When Michael Klibaner saw his future bride walking down the aisle in Puerto Rico during their wedding in 2004, he burst into tears.
Klibaner has a reputation for being analytical – especially in science and math high school, where he met his future wife and this reporter – and the logic would be that he saw Amy enough in the 13 years they went out to his to maintain calm.
The large brain is often only overshadowed by a larger heart.
“Mike was a big juice,” said Amy Klibaner, his wife of almost 17 years. “He’s the man who would cry over Hallmark card ads.”
These days, though, it’s everyone’s turn to cry.
Klibaner died on April 14 due to complications from Covid-19 – less than a month before he would have turned 48.
What makes the loss more devastating for his family and friends is that he seems to have recovered from a relatively manageable case of the virus in his New York home, relieved that he did not need an emergency trip to an overcrowded hospital during the early weeks of the pandemic. When he collapsed in the bathroom of the apartment he shared with his wife and their 9-year-old daughter, he was brushing his teeth to get ready for his first walk outside in two weeks.
He went into cardiac arrest when paramedics took him down the stairs, which would be the result of a massive pulmonary embolism.
“They took him to the hospital, and I called about an hour later that he was dead,” Amy Klibaner said. “It was just so unexpected.”
The loss was so sudden, so devastating, that it was only ten months later that his family could talk about it. It is only now that this reporter can ask the questions.
His daughter, Sidney, who turns 10 in June, likes to look at a photo from her childhood in Shanghai in which she is propped up on her father’s lap, and she grabs one hand to his bowl of noodles to steal his food, as she puts it it. The picture reminds her of her father’s smile. He smiled a lot.
“My favorite moment with him is when we swam together because we would chase and I would always win, but sometimes I would let him,” she said in an email.
Born on May 7, 1972 in Brooklyn, Klibaner was destined for a life of learning as the son of two science teachers.
In some ways, he grew up an ordinary suburban kid on Staten Island, riding his bike, watching baseball, and collecting trading cards. Less typical were his extensive science projects in high school. One first-place project that particularly stands out for his father, Edwin: a study of how different wavelengths of light affect a shape that grows in horse manure.
“We went to Staten Island,” he said. “There were people who had horses, and we would ask them if we could take some of their manure.”
In the summer, the Klibaner family packed up their car and left nationwide for epic camping trips to national parks. And it was then that Michael was really in his element.
“We were always in the back of the suit, and Michael and his sister, Alyssa, were always in the front of the suit with the rangers, and he always asked questions,” said Klibaner’s mother, Roberta. “He always had to know everything.”
It was therefore no surprise that Klibaner was eventually admitted to Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.
Even at a magnetic school that attracted so many other science and math miracles, Klibaner stood out as a student eager to learn more. “We hung out in math circles, and I remember being under the impression that he taught himself knot theory,” said classmate John Ledwith.
The resulting project in the stuffy field of advanced mathematics earned him a finalist in the prestigious Westinghouse National Science Talent Search.
In high school, Michael apparently knew everyone – including Amy, who at the time was just a girlfriend of a girlfriend. That changed as soon as they bumped into each other again on the ferry on Staten Island the summer after they graduated. Their relationship also graduated.
“We saw each other just like different people once we started getting to know each other,” Amy said.
In 1994, Klibaner graduated from Princeton University, where he majored in applied mathematics and maintained a lifelong school pride.
After graduation, Klibaner began a career in finance before finding niche advice for dotcoms. A year after they got married, the couple moved to Shanghai. Klibaner, who could start a conversation on almost any topic with anyone, made a great impression with a guest at a friend’s wedding to get a job offer at the reception.
Two years later, he was appointed by the Asia-Pacific office of Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., a real estate company, where he was head of research for Greater China.
“He was a natural trainer and mentor to the staff, which is a good trait, especially in China, where we had a very young local workforce at the time who were eager to learn,” said Anthony Couse, five years’ boss, said the CEO of the company in Asia-Pacific.
One of Klibaner’s favorite maintenance questions for the young workforce: How many cows are there in all of China? He does not care for the answer; it was all about reasoning.
“Michael was not ashamed of the media either,” Couse said. “I could always count on him tackling the difficult TV interviews at 5am.”
Klibaner’s lifelong love of talking keeps him in demand as an expert on Asian real estate in Western stores such as Bloomberg and CNBC.
Sidney was born in 2011, and the family moved to Hong Kong two years later.
In Asia, the family had the opportunity to enjoy Klibaner’s greatest passion – traveling across the continent and beyond. Instead of a tent in a national park, however, he chooses a wine house in Capetown, South Africa.
Klibaner retained other hobbies. He may have outgrown baseball tickets, but he collected a lot. He kept extensive databases that required a degree in advanced mathematics to decipher – whether it cataloged bourbon, contemporary Chinese art, or even the movies he watched.
He also loved debating politics, and he found much about President Donald Trump to argue about. “He knew something about everything in the world,” his mother said. “And if you read his Facebook posts, you know you had an opinion on every thing.”
By the summer of 2019, Klibaner was between jobs when he attended his 25th year reunion. Because Klibaner and his wife were so close to their families, they considered moving back. They did it in August.
While they were here, Klibaner looked forward to passing on his own love of learning to his daughter.
“When we moved back to New York, we got family members at the zoos, the museums and stuff like that,” Amy said. “And so we were very much looking forward to utilizing all the cultural institutions here.”
They did not get much chance before Michael became ill.
Then everything changed.
His sister, Alyssa Geibel, comforts her these days watching YouTube clips of the media interviews Klibaner did in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
“Just seeing him alive and well and doing his job brings tears of happiness,” Geibel said. “I’m like, ‘Oh, this is my brother. ‘
There is no mathematical formula for dealing with grief – even almost ten months later.
“I often get caught up in concentrating on the loss,” says Amy, “and forget to remember the peculiarities that made Mike who he was.”