Daniel Rubin: A little longer with an old friend

Every three weeks or so, my friend Tom Kadesch would pull up to The Inquirer building at noon to whisk me away for an hour-long escape.

He'd drive, I'd point, toward some exotic spot for lunch - Chinese soup dumplings, corner grocery Mexican, whatever was new, authentic, unsung.

Over our two decades of friendship, we rarely talked about work. He never visited the newsroom, I never saw his lab. In truth, I never really understood what he did for a living.

Tom was on the brainy side. He was interim chair of the genetics department at Penn's medical school, a world-renowned researcher into cell behavior, a gifted teacher.

To me, Tom was the guy I could be myself with, my brother's old buddy from California, a wild-haired savant in flip-flops and shorts who never took himself too seriously.

He died last week. Cancer. Quick and unexpected, two weeks after surgery. Since he loved obituaries - he'd read them aloud in the kitchen - I thought I'd write him one, because it's a way to hang on just a little longer.

During our lunches we'd talk about manly things - grilling, football, why the woman I love doesn't love Neil Young. But kids, relationships, and dreams became the stuff of our best conversations, and there was something about his easy laugh and wry smile that made me tell him the unvarnished truth.

He was trained as a molecular biologist and had a gift for breaking problems down to their most basic elements. He loved a good puzzler, and I had one ready for our next meal.

When blue smoke started belching from my new snowblower, the repair shop identified an unlikely culprit: dog food in the carburetor. Tom would have loved that one.

But I never saw him after his 58th birthday, Nov. 12, when he and his wife, Abby, invited my wife and me for dinner, and he brought two bottles of Brunello di Montalcino that his late father had encouraged him to splurge on. Tom never let on to me just how sick he was. He was going to beat it.

He was visiting his sister in Utah in April when he complained of a stomachache. He thought he had a bug, or had eaten something bad.

Back home, his internist felt a mass in his abdomen. Tom was stunned to learn a rare tumor was growing against his pancreas and stomach. After consulting the best clinicians in the country, he was optimistic that he'd die with the tumor, not from it. But it kept growing, to the size of a softball, and it was entangling other organs in his gut. Scary as it sounded, he opted for surgery.

The hardest to process is how well he did after his 16-hour operation. For two weeks he made slow, brave progress, to the point where he was wearing his own pajamas, watching football, craving the tasty burgers his children, Alex and Hanna, brought into the hospital.

Tom was getting ready for his release, which was to be last Thursday. Then everything turned around, fast. The reconstruction of his portal vein failed. On what would have been his first night home, friends and colleagues visited his family to grieve his death.

I had collected a bunch of songs for his recovery - we were habitual playlist swappers. But I found I couldn't listen to music, not the rootsy country songs he loved, nor the classic Miles Davis and Bill Evans sides. Not anything.

It was Tom's son who changed that. Alex was standing in the center of their Bala Cynwyd home, drinking a glass of wine and turning up the stereo, which he'd programmed with the Band, Los Lobos, and Richard Thompson - Tom's favorites.

Alex is about to finish grad school in engineering, and as he talked, I realized how much he looked and sounded like his father. Tom had laid some heavy lessons on him early in life, Alex was saying.

Something had gone badly when he was a boy, and Tom said to him, "Stop moping. Stop feeling sorry for yourself." So Alex was not going to get weepy.

Tom's sister Ann said that toughness came from their mother, who left an iron lung to deliver him. Growing up, their house in Utah was a "no-whining zone," she said. "There was always someone who had it worse."

So there was no whining that night. Any tears were discreet. Instead, we told stories - hilarious, fearless ones about an adventurous spirit who knew how to balance work and play, family and friends. It made me miss him all the more.

at 215-854-5917 or drubin@phillynews.com.