It was quite a shock to hear yesterday that former Senator Joe Lieberman had died. Whether he had been ill at all, I don’t know, but apparently he fell in New York City, and died of complications of the fall at his home in Connecticut. That’s all that has been reported so far.

It certainly gets you thinking about falling. The statistics on how many older people fall are also shocking. The CDC says that about 15 million adults 65 or older report having fallen each year, with 9 million of those requiring medical help or leading to temporary immobility. Falling is the leading cause of injury related deaths among the elderly.

I had lunch with a friend just a few years older than I am last week, and he told me that he had recently fallen and broken his nose. I had coffee with another friend the week before, who is in her early 70s, and she told me that she has fallen four or five times. Another friend, also in her early 70s, who has a number of medical problems and uses a walker when she leaves her apartment, has fallen a number of times at home, twice having to be hospitalized. It’s clearly a serious business – especially if your bones have become brittle or you hit your head. Whenever there is ice on the ground, I think back to Dr. Robert Atkins, whose professional goals were to keep people healthy through their diets, and who slipped on ice in New York City, hit his head and that was it. How quickly things can turn.

Going back to Joe Lieberman, he and I were in the same law school class, Yale 1967. I really didn’t know Joe back then. He had also been a Yale undergraduate and knew those Yalies who had continued on to the law school, but was not one who was normally present during the activities of his law school classmates. He was always off doing political things. And even back then, everyone said that Joe was a politician and would become a Senator one day.

He did, of course, and moved to Washington. I saw him now and then at class “lunches”, something we did then, and then saw him more, when he became a semi-regular at Adas Israel services, at a time when I was an active board member and officer of the Congregation. He and his wife were involved in the synagogue’s primary day school, but he became disillusioned with Adas Israel after the day school left the synagogue to become independent, and the synagogue/school divorce was not pretty. I stayed at Adas (still there, and we are talking decades ago), but also became a Board of Directors member at the independent school. By then the Liebermans had aged out, I think. After that, I saw Joe largely at Law School functions, including our every five year reunions in New Haven, which he and I both religiously attended. He was in person as he seemed in public – warm, polite, friendly, and respectful.

It was of course exciting to see him run for the Vice Presidency on the Gore ticket and very disappointing when the Supreme Court first showed its political colors by intervening in the Florida race and deciding, on its own pretty much, who won the presidency. Gore and Lieberman bowed out; that was how things worked back then. But WWDJTD?

It was also interesting to see Joe win a Senate seat as an independent, after losing the Democratic primary, in 2006, even though he caucused with the Democrats. But he never went back to the Democratic Party, he supported John McCain for president over Barack Obama, and he ended his career (no longer in office) by embarking on the unrealistic No Labels attempt to run a third (or fourth or fifth or sixth) presidential candidate in 2024. No Labels has not yet identified, or at least has not yet publicly identified, a candidate and now may not do so. We will see.

In other words, Joe left a very mixed legacy. He did things his way, and sometimes that doesn’t work as well as expected.

Joe Lieberman was not the only high level national politician in my law school class. The other was Paul Tsongas, who was a Senator from Massachusetts and a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992.

Paul was very different at law school from the oft-missing Joe. And Paul and I were quite friendly throughout law school. He was one of the nicest guys I knew, but he never seemed to me very sure of himself. Working class background, Greek background – maybe these things made him feel isolated. He was very soft spoken, quite cerebral I thought, someone you could have a good conversation with. But he seemed to me to be somewhat lost during the law school years.

I remember a conversation we had during our third year. I was pretty clear where I was going after we graduated (of course, things turned out completely different from what I thought my clear path would be), but Paul had no idea. He didn’t want to practice law. He had no idea where he wanted to live. He was so tied into his Lowell MA community, but what could he really do there? And where else could he go? I remember him telling me that he was thinking about applying for (or maybe he had applied for ) a clerkship with the District Judge in American Samoa, and he thought he might go there (and never be heard from again).

He didn’t go to American Samoa – he got involved in politics, and found his surprising niche. He probably would have run for president as the Democratic candidate if it weren’t for Super Tuesday and a guy named Bill Clinton. Had he run and won, I guarantee you he’d never have fooled around with Monica Lewinsky.

Sadly, Paul had come down with lymphoma in the 1980s and, although it seemed he had been cured, it came back and he died in 1997, when he was only 55. It was a year after my sister, age 49, passed away from the same disease.

At any rate….a lot to think about today. I’ll think about something else tomorrow. I hope.