My calls with Mom and Dad (and then just Dad) always started:
“Hi [Mom][Daddy], it’s [Blogger]”
And every time, no matter the hour and what I might be interrupting, Mom or Dad would say, in the most enthusiastic and happy way:
“Darling!!! So good to hear your voice!”
Everything else was gravy. And now I just smile at the memory.
Last Passover, Dad was not well enough to attend. That freaked me out.
And, in one of those moments that, even then, you realize are precious, prescient, and Heaven-sent, BOB (brother of Blogger) decided to come North and bring his sons to Seder.
It had been more than 35 years since BOB, SOB (sister of Blogger) and I had shared Seder. And the last time, we had both parents, scores of cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, great aunts and uncles.
With Dad’s absence feeling like a foreshadow of recent events, I was so grateful to share Seder with SOB and BOB.
Like the old days. Only not at all.
We were older. The traditions meant more. The togetherness was special.
The years in between had smoothed our rough edges.
Ok, just mine.
Ok, Ok, Ok, only SOME of mine.
We had come full circle — us, kids — and found togetherness in our religious traditions.
This year, we won’t all be together. But I will carry my visual memory of last year — looking around the Seder table at my siblings, all of us gray-haired (if left untreated), carrying on the traditions handed down through the generations.
And, even though, we won’t all be together for this Passover, that memory sustains me. Because we have reconnected, in life and in tradition.
Hey, bro, next year, OK? We will miss you and your family something awful.
Dear Dad:
I am writing but I don’t know what will spill out or whether it will make any sense. I am not going to edit it afterwards. I am just going to write.
Friends from high school (and Facebook) lost their dad a day ago. It seems we are at that age.
And, a young girl whom we know from Benny’s school died from an anaphalactic reaction to medication when traveling in Asia on a school trip.
So, I feel so lucky that you lived a long and happy life. Even when I resented the pressure, and frankly the fear, of how to make it all work financially.
I think you died exactly when you knew it was going to be more than I could handle emotionally or figure out financially. You never wanted to be a burden.
I am going to the apartment this weekend. I am scared. Right after you died, I cleaned out some rooms. I think I was channeling energy into something that seemed constructive. SOB (sister of blogger) and BOB (brother of blogger) have taken some stuff that they wanted. I haven’t been back in more than two weeks. Because the place will not look the same.
We all talked about what would happen to Mom’s portrait. But I didn’t think about what would happen to our portraits. The ones that hung over your bed for literally 50 years.
BOB took his. SOB took hers.
Mine is left. I will take it this weekend.
And, with that, the deconstruction of our home. A small place. Way too small for all of us. I know we had the country house but we were crammed into the apartment growing up. I know Mom and you wanted to give us the best of everything, and some things had to give. I get that now. I used to be embarrassed, but now I get it.
And now I want to emulate you both as models of parental love and sacrifice.
And this weekend, I will take my portrait down from its place since 1967 and I will take more boxes of pictures.
And I will try to absorb all the memories dancing in the ether.
And I will relish the years in this house and regret the toll of my adolescent years and my embarrassment in front of my rich friends.
I will learn again that I am so lucky. That I didn’t bury a sibling or child. That I can take care of my family. That I have wonderful memories of the old days and the knowledge that Mom and you enjoyed your lives.
But I will still be a child in the deafening quiet of an emptying house, taking down my portrait. One of the three that hung above your bed for 50 years.
50 years.
50 years.
And a generation of the family, and my childhood, comes to an end.
I love you forever, Dad,
Blogger
P.S.: I imagine that being with Mom again is the same as it was. She is deep in conversation with a stranger and you are worried that you are going to be late to meet people to go to a museum. I bet the show is “Earth on Heaven: The Horror, the Horror.” If Mom doesn’t know about Trump, don’t tell her.
Home.
Just the word evokes a sigh of relief.
It has a different meaning — perhaps more than one — to each of us and, even that meaning may change over the course of time and our life experience.
Lately, I have been thinking about what home means to me. And I know it is affected by the passing of Dad and, with him, the last of our elders.
