My father, Arnold Galpern (Arny), died a few minutes ago, at 10am, September 24, 2025. He was 94. His last hours were with in-patient hospice, on morphine, following months of agonizing pain. Arny fought for life until the very end, well beyond the point of tolerance for most people.
I take this moment to note my father’s passing because he, like you, was a supporter of CPR Initiative.
On occasion, over these last 5 years, my father would read an article in the New York Times, or Philadelphia Inquirer, concerning the climate crisis, and then press me for my thoughts as to its accuracy or quality. And nearly always he’d ask: How could we let this get so bad?
Many who press for a better future do so in the name of their children and future generations. I do that too, but I do it also for my parents, including now in honor of my father.
My mother, Lois Galpern, survives her husband Arny. They had been together for more than seven decades, through thick and thin. For the last six of those years, they have been fortunate to live at the Lions Gate Continuing Care Retirement Community in Voorhees, New Jersey, an institution that seeks to meet more than its residents’ basic needs.
My parents were active in their community even as they age well past expectations. Being part of a vital community is likely a key to longevity, and Arny and Lois sought out to find humor in most things (perhaps another such key) even through Covid lockdowns. With increasing frequency, as they aged, my mother would joke that, no matter what, they would not die young. Arny, even in his nineties, sought out new friends with whom to play chess or discuss (and listen to) music. In recent years, Arny was increasingly concerned about his decreasing ability to care for Lois.
On six or seven occasions over this period my parents helped convince Lions Gate activity leaders to host my talks concerning climate change, international law, and democracy. Arny frequently would try to say a few words of introduction, and he was mostly able to stay on point. In consequence, several of Arny and Lois’ friends and neighbors became CPR Initiative supporters and donors.
These community meetings seemed to attract surprisingly large gatherings, often 50 to 80 people. Virtually everyone in attendance would be from 70 to 105 in years. Discussions commenced by 7pm, and even though facility staff would warn me to end it all by 8pm “in order for folks to get to bed on time,” invariably many would stay, seeking more. They’d stand, often with the aid of walkers, sometimes unsteadily, and pepper me with questions like these:
- Why is (variously) Trump/ Biden/ Trump so eager to please the fossil fuel industry?
- When are we going to install solar in our community?
- What about nuclear? Is that an option?
- I recycle everything and take public transportation, but is there something else I can do?
- If the law is clear, why is our country not moving away from fossil fuels as rapidly as possible?
- Why isn’t there a price on carbon emissions here, if other nations have shown they can do that?
From the podium, as these questions would flow, I would at times look out on my father, seated in the first row, nodding, faintly smiling, mentally engaged even as his capacity to stay awake declined.
Arny Galpern saw the world as it is, but here, where people he knew and respected wrestled honestly with an unnerving challenge, I know my father appreciated the effort even as he hoped for far more.
To make a contribution to CPR Initiative in honor of Arny Galpern, click here:
https://givebutter.com/arny-galpern
Postscript: Remarks During my Father’s Funeral, September 29, 2025.
In the end, there are not words to properly mark the passing of such a man as my father.
Still, words must be found, even where the son buries the father, adhering to the natural order notwithstanding a fair appreciation of the terrible uncertainty that conditions so much of life on this, our lonely and fragile planet.
Arnold Galpern, Arny to his many friends, lived a full life.
Born too late to serve in World War II, he was nonetheless highly impacted by it, in particular the sacrifice made to secure our nation, and principles undergirding the rule of law.
Arny received a solid public-school education, including at Bronx Science High School. But, at bottom, well beyond formal education, my father was a life-long learner — including with respect to history, the arts ( especially classical music), science, and the natural world.
I mention this here, today, because it helps explain, at least in part, his remarkable fight for life. My father struggled, for years, time after again cheating death, pressing for solutions to his pain, solutions that, even if temporary, yet still held hope that he might persist in life for another year, or another month, to pursue his four great goals:
- Care of Lois, his wife and love of 71 years,
- Being there for his family,
- Wider concern for community, and nation, and
- Life-long learning.
The thought has come to me, repeatedly, that from perhaps disproportionate respect for my father’s autonomy, and his fundamental right to choose, we waited too long to help him preserve dignity while dying, to finally let it go, and rest in peace.
But yesterday the New York Times published an interview with a great American writer, in which Ta-Nehisi Coates said, albeit in a different context, that it is important “to differentiate how people die [from] how they live[d].”
My father lived well, in part because he knew what was important.
In particular, I will not forget his enormous efforts, over many summers, to marshal my mother, my brother, our noble beast of a dog Homer, our cat Pumpkin, and me, for annual family excursions to the Motherbunch- and Narrows Islands of Lake George in the center of the Adirondacks.
We slept in canvas tents, cooking with an iron skillet and metal pot over a Coleman stove fueled by white gas, with few facilities other than an outhouse, a picnic table, and a fire ring, swimming, hiking, fishing, and canoeing, all day every day, enjoying every moment.
Except, perhaps, the time my mother broke her leg trailing at the end of Homer’s leash, down a very steep path, towards the wooden dock. Or the time that Pumpkin, ever ravenous, hooked himself on a baloney-baited fishing hook, causing us to rush, via flat-back rowboat with a 5-horse Evinrude outboard mot, to a vet in Hewsletts Landing. Or the time, perhaps, that my mother endured darkness and swells as she made her way back, alone, over three miles of open swater, to our campsite. I sat there, with my little brother, at the edge of the wooden dock, our Coleman lantern, illuminating the cove.
My father was the first conservationist I knew, and he instilled in us all a love of the natural world and the sense that it was our obligation to preserve it. He also showed us how to relax.
Indeed, his determination, each summer, to find precisely the best spot, with the perfect view, to string and stretch his canvas and stick hammock, was remarkable. I can see him now, laying there with his pipe in his left hand, a book in his right, with a battery-operated box atop pine-covered and rocky ground playing classical music, swaying slightly, in the cool summer breeze, removed for a time from the stress of ordinary life.
My father took me up Black Mountain at age 5, which mountain comprises and frames the eastern shore of the central part of Large George. I remember that he gave me the last swig of our sole aluminum canteen, as we approached its summit. We were thirsty all the way back down to the lakeside trailhead.
Fifteen years later, I guided Arny up to the summit of Tongue Mountain, which escarpment frames the Lake’s western shore. My father still, back then, did well, even as we skirted a large rattlesnake.
Some 20 years later, when he was by then approaching age 69, and in perhaps still passable condition, I had occasion to take Arny on his first and only overnight backpack trip, to Lake Winnemucca, beneath Roundtop Mountain, in the Mokelumne Wilderness of the Sierra Nevada, at 10,000 feet. It is a magnificent place, and we had it to ourselves, because it was Fall, and a little cold. After several hours of hiking, I pitched my one-man tent for him, and I made my father dinner — as he tried with some considerable effort to find a comfortable rock to sit.
We ate silently, taken with the alpenglow on Roundtop’s western face, bright at first, then fading with the sun.
With darkness, the temperature dropped steeply. I rose four or five times from my bivy sack that night to check, so as to ensure my father, not used to this, was comfortable and sufficiently warm, covering and re-covering him with the extra down bag that I had brought for the purpose.
I remember, with some sadness, him shivering, and I worried that I had pushed my father too far that day. I worry about him still, now in death. I wish him comfort, and I thank him for everything.