With a sweet smile on his face and a cheerful lilt in his voice, Milt Seif hands over a 14-page typewritten eulogy he has written. It is his own. He will be 91 in two weeks and has no plans for departing. But he knows the curtain eventually descends on everyone, and he wants to make certain somebody gets the details straight.
He is irrepressible. He’s been through surgery “on every part of my body.” This includes heart surgery and knee surgery and the amputation of a leg from diabetes a few years ago that caused him to stop playing handball at the Jewish Community Center in northwest Baltimore. This was a pity, since he was only 87.
Also, to be treasured greatly over half a century, there was an accident when he worked at the Bethlehem Steel Key Highway shipyard and had an accident that broke his nose. He needed immediate surgery.
“The beautiful part,” he was saying the other day, “is that the surgeon cleaned out my sinuses. I’ve never had a headache since then. How do you like that?”
He laughs aloud at the memory. He brings joy to life, and to his eulogy, in which he writes: “This will be my only eulogy, because I don’t want a doctored-up, fanciful one full of praise, glories, fabrications and malarkey. I’ve heard eulogies where I’ve had to return to the coffin to assure myself the speaker was talking of the person deceased.”
He writes this with a slight comic effect, but he means it. A lifetime is too important to leave it to somebody else for summing up. You write it yourself, and you’ve managed to get your side of the story out there. It’s a kind of closing argument for a lifetime of jurors.
Only, in Seif’s eulogy, there’s a minimum about Milt and a maximum of those he’s loved — for this is a man who’s defined his own life, and found his greatest pleasures, in those who around him.
The eulogy makes only passing reference to his two decades in the Bethlehem Steel welding department, or his union activism there when he was “Don Quixote fighting windmills.”
In the 1940s and ‘50s, when the company was laying off women who’d labored during World War II, Seif helped bring their cases to legal arbitration. It was discrimination based on gender, he argued. He helped win full back pay for the women.
But his eulogy is filled with enormous affection for his wife Gert, to whom he has only been married for 67 years, and for his children and grandchildren.
The secret to such a long marriage?
“We both have more or less the same philosophy,” Seif says. “There are some differences, but it’s pretty much the same thing. And we support each other. That’s very important. I started a business, I’ve had operations. I’ve always had support. That in conjunction with our wonderful children has made our marriage a success.”
The eulogy is not precisely a love letter to himself. This is a man with a keen conscience, and the low moments stay with him, and are blemishes on “my soul.”
A high school chemistry exam lingers across 70 years. “I was a B student, and knew the subject fairly well,” he writes. “On a mid-term exam, I came to a problem with an easy formula. I used it umpteen times but couldn’t think of it. I took my chemistry book from the desk, put it on my lap, and cribbed.
“My teacher then came from behind, sees what I’m doing, doesn’t say a word, looks me in the eyes, looks down on my paper, then back to my eyes, and walks away. Had he slapped me in my face, thrown me out of class, or embarrassed me before my classmates, I would not have felt as bad as I did with his eyes staring at me.
“I resolved then and there that I would never cheat again. This incident has had a lasting effect on me because, up to this day, I think about it and occasionally have a nightmare.”
As he edges toward his 91st birthday, Milt Seif should give himself a break. There is surely a statute of limitations on such youthful indiscretions.
Mainly, though, his eulogy is filled with happiness, with love of family and friends, and with the sense of a life of emotional fulfillment.
By writing it, he says, he’ll pass that message to those he’ll leave behind.
“Some nights,” he says, “I’d wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning and add more stuff, and then fall asleep writing.”
Each expression of joy was a reminder to himself, a validation of a life well lived.
