Tag Archives: death

Dear Mom

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Recently, I have welcomed some friends to the unfortunate club of children who have lost parents.

The finality of it all.  And the guilt that life must go on.   I remember how hard it was to breathe sometimes.

What I don’t dare tell them is that after 7+ years, the snapshot I hold of you in my mind — white-haired wig, tennis sneakers, slacks, blouse (Dad didn’t like you in turtlenecks) and an Eddie Bauer or J. Crew woolen zip-up sweater — is getting a little vague and dimmed as time goes by.  I have razor-sharp memories of many, many things — throughout the years and especially during the month before your death — but the sound of your voice, Mom, the sound of your voice, exists only in my imitation of what I remember of it. Has that become the memory and is your voice lost to me?

You are still a force in my life. I was recently at a company retreat and there were over 300 people I didn’t know.  I just pretended to be you — the way you would walk into a room and find ways to meet and really talk with — well, up to then — strangers.  My mantra, “just be Mom,” enables me to work the room but never like you, the master.  You had a way (mine is diluted with Dad’s bluntness) of making people feel, as if when talking to you, no one else in the world existed and you had all the time in the world to chat.  And they were right, you remembered everything and you were interested in them and what made them happy or sad and, if they seemed lonely, then — whether they liked it or not — they had to come to every holiday at our house.  I feel that way, too, about people I meet, but sometimes my directness (ok, Dad’s genes again) turns them off.

To be fair to Dad, life in the fast-paced world of corporate law (and its diminishing economic rewards) make bluntness a relevant and useful tool.  I try to do it á la Larry King (I know, I know, you stopped watching him once he started interviewing headline catchers and hangers-on), with a directness that is a little self-effacing but gets the point across.  You see, Mom, I realize that since you died at an age a full 25 years younger than when your parents died, that I cannot rely on the fullness of time for people to come around.  In truth, that is a cop-out.  I am not as patient as you.  And although I believe in the goodness of people and their senses of fundamental fairness, I have a more cynical streak.  Since you died before the invasion of Iraq, you are just going to have to trust me that some Republicans and those who are leaders of the military-industrial complex are beyond redemption.

But then again you missed the heady days following Barack Hussein Obama’s election as the 44th President of the United States of America.  That would have lifted your soul.  The sheer promise of America in those moments would have made your eyes well with tears.  He has been attacked and stymied at every turn, but, Mom, he is a transformational leader for our country and our generation.  When I see the political machinations going on, I have to dig deep and believe as you that what is true and right will prevail.

Wow, after all of this, I guess you’re not so fuzzy after all.  Even though the picture of you is getting fuzzy, you live on in my mind, my heart and my soul.

I really appreciate this talk.  And I appreciate your stopping by in my dreams.  When I am sick, could you remember to say, “my poor tsakele, if I could have it for you I would”?  That always helped.  Even your grandson needs to hear me say it “just like Grandma would’ve” when he is sick.  And I totally get it.  You never want your child to hurt even the teensiest bit.  Maybe that is why you hang around, to ease our pain.

Ok, I am not ready to dive in the with the “G-d thing” but I believe that your life force abides.  That’s as far as I am willing to go on the “everlasting” subject.  You are going to have to win me over on that one.  This is going to test your patience.  (I was never the easy child.)

I love you.  Now I am remembering that you did have a few cashmere turtlenecks, notwithstanding Dad’s preference otherwise, under your sweaters.  (We still wear them.)

Love,

Me

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The most universal of tragedies

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Life is a journey.  From birth to inescapable, uncheatable, death.  We accept this cycle of life and the orderly progression from youth to elderly to . . . nothingness or life everlasting, depending on one’s view and religion.

But what breaks a person’s (my) heart is knowing — however tangentially — parents who must bury their children, and grandparents unable to comprehend or comfort their own grieving children.  Since the 1950s, the death of a child breaks social and religious compacts, both having evolved from greater longevity and higher standards of living.  Not long ago, parents buried children in this country all too often.  Still, as a parent, I cannot imagine the pain and grief of those parents, just as I cannot imagine the pain and grief of parents of a girl recently found dead in her dorm room at college.

A life and future snuffed out and a family in tatters.  And, depending on the cause of death, other young lives guilty for not preventing the loss or complicit in causing the loss.  I look back on my college years and wonder how I survived the colossally stupid things I did.  I think about the way I cavalierly put my life and limb at risk in crazy, drunken escapades in the snowy mountains of New Hampshire. And, yet, I survived.  Why?

