Remembering Noah
Words for the funeral, April 10, 2017:
Noah Gibson was “one of the great dads.” A close friend of mine called him that not too long ago—she has a great dad of her own—and it is one of the truest things ever said about Noah. One of the great dads. Mine and my sister’s memories, from childhood right up to the present, are full of his love and protection and attention and generosity. These things were limitless. He taught us to shoot and to fish and to drive a Jon boat. He taught us to balance a checkbook. He made sure we were never without a pocket knife or a flashlight. He helped each of us move apartments who knows how many times, and talked us through difficult decisions about school and work and life. He shared our joys and interests, and he included us in his own. In any crisis, Noah was always the first phone call.
Here’s one story. Not long ago, I moved to Boston, after many years of living in Chicago. It was a hard move in some ways—I’d made a home in Chicago and was feeling uprooted and sad about leaving it, and anxious about settling into a city where I was a stranger. Noah met me at the end of my long road trip east and stayed with me for several days in a Boston hotel, while we waited for the moving truck to arrive with my stuff.
We ran errands and picked up the keys to my apartment, whose bare rooms Noah assured me would soon feel full and comfortable. We went grocery shopping together and explored the streets in my new neighborhood. We went out to eat and went to the movies. We talked and watched TV in the hotel. He brought a jar of his famous pimento cheese for us to share. Just being there with me, Noah gave this city that neither of us knew a feeling of familiarity and home. His presence—steady, patient, caring—was profoundly calming and bolstering. This was so often true, and not only for me: Noah made things feel easier, safer; sometimes he made them feel possible.
***
It was perhaps not immediately obvious from Noah’s own childhood in South Carolina that he would be such a naturally good father to two little girls. He didn’t have sisters, or siblings at all, and he grew up with a collection of first cousins—all boys—with whom he played and fought and swam and fished and got into mud and mischief. His mother died when he was 12 years old. The family had recently moved to Tatum, in Marlboro County, and after her death, his father left a job as a textile engineer to become a math teacher at the high school near where Noah was in sixth grade, so that the two of them could be together as much as possible.
I have to think that simple, sweet act of love must have influenced the kind of father Noah himself became. As busy as he was, as a pediatrician on regular night call, Noah spent so much time with me and my sister, and he was always willing to meet us on the ground of our own interests. So he went duck hunting and skeet shooting with me, and when my sister, at six years old, discovered the three-quarter-sized violin he’d played as a boy and decided she wanted to take lessons, Noah signed up to take lessons with her.
Those early explorations on the violin—with her new to music and him rusty, both of them learning together—opened up one of the great loves of his life. “Music can pierce the heart directly; it needs no mediation,” wrote neurologist Oliver Sacks, one of Noah’s favorite authors, and for Noah this was keenly true. A few years after they began playing, he and Kate helped found the Danville Symphony Orchestra, to which Noah was devoted for the rest of his life and for which he played first violin. He and my sister practiced together every day when she was a kid, and afterward they would play together whenever she came home to visit. Over email and by phone, they exchanged music and stories and playing techniques; he always had a new album or artist or discovery to share. The violin became a close bond between them, and it remains so.
Somewhere in there, Noah discovered traditional Irish music and jumped headlong into the world of reels and jigs and hornpipes and ballads—this was the province of the fiddle, not the violin. He began playing in Irish sessions every weekend in Winston-Salem and Greensboro, finding like-minded friends among the other players there. One of the happiest moments of his life came on a family trip to Ireland, when he sat in with other musicians at a pub called the Honk. He played with them for hours, until the session finally broke up for the night. As we flew home the next day, he looked out the airplane window to try to catch one last glimpse of that pub.
More recently, he and my mother and sister and I began going to Merlefest, the bluegrass festival in western North Carolina. Every year brought four intense days of musical transcendence, and togetherness. In the mornings, Noah and I would roll out early, just the two of us, and arrive on the festival grounds with the dew still wet, before the crowds and the clamor descended. We’d eat a breakfast of ham biscuits and hash browns under the trees and wander over to the morning’s first concert. Merlefest became a touchstone in our yearly family calendar. Months ahead of time, Noah would begin sending the rest of us updates on the next festival’s lineup and schedule-in-progress, so that we could look forward, as he did, to what was coming.
