Dean’s List

Erica Rhodes
15 min readNov 1, 2020

If a man does not master his circumstances then he is bound to be mastered by them. — ‘A Gentleman in Moscow,’ Amor Towles

Dad reading in our backyard: Newton, MA

Last week, on October 25th, 2020 my dear father, Dean Rhodes, passed away peacefully at home with his loved ones by his side. When I’ve told friends, “I can’t imagine a world without him,” they’ve comforted me with, “you don’t have to…he’s always with you.” And I can feel that’s true. I realize now that parents teach their children much more based on how they lived, rather than how they tell us to live. And my Dad’s legacy is how he lived and thrived while battling Multiple Sclerosis, and how he chose humor over misery, imagination over isolation, and love over all.

After his diagnosis, he was forced to change professions, so he shifted from clarinetist to CPA, working his way to the top of his firm at Ernst & Young. When he retired, after he was confined to a wheelchair, and his MS got so bad he could only move one pinky, he took it upon himself to read all of the greatest classic literature, completing 168 novels, and writing a funny one-line synopsis of each, then did the same for all of the Shakespeare plays. He used a Kindle and sometimes had to ask my mom, his devoted wife of 43 years, to turn a page for him. But he kept reading. He refused to be a prisoner of his disease and he never turned bitter or angry. He said he had one rule, “Never talk about the illness.”…

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