Diane Margolin delivered a eulogy for her husband, Michael Weiner, on Sunday morning that combined wisdom, humor and passion; that connected the diverse group that literally spilled out of Robert Schoem’s Menorah Chapel in Paramus, N.J.; and that did so with uncommon steadiness and grace considering the circumstances.
In other words, she offered all that made her husband a treasure. The wisdom, the humor, the passion. The ability to connect diverse groups. The uncommon steadinesss and grace under the most trying of circumstances.
Michael Weiner, who died Thursday, spent the past 15 months dying in public, his body withering from the ravages of a brain tumor and the attempts to make it go away. Yet, he kept getting bigger. He handled the worst days in a fashion we hope to handle the finest. Diane asked to remember the good times. Done. Easy. Her husband was unforgettable.
She quoted the novelist, Thornton Wilder, saying, “The highest tribute to the dead is not grief but gratitude.”
And so here is mine:
Mike Weiner started in the Players Association in 1988, I joined The Post and became the Yankee beat writer in 1989 and there was a labor stoppage in 1990. I found the top officials of the union unhelpful.
Maybe it was my youth. Or maybe they did not take The Post seriously, since I sensed they would all but type out statements for the Times. Or maybe it was the rightward political lean of The Post.
So I kept trying to find someone who might explain the complexities to me, kept going down a phone list before reaching a Michael Weiner. He spoke to me. He actually asked about me. And I told him that when I was 11, my truck-driver dad went from delivering soda and beer to delivering meat out of the Hunts Point Market, and for the first time our family had full union benefits.
We were able to move out of the projects and I never saw my mom cry again about finding the money to send my brother and me to the dentist. In other words, whatever Weiner’s superiors might have thought about my sympathies, I believed in unions because they had changed my life. I told Mike I would always give the Players Association a fair hearing.
From that day forward, Weiner returned every one of my calls or emails. For more than two decades, he did for me what he did for his players — he made the intricate understandable. He never made me feel dumb. He accepted my devil’s advocate counterpoints not with hostility, but with a fertile mind — I don’t think it is overstating to call him a genius — and offered responses from two, three, five, seven different angles. I got an idea what it must have been like to negotiate against him.
He was an unflinching advocate for the players as he rose to become their union leader in 2009, but he did not need today’s tactics of intimidating or screaming louder to make his point. He won with relentless smarts and decency. A beautiful mind.
All of this made me understand the issues better, think about them in multi-faceted ways and — hopefully — bring that to my readers. For that I have, yes, infinite gratitude. I tried to express some of that the last time I saw Michael. The All-Star Game at Citi Field. By then, he was in a wheelchair, his body shrunken, parts no longer moving, his hair all but gone, his speech halting.
I told him thanks, but Mike Weiner didn’t do victory laps in life or as he was resigning himself to a death too young, just 51. Cancer had robbed him of so much. But not his open mind and open heart. With the hand that still worked he patted my own, a reassuring act. A “life goes on” act.
On Sunday, hundreds of mourners came to honor his life. Only for Mike Weiner could you get Bud Selig, Alex Rodriguez and Scott Boras in the same place at the same time without rancor. We all told our stories and listened to Diane and went out into a cold, late morning feeling the grief of this loss. But I believe his wife was right, that a life led so decently and wisely and with such giving will be expressed in acts of kindness and thoughtfulness moving forward by all of those he touched.
Gratitude.