Sebastian Sora: The Wake

"I only make big decisions."

Today we say goodbye to Sebastian. My father-in-law. A man who was impossible to sum up on a page, but I'm going to try. I know you liked constraints. They make you think harder. They make you think sharper. So I think you might appreciate this, in an odd way.

He was, above all else, a generous man. The most generous I have ever met. A father of four, married twice. His first wife passed away from breast cancer, and through everything life brought him, he remained steady in his commitment to his family.

Four kids, eleven grandkids, and he showed up for every one of them in a way that was unwavering. He paid for weddings. He paid for college. He was the guy who would order the cold seafood tower at dinner, the one that ran a few hundred dollars, and not even take a bite of it himself. It was there for the table, not for him. He made sure his family had what they needed, and not just financially. He was present. That's the thing that actually holds a family together.

He was a man of principles. He was proud of his Italian heritage, and he had a very clear sense of fairness and consistency. If you married one of his kids and chose Italy for your honeymoon, he paid for the whole trip: travel agents, everything. All you had to bring was spending money. If you picked somewhere else, you paid for it yourself. He followed through on that every time. That was just who he was. Clear. Consistent. No shortcuts. No exceptions.

Anyone who knew him knew they could count on him.

He was also a man of real intellect. He earned a PhD in Mathematics and Physics and worked in artificial intelligence at IBM in the 1960s, when the field was still being defined. He later ran his own company and taught at the college level. He had a brilliant mind, but he never used it for ego. He used it to build things, teach people, and generally make himself useful, which is a rarer combination among smart people than you'd think.

He could have been an executive at IBM. By all accounts, people respected his intellect and enjoyed working with him. He had the kind of mind and presence that would have fit that path easily. But he chose something else.

He chose to be home at 5 PM every weeknight for his family.

People like that don't usually become executives. That path requires tradeoffs he wasn't willing to make. He ran his own company instead, and I think that says more about him than any title ever could.

And let's be honest, you can rise to the rank of executive. You can get the title, the office, the travel. But a few financial quarters after you leave the company, you'll be known as good old what's-his-name, or what's-her-name. What lasts is not the title. It's the dinners you were actually present for.

He built a life where dinners with his family mattered more than dinners in boardrooms. And as a result, they got him at home.

He did well for himself financially, but you would never have known it to look at him. I think he owned two nice cars in his whole life. His last car was a Hyundai. This guy drove a Hyundai. (The Hyundai is forever associated with the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, and it can never redeem itself, no matter how good the brand does now.) I always thought that was kind of amazing.

He was also a devout Catholic, and his faith was not something he spoke about lightly. It was something he lived. He knew physics, computer science, and early AI modeling. I always found that pairing strange. How could someone that sharp be that certain about faith? F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." That was Sebastian. Physics in one hand, faith in the other, functioning better than most of us. He went to church every week, without fail, and over time, without my quite noticing, something in me started to come around to it too.

A friend's mother in Brooklyn pulled me aside early on and told me, "Sebastian, Jenny's father, is a true intellectual and a man of faith." At the time, it seemed like an odd way to describe someone I had never met.

But over the years, I realized she was completely right.

He truly was that kind of mind: always questioning, never satisfied with an easy answer. At times he could come across as a crank to people who didn't know him well, but underneath it was a mind that didn't accept things lightly and a commitment to principles he didn't easily bend on. And he was a man of faith in a way I didn't fully understand at first, but came to respect deeply over time.

There are a few things he did in his life that I won't go into here. Most people talk about their faith, or talk about their principles. Plenty of people will tell you what they believe. It costs them nothing. Sebastian was the rarer type: the belief cost him something, and he paid it anyway. One of the most remarkable things I know him to have done still stops me in my tracks. Every time I walk into his house, I see four charcoal portraits of his kids on the wall, made by the person he helped. That is a piece of art we get to keep forever because of what he did.

Because of him, I became Catholic, though if I'm honest, that's not really why I started. I signed up for the accelerated RCIA classes at Saint Monica's, on 72nd Street on the Upper East Side, mostly so I could get married in a church. I wasn't looking to be converted. But somewhere in that process, I actually started to like it. I met wonderful people, and the faith itself started to make sense to me in a way I hadn't expected.

Sebastian's good friend, Father Natali, baptized me in my own apartment on 72nd Street, using a fruit bowl as the basin, which still makes me laugh. (Sebastian also taught me, via Father Natali, that a high IQ and good financial decisions do not always travel together. Father Natali proved that theory.)

When it came time for my confirmation, I invited Sebastian to be there, along with my wife. If I'm honest, what I really wanted was his approval, some sign that I had actually become Catholic, for real, in his eyes. Having him there meant more to me than I can easily explain. I still think about that moment.

I still practice to this day. His example had that kind of effect on people.

I have a degree in Decision and Information Sciences, which is basically a business core with computer science electives. I always enjoyed my conversations with Sebastian because of that mix. We could talk business, and we could talk about very technical things, and he was fluent in both. It was one of my favorite parts of knowing him.

