligence. Well, for now, let me just say what many of us have figured out: There is more than one kind of intelligence.

One of Sam’s favorite childhood pastimes was 1950s radio. From what I gather, he listened primarily to the jazz greats and also radio comedy. In fact, he admitted many of his always well-chosen puns were not of his own invention, but recalled from the radio shows he’d loved as a child.

Sam had a gift. As an adult he always had his comic gems at the ready. He employed them in conversation at every conceivable opportunity, at just the right moment, with flawless delivery. I must have heard each one of Sam’s jokes at least a hundred times!

As for jazz, Sam knew his standards, and he knew the musicians.

During our years together, if an old jazz recording played in a store or restaurant, he was liable to say, Sweetie, do you hear that?

He’d name the song, and then say something like, That’s Woody Herman on sax and Gene Krupa on drums.

I sneakily internet searched a sampling of these declarations. Sam was always right.

He spoke of summers partly spent at his monied aunt and uncle’s beach house on Fire Island, off the coast of Long Island. He’d be tasked with looking after two very attractive female cousins.

Sam’s family, who were Jewish, would spend a week or so each summer at one of the Jewish family camps in the Catskills. A few years later a teenage Sam, who was a passable drummer, auditioned for jobs as a musician at one or more of those camps. He got the jobs, but only because he’d lied about being able to read music. I wouldn’t have had the nerve.

As a teenager, Sam had a couple of guy friends who he hung around with. One was Ritchie, who was still a devoted friend until Sam’s death. The baffling one was the other boy, Bob. By all of Sam’s and Ritchie’s accounts, Bob was the personification of evil. After hearing the sagas of the scrapes the three of them got into, I never developed any understanding whatsoever of why two nice boys like Sam and Ritchie had befriended a terrible guy like Bob. It remains a mystery.

When Sam was about seventeen, he scored a date with a girl he really liked. They went to an amusement park. Margie wanted to ride the rollercoasters and other attractions, which would have been more than agreeable to Sam. Except for one thing: The minute the two of them passed through the gate to enter the amusement park, Sam saw his unexpected opportunity of a lifetime. Count Basie’s band was playing under a pavilion, and almost no one was gathered to take in the performance!

Sam had to make a decision. Would it be rides with Margie, his fondest crush? Or would he do the thoroughly ungentlemanly thing, and ditch Margie in favor of the Count?

The Count won out. Sam sat a few feet from the band for over an hour, satisfying a dream he’d never imagined would come true, while Margie went on some of the rides. Needless to say, that was Sam’s first and last date with Margie.

When I asked him if it had been worth it, he replied with a decisive, Oh yeah.

Not his finest moment, as you will see. The choice Sam the teenager made that day was wholly un-Sam-like, given his philosophy on life later on. The man I knew always, and I mean always, did the right thing.

Sam floundered a bit after high school. In those days, political correctness dictated young men from politically left-leaning backgrounds avoid the draft if at all possible. Sam’s number, based on one’s birth date, had come up in the draft lottery.

Sam had no desire to serve in Vietnam. So, his uncle suggested he would be exempt from the draft if he enrolled to study at the yeshiva, an educational institution where Jewish men study religious texts, primarily the Torah and the Talmud.

Sam lasted only a couple of weeks at the yeshiva before he was forced to admit it just wasn’t for him.

In relating the story to me, he joked that he’d so disliked the many hours of daily Torah study he’d implored his family, Tell the army I’m ready to go! They can have me!

It so happened the mandatory draft ended and Sam was off the hook.

I know later in life Sam was not proud of the actions he took to avoid the draft. But it makes for a good story.

Sam at age 19

Over the next few years, Sam held various jobs. He was a bus boy in a fancy restaurant at the top of a Manhattan skyscraper. He managed a hospital food service kitchen and worked for a short time at the liquor distribution company where his dad had been an accountant for years.

