10.22 Other Lives - Deathwatches

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10.22 Other Lives - Deathwatches (Update 23 Septr 2021)

First, Sadja Greenwood nee Andrea Sadja Stokowski is the 2nd daughter born around 1930 of the famous orchestra maestro Leopold Stokowski with his 2nd wife Evangeline Johnson Stokowski (They later divorced). In her 2013 Roman a Clef novel Changing the Rules, Sadja has revealed heretofore unknown, important knowledge about her famous father that has slipped by the historians' and biographers' notice.  She has lived and is living a good life as a physician, significant in the women's health movement. Although she has not gone out of her way to hide her illustrious father, neither has she made it known even to her closest friends and the fact that she changed her surname first by marriage (Stokowski to Goldsmith) and then legally (Goldsmith to Greenwood) suggests she prefers it not to be known.  As far as I know she has never requested any acquaintance to hide or research her parentage but as long as I have known her (since 1975) it has been rumored about that her father is (and now "was") Leopold Stokowski. In the book (Available on Amazon.com and quite good) she identifies her famous father as an opera singer "Victor".  This book contains remarkable, previously unknown insights into Leopold Stokowski's inner mind, particularly his deep anti-Semitism which was never revealed in his lifetime and which as far as is known he never acted out in his life. Here is a letter reply from Leopold Stokowski’s biographer, Larry Huffman:

"Dear Dr. Stim, thank you for your interesting email. Regarding Sadja Stokowski, if I read your email correctly, you suggest that Sadja ... subsequently had no children. However, this seems not correct, since I have a photograph with Leopold Stokowski with family including Dr. Robert Goldsmith, husband of Sadja, and Sadja holding her six month old son Jason. This was in Fossard, Switzerland near Geneva in July, 1961."

(Dr Ed continues): Strictly speaking this additional information from Larry Huffman does not necessarily contradict the truth of what I mention in "Changing the Rules".  Leopold and his wife Evangeline could still have objected to the marriage (As the character Victor and his wife do in the novel) for the anti-Semitic reasons of the novel.

Sadja's health problems have been breast cancer which she was cured of years ago by standard treatments and recent atrial fibrillation that she writes about interestingly in her blog, Sadja's Columns.

 Other deathwatches are the following:
Dr Derek Fair was a New Zealand physician who first came to Tokyo during the Korean War in the early 1950s and was a partner in the Tokyo Medical and Surgical Clinic until retiring in the early 2000s. I knew Derek since the 1950s on and off well and especially in the years after his retirement when he was living in a nice Homat ("Home Atmosphere", well furnished apartment in Tokyo).  Derek never married preferring his homosexual lifestyle with a partner who also functioned as his live-in valet. He enjoyed his life and drank alcohol much. He tended toward an increased girth as he aged but always was a handsome man. I visited him frequently, we had a very pleasant relationship, and in 2007 he told me his brain MRI scan showed "leukodystrophy". (An abnormality of the white matter of the brain believed to be a precursor of Alzheimer's Disease.)  Shortly after that, he left Japan for New Zealand and into 2008 I spoke with him frequently on the phone and noted he slowly deteriorated in verbal skills until one day his phone disconnected and, I guess, he died.  He presents the problem that all us older persons may face: What to do when your brain tests positive for Alzheimer's?  I do not have an answer but I guess if you have good nursing home care that is one answer. If not, then you need access to life-termination.


Retired Sergeant Lou Nadell born 24 November 1931 was my boyhood pal in the Bronx in the early 1940s. We were close then but I considered him a rather uneducated fellow.  In 1948 he dropped out of high school and joined the army and after 20+ years of service retired as sergeant on pension.  He married a Japanese wife during his service in Japan in the early 1950s and we had the bond that we, boyhood pals, both married so-called "Japanese war brides.”

  Our families (his and my children with wives) socialized together from the 1950s to 1960 when I was a medical student. Then he dropped out of my life until 2007 when I got an email from him and since then we have been close email correspondence.  What is interesting about Sgt Lou is that he lost his vision to diabetic retinopathy in the 1990s, and the Veterans Administration fitted him with a talking and listening and writing computer in the late 1990s and since then he has improved his life by reading and communicating via email.  And I noted that since re connecting he seemed to me more intelligent than I remembered him to have been.  It is a case where the ability to see again via computer has so improved the positive reinforcement quality of his life as to give him a better intelligence.  Perhaps it opens a view of an ideal future for older persons and others who lose vision or hearing or other sensory modality and get hooked up with computer advancement  and connection into their brains or vision or hearing. In early 2021 got an email from Lou and he was fine despite recent loss of wife and his being blind. He lived alone at home with assistance from neighbor and visiting daughter, and got out of bed for short walks as he pleased and communicated regularly by computer-for-blind email.  He continued to live on alone, assisted by neighbors  and  daughter occasionally. His daughter works as a teacher. We continued to email but in late March 2021 his replies stopped and have not renewed despite my several pleas for a response. He was 90 and I presume him either having died or become completely indisposed due to severe illness.

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