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I agreed to share slightly modified remarks from my grandfather’s memorial for this issue to represent a more personal side to Sidney and to work through my own reflections since his death on what it means to be a Blatt.
It’s hard to believe Pop has been gone for over ten years now (a mischievous impulse led me to shorten our standard Grandpop moniker to “Pop,” once, and he’d unexpectedly embraced the endearment). So much of who I am I can attribute to him – either how he and Grandmom raised my mother Susan or how they shaped my childhood directly. I grew up in the same small town outside New Haven where they’d lived most of their years prior to Whitney Center, and they were very much a part of my life. While I didn’t have the same pressures as the Blatt children, it was always clear to me that, as part of the family, I was expected to achieve greatness. I could be a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a hairdresser – but whatever it was I had to be the best one out there. From my grandfather, I learned three main things:
Aim beyond what I think I can achieve
Never take no for an answer
Follow my passion
These were concepts he lived by that I learned from example.
Pop expected me to aim high. I know I’m not alone in that; he challenged his relatives, students, and colleagues alike. I’m sure all the Blatt kids have stories of bringing home a test where they’d set the curve for the class or gotten a 99%, only for Sidney to inquire, “so, what did you get wrong?” It was clear to me from an early age that achievement in our family was not going to be defined by performance relative to the average, but by striving for the very best you could do. Sidney’s endless curiosity and the prolific, diverse body of work he produced are well known. He didn’t talk much at family gatherings about his professional success, but I remember several years before his death asking what he was working on. He’d expressed some anxiety for the need to finish a unifying perspective on mental diseases and sel