There is a concept in computer science called recursion, and it is one I always come back to. A recursive function solves a problem by calling a smaller version of itself, again and again, until it reaches what is called a base case: the simplest version of the problem, the one you can answer on its own, with nothing left to call. I think a family works a lot like that. You get handed something from the person before you. You run it through your own life. Then you pass a version of it down to the next call. Most recursive functions eventually hit their base case and stop. I don't think this one does. I think Sebastian is still running, quietly, in his kids, and in his kids' kids, and now in mine.

Whenever I had an idea to run by Sebastian, I would practice it in my head first. Sometimes in the mirror. His intellect was top tier, and I knew he would question whatever I brought him. And he did.

Most people don't question you like that. Sebastian did. At times it could feel intense, even blunt, but it wasn't about criticism. It was about sharpening your thinking. It forced you to defend what you believed, and sometimes to realize you didn't fully believe it yet.

Having a mind like his in your life means some of your ideas don't survive contact. He would let you know when something didn't hold up, not to tear you down, but to make you better. And more often than not, he was right.

It wasn't just me. Sebastian helped a lot of people. He was the person you called in a crisis, and you called him for his intellect and his reasoning. You didn't call him for a pat on the back or to have your ego fluffed. He could be cold sometimes, but that was important. Sometimes you need to hear the real truth, and the real truth can be a little painful.

My wife has told me that whenever she hears a landline ring, it takes her back to her childhood. There would be people in crisis, most of it self-inflicted but not all of it, and they needed to talk to Seb. The phone would just ring and ring and ring.

My own father died when I was ten, and I grew up without much of a model for what fathers do. So when I had my first child, I used to joke, half-seriously, that I didn't really know what I was doing.

But the truth is, I was following Sebastian's lead. He was the constant in the equation. When things were hard, I would find myself asking, "What would Seb think?" Sometimes I could almost see his face in those moments.

I still remember asking for his daughter's hand in marriage. He gave me his mother's wedding ring and shared advice I will never forget. He said there would be conflict. That it would not always be easy. At the time I didn't fully understand what he meant. Over time, I learned how right he was.

He was stubborn. I think that was one of his strengths. He didn't bend easily, but he also didn't break easily.

One of my fondest memories of him was early on in my relationship with his daughter. I was standing there holding a bunch of plastic bottles, not knowing where to put them, and I asked him where the recycling went. He shut the screen door quickly behind him and accidentally caught me right in the face with it. Then he looked at me and said, "I only make big decisions." I never forgot that.

In recent years, I've come to understand more deeply what he meant about marriage, about conflict, and about commitment. I wish I could show him how much of that has sunk in. That's a chance I won't get, and it's one of the things about losing him that hurts the most.

I stopped joking about not knowing what dads do, and just started doing what I think Sebastian would have done. I hope I can take care of my kids the way he took care of his.

I know Sebastian dealt with depression, and so do I. It runs in my family. I even had to take a leave from work because of it once, which felt embarrassing at the time, but I did what I needed to do. Maybe there is something to that, some thread that runs through people like us.

I wouldn't wish depression on anybody. It isn't the blues. It's prolonged periods of feeling awful, and it's a horrible illness to have. But it does leave you with something. It makes you appreciate the good stretches more, and it forces you to look at the world from angles most people never have to. I think that was part of Sebastian's depth too.

Because of that family history, I have spent a lot of time studying the brain and memory. I am fascinated by how it all works.

I recognize that reaching for neuroscience to describe missing your father-in-law is a slightly absurd impulse. Absurd or not, it happens to be true. There is a saying in neuroscience that neurons that fire together wire together: the brain physically rewires itself around the things that matter to us. There is even a name for how it flags certain moments as worth keeping. It's called synaptic tagging. From my first conversation with Sebastian, some part of my brain seems to have decided he mattered and started taking notes. I like knowing that. These aren't just memories. He's built into the wiring.

When I think about him now, I think about a man who did not just talk about principles, but lived them. A man who showed up, provided, taught, gave, and stood firm in what he believed was right.

Most people never really leave a mark. They pass through life without shaping it. Sebastian was not one of those people.

He went for it. He built things. He raised a family. He taught. He gave. And even in the moments where he held firm when others might have bent, he did so because he believed it mattered.

He made a real difference in this world. Not through noise, but through a lifetime of consistent action.

Before I married his daughter, Sebastian had pancreatic cancer, and doctors removed it. From a health standpoint, it was a slow decline from there. I'm still amazed he got as many good years as he did.

The other day, we were talking about Papa, and my son put it better than I could: "Dad, Papa's built different."

I grew up on the water. First in Massachusetts, on the beach, by the ocean. Then in the Florida Keys. Later, I lived in Manhattan. I have seen a lot of wakes in my life.

Most people create a wake. A small one. Some people create big wakes and cause a lot of damage on their way through. My father's father created that kind of wake: a bad one, very disruptive. My own father created an even bigger one, and it hit the lives of a lot of people around him. I don't think he ever understood how destructive a wake like that could be. He was gone too soon, and I spent years feeling it.

Then there are people like Sebastian. He created a different kind of wake: strong, steady, durable. The kind that does not crash into anything on its way past. It just keeps moving. He understood physics better than anyone in this room, so he would probably remind me that energy never really disappears. It only changes form and keeps traveling.

That is the kind of wake Sebastian left. It is still moving. It is going to keep moving for a long time.

A Few Photos

Rest in peace, Sebastian. You will be deeply missed. And you will not be forgotten.