Home is physical and emotional. Two physical places — an apartment on the east side, where I was raised, and an apartment on the west side, where we raise our son. Together, they are where I feel safe and where memories of the generations dance in the ether. They are my past and present, and they indicate my future.
And home is the place where Mom’s portrait hangs, as it has for literally 50 years in the home of my youth. [One of Dad’s sculptures is in the foreground.]
I am unsettled that this will be the first time we kids don’t have a common place. A place where the three of us belong and that belongs to us.
I think we need to figure out a place for Mom’s picture, in one of our homes. Because that is where the memories of Mom and Dad, our aunts, uncles and grandparents, will dance in the ether, and where we can feel safe and loved.
Because, without that, home is incomplete.
In the last 10 or so conscious days of Dad’s life, he was present in a way that he hadn’t been in more than a year.
He slept a lot. And he seemed to dream because he smiled and reached out his arms. I hoped that he was talking to Mom.
But when he was conscious or semi-conscious, he was able to respond to our questions and if one of us said, “I love you,” he would respond in kind.
This was a gift to his kids in his final days.
First, a back story:
BACK STORY: Cocktail hour (with hors d’oeuvres) was a time-honored tradition in our family. As old world as that sounds, we are Jews and so it was Jewish all the way — mostly food and a little alcohol. Scotch was the drink of choice. And the food was white fish salad, pickled herring, eggplant salad and, in a nod to the “new country,” mixed nuts. Ok, so some affectations but we never forgot our roots. In later years, Dad would alternate between scotch and wine.
So in those last days, we celebrated with Dad, as much and as often as was safe. And we toasted his life. Unfortunately, the serving set was less than ideal . . . .
So we all had wine together (scotch would have been too hard to handle). And we hung out in Dad’s room. (And when he slept, we had MORE.)
About five days before Dad died, when he was essentially unconscious, SOB (sister of blogger) had the brilliant idea to move a mattress in Dad’s room so that the three kids could be right there any case anything happened.
SIDEBAR: The usual night aides — wonderful women — helped us change him when needed and mostly slept in another room.
As I was helping SOB move the mattress, I looked at her and said, “You are on the other side of crazy. And I am even more crazy for helping you.” SOB nodded in a way that indicated, “true,” and was pleased that I acknowledged the sibling pecking order of — let’s say loosely — “sanity”.
BOB (brother of blogger) wasted no time throwing himself on the mattress and falling asleep. SOB and I rolled him as necessary to make the bed. SOB got on the mattress and beckoned me in the middle.
WAIT. STOP. My brother tosses and turns and my sister wakes up at the slightest noise. Is this 45 years ago and am I in the middle in the back seat of the car on family trips, feeling nauseated and poked and pinched by BOB? Are you kidding me?
“Nah, I just sleep on the comfy floor.”
“Are you sure? There is enough room.”
“Yeah. I’m good.”
Over the course of that first evening of Dad’s effective unconsciousness, Dad’s breathing changed to a Cheynes-Stokes rhythm — no breath for an insane amount of time and then four deep breaths. Repeat, until you almost kill your children.
So, as you can imagine, that first night, SOB is lunging over BOB to check Dad’s pulse while I am watching wide-eyed and scared because Dad is not breathing. And then he would start breathing again.
At dawn on each of those days, I would pick up my pillow and blanket and go into a different bedroom to sleep a few hours. SOB would go to Dunkin’ Donuts. BOB would continue going through photos. Rinse. Repeat. Wonder about sedation. FOR US.
And so it went. And we shifted sleeping places over the nights. Because, we had some sanity left in us.
Dad died at 2:48am on a Friday with his kids around him. No one pronounces a person dead, like in the movies. You just watch it. And let the enormity of it wash over you.
Yep, there is pain. But Dad had a good and long life. There is no tragedy here. There is no anger. There is, in fact, guilty joy for being able to celebrate a long life well-lived. An embarrassment of riches.
Ok, because I need to bring it back to humorous.
Here are things I learned:
And now I have to get all emotional.
