My family nominated my father, Jacob Goldstein, before he passed away. Today he is being honored

Dad did well in school, and through his perseverance and baby boomer wealth, he got a medical degree, married my mom, bought a house, took a gap year to travel the world, and entered a surgical training program in Melbourne—all before he was 26, and without any privilege, money, or connections to the overwhelmingly British medical establishment.

For 50 years, he was on call so gruelingly that his mother nicknamed him “the 7-11 man” (out before 7 a.m., home after 11 p.m.)—but in fact, his hours were often more extreme than that, a sign of his dedication to his job and his patients.

When he was home, though, he was home: tucking us into bed, complaining about how much TV we watched, discussing football with my brother, helping us with homework. I vividly remember him hunched over my sister’s desk late at night during her VCE years, in his suit jacket and briefcase at his side, expounding on differential equations in what I can only describe as a talmudic cadence.

As a surgeon, Dad was renowned for his compassionate clinical attitude, which was not common or even considered important in surgical training at the time. He performed more than 10,000 operations and was highly respected and sought after, especially by patients from non-English speaking backgrounds. Dad’s compassion was undoubtedly a product of his childhood. From an early age, he and his sister Pearl served as interpreters for their parents—today we would call them “parentified children”—a responsibility that, by his own admission, fostered in him a deep understanding of the experiences of marginalized people.

At Monash Medical Centre, he also dedicated himself to training the next generation of cardiac surgeons and served as Director of Cardiothoracic Surgery Training from 1989 to 2017. As a beneficiary of an excellent public education from primary school to university, Dad felt compelled to pass on his knowledge to the Australian and international medical community, and although he would not express it in such idealistic terms, he simply did so.

I am grateful for Dad’s tremendous, solid strength that has helped me and countless others through life-changing challenges.

Several of his trainees, who came from China, Malaysia, and India, later established cardiothoracic surgery departments in underserved communities across the country. One former trainee recalled how he guided her through her first major surgical complication, calling him a peoplea difficult-to-translate Yiddish term meaning an upright, good person (but it means much more than that).

She described how her dad patiently educated her throughout the repair process, called to check on her that evening, and insisted that she do this part of the procedure herself next time so that she would have the confidence to master it.

My father was in many ways unshakable—just the way you want someone willing to open your chest and hold your heart in his hands. He had been in a serious car accident at age 50, with broken ribs, but luckily he made it out alive from our crushed Peugeot station wagon. (I never got a chance to look at the photos; he assesses them with the curiosity of a seasoned frontline worker.)

Lying in his hospital bed, he lamented the impact of his injury on his running schedule and wondered if he could ever break his personal best again. When he was discharged from the hospital, he insisted on driving himself home, still covered in bruises. “You have to drive right away,” he explained to the 13-year-old me. “You can’t let this get you down.” A year later, he ran a marathon, the first of his 11.

Someone with this kind of stubborn drive and apparent invincibility can also be frustrating and uncompromising—I could write a book about that—but I’m grateful for Dad’s immense, solid strength, which has helped me and countless others through life-changing challenges.

On Mother’s Day 2018, my family experienced our greatest challenge when my beloved nephew Gideon (Dad’s oldest grandson) was diagnosed with advanced brain cancer at age 8. Dad was a rock, working full time while attending doctor appointments and answering questions from our extended family.

He was unable to save his grandson, who died 11 months later, and that was the deepest sorrow. At the beginning of that painful, sleepless year, I worried that my inner pillars would collapse, but I tapped into a resilience I had never known I had, a spirit that bore Dad’s stamp everywhere.

He went on to become a star fundraiser for the Robert Connor Dawes Foundation, a Melbourne-based charity dedicated to childhood brain cancer research. Dad had a hard time raising donations – he liked to keep a low profile, social media was annoying to him and he’d never really mastered mass BCC texting – but inevitably he beat the rest of the family at our annual event, personally raising more than $50,000.

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Last year, when Dad’s health began to rapidly decline, we decided to show him the nomination form, not knowing whether he would live to receive this honor. My sister read it aloud to him while sitting in his bed at Cabrini Hospital—another hospital where he had worked for decades. This is your life: palliative care That day, I looked across the rooftops of Malvern and Caulfield towards my childhood home in Elsternwick and thought to myself what a spin-off this is. It sounds ironic that my father is receiving hospice care at a Catholic hospital so close to Melbourne’s bagel belt that he and many other Jewish doctors helped build, but it feels like a fitting coda to me.

He listened with a look of wonder on his face, both at the effort we put in and at the testimonials of his peers and former students, occasionally raising an eyebrow, shaking his head, and showing his characteristic humility—almost like he was listening to someone else’s biography. A few months later, he died at home.

Now, I inevitably find myself poring over the list of winners, just as Dad once did. He might be a little embarrassed by all the fuss, but I can night. AM is a fitting tribute to the place where he grew up – a place that has also been enriched by opening its doors to child refugees and skilled migrants. You never know who might step off a boat or plane one day and hold your heart in their hands.

I only wish I could pick up the phone and share the news like he did: “Guess who won?”

Elissa Goldstein is age.

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