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31 Oct 1953 - 11 Jan 1975
Died in Riverside, California.
Robert Goldstein was a brilliant student. Many of us knew him at Emerson and Pomona High. He excelled at mathematics.
I went to University of California Riverside with Robert and ran into him from time to time. Robert and I took an elective Botany class together during his last quarter at UCR. This turned out to be one of the most fun classes I’ve ever taken. We took an overnight field trip to the flower market in Los Angeles. We were given plots and all the supplies we needed to plant a garden. I remember planting things like hot peppers, kohlrabi, and other interesting things. Robert had a plot near mine and he planted things like cactus and kumquats. I remember wondering why in the world he would plant those items in a temporary garden plot. He died in January, 1975, and he should have graduated in June, 1975. There were a lot of our classmates at his memorial service in Pomona, including several of his math teachers from Emerson and PHS. I’m sorry you didn’t get to see your cactus continue to grow, Robert.
Robert took everything seriously, which was both a strength and a weakness. When he got what he thought was too low of a score on the SAT verbal test, he spent a lot of time with a dictionary, learning new words. We traveled to Europe together after graduating from high school. I intended to have fun, but once we got as far as Spain, he decided to stay there, working on learning his Spanish, so I ended up traveling alone.
Sadly, for him life was extremely painful (emotionally). He once went to a rabbi seeking reassurance that there is no afterlife. To him, the best option was a complete absence of feeling.
He came to eat breakfast with me the day before he died. I had never seen him so happy and outgoing (it was unlike him to join me when I was eating with someone else), and wondered what had changed. I later concluded that he was happy because he had made his decision, and that gave him peace. He was making his final goodbyes. The next morning he went to the train station, paced back and forth waiting for the train, and placed his neck over the railroad tracks in the path of the train, decapitating himself.
It is hard for me to imagine that level of pain. At the time, I was making a slow transition from atheism to Christianity, and didn’t know what to think about an afterlife. I pray that he found peace.
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