Greg Posnick: 1943-2020

 My father, Gregory Meredith Posnick, died last month, on Oct. 17, 2020. As I'm writing this, it's a few days short of what would have been his 77th birthday.

He didn't have much of an internet presence; this picture from Getty is about all you'll get if you search for photos of him online:

Embed from Getty Images
Anti-war protester Greg Posnick (L) argues with war supporter Pamela Hall on March 19, 2008 in Times Square in New York. Demonstrators are staging a series of protests across the US to mark the 5th anniversary of the war in Iraq. AFP PHOTO/DON EMMERT

That's a good encapsulation of what my father stood for. His involvement in the anti-war movement goes back to the 1960s.

To avoid the Vietnam War draft, he obtained a PhD in experimental psychology from Duke University after graduating from Queens College. While his career in academia was short-lived, his love of the Duke Blue Devils continued for the rest of his life.

He spent most of his life working as a computer programming consultant, specializing in SAS, COBOL, and other languages that are no longer in vogue, but still power an (alarming...) number of important mainframe systems. I'd like to say that I inherited a love of technology from him, but he honestly didn't have much use for personal computers. Instead, he was a voracious reader, and loved television and movies. (I did get that from him.)

In recent years, my father suffered from the degenerative effects of Parkinson's disease. He was able to enjoy a high quality of life thanks to the expert home care of his sister, my aunt Judi. They lived together in Louisiana, and we've been lucky enough to visit my extended family down there regularly over the past few years.

Due to the ongoing pandemic, travel outside of NYC hasn't been feasible, and my father's funeral services are on hold indefinitely until it's safe for us to come down and participate. In terms of hardships endured due to coronavirus, an inability to travel isn't near the top of the list. At the same time, the emotional stress caused by being apart from loved ones is real.

Please avoid risky behavior, wear a mask, and once a coronavirus vaccine is available, get inoculated. It's my hope that I'll be able to celebrate his life with family in person sometime next year.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beep Beep Beep Beep, Yeah!

Cars are scary. They're big steel machines of doom. I do not trust that a car I operate won't just stop working as a drive it. I fear running over nails. I fear psycho people in lanes next to me losing their minds and making sharp turns of their steering wheels to crash into me...for no reason. No one (aside from Jeff) at all understands my fear of driving. Not just, "driving at night is a little creepy." We're talking nightmares. Every bad dream I have that I can remember involves me operating a vehicle careening out of control. Me driving a vehicle without brakes. Having to merge into traffic and not being able to maneuver the steering wheel. I drove a bit growing up (living in a Florida suburb, you kind of had to), but unlike the majority of my friends, I didn't have my own car. So I borrowed my parents' cars when necessary, to drive to and from my house and my buddies' houses, the mall, Borders, Friday's, and back home. I was terrified of chang...
Read more

In which I blog again, however briefly

Blogging has been sporadic at best (and postively tubercular at worst) throughout the past weeks as I haven't had much of an Internet connection. Now I do have much of an Internet connection, but only because I am at Ryan and Sarahs's home in Boston for the weekend, and they were kind enough to have a cable modem that doesn't suck. I've posted some nerd-phone photos of my trip on the Flickr side of things, and the basic gist is that I'm having a nice time with two of my favourite people. If anyone out there happens to work for Verizon and would like to set me up for DSL back in Brooklyn, I think I'm ready.
Read more

The Colorless Wonder

The oddest thing that I’ve gathered about Jeff (so far…I’m assuming there’s a lot more there) is that he is without any distinct color. No, I’m not talking about his colorBLINDness and color CLUELESSness, although that’s fascinating. (He really doesn’t know his colors. Try him some time. I said “chartreuse” or “magenta” the other day and he was all, “how can you possibly know what those mean!?!”) Jeff’s name, when it pops up in my mind or in my e-mail Inbox, does not take on a color of its own. And that’s weird for me. Because I spent the better part of my only-child-dom with either a book or my Crayola box of 64, when I see letters or numbers, my brain automatically links them with a distinct color. (This is, of course, a self-diagnosis.) The experts call this “condition” synesthesia . I don’t think I have the full-blown deal. Hardcore folks look at a page of text and see a rainbow in front of their eyes. Other sysenthites see colors when they hear certain tones, or vice versa. It’s a...
Read more