There is no rhyme or reason to who lives and who dies, who is born into riches and who is mired in poverty and who is blessed and who cursed.  Yes, biblical and epic struggles between humans and G-d are unleashed again in times of gut-wrenching sadness.

It is part of the human condition, I believe, to become inured to the death tolls in far-away Iraq and the famine in parts of far-away Africa, but be heart-sick at the death of a child barely considered “kin”.  Maybe because I am a parent.  Maybe because it didn’t happen in a faraway place or under circumstances outside my experiences.  Maybe because in the America of my hopes and dreams — and those of my parents and grandparents — things like this don’t happen.  The “shining beacon to the world” (if that is still true) is a little dimmed by each such senseless death.

There are many riffs on this — political, sociological, religious — but the fact remains that a young life is lost.  And that is just too much.  And, maybe we ought to think about every life this way.  But for right now, I am thinking locally not globally.

I only hope that the family of this young girl find some form of peace in their lifetimes.

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The greatest generation

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I know, I know. I write about death and destruction a lot. But life is like that. And movies and TV depict death and destruction with a certain enthusiasm that seems, well, ooky.

Today, I went to a friend’s father’s funeral. I didn’t know my friend’s father but I knew about his life.  I heard him speak once.  And his is a life story worth telling again and again, over and over.

He was born in Turkey and raised — before World War II — in France. He was a Jew and fled to the forests in unoccupied France.  There he met his wife and together, with others they met in hiding, fought with the Resistance.

I remember his saying at a talk at our synagogue that he never really thought of himself as a survivor in the same way that those who survived the concentration camps were survivors.

At the funeral, the rabbi asked those who hid with him to stand and three very old people slowly, and with assistance, stood, two of them very stooped over.  These old people did heroic things in a world gone haywire and they survived in a jungle of sorts where other humans were hunters and they were the game.

This man did the exact opposite of what was done to him. He loved, he gave generously of his time and his resources, he was grateful for life‘s gifts and, as someone at the funeral said, he didn’t blink when adversity hit.

He is truly the epitome of our greatest generation.  He saw the worst, endured the worst and gave his best back.

I didn’t know him but I stand on his shoulders and those like him — my own parents and grandparents — and therefore I need to pay my respects to a man who made possible the opportunities in my life.  For the debt I cannot repay to those who so willingly gave to me, I promise to pay it forward to the next generation, all the while telling the heroic stories of those who came before me.

Monsieur Henri, your memory is a blessing to all who know you and your family.

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The ties that bind

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Humans are bound together by many things (being human, for one).  But there is a litany of things that people say are intrinsic to being human and, therefore, we share.  If you read my blog before, you can imagine my eyes rolling at lofty connections.  But I came upon one tie that caught me quite by accident.

A person’s relationship with his/her hair stylist.  Most people don’t think about that relationship.  It is the only one where if you “step out”, you can’t hide it.  If you are unfaithful, you have to break up because your hair stylist will know you went to someone else.   Don’t even think that skipping a few “trim cycles” will protect your indiscretion.  The very fact that you avoid your hair stylist is evidence of your guilt and your infidelity.  Fooling a spouse or a lover, piece of cake.  Hair stylist?  All I can say is that I am glad that those open razors (a la Sweeney Todd) are not in fashion anymore.

I always thought of my relationship with Miwa as “oy, she will look at how I let her beautiful cut go to hell, like an overgrown garden.”  And always wondered if she would break up with me because I was so unreliable about getting my hair cut.  Yet, ours was a different relationship.  Miwa talked to me as much as I talked to her.  So, I knew about her mother’s death and her difficult and conflict-ridden relationships with her mother and her daughter.  I knew she felt  guilty that her daughter was her surrogate in caring for her dying mother in their native Japan. I knew that she left her family for a career in the US, which was so radical in so many ways, even more so in the decade in which she did it.  In her youth, it seemed, she did what she wanted and then figured out how to pick up the pieces.

I knew that, while Japanese and not Jewish, she knew how to cook for a seder since her male companion was Jewish.  I knew that his mother and his sister and sister’s family never (it seemed to her) showed any respect or appreciation for her efforts.

I also knew that she recently had a bruising fight with cancer and that she won rounds 1 and 2.  I also figured she was anywhere from mid-50s to mid-60s.

