What to do with the room where Mom died?
Two days after my mother died, the grief is immobilizing in its formlessness. My brothers, my Dad and I are too alone with it, unprotected. It seems clear that we will need some kind of gathering, some structure for our mourning. But in my secular leftwing family, my father doesn’t feel a connection to shivah, to Kaddish, and he and my brothers won’t abide by God-language. Over the years I’ve been learning, falteringly, to translate some of this language internally so as to partake in some of the Judaic rituals and practices, which I find rich in meaning without needing to disavow my secular heritage. And now the Jewish rituals of mourning seem like they will help my family through this time, foreign as they may seem to us at first. I put out a call to several rabbi friends – do you know someone here in New York City who might be able to help to create some kind of shivah and rituals of mourning that could work for this family?
***
Michael Posnick’s name comes through a mutual friend. Michael and I have met a couple of times over the years through work in theater. He is not a rabbi – that would disqualify him, for Dad. But he’s a learned Jew. And on the phone with him, I can tell immediately, a mensch. I ask him what his parents did for a living. My father was a grocer, my mom a homemaker. What is your relationship with shivah? My wife died 18 months ago, and I led shivah there in our apartment.
This Michael Posnick, I tell Dad, he comes from a working-class family. Not a rabbi, but when he lost his wife recently, he led the shivah. Michael sounds like a good man, says Dad. Let’s meet with him. Michael comes over to the apartment, connects with Dad straightaway. They talk about losing their wives. Dad tells Michael his misgivings about rabbis, about Judaism (though there’s some yearning mixed in there, as I’ve detected over the years). Michael looks around the living room, the art on the walls, the shelves lined with books and CDs. What is the music Wendy loved, who are the writers she looked to? Who were her parents? We plan for a gathering with Yiddish and secular readings, with Pete Seeger’s songs. A time for a small group of their oldest remaining friends to remember Mom together with us. Will you want to say Kaddish? Michael asks. Dad stiffens a bit, unfamiliar, suspicious. I don’t know about that. There are secular interpretations of the Kaddish, I offer. Mom was a peace activist, bringing us as children along to marches and to moratoriums in Washington DC to stop the war in Vietnam. Those were some of our closest times as a family. Here’s a Kaddish interpretation that is about building peace in the world:
Let us praise the glory of life. Let us make life sacred with love and respect. Let us celebrate life. Let us work to create peace here on earth for all peoples. Let us find comfort in each other. And let us say, Amen.
Michael adds – Kaddish is for the living, Nat. But of course it’s up to you.
Later that day with Dad and my brothers, planning for the gathering, we are all comforted that people will be coming over to the house. Dad, I ask, what about Kaddish? I don’t think so, he says. I don’t understand the language, it’s not….and then he pauses, looks me in the eyes, and says – but I won’t stop anyone who wants to say it. I would stand with you.
At the shivah, the group – many in their 90s, some recently widowed themselves – share their stories about Mom. In their presence, we feel the mourning as a collective process. Still, I am not ready to have Mom be in the past only; I cannot say a word. I appreciate shivah’s understanding that the mourners do not entertain or host, nor even necessarily be inquired of as to their emotional state. Mourners should just be held in the space and allowed to be shattered. The group sings “Turn, Turn, Turn”. I listen, am not ready to sing. We stand together and we do recite the Kaddish.
***
The next week is Sukkot. For the first time since Mom was suddenly hospitalized a month ago with a diagnosis of acute leukemia, I go back to Philadelphia to be with Sara and Zevi, my partner and our daughter. In our Sukkah with some friends, now at the end of the shivah week, I have a desire to shake the Lulav and Etrog in the six directions – not a practice I have done before. And to somehow connect this practice to the mourning. As I tentatively enact the ancient movements, my mind comes alive with images. I remember some of Mom’s connections to the directions – to the North, as I start to shake, Goldens Bridge, the cooperative leftwing Jewish village where we grew up in our summers, and where she connected so deeply to the land and to communal child raising. Facing East, I acknowledge Olshan, the shtetl where her mother’s family had lived for generations. I’m less sure as I shake to the South. Later, memories come to me of how much Mom and Dad loved experiencing the teeming life of the Galapagos, once we were all grown and out of the house. To the West, her dear cousin Roz, California where we’d all visited our cousins many times. Upwards, the question forms, where is Mom’s soul? And the winds of the early autumn blow through the thatchy walls and schakh of magnolia and mulberry branches of the Sukkah’s roof, speaking of cycles, of loss, of change. When I shake the wand of willow, palm, myrtle down toward myself, I am humbled to feel that this body, this heart and mind, is one of the places where my Mom still is. I came to life and grew inside her body, and now in death perhaps she still lives somewhere in mine. How do I make the space in here for her to continue to dwell?
On the train back to New York to take care of Dad, I wonder how to deal with the room where Mom breathed her last breaths, the memory of her body there in the hours after, the four of us weeping and in shock. Her death still hangs heavily in the air when I’m in there to take care of household details. Burn sage, perhaps, wave smoke through the space and out into the open air, as we say Kaddish again? Comes a quick internal rebuke: ‘this is appropriating native ritual’. I mention the notion of burning sage to a friend whose ancestors are from Japan and who works as a community organizer in South Philadelphia’s neighborhood of immigrants from Laos, Vietnam, Korea, South Asia. Of course, she replies – there’s always herbs and smoke in our homes when someone dies.
