The Passing of Richard David Liscia - my dad

My dad just died of terminal emphysema, a short while after my father-in-law passed. He was still smoking two weeks before his death. He dragged himself around, to the supermarket, to the bank, to City Hall, and now I see that  his superhuman will kept him going, since he was constantly gasping for air. 

We discovered he only had twenty-five percent lung capacity left. Imagine sucking down one-fourth of what you need with every breath. For months on end. years maybe. In retrospect I understand the extreme suffering and grouchiness I witnessed, the strange panic attacks that lasted all night, every night for weeks, and had to do with some imaginary pain. And, towards the end, the slightly erratic behavior and writings. The brain needs oxygen too.

What's astonishing was not all that. It's how functional he remained. He still wrote his blog, and it was still damn good. He was literally hanging on, waiting for me to show up. As soon as I arrived in France he went downhill. I didn't come to see him die - I had no idea. I came to see him live. To help him through some difficult paperwork issues. I

t was a bewildering run, nightmarish. Surreal. 

He was very organized, meaning I'm not concerned about the estate. But there are a ton of little things that take on massive proportions: credit card pin numbers; not having POA on the accounts; my mom not being able to go further than forty yards at this point which makes it near impossible to get POA. Also, my fear of driving my dad's car, which is manual. I stalled three times and nearly crashed into the wall. I'm in no state to do complicated things. I have to try to get a refund on his tickets to NYC, and of course they want reams of paperwork. My heart sinks when I think about it. Of course it's only money, but some part of me is thinking, this is money I'm taking away from my poor mom. I drive myself crazy. Maybe I'll ask my mom's good friend Francoise for help. I'm getting better at asking. 

What I won't talk about is what I saw in the hospital. At one point I couldn't keep it in and I cried endlessly, in a corner of the room, while the nurse took care of him. Death is not the issue. It's what happens before. No benevolent god would do this. What a farce religion is. What an absolute rip-off. It makes me angry. Ok, I realize I'm transferring my anger to the wrong target. There is no target. 

My dad at 12 or 13. The Allies are still in Tunisia, but the Nazis have been soundly defeated, the Allied bombings have stopped. His father survived several arrests by the Gestapo, and was not part of the first deportations to Auschwitz. But his sister Simone has died. This haunted look, and the bags under his eyes - that's him for the rest of his life. 

My mom is reeling. But she's tough. Now she's having some clarity around how she wants to live the remainder of her days. At the moment she doesn't much point in living, and that's OK too. I wouldn't either in her shoes. She's 93. She survived, barely, the Shoah, the wholesale Nazi murder of six million European Jews. She lived to see the Hamas massacre on October 7, and I think that taxed her life force and re-traumatized her. She's seen and done it all. She was an eccentric through and through and never had to change her ways to accommodate the world. It's all good, and departing would be fine. I don't think that will be her choice because I'm seeing her perk up. She asked about living with me in the US, but very quickly she saw that she would have to leave behind her friends, her neighborhood, many things she loves and is used to. Oddly, she has become French through and through. And she is beloved around here. Even my dad was well-liked, though he was a notorious curmudgeon. The French respect that. I have to put a system in place that supports her choice. Wish me luck. 

I keep thinking my dad will be reading this post and nodding his head. "My son knows me well." Curiously he thought his life was a failure. Even though he was famous, had thousands of devoted readers, a genuine following, and an unmatched instinct for writing. He's a much better writer than I will ever be. And he made a very decent living doing it too. I'm a nobody, I live in a suburb, my achievements include swimming two miles on occasion. And yet, he felt I had done well, and I was true to what mattered in his eyes: love, family, and justice. When I was young, I had gotten some silly academic award from the nation, and the then President Giscard shook my hand on TV. My dad wasn't proud of that, or very little, he was proud of the fact that when I came home, I was excited because the President had given me a 600-euro check to buy a bunch of books. Dad compared me to Larry Darrell, the main character in Somerset Maugham's "Razor's Edge." A drop-out who embraces the Eastern path of kindness and compassion. Rather astonishing since that's the "path" I'm on right now, decades later. I also discovered that when I was born, the reason they named me "Laurent" was BECAUSE of Larry (Lawrence) Durrell. It's as if this alternate life in the Dharma was what they had wanted for me all along. I don't get my parents. They are full of mysteries. But I do love them for it. 

Below a Google translation of an obit published in the French press about my dad. 

