Luis N Zumarraga

 

A psychiatrist in Panama City, Florida, recently died, I was very sorry to hear. I was an intimate part of the mental health community in Panama City from the mid-eighties to 2020. Attrition of old friends and mentors and acquaintances proceeds at an accelerated pace after 60, and the normalcy of the subjective experience, over time, if that is what it is, rather than a sort of numbing, is one of the strangest adaptive qualities of older age. The world's structures, rules, and mores stay roughly the same, but it is peopled with a new set of actors. In any case, I was very sorry to hear of Dr. Zumarraga's death. He was a kind and competent individual from the Philippines, and one aspect of our friendship was that my Dad had served in Manilla during the forties, during the conflagration of that city. At the same time, Dr. Zumaragga was a youngster there.

I first met Dr. Zumarraga at the Life Management Center in 1986. He attended weekly meetings to provide psychiatric coverage.  Well-liked, he was easygoing and pleasant, with none of the even slight officiousness you might associate with a psychiatrist when you are a psychologist. Being a psychologist, I learned early on that there are subtle gradations of rank in the field in medical settings, and some psychiatrists presume a hair-breadth advantage. It was not in Dr. Z’s temperament to do that. That day in 1986, he drove a new BMW in and the Bay County Guidance Staff oohed and ahh'ed about it.   That BMW stayed in use for 30 years by Dr. Z, and then his office manager, Ted Winscheif.

Several years later, I rented from Dr. Zumarraga, who had a new office on the land of a psychiatric hospital named Rivendell (an organization that came to no good). I had my own suite of rooms, and Dr. Z would refer his psychiatry clients to me and vice versa.  The office has a well-healed vibe.  Dr. Z had grown up in a relatively affluent rea of the Philippines, with family members in responsible or prominent roles. His wife, Serafina, also was from an established family background. One thing we discussed was WWII. Dr. Z remembered the Japanese invasion and described being hoisted onto the horse of a Japanese officer who would trot him around. He recalled the invaders of two types—the highly civilized Japanese officers of one part of the invasion and the more sadistic soldiers of another part of the invasion. My Dad had been a physician in Guadalcanal, so I was very curious about these events. He recalled that Japanese officer took a genial interest in the young lad he was then was of the former group.

At a certain point, we took up golf and took we began lessons an infinitely patient and politic instructor named Dan, whose best teaching attribute was totally non-reactivity to our level of play.  tSteve Bornhoft, then the Editor of the News Herald, joined our threesome.  Dr. Zumarraga could hit the ball with a reasonably degree of frequency, though one shot, I recall, careened off a nearby golf cart and nearly hit the instructor.  He stayed remarkably youthful, appearing slender though slightly mesomorphic, despite approaching what must have been about fifty at that time. We seemed to progress at about the same speed which provided some insulation from a conspicuous self-awareness of lagging other golfers on the course.

Dr. Z had a knack for finding competent people to surround him. Ted Winscheif ran his office rather ferociously, which could be good or bad based on what side of Ted you were on. Ted always gave me a pass for whatever office infractions I made—in fact, after a particularly bad financial setback trading stocks, I kicked an object and broke it and Ted quietly fixed it.  If you wanted an office that was well run, though, there was no better person than Ted. Though I forget the details, Ted had a military past, and a sort of Prussian demeanor and was excellent at books—a type of bureaucratic green beret. When Ted died, it must be twenty years ago, the family took very good care of him. There was always a sense of solidarity within the office.  The secretaries and billing people were first rate—stable, honest, and with good social skills.  The HR skills of a physician cannot be underrated since the staff is what the public deals with.

Dr. Z had a debonair style and appearance. Yet I never saw him flirt. Every occasionally, he would act gallantly, if the situation really called for it, but he was extremely devoted to his wife, Serafina, and it would be inconceivable to ever imagine him capitulating to the professional mores of that time and place, and Panama City then could be rather libertine, depending on the individual. He was solid  that way. Every day there would be lunch in the office, with good food—it was like working in a very finely appointed home.  And the financial dealings of the office, of concern to me since I was paying rent even though I felt I was more than just a renter, were always  regular and fair. It was just a well-run system, and I imagined it must have reflected some exposure, back in the Philippines to very well run, established family system where these things came naturally. Work ethic was first rate, and the one strained interaction I had with Dr. Z over the decades was him chastising me in an exasperated tone for not working hard enough, during some personal period of ill-advised spring break gaiety on my part in that town.

Dr Z tended to be medically model oriented and common sensical. He was less interested in theoretical discussions of personality or pathology. His notes were complete with a finely aristocratic handwriting style.  One got the impression that he had the type of upbringing where he could have chosen various fields—public administration or service, medicine, engineering, government or military and display equal finesse. His descriptions of medical school were at times comic—sleeping aside his medical school cronies in a room with a dissecting cadaver, his various professors and so forth.  He had a stint as a plastic surgeon in a gynecology practice, providing aesthetic surgery for women traveling in from various Asian hotspots with unlimited resources to tweak every aspect of their physical attractiveness. That easy grasp of medical and biological concepts made him excellent in situations where patients had multiple physical problems, since he could address all the interacting systems, not just psychiatric, and do so reliably and consistently. That discernment allowed him to shift into multiple consulting roles along the way.

At a personal level, Dr. Z was quite kind and generous to me. There was no need to for him to help a fledgling psychologist or provide the ongoing personal and professional help he did, nor any particular advantage he derived from having me in his office.  He seemed to operate more out of a sense of commitment and good will than self-interest, and, by and by,  it was a stroke of luck to be able to have known him.