For the next three weeks of the shloshim, the idea of the sage and Kaddish seems comforting. The hospital bed has long been cleared out, but we can’t bring ourselves to be in the room. My brothers also feel some need to somehow transition the space. Maybe when our cousin Paula is here – Roz’s daughter – and husband David, coming in from California for the memorial service. Maybe when they are with us we can recite the Kaddish and light the sage smudge-stick I’ve purchased. I suggest this to Dad. Fine, he responds, we’ll say Kaddish in there. But no sage, no smoke. Understood, Pop. Too much.
***
We gather in the apartment with our cousins the night before the memorial. Paula is our cousin who knew my grandparents best, who had the first 10 years of her life with the extended mispucha in Brooklyn. After her own parents moved Paula and her brothers to California in 1956, three years before I was born, Paula never got over the loss of her dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins, the spirited family seders in my grandparents’ basement, the Yiddish singing, her big cousin Wendy, the whole immigrant cultural world that could not be further emigrated with them out west. An extended family I never knew, though I somehow felt the huge absence I was born into. I observe Paula standing quietly in the kitchen, looking around at the cabinets and the tchachkes on the shelves. I’m feeling Wendy in this space, she says. So familiar. I remember those, she points at the tiles painted with scenes of a Yemenite Jewish family carrying bundles of firewood and vegetables that my grandparents brought back from Israel in the early 1950s. Later I find Paula gazing up at the bookshelf in the living room, reading title after title on the spines of the books.
After dinner we gather in the room and recite Kaddish. It’s awkward, not quite the clearing I had hoped for.
But later in the evening, I overhear Paula in the room where Mom died, on the phone.
…Treyst mayn folk, es darf dee treyst;
shtarkt dos harts, makht fest dem gayst…
Be consoled, be consoled, my people;
Take comfort from your grief. Make strong your hearts…
She is practicing the pronunciation of the Yiddish poem she’ll be reading at the memorial service. Paula finds herself newly the matriarch of the family, with Roz’s recent death and now my Mom’s. Though not fluent, at the memorial tomorrow she will be the person there closest to Yiddish, a language my mother loved. Paula is working to get the sounds right. On speaker-phone coaching her is Hershl Hartman, at 92 a prominent leader of secular Yiddish culture and ritual, who has generously given us resources and texts for the service. And so our ancestral language is being spoken in the room where Mom died. The Yiddish is its own smoke of offering, seeming as a pathway for Mom’s soul to connect with her parents, my grandparents, the ancestors. If this all seems to veer toward a supernatural I don’t usually delve in, I am not concerned. I’m getting it in my kishkes – the feel of the words in the air, Paula’s presence, Hershl’s support.
Later, I’m sitting in the room by myself for a moment, organizing some family photos. My younger brother Steve enters. Before it became the office where Mom saw her therapy clients in her last decades, this was our shared bedroom for 15 years as boys, a space of play and wrestling, a refuge for us of closeness, the Empire State Building our nightlight just a few blocks away. As we talk through some details about tomorrow’s reception after the memorial service, Steve asks me if I’m going to speak at the service. I’m going to try, I tell him. You? I wrote something, but I won’t be able to say it. Why not, I ask. I don’t want to break down in front of everyone. He begins to cry. I pull a chair closer, put a hand on his leg. After a moment of weeping he takes out his phone. Can I read it to you? A beautiful story about him and Mom, intimate, elegant, aching. More tears, both of us. Who knows, I tell him, maybe you’ll decide to speak, even at the last minute would be fine.
***
At the memorial service the next day, Paula begins her brief eulogy by telling of her own parents. When Roz began to go into labor at their apartment on the Lower East Side, she and Milt got straight on the subway to my grandparents’ home in Brooklyn. It was Grandpa William who delivered Paula. She continues – and when I became a mother, I would bring my babies to Wendy and Nat’s house. And in the next generation, my children brought their babies there too.
Then she speaks the poem she’d practiced, by Yitskhok Leybish Peretz.
| ..Shtarkt dos harts makht fest dem gayst. | Make strong your hearts; your spirits, firm. |
| zayt nisht der vint vos lesht dee flam | Be not the wind that blows out the flame |
| nor blozt zee oyf vayl nakht iz sam! | But the breeze that makes it glow |
- Translation, Hershl Hartman
Peretz, who my Grandma Sarah had commended to us of the next generations in an essay we found amidst a folio of her writings about Yiddish poets and playwrights, secretly published under pseudonyms, discovered 20 years after her death high in a closet in our apartment. Among the Yiddish writers of his generation, Grandma wrote, Peretz was “the greatest and most enduring” in his deep love and respect for the poor Jews of the Pale. She describes several of his stories in which Hasidic rabbis (turns out Grandma Sarah’s own grandfather was one, the Gedrewitzer rebbe) preferred the tumult of daily Jewish life and struggle to a formalistic and elitist orthodoxy. Peretz foresaw a time in which secular Jewish writers, artists and educators would inspire and lead the Jewish people. I discover in Peretz, then, a companion in trespassing between the secular and religious worlds.
