The Synchronicity of Grief and Glory: A Father’s Day Tribute by the Numbers

“Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous.” -Albert Einstein

I’ve often believed the world is ordered by numbers. The number 117 has played an eerie role throughout my life, which may end up as worthy of a future edition. On the first anniversary of 9/11, the New York pick 3 was 911. And then there is 613.

The Knicks just brought the first NBA Championship back to NY in 53 years! And they did it on 6/13. The same number that hangs from the rafters at Madison Square Garden celebrating Red Holzman’s 613 wins as Knicks head coach, the last one to win a Championship with them in 1973.

And then there is my own very personal connection to 6/13 . . .

An Unplanned Stress Test

In June 2025, I was scheduled to deliver my first TEDx talk, something I’d been preparing for over a year. Two weeks before the talk, my ninety-year-old father took a fall and suffered a severe brain injury.

I camped out at the hospital, practicing my talk with my mother and sister as my audience. As the day approached, my father was still hanging on. He was very strong. My family insisted I honor my commitment.

An hour before I took the TEDx stage, I learned my father had passed the night before, on the evening of 6/13. The next day would be Father’s Day.

I had one fixed vision, and I refused to let circumstances change the course. I knew my father wouldn’t have wanted me to do anything else, so I hit the road from New York to North Carolina.

I delivered the talk. Then, a few days later, I delivered something far more monumental … my father’s eulogy:

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I hope you’ll indulge me for a bit here. My dad lived a full life of ninety years, so it will take a bit of recounting . . .

This may sound like some sort of literary Dickens-esque cliché, but it’s appropriate, so I’ll start here . . .

My father was an extraordinary man, and he lived through extraordinary times.

A self-made man who rose from relative poverty, my father, Jesse, represented the best of the American story. Born Gesualdo to Sicilian immigrants during the middle of the Great Depression, he was the firstborn son of six children, a prestigious position in an old-world Sicilian family. And he played the role of leader capably from the start. His grandmother would call young Gesualdo by the endearing nickname Gesutz.

My father was uniquely talented and resourceful from the time he was a young boy. He was never given much time to grow up. As a young child, he sold dolls in the street that his grandmother knitted to help make ends meet. He cried in despair with his mother as they held each other’s hands tight walking home from a store that would not accept their church’s food stamps to buy the laundry detergent they so badly needed to wash the growing family’s clothes. My father first recounted this story to me well into his sixties or seventies. A strong man I’d only seen cry on very rare and isolated occasions, he did shed tears as he recalled this early childhood memory. The pain of his family’s early immigrant Depression-era struggles and the burden it placed on him never left him.

By age fourteen he was replacing the home windows on his own and building a bar from appliance delivery crates in the family home for his older sister Connie’s Sweet Sixteen. He had already developed a keen interest and savant’s understanding of electricity by that age, which would lead him to his chosen and esteemed profession as an electrical engineer. Years later, mainly in his twenties (the best years of his life as he would often describe it), he would apply all this cumulative knowledge, creativity, and work ethic to his dream project at Greenwood Lake, where I now live. I was always in awe of his astounding capability.

When he started school, my father didn’t speak a word of English. As a result, he was held back a year. But he learned to excel on his own. Self-reliance became a strength and ultimately a tragic flaw in some respects. He may have been too smart for his own good at times.

He had a natural love for nature and wildlife. Even growing up in the concrete jungle of Brooklyn, he found his natural affinity for fishing and scuba diving in Coney Island, and his real passion, horseback riding, at Sheepshead Bay. He was genuinely interested, even curious, in all that life had to offer. He engaged in it!

As a child, I was fascinated by his library of books on all topics, especially those on sharks and Jacques Cousteau. Each August my family and I would travel to a Caribbean holiday destination. (Tough childhood, I know!) It was there that my father first introduced me to his love for the ocean and its marvelous marine life: Snorkeling, spearfishing, scuba diving. He instilled a passion in me that would later become a very important part of my own adult life.

At my college graduation, my then girlfriend asked my father what his dream would have been if he could have been anything. I was sort of ashamed I’d never even thought to ask him that same question myself. His answer: A horse rancher! This wasn’t surprising given our house was adorned with bronze and ceramic horse statues and paintings of all sorts. Whenever there was a Western on, he would always say, “Anything with a horse can’t be that bad.” I carried this theme throughout his life with equestrian birthday cards and the like. He absolutely adored horses! He marveled at them.

Representing a zeitgeist reminiscent of Forrest Gump, my father graduated Brooklyn’s Lafayette High School with Sandy Koufax in 1953. He then attended CCNY, at the time one of the country’s top three engineering schools, crossing timelines there with Colin Powell, and later enlisted in the army to join Elvis Presley’s platoon at Fort Hood, Texas, only to arrive on base one day after the King had left the building. They were both born in the same week. Elvis would be ninety today. My dad beat the King by forty-eight years! A life well-lived.

My father was slow, steady, and methodical. I know what some of you must be thinking: Slow, steady, and methodical? He was your father? Well, let’s just say I take after my mother in those respects.

