Monday, October 27, 2014
We will bury her tomorrow.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
She fought all the way through the end, at first, maybe fighting to stay alive, then fighting to die: refusing medicine, refusing food, simply refusing, I think, to live. I had not seen her for two years, a time that coincided with her descent into dementia. My cousin Suzy said she spoke with a death 'n' dying expert who said that her children had to visit her and give her permission to let go. I am, to say the least, sceptical of such stuff, but I went. She was unconscious and looked every inch a concentration camp inmate tossed on a pile of other mangled corpses. She had recently taken a fall when for some reason she tried to get out of her wheelchair and took a face plant, so there she was with half her face deep purple, her forehead split, wearing a collar, her face contorted. Jaw slack. Hands and wrists like bird claws. One hundred years and eight months. How could she still be alive? My sister went to do some business at the front desk. I stayed awhile, then I said, "OK, mom. I'm heading back to LA", and walked from the room. This was about six p.m., maybe seven. Her dying began shortly thereafter, and by 8:55 a.m., Sunday, she was gone.
There is more to this. As I've said elsewhere, a lot of what but very little why, at least, not to me.
My trip to Baltimore, city of my birth, had been planned for weeks. It would include old friends, family, and my first visit to the Morgan campus in fifty years. It began the Tuesday before her death. I finished closing our home for Winter in the Catkills and drove the Jeep to Boston where I left it with my daughter. I spent two delicious days with Madden until Thursday morning when she took me to South Station for a seven hour train ride to Baltimore. Madden urged me to see my mother (she had a much more benign image of Bubbe based on having once done her nails), but I had no plans to do so and, though I hate to refuse Madden anything, was right adamant about it.
Fifteen minutes later than scheduled my train arrived at Penn Station, Baltimore, a railroad station my family had used even before my birth. Beloved Uncle Milton always arrived from New York City at Penn Station, and when my father came to pick me up -- a slick sleeve grunt on leave from four months in the Marine Corps, swaggering like an old salt -- he walked right by me. "Dad," I called. He stopped, turned around, gasped, and stifled a sob. This night, however, when I'd just arrived from Boston, an old high school buddy picked me up and took me for the ritual Chesapeake Bay dinner: crab soup and a back fin crabcake the size of a softball. Two beers and a martini later, we might as well have been back in high school. We were having that much fun. But, when with friends, the conversation invariably came around to my mother. She was famous among my friends. Most of them had only seen the side she chose to show them, mostly an energetic and enthusiastic side. She was a lot of fun one friend recently told me. People have good memories of her. Howard asked about her. She'd barely been awake for months, didn't recognize anybody any more. Are you going to see her, he asked? Not planning to. "You should." Why? "It's a mitzvah," he said, a mitzvah, in this case, being a good deed, a fine thing to have on your spiritual resume. "She won't even know me, worse if she does." "Go," he said, "Say goodbye." "Suppose she's not awake?" "Do it anyway." "Why? And don't gimme that horseshit about it being my mother. I know who she is. She's why we're having this conversation." Howard's a really good guy, a mensch di tutti menschen, so I told him I'd think about it.
The next day I had lunch with Carolyn Wainwright, the first actress ever to do a play of mine when we were both students at Morgan. She was a Dotson back then, fifty years ago. We laughed and yakked away and heartily enjoyed each other's company. And then she asked how my mother was. She remembered her as a cheerful, funny lady, easy to be with. I told her of my mother's condition and that I hadn't seen her since she entered deep dementia two years ago. "You have to go see her," said Carolyn. "Why?" "Because she gave you life." She was adamant. I told her I'd think about it. That was Friday. When I went to bed that evening I was teetering on the edge. I meant what I'd said to Howard: worse than unconscious would be conscious. I'd kept a life time of crazy mostly at bay, and I wasn't about to put myself in danger again at this end stage of a long and bloody war.
I woke up the next morning not knowing why only what: I would go to see her. I asked my sister who reluctantly said yes and my brother who said no, and Ellen suggested a time much later in the day, down to the last possible nanosecond that the place our mother was in would let us through the door. My sister delayed, and I was just as happy to be delayed except I also wanted to get it over with. As I already told you, this was late in the day on Saturday, nearly seven. Then Sunday morning. You know the rest.