Our parents always included me and Kate in the experiences they had out in the world. From an early age, we went with them on trips abroad, and as a family we saw England and Scotland, Wales and Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Italy. So many water fountains and works of art, classical concerts, military museums, castles, ancient ruins, train rides through the countryside. So many stories. And miles and miles and miles of walking. Noah loved to travel—he and my mom had spent two years living in Okinawa, Japan, as a young couple when he served in the Army, and they’d toured India, Nepal, Thailand, and Hong Kong together.
His itineraries for our family trips reflected one of his most prominent characteristics: his careful (some would say maniacal) attention to detail, and his scrupulous plan-making. Everything was gridded out on the spreadsheet of our journey: opening and closing times for every museum and park and store, walking distances between sights, restaurants and gaps for meals, sunrise and sunset times.
He was like this about everything he did: plans, contingencies, spreadsheets, details. Everything in order, nothing left to chance. My sister and I neither inherited nor learned Noah’s organizational skills and his habit for punctuality—which to him meant being not on time, but early—and I used to wonder why he was so intensely focused this way. Partly it was just who he was and how he operated, but I think also that there was so much he loved doing and wanted to do, and making careful plans and paying attention to details made more of those things possible. Things didn’t go astray with Noah; he never wasted time wondering what to do next.
***
From the time he was a little boy, Noah always wanted to be a doctor. It seems to be the only path he ever considered. After high school, he went to Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina—where, to hear him tell it, he ate at the Beacon Drive-In almost nightly—and then after that, he went to medical school at Bowman Gray in Winston-Salem. That was where he met my mom; she was a student then at Wake Forest. He always told people that she was the making of him as a man.
In recent years, whenever Noah and I were driving through Winston, or even near it, he would tell me again the story of the night that they first met, and the days that followed after that, and we would detour into town so that he could take me past the apartment where he was living when they began dating, and the first house they lived in together. Sometimes he would stop the car and we would sit for a few moments in silence, him gazing out at that little red brick house with a look of almost wonder, remembering. Forty years later, he still couldn’t believe his luck.
Noah decided on pediatrics in the middle of his family-practice residency, when he realized that he enjoyed the kids much more than the adults. He loved children, and he loved looking after them. Being a physician meant the world to him. Once in a while when I was a little girl, I used to accompany him at his office to “help” him see patients. He had a joke for every child, and one for every parent, and I remember the tenderness and ease with which he related to them both. Watching him gave me an early lesson in how to truly listen to someone, and what it means to put yourself inside another person’s experience.
When Noah’s obituary appeared online late last week, people immediately began posting responses. Many of the first ones were from former patients and their parents, and they offer testimony to the kind of pediatrician that Noah was:
“My children thought the world of him.”
“He taught me so many things about being a new mother.”
“He saved my life.”
“He brought my sweet baby through meningitis at 8 months old.”
“A wonderful man and doctor.”
“He went over and beyond the call of duty for my children.”
“Thank you, Dr. Gibson, for helping me raise my three daughters.”
“The kindest soul.”
“Such a sweet man.”
“Proud to call him a friend.”
“The only pediatrician we trusted.”
“He always left you laughing.”
“He cared for every child as his own.”
***
The thought that keeps coming back to me these past few days is how much Noah enjoyed being Noah. He loved his life so much. He was so completely himself: funny and kind, all in on all his passions, open-hearted and full of unselfconscious joy. It’s no surprise that he made so many friends everywhere; in every realm of his life, he reached out to people, and they reached back.
The length of an airplane ride was enough time for this to happen. At the end of two hours, Noah would have his seatmate’s contact information and would soon begin sending along links to articles or papers or videos about whatever splinter of shared interest had flashed between them. Usually, though not always, that shared splinter was music. I have friends who met Noah only once and for years afterward would receive emails from him at random moments, cheerfully pointing them to a piece of music he thought they might like, or an upcoming fiddle concert in the town where they lived. He never forgot. “For your interest,” was the frequent email subject line. Or, “For your amusement.”
I will miss seeing those words pop up in my inbox. There are so many things that I will miss, and I have hardly begun to even grasp them. But I am grateful for Noah’s steadfast love, which I still feel—which we all still feel—and the example he offered for how to live, and how to love those around you. For how to be fully and deeply alive.