The largest newspaper my dad ever ran was France-Soir which .. was the largest French newspaper. He hated it. Even though we, his family, liked the perks, a chauffeur and limo, opulent vacations and the like.
I think he loved boutique journalism for smaller audiences, and though the newspaper he ended up at was medical in nature, there was enough politics involved that he was content.

I hope what comes through the piece is a history of the French (and global) Press after the war. It reached its peak in the seventies, early eighties, then started a steep decline, which was accelerated by social media.  The French press has fared better than in other places, but like the New York Times and the WP, it survives via its online subscriptions and a blend of blogs and how-to that are a far cry from the investigative tradition that made it one of the true checks and balances of democracy. My dad knew all this, and he had his feelings around it ... But he embraced blogging wholeheartedly.

Enjoy.


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Richard Liscia died last Thursday surrounded by his family, announced his family, died at the age of 89 from pulmonary emphysema linked to smoking. Since September 1987, then director of our editorial staff, then from 2007 and until last week columnist at the helm of his blog, he will have devoted the majority of his career to Quotidien du Médecin.

Day after day, for thirty-six years. “Every day, surprise had to take us out of skepticism and we had to be, in a way, journalists who abandon themselves to the passion of revealing,” he wrote about his friend Philippe Tesson, who passed a year ago. These words apply exactly to him, the tireless and subtle analyst of current affairs.

"A talented writer, capable of writing his editorial in one go"
Pierre Assouline

Born in Tunis in 1935, after studying literature, law and also pharmacy, he worked for the Presse de Tunis then from 1955 to 1960 was the correspondent of Paris-Presse in the United States, under the pseudonym François Latour . In Paris, it was at the Combat newspaper that he met a young editor-in-chief, in the person of Philippe Tesson. He accompanied him to the Quotidien de Paris, from 1974 to 1978, directing a tumultuous editorial staff where all talents rubbed shoulders. “Richard was our station manager,” remembers one of them, the journalist and writer Pierre Assouline. Without him, the implacable man of confidence, there would have been no possible newspaper, Tesson could not have been Tesson, there would have been no Quotidien,” assures academician Goncourt, who also salutes “a talented writer, capable of writing his editorial in one go, whether describing the mysteries of foreign policy, or dismantling Franco-French intrigues and issues. »


“A top-flight journalist,” Philippe Tesson himself will tell us, recalling their shared history and the famous episode of April 1975: in the middle of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, while members of the communist far left and liberal socialists confronted each other with live ammunition, Richard Liscia managed to join the editorial staff of La Reppublica, a newspaper banned by the putschists; facing armed soldiers, at the risk of his life, he published the newspaper in the columns of the Quotidien de Paris, releasing a democratic wave between Lisbon and Paris and causing considerable resonance. Then the station master made history.

Successor to Dr Marie-Claude Tesson-Millet and Philippe Tesson at the head of the SESC group (company which published the Quotidien du Docteur and the Quotidien du Pharmacist), Dr Gérard Kouchner confirms: “Through his open-mindedness on all subjects as well as the scrupulous look he gave to each article in the newspaper, none of which escaped his extreme perfectionism, Richard Liscia left nothing unfinished, in form or content. A man of writing and character, he only lived to write newspapers. »

Journalist and also novelist
Richard Liscia also achieved his “high flight” by directing the weekly VSD, France-Soir, then the first edition of the national press, Le Matin de Paris, where François Mitterrand suggested calling on him, alongside Max Gallo.

In the cultural arena, he again edited Les Nouvelles littéraires, having developed his own talents as a novelist with “The Conscript and the General” (1980) and “Rachel and Raphaël” (1983), two books noted by critics (1). But the journalist will not give the novelist time to pursue his literary work, nor will he allow him to tell his story, professional or personal, fundamentally mobilized as he was in the daily news.

Basically, but not totally: his novels reveal beneath a modest exterior a fiery temperament, an ardent man revolted by injustices, never tired of denouncing them and at the same time always eager for friendship. The journalists in his editorial offices will not forget the authority he exercised without sharing, with nobility of heart.

He had chosen to illustrate his blog with a photo of a long alley lined with trees with dark foliage; at the end, a silhouette disappears into the distance of the falling night. His last words as a journalist, written on January 9: “Politics is scary because the line is blurred between triumph and failure.” His line shines. The grief of Helena, his wife, and Laurent, his son, is ours. We share in their mourning.

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