Engineering was a good fit. It suited him. It interested him. He was involved with many amazing assignments, some of which kept him overseas living in Spain, Germany, and Italy for years. He worked on mountaintops and skied home from work. He worked on Top Secret government projects during the height of the Cold War. While with ITT Labs he patented the camera filter used to take the infamous covert aerial images by plane during the Cuban Missile Crisis. His proud grandson Thomas now interns at the same ITT Labs currently based in Stamford, Connecticut. My father’s work inspired my high school friend to pursue a career in engineering himself. In fact, when we were tasked with writing a paper on “Who is an American hero to me?” in eighth-grade American history class, this same friend chose my father as his subject.

I grew up in awe of the international man of the world that my father was. He was a real-life James Bond to me. Our home was filled with artifacts from his many world travels. Wooden clogs from Holland. A machete from Bangkok. Wooden carvings from Italy. The list goes on. I would later seek to emulate him . . . with voracious appetite. I have done a fair amount of travel and adventure of my own. My family often seems to think I am crazy for it. I am not sure he realized it, but he was always the hero I was chasing.

Ultimately, his engineering career ended with Sears, Roebuck. Close to a decade after the Sears Tower went up in Chicago, his role was transferred. An attractive promotion was on offer. My family considered relocation, but ultimately, we were New Yorkers, so sometime around 1980 my dad made the fateful choice to join two of his brothers in their lucrative commercial real estate finance business. His soul would never be the same.

The steady, dependable salary and benefits from rewarding work as an engineer were supplanted by a commission-based rat race in an industry of conniving, back-stabbing schmucks and bastards. “To paraphrase.” I would later go through a similar transition in my own career, which taught me more about my own father. We are never done learning!

Through it all, my dear mother remained his one rock. His guiding light. Their marriage of almost fifty-five years stands as a testament to the strength of the institution itself. The lack of giving up that so plagues our society and younger generations today. The value of staying the course and working through adversity. “In good times and in bad. Through sickness and in health. For richer, for poorer. ’Til death do us part.”

In the sum of things, my father was a complicated, often misunderstood man. He was a man of great emotional depth and range. He had a big heart that loved as much as it ached. He was a charming man of great character, intellect, and capability. A good and devoted family man. He loved his wife, he loved his children, and he loved his grandchildren.

They call it the long goodbye. The last decade of my father’s life was defined by physical and cognitive decline marred by dementia, but these were also years of healing in many ways. Within the family, as he regressed, we took to calling him by his childhood nickname again — Gesutz. (I may need to take credit for that one myself). All the while, my mother was the guardian angel at his side managing his every need in real time. He hadn’t taken care of his physical and mental health as well as he should have in the latter part of his life, so making it to ninety probably didn’t seem in the cards. But with my mother’s loyal love, care, and support, she got him there. Can I please have a round of applause for my dear mother for getting my dad to ninety years old?

So let’s celebrate the life of a man who saw it all, from the sea to the mountaintops, as he gallops off into the sunset for one last time. Because anything with a horse can’t be that bad, right?

Thank you! Here’s to my incredible father, and a life fully-lived . . .

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My father taught me about opening new doors in life, about adventure, about exploring the globe, about the impact of chance versus choice in life. In his final days, he taught me about Resilience, showing up even when your heart is breaking.

In this life, we will all be presented with doors to either walk through or avoid. Some may be revolving; others will be one way.

And as these doors open and close, you’ll be able to determine your own fortunes, particularly when you maintain

• Discipline in your preparation,
• Mindset in your approach, and
• Resilience in your response.

You are engineering outcomes. This is Character-driven leadership in action. With Discipline, Mindset, and Resilience calibrated together, you determine your own path.

Resilience is the third dial, the final component of Determination. With Discipline, Mindset, and Resilience calibrated together, setbacks lose their power to define you. They become information, not termination.

I presented this framework on the TEDx stage as I lived it in real time. The Knicks personified this same Determination in delivering a remarkable and historic post-season for the ages.

Discipline, Mindset and Resilience are all you need to determine your own outcomes.

The Knicks Just Proved It

On the same day my father passed, the New York Knicks were engineering history.

DISCIPLINE. Championships aren’t won in June. They’re built in the work no one sees. The regular season. The practice floor. The reps put in alone when no one’s watching. The non-negotiables.

MINDSET. The unflappable belief that the title was already theirs. Down big, on the road, doesn’t matter. They never stopped thinking like champions, so they became them.

RESILIENCE. Game 4. Down 29 at the half. The greatest comeback in NBA Finals history. They didn’t just survive adversity. They used it as fuel.

Discipline + Mindset + Resilience = Determination.

That’s not a slogan. This team just proved it on the biggest stage there is.

And the next morning, I proved it to myself on a much smaller one.

Three dials. One framework. Whether you’re creating a new legacy or honoring the passing of one, the engineering is the same.

What moment tested your three dials? When did you have to show up even when everything in you wanted to stop? Who’s the hero you’re chasing? I’d love to hear your story in the comments.