The cousins' get together was as scheduled Sunday afternoon at Peggy's, cousins and cousins of cousins, so the talk was mostly about Aunt Lizzy. It was good to be with them. They knew her well and remembered her as the one who introduced us all to culture: art museums, symphonies, theatre. She was the one who threw all the cousins into her 1940 Ford and took us to West Virginia on back roads. She was a Jew from North Fork and bragged about how she was delivered by Dr. Hatfield of the Hatfields and the McCoys. Come to think of it, and I mean really come to think of it as in right this instant come to think of it, Aunt Lizzy never touched one of the cousins, and I can't remember any of them being berated until they were adults and off with their own families when she could find nothing good to say about any of them. The funeral was set for Tuesday morning. Monday was my planned visit to Morgan, and there was no way I would miss it. Tuesday morning. My Cousin Suzy offered her home as the shiva house.
There are orthodox women who volunteer to bathe and dress the dead. She was wrapped in a shroud with a prayer shawl around her shoulders and placed in what seemed to me a hastily made pine box. The lid had a Star of David on it, but it was no snug join. One corner was slightly off. She would have had a fit. The coffin stayed closed. She had been a tiny woman, yet it appeared so big I had to wonder at her in there? She never broke four-eleven and was much smaller as she aged. Was it so that she was truly in that box? That's what was in my mind, and it stayed there as the coffin lowered into the earth, and one by one mourners lined up to pitch a shovel of dirt into the grave. Each made a hollow sound when it hit the lid. I didn't participate. I just watched; and, when everyone else returned to their cars, I simply stood there looking down into the grave. The dirt. The lid. The Star of David. Was she really in there? Where was her temper now? Why wasn't she banging her heels and flailing about? Had her temper cut loose (like a soul some would say) and soared up into the stratosphere to wage eternal war with the winds? Years before she'd said to my nephew, "Jonathan, if Uncle Stephen cries at my funeral, you have my permission to break his nose." I'm sure you're relieved to know that a punch to the nose was never needed. Put that in a eulogy. I think I just beat myself to it.
What nags at me is the symmetry of it all. A trip that had been planned for weeks to include family time did just that. My bags were already packed and loaded into my sister's car, an easy transfer from her car to my brother's at the cemetery. The shiva house was a half hour away. My cousin Suzy had spread a table with every kosher delicacy Baltimore had to offer. We got to the shiva house at two, stayed till four, then my brother, Joel, took me to the airport. At 6:40 p.m. my plane to LA took off. The flight had been booked for weeks. Exquisite timing. Some might say cosmic. There could not have been a more perfect plan they say. "You were in Baltimore. You gave her permission to go." A grand coincidence. Still. Here's what I read somewhere: "When I pray, coincidences happen. When I don't, they don't." I don't necessarily subscribe to this, but standing by her bedside looking at this battered creature I wanted her out of her misery. I didn't think of this as a prayer, not then, anyway, just a wish for her to be peaceful. What to make of it? Out there is a multiverse of infinite questions and infinite possibilities, and you shouldn't trust me for the answers. I might have them, but that doesn't make me right. Yet, lurking in some faraway corner of my brain is the notion of all this having been pulled together without me. It seems in some far corner of my brain that I might be a witness to my own disbelief.
She's dead for sure. She hasn't clawed her way to the surface. She remains where she was put. However -- here we need a drum roll -- it really doesn't feel that much different than it ever has. Like Robert DeNiro as Jake Lamotta after he had taken a beating from Sugar Ray Robinson. Barely able to stand without holding onto the ropes, Lamotta taunts him. "I'm still standin', Ray. I'm still standin'." Me 'n' Jake, priding ourselves that we're each still standing. I'm not saying there's no work to be done. Even now, at this late stage, there's still plenty of it. I haven't reached nirvana, yet (the Jewish version), but I know that bitterness and anger are not the trails to take. Recently, someone told me I was kind. I've never thought of myself that way nor had anyone ever said that to me. I liked it. It was nice. Kind. Yes. That's a new one on me, but I'll take it.