Miwa was too tired in round 3 to cut hair.  She wouldn’t schedule appointments.  That was a bad sign because it was her art and her passion.   In a 45-minute flurry of hair flying out of her scissors, she could make me look vital (and less like a graying middle-aged person) and yet I didn’t look like the proverbial 50 year-old trying to pull off a mini-skirt.

Finally, I had to have someone else cut my hair.  I held out as long as I could until I started looking like a hippy. I felt like I was betraying a dying friend but Miwa had said during each of my last two haircuts that, if she were unavailable, I should have Mary cut my hair.  Mary is very good, but Miwa was an artist.

Miwa lost the fight in Round 3.  She was actually in her mid-70s.  And I bet she took the death blow rather than stay alive and be helpless.

Miwa, I toast your life lived on your terms.  I know you had regrets.  I hope you healed as many of them as you could before the end.

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Tainted Beef, Still a Problem after 100 years

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I read this weekend about a young girl paralyzed by eating a hamburger tainted with bacteria.

In the 1900s, reporters and journalists — among them Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell — wrote articles and books detailing, among other things, the unclean practices in meat-packing factories. 

One hundred years later, we still read about tainted meat.  Not in a third world country.  Right here in the USA.

It seems that most of the strides made in sanitary food preparation have been lost in the era of de-regulation. 

We need more and better inspectors and real, catastrophic economic sanctions against operators of packaging companies that produce tainted food.  In some of the most egregious cases, the unsanitary conditions are obvious to the untrained eye.  We need to make it too costly to produce unhealthy products.

How many more children must die or be crippled by E Coli or other dangerous bacteria festering in our food production plants?

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Dear Mom

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It’s almost Yom Kippur and I have that rage inside me again.  I am supposed to seek forgiveness and I am still waiting for an apology from On High for making you suffer and taking you away.  Just an acknowledgment of a “Heavenly oops” would work. 

Two of my friends are dealing with the terminal illnesses of their mothers.  I just try to offer my ear because, as you know, it is all of jumble of good, bad, generous and selfish emotions.

The one thing that stays with me always is your last day.  “Your girls” knew from the change in your breathing — the increasingly shallower breaths and the elongation of your breathing rhythms — that the end was near. 

Breathe, two, three, four, five.  Breathe, two, three, four, five.

Breathe, two, three, four, five.  Breathe, two, three, four, five.

Breathe, two, three, four, five, six (phew).  Breathe, two, three, four, five, six.

I even went to the medical supply store to get a suction machine to suction out the mucous because it sounded like you were choking and couldn’t clear your throat (I later learned that is known as the death rattle).

Breathe, two, three, four, five, six.  Breathe, two, three, four, five, six.

At the end, Dad was holding you in his arms and your children were touching your hands and your legs and we watched and we listened. Your breaths were even more shallow and the length between them got even longer.  We stayed with the rhythm and we were breathing with you. 

Breathe, two, three, four, five, six, seven (phew).  Breathe, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Breathe, two, three, four, five, six, seven.  Breathe, two, three, four, five, six, seven.
Breathe, two, three, four, five, six, seven.  Breathe, two, three, four, five, six. . . .

And then you didn’t take the next breath and you were gone.

There was an eternity in that time between the last breath and the next one you didn’t take. 

In that eternity was the difference between life and death.  In that eternity was the secret of what makes a person alive.  What was that infinitessimal change that made the difference between life and death? 

I am not religious (as you know) but I really believe that we helped put your soul on the wings of angels.  And I am glad.  And then I think: angels, shmangels.  I just miss my mom. AND I am waiting for that apology.

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Visiting Mom

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So I let my son wake me earlier than usual on a weekend [dulcet tones of “wake up, WAKE UP, Mom, there are CARTOOOOONS on!!”] because I need to pick up my sister and father to go to visit Mom at the cemetery.  My son didn’t want to come because he says cemeteries are creepy and make him think of ghosts and skeletons.  I get that.  Cemeteries are creepy, I tell him, but I have to visit Grandma’s grave.  He says he will visit us but he is not ready yet.  We are not ready to be visited there for a really long time, I tell him.  He nods and then asks to turn on cartoons.  Good, I think, death and destruction before the pilgrimage to the cemetery.

Lots of people are buried in Queens and on Long Island.  Very convenient if you need to pop in on two funerals on different sides of the family on the same day. We had to do that once. Very convenient, indeed.

