Update: 11/11/25

I posted the following last spring on Memorial Day. Soon after, my cousin wrote to me, upset that I didn’t mention her, didn’t acknowledge her loss.

She was born two weeks before me, and I cannot even fathom the lifelong pain of losing a parent while still an infant. I do know this: When I had cancer and my children were very young, the only thing that made me cry was the thought of them growing up with no memory of their mother.

But I do know something about my father’s pain, and how deeply it affected his three children. Below is a small slice of our story, originally written for Memorial Day.

………

He died before my first birthday. But he was my father’s identical twin, and I grew up surrounded by stories about Uncle Dick.

He was an Air Force pilot, recently transferred to Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City. Though he was a test pilot by training, on April 14, 1958, he wasn’t testing a plane—he was ferrying one. It crashed. He was 24 years old.

The aircraft was an F-100D. According to a USAF accident report, “Over the lifetime of its USAF service, 889 F-100s were destroyed in accidents, resulting in the deaths of 324 pilots. The deadliest year for F-100 accidents was 1958, which saw 116 aircraft destroyed and 47 pilots killed.”

My dad and his twin, Frederick and Richard Glassberg, were born in 1933. During World War II, researchers tested many identical twins to see if they could communicate telepathically. Fred and Dick were among them. They failed miserably.

Still, the day Dick died, my mom sent a friend to find my father in the NYU Law School library. As the friend approached, my dad looked up from his book and said, “Dick is dead, isn’t he?”

My father once told me he missed his brother every single day of his life. People say things like that all the time, but I believe that was literally true. Every. Single. Day.

When I was growing up, we often visited Uncle Dick’s grave at Arlington National Cemetery. My dad had a special pass that allowed us to drive close to the site. It was always incredibly peaceful there—calm, quiet, beautiful. We loved going.

The place became a sacred landmark in our family. Years later, when my daughter Ellie was doing a college internship in Washington, D.C., she called me out of the blue: “Where is Uncle Dick buried?” she asked.

“In Arlington,” I said.

“Yes, but where, exactly? I’m here.”

I told her to go to the visitor’s center for directions, and when I hung up, I found myself wishing my dad were still alive. He would have been so moved to know that she had gone on her own to honor his brother’s memory — someone she had never met, someone I never met, but someone who had meant the world to her grandfather.

Today, I drove to the National Cemetery here, a few miles outside Sarasota. It’s nothing like Arlington. I’ve been to this site many times, officiating at funerals. Today, I was just a visitor. Because for so many of us, these places are sacred, holy, and filled with memories of family and love.