At age 27, Sam made a rather bold decision. He decided to move to Southern California. Why? In part, it was because he didn’t care for the New York weather extremes. But the overriding factor was Sam’s low-key personality, which made him a less than ideal fit with the more intense aspects of New York City culture. So, off to laid-back California he drove.

Sam had some cousins and an aunt in California, so it wasn’t as though he’d be moving to a place where he knew not a soul.

Sam had been dabbling in photography for years as a hobby, even hiring on to photograph some weddings. He said working weddings was one of the most nerve-wracking things he’d ever done. He said he lost more than a night’s sleep over the fear that both of his cameras would fail and a wedding would go entirely unphotographed. He couldn’t stand the pressure.

So, with Sam’s semi-professional photography experience behind him, he fancied himself a movie cameraman! He never succeeded in landing a job in Hollywood, though he tried. (Where have we heard this story before?)

Instead, Sam became a travel agent and truly loved the work. He led fam (familiarization) trips with groups of agents to many world destinations. The only problem was the job paid next to nothing. That didn’t matter so much as long as Sam could stay with his cousin’s family.

Then Sam received surprising news. He was told a woman he dated was pregnant. He would soon be a father.

Sam was initially distraught at this turn of events. Distraught until he set eyes on his baby son for the first time. He said he was instantly hooked.

His son’s mother, who he never married, insisted on naming the baby after Sam. Naming children after a parent is not, generally speaking, the Jewish way. But the baby’s mother wasn’t Jewish, and she was committed to the idea. So Sam Jr. Sammy it was.

Sammy never lived with his dad. But Sam put his son first, never failing to visit on the pre-determined days.

Sam and Sammy

Sam got a better-paying job in reservations with one of the major airlines. He hated to give up the gig at the travel agency. But there really was no choice, given he now had a child to support.

Somehow, in the midst of all this, Sam decided to finish college. The man I later knew, who would surely have described his own educational and career aspirations as unambitious, wasn’t one to take on a heavy schedule that included full time employment at the airline, evening classes at the college, and visits with his young son several times a week. But that’s what he did. He finished his degree in Health Care Management, not knowing if he would ever put that degree to use.

Sam was not one to take risks. So, tales from his earlier life depicting harrowing situations were almost non-existent. But there was one such story. It was the time he was persuaded by a group of friends to join them on a mule train into the Grand Canyon.

Sam’s mule, whose name was Emory (how in the world did I recall the name?!), was the last one in line on the trail, with only a guide taking up the rear behind him. Sam said the trail was quite narrow in places and he really couldn’t relax for the entire ride, which lasted several hours.

Everything went fairly well, though, until some runners heading in the opposite direction passed by the mule train. Trail rules and etiquette apparently dictate that people moving at elevated speeds slow down when passing mules. But these runners failed to heed the regulation, continuing past the mules at a swift clip. With Sam in his saddle, Emory spooked and reared up at a particularly perilous spot on the trail.

Sam recalled, I saw my life pass before my eyes.

He fully expected to tumble with Emory down the mountain to their deaths. But the rear guide, riding the last mule in the train behind Sam, grabbed Emory’s reins and prevented him from stepping backward toward the trail’s edge and plunging off the mountain with a helpless Sam on his back.

Needless to say, that would be Sam’s last mule ride…ever.

Sam was also married for a short time during the 1980s, while Sammy was a young child. The marriage, which lasted only about ten months, was even less successful than my five-year-long first marriage, which can only be described as disastrously unhappy.

I had married a man I met in engineering school at UCLA. Even though we were both in our 30s, maturity was not our strong suit.

My husband lost his job the day before our wedding and didn’t gain full-time employment in his field again for two years! By that time, there had been so much disappointment, anxiety, and financial stress in our young marriage it couldn’t be salvaged. To make matters worse, we were both type A personalities, which hardly helped to calm our squabbles.

My first husband was a large man. And although he hadn’t been abusive with me, the level