I pick up my sister who is limping badly, even with a cane.  Her husband who is NOT coming with us (he hasn’t met Mom yet) is feeling sheepish but he needs to focus on a painting.  He is trying not to look like a heel by carrying my sister’s stuff to the car.  He even offers to carry her cane.  Ok, he IS funny.

We drive to Dad’s and set off to Long Island.  Once, when I mentioned that Grandma is in Heaven, my son asked, “Heaven is on Long Island?” [ To some, yes, I guess, Heaven is on Long Island.]  I stammered that her body is there but her spirit is somewhere else.  Then I called for my partner because I was WAY out of my element.  Kids are smarter than adults.  But I digress.

Dad gives me helpful driving hints like, “is there a reason you are driving behind the slow car?” and “go straight. no, make a left.  I said make a left!” and “well, I guess I told you to get off at the wrong exit.”  It is really ok.  My dad is going to be 89 in October, and he is in terrific shape (spit in the evil eye, a Jewish superstition).

We arrive and get a little lost in the cemetery.  So many dead people.  But we find Mom and our other relatives.  Luckily, they haven’t moved.  We three say a few prayers for all of the family members, leave stones on the graves and reminisce about Mom.  My sister brings pictures of Mom through the years.  It is good to have the gravestone as a focus of our thoughts.  About 45 minutes into our visit, a couple stops and visits another grave nearby.  After they finish their drive-by visit, the woman comes over to us to say, “we come all the time and never see anyone else here.”  Gee, thanks.  Very thoughtful of you to say and I don’t really notice all your ugly plastic surgery.   

My sister needs to take pictures to document the occasion.  No joke, these go into our family photo albums. I wish she had taken a picture of the woman with the bad face lift.

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The irony of Dominick Dunne’s and Ted Kennedy’s contemporaneous deaths

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Dominick Dunne was a writer of some repute early in his career. A career which careened out of control from drugs and alcohol, if I remember correctly.  A person of power and privilege was the main suspect in his daughter’s murder and the suspect eluded conviction, as Mr. Dunne maintained, precisely because of his power and privilege.  He then became a TV personality doing exposés on the “unsolved” crimes committed by the rich and powerful.

Dominick Dunne’s death has gone relatively unnoticed, more unnoticed probably because Ted Kennedy died hours earlier.  What a strange juxtaposition.  One man, a TV personality driven by never having gotten justice for his daughter; the other, a child of our American aristocracy and leader of a political dynasty who was responsible for a woman’s death and at the scene of another’s rape. 

In these last few days, our leaders have gently referred to Ted Kennedy’s “transgressions” as they eulogize the liberal lion of the Senate.  I keep thinking of Dominick Dunne.

I loved Ted Kennedy’s politics, but I am still working through my issues with all of these days of mourning.  Was the nation better served by his service in the Senate or would his being held to account for his behavior have made us the more perfect union we desire?  I keep thinking about the pledge of allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands: one nation [under G-d] with liberty and justice for all.” 

I just don’t know.

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Senator Ted Kennedy

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Much to my relief, the news reports do not paint a saintly portrait of Ted Kennedy. 

Sen. Kennedy was an effective legislator and a champion of causes important to those not born into wealth.  He was a complicated man from a complicated family.  He lost three brothers violently.  First, Joe in the carnage of WWII, followed by John and Bobby by assassination.  He drank.  He left a woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, to die in the water when he drove his car off a bridge.  His personal life seemed out of control, until the 1990s. 

People are complicated.  When they die, they don’t shed the complexity.  Their deaths force us to contemplate the messy wholes that don’t fit well into eulogies.

Elie Wiesel once said that only a victim can forgive his tormentor.  He is right.  We can laud Sen. Kennedy for all he did to make our nation a more perfect union, but only the Kopechnes can tell us whether on balance his good deeds outweighed his failings. 

For me, I hope he rests in peace.

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Lynette Squeaky Fromme

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The only reason to feel sorry for this Charles Manson follower and would-be assassinator of our then President Ford, is that she is 60 years old and STILL she is called Squeaky.  Is Lynette such a bad name?

Do you think she is different now?  It is hard to imagine a 60 year-old Manson follower.  It is like imagining your grandparents’ having sex.  But not as gross.  Eeewww.   Eeeeewwww.  I need to stop now.

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