There is comfort in hearing Paula speak the Yiddish words. And she closes – “and Wendy’s soul is gathered to her ancestors now”. That phrase brings tears; it is becoming understandable.
***
Dad has dreams, he tells us, where Mom comes to him, though she hasn’t yet spoken to him in them. Maybe there is some way I can keep opening my mind, Dad wonders, that will allow her to come to me more, to talk with me.
In the weeks after Mom died, I found myself going again and again to the Hudson River. I feel the unspoken, ordinary closeness of having been alive there next to her and us looking out at the water. And there’s the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, and the New York Harbor becomes a place where I remember her and our ancestors together.
I don’t have a synagogue community or prayer practice for saying Kaddish with a minyan. I do have a network of close comrades from all backgrounds who understand that crying and moving emotion out through the body and the mind is essential to recovering from loss, and for living with solidarity and purpose. With them I cry my way through the days, saying goodbye, remembering Mom and our relationship back to when I was a small boy.
Mom did not have the chance to mourn her own parents when they died in her late 20s – she had the three of us boys to take care of, all under four years old. As I got older, I could feel where the loss had scarred over in her. Now I start to see what it takes to grieve – the time, the support of a community, an ongoing structure. For the year after the loss of a parent, as I can now see, traditional Jewish practice around death seeks to balance the mourner’s attention, understanding the needs to grieve, to keep remembering the loved one, and gradually to move outwards to more deeply embrace life. The ideas about how saying Kaddish assists the departed soul’s ascension seem beyond me. But after an extended cry from the bottom of my belly I do feel calmer, more connected, better able to function the next day. And with Mom closer in my mind, there is some discernible upward movement between memory and the present.
***
At the memorial service, our friends and family tell stories of the decades of their relationships with Mom. My boyhood friends show up, and cousins and family friends we haven’t seen in thirty or fifty years. Many from Goldens Bridge, three generations of families from our village. I am surprised; my family has a kind of amnesia that there are still people who know and love us. My friends lead more Pete Seeger’s songs, part of our liturgy. I find that I am able to sing this time.
I give my talk. Given the strictures of how I grew up, what guy cries openly in public? But what gathering may ever happen where you can tell people are on your side as you become a bearer of your mother’s story? So I talk through the tears, I pause and weep, I talk some more. My older brother Daniel speaks, then my father, both facing out bravely at our community to say their words about Mom. During Dad’s talk, I look over at Steve, give a small gesture with my chin toward the podium. His eyes go wide to me for a moment, considering; then a slight shaking of his head, no. After Dad finishes. I help him down from the podium. And when I look back up, there is Steve starting to speak.
Now Michael leads the group in reciting a piece from the Book of Psalms, translated from Hebrew to Yiddish by the poet Yehoyish (Grandma Sarah told us about him too, and how he translated the entire Hebrew Bible into Yiddish), and then adapted into English by Hershl:
| It is well for the person who in the paths of evil did not stand, | voyl iz dem mentshn vos iz nit gegangen in der eytse fun dee reshoyim
un oyf dem veg fun dee zindike iz nit geshtanen |
| And who did not sit among the cynics. | un in der zitsung fun dee shpeter iz nit gezesn. |
| And they will be as trees planted by the waters | un zey veln zayn vee beymer geflantste bay bekhn vaser |
| Which bring forth fruits in their time; | vos git zeyer frukht in zeyer tsayt |
| And their leaves are not withered, | un zeyer blat vert nit farvelkt |
| And in all that they do they will triumph. | un in alts vos zey tuen veln zey baglikn |
I’m struck to find here the trees planted by the waters – that “We Shall Not be Moved” (the labor, civil rights and peace anthem that Mom sang with us) has this biblical origin. Held by the Psalm, I can see that Mom did not go in for cynicism, that she never stopped trying hard for her principles, and never stopped reaching for me. And I begin to accept that she is now in memory only. And that in this time that is after her lifetime, feeling these attributes of her is perhaps what is meant by the phrase – may her memory being for a blessing.
And like the tree that’s planted by the waters, We shall not be moved
Is this about her soul being gathered to the ancestors, to join that grove of trees that is planted there, to be tended? That we might find a path to that place, and there to remember her? Is this how it works?
After the reception, my brothers, my Dad and I get into a cab to the apartment just before the rain starts, carrying the flowers and a large folio of photos of Mom. We remain brokenhearted; it will be a long year of mourning ahead for the four of us. But sharing stories of Mom, and reciting and singing, and breaking bread together afterwards on the sidewalk café there on the upper West Side, our community had reconstituted itself in love for her, and us. We sense the possibility for continued reconnection, and the shared honor of keeping her memory alive.
Back at the apartment, sometimes at night after a day of taking care of Dad I’ll go into the room. I’ll call one of my people. We may say a line or two of the Kaddish. A memory of Mom can come back, and tears. Then a few more of the ancient words together. It’s part of living now.
