Jewish Funerals
from regardless by annie
Everything is in boxes again. I’m fumbling over my words, picking fights I shouldn’t, running from the wave of grief that will eventually shut me down. I tinker around my new apartment, rearranging the same things over and over again in this new space. I drive to our old place to put a few items at a time into my car. It keeps me busy, going back and forth, tinkering and loitering.
I’m packing and unpacking instead of sitting in how I should feel. I rewash the same article of clothing worn only briefly for an excuse to go up and down the stairs again. Part of me wants to bolt out of town, get so far from what I’m sitting in here. I could fly to California, watch the ocean boil, simmer and sink into a sandy coastline.
It’s funeral season for my family. We will have two within a short time period, but we are somehow experts in not talking about it when together. We get to talk about babies and dogs and what’s for dinner instead.
Last week we bought enough food and beverage for the two upcoming post-funeral Shivas. We crack jokes about how the hundred-count pack of cups won’t go to waste. We deliberate over which type of white wine to get. (What do people usually drink after a funeral? Bloody Marys? A forty-pack of High Noons? A giant handle of Tito’s?) I push for the French white selfishly. The heat wave has rolled in and it’s time for an outdoor ceremony followed by a selection of beverages and cured meats.
I’m afraid of going to bed. In the morning we’ll encircle a cross-section of graves and bury one of our own inside of it. It will be one hundred degrees outside as we stand in mourning black, polyester dresses and full suits. My grandfather is to be right next to his wife, for hopefully forever.
My boyfriend has never been to a Jewish funeral. Here, we bring stones and pebbles to place on top of the headstones. I throw one in my bag before we leave the old house in the morning, nearly forgetting. The rock is nearly heart-shaped. He asks what the stones are about afterwards, and we explain it to him. During it all, the rock is in my purse and the pits of my knees are sweating.
The Rabbi, in his introduction, says those of us in suits are encouraged to take off their ties and jackets. The man we are burying is a physician, he says, he would not want us to pass out over the drama.
But, we’re Jews, and we love the drama. As if in retaliation, nobody takes their jackets off. We have all made some kind of bed of sitting in the heat, the stickiness and have vowed to lay in it without discussion. We are choking on the heat and crying. An hour or two later we take turns shoveling dirt on top of my grandpa’s casket, leaving momentos as we go. Notes and four leaf clovers, photographs. The wooden handles slip in our hands, as we bury him and pass the shovel to the person behind us.
In hindsight, it is probably the most Jewish funeral of all time to be my boyfriend’s introduction on Jewish grieving, and our uncomfortable, quiet, modern ceremony of it all.
Hours later we are in a house nobody lives in anymore, rifling through the drawer beneath the wet bar for a wine key. I crank open and eventually relish my glass and a half of that bottle of white we bought the other day. The cousins quietly escape to the basement, musing something about the AC being better down there or about it being a calmer environment for the baby. Grandpa’s palm pilot is still charging on the floor. A thank-you note I wrote him years ago on the corner of the desk. A bookshelf is lined with his favorite fossils and creepy, caricature mugs, others with first editions of medical textbooks. The walls are dotted with framed photographs of his taking. He always loved trinkets, hobbies and mechanical things.
We all used to play down here as kids, twenty years ago, running in circles and throwing each other at the wallpaper. We would trample upstairs for dinner at their big, fancy table and make faces at each other in the mirror. I wonder, writing this, if we’ll ever be together in that basement again. Eventually, the house will be sold, and every item displaced. Decades of thank-you cards thrown away. Clothes donated. The plants will die, especially if they wind up in my care.
For a few hours, we cool off and eat cold bagels with lox and capers. The sixty of us make lazy trips to the coolers for another beer. My boyfriend and I stay late into the afternoon to break down the party in nobody’s house, taking care to wipe and tidy. Pack flavors of cream cheese back into quart containers. Nothing can go to waste, so the lox goes home with my mom. I pilfer a Diet Coke on my way out. I figure, there are still thirty cans in there for the next luncheon after the next funeral.
We go back to our old place after the shiva to pack our own kitchen up for its own kind of end. The movers are supposed to come the following morning. I apologize to them that we didn’t have time to finish packing the kitchen, as the funeral put us behind. The brothers in my house say, we went to a funeral yesterday too, for their uncle. I’m so sorry for your loss.
Days later and the house is unpacked. My grandfather is still buried. A summer storm has broken the heat wave. I’m stocking our new kitchen with eggs and bread and scrolling online for bathroom storage options. The sunset looks so pretty through the treetops, speckling into the sunroom.
My grandfather, Dr. Richard Aach, was one of the best physicians of his generation. He brought his wife and children to London, and then all around the US, on his incredible lifelong career. His CV was heavy to hold. I even got to accompany some family members as a child when he was indoctrinated into the Clayton High School Hall of Fame. To me, however, he was never a physician, professor, or public health researcher. He was just my grandpa, toting around a chunky camera bag on family vacations to photograph the birds. He bought me lens protectors and other gadgets years later when I got my own digital camera, he was so excited. He loved his wife dearly.
This is by no means a eulogy to an incredible life lived. Just, maybe, a snapshot of grief as it can be, awkward and creepy and long. A bookend to a life, the beginning of a strange new chapter beginning without them in it. Over everything is a film of complex, regret-filled sadness that I can see through enough to ignore it for the day.
I make a list of things to do.
