Exemplary Lives: Rob Gardner

October 30, 2023

Rob Gardner, teaching at Highland High School, Salt Lake City, UT (2011)

We learn how to be human by emulating virtuous people. This is what I try to do in my essays about famous writers (Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens) or saints (Marcus Aurelius, Pedro Arrupe). Sontag, Hitchens, and Marcus had flaws, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them.

This essay is about someone I admire without reservation: my younger brother, Rob.¹

Rob and I have lived different lives. People sometimes assume that I come from New England aristocrats because I have a WASP name and was educated at private schools in Massachusetts. Nope. My mother and father grew up during the Great Depression in Salt Lake City, UT. My grandmother raised my Dad as a single mom because my paternal grandfather abandoned the family after he drank away their money. During his teens, Dad worked on a railroad track gang in the copper mine west of the city. My maternal grandfather sold insurance. My maternal grandmother was ill, depressed, and bedridden much of the time, and my mother became responsible for the household from a young age. In short, my parents came from hardship in the provinces.

Mom and Dad were intelligent people and cold but responsible parents. They believed in education. My father was a classical Tiger Dad, pressing high expectations for academic success on me, his eldest son. I was sent to boarding school and was glad to be gone from a house that never felt like a home. I never looked back. Emotionally emancipated at age 13, I have lived a cosmopolitan life in many cities and countries, pursuing an academic career. Now, I feel shame at having failed to honour my parents or to express the gratitude they deserved.

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Rob did not leave home. He wanted what ordinary people want: to live close to family and friends in the community where he grew up. Rob was a star high school athlete with tremendous physical strength. Rob married Lori, his college girlfriend, soon after they graduated from the University of Utah. They settled in Salt Lake, where he kept an impressive urban vegetable garden. Rob became an outdoorsman and an absurdly skilled fly fisherman. He and Lori raised two wonderful children: Matt, an attorney in Chicago, and Katie, a special education teacher.

Rob and Lori taught in the Utah public schools, Lori rising to be a senior administrator. Rob taught US History. He loved his subject, was immensely knowledgeable, and taught it passionately. He was committed to ordinary students, children who aren’t routinely taken seriously by the world.

Teaching history is about telling

stories about humans in places you can never go,” [Rob] Gardner said. “If you can get students connected, they’ll see how much they really are like them. History is about people.

Rob engaged them in their nation’s story. He helped them see themselves as having the same dignity and rights as anyone else. He was the kind of instructor who changed students’ lives. Rob was honoured as the 2011 Utah Teacher of the Year.

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Rob and Lori cared for family and neighbours. Lori’s sister suffered from a terrible psychiatric disorder. Rob and Lori stepped in to raise her sister’s children. When Lori’s mother developed dementia, they took responsibility for her care. After my mother was widowed, she kept her sharp mind—sharp in every sense—but Mom, too, needed help, and this fell primarily on Rob and Lori.

They did not just care for our family. There are many single elderly people in their Salt Lake neighbourhood. Lori cooked large meals weekly and brought them to neighbours who were otherwise alone. I am sure this saved lives.

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Rob contracted a vicious form of rheumatoid arthritis. It attacks his joints—elbows, knees, wrists—and spine. He has had multiple orthopedic surgeries to repair or replace his joints. At some point, one of his surgical wounds became infected. His doctors have never successfully cleared this infection, and since then, many of his surgeries have required follow-up surgeries to treat the infected wound. Rob was forced to take an early retirement from teaching. He has lost fine motor control in his hands, needs a walker or a chair to get around, and lives with severe chronic pain.

The medications Rob has to take have weakened his bones through osteoporosis. Around Easter of this spring, he fell and broke his femur. He spent time in a rehabilitation hospital to recover. While Rob was hospitalized, Lori fell while walking their Boxer. We do not know what happened: she may have been struck by a hit-and-run driver. Lori hit her head on a curb, was found unconscious in the street, and died in the hospital.

When people learn I have cancer, they say to me, “It’s terrible what you have been through.” I thank them for their kindness but think, “You have no idea what grievous losses some people must endure.”

Rob is getting physical therapy on Friday, October 27, 2023.

Please look at the photograph of Rob above at his physical therapy session. Notice how he needs to be suspended from above. Nothing in Rob’s life explains why a relentless disease process has attacked him. There are no ‘lifestyle’ choices that would make him responsible for what he has suffered. His lifestyle—this is what I hope to emulate—is a relentless determination to stand upright in the world.

My brother and my late sister-in-law are the salt of the earth. What does this mean? It means they recognized the suffering of others and gave them care. Rob and Lori were the Good Samaritans who found the man assaulted by robbers on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. They did not judge who did or did not deserve their help. They did not calculate whether anyone would recognize them for helping. They just did it. “Do you need help? We are here to help.”

1. I also have a younger sister, Amy, who deserves an essay.