The greatest lessons I learned are:
(i) we siblings need our own bedrooms,
(ii) we have the craziest memories of childhood and they are all different,
(iii) we siblings are in sync in a crisis, and
(iv) SOB and BOB are the finest people anyone could ever hope to meet.
Yes, SOB and BOB are the finest people anyone could ever hope to meet.
I am the luckiest person ever.
Dad is not “right” as you all know.
In the midst of a crazy conversation before lunch one recent Saturday, I decided to show him and Heather, his home attendant, how far I have gotten in my new goal: a hand stand.
I interrupted Dad’s crazy talk, and in quintessentially child-like manner, I said, “Look at me!!” and I did a facsimile handstand facing a wall.
“What in the hell are you doing? You could hurt yourself!”
I peeled myself down in shock.
Dad, as if snapped back into the present, was being my Dad.
The sheer shock factor brought him back.
Next goal: The tight rope from the Freedom Tower to the nearest high building.
If it doesn’t kill Dad, it may make him sane again.
Dad’s world is closing in. He can understand some things. But, he no longer tries to understand the intricacies of his care, his insurance, etc. He refers any material matters to his children. I think that is freeing for him, even as it is an admission — a resignation — that he can’t navigate the bigger world anymore. We are here to catch him before he falls.
But at my son’s Bar Mitzvah, when he slowly came to the Bimah and — relying decades’ old some-kind-of-muscle memory — chanted the prayers before my son read Torah, I imagined that Dad understood that his grandson was being called to Torah as a Bar Mitzvah. Linking the past with the present. From generation to generation.
My son did a magnificent job, by all accounts (including mine).
Dad was in and out of reality during the day. He enjoyed dancing at the reception, as always, cutting up the floor.
But did he understand what happened? Did he understand that his grandson accepted his birthright to become a Bar Mitzvah? To hold the Torah and read from it?
In my mind, I said, “Of course, Dad knew!”
But I had no idea.
Then my son said to me, days later, “Grandpa didn’t understand what happened at my Bar Mitzvah, did he?”
“Dude, I think he did, in moments, but I am not sure that he always understood.”
Silence. Resolution. Generational connection lost. I could feel it in my son’s look and posture. I felt a desperation to keep the connection alive.
Today, I asked his health aide (who was with him at the Bar Mitzvah), “Tell me for real, FOR REAL, did Dad understand what was happening at the Bar Mitzvah?”
“Well, this week, he told the visiting nurse how his grandson read from Torah so beautifully!! Some days the light is on and others he is a little in the dark. But he knew it then and sometimes he knows it now.”
And that is all I need. I hope it is enough for my son.
I have been generally quiet these past few months about Dad. Out of respect for him and his privacy.
But, let’s be honest: a mouth as loud as mine can only be still for just so long.
Today’s events are par for the course for so many of us. We try to preserve our parents’ dignity, by putting cash and credit cards in their pockets and remotely monitoring the financial doings, ready to step in at any sign of trouble. We also hire lovely, underpaid people to handle our parents so that we don’t have to give up our lives to care for them. One such lovely person left Dad alone for 10 minutes while she changed over the laundry. He didn’t leave the apartment (thank G-d) but when she came back, he was on the phone giving his credit card number to someone.
REALLY, Dad? Really, Heather? Heather, can you just take him with you to the laundry room? Dad, could you just speed dial your children instead of handing over personal information to anyone who calls?
Ok, Heather invokes the Blogger family data breach protocol, which means she calls the daughter least likely to curse, but also least likely to know what to do. And that sends the cell towers buzzing.
Ring, ring, ring, on my cell. “Hey, [SOB — sister of blogger]!” trying to sound cheery even though I know that a call during the day at the office cannot be good.
Ok. So, Heather calls my sister who calls me. I decide not to call my brother, BOB, because, while creating a national frenzy has some appeal (he lives pretty far away), I have the information to handle the data breach. And why give another person indigestion? [BOB, sorry you are reading this on my blog, but if I told you, in real time, you would have (rightfully) invoked Blogger family LOCKDOWN protocol, and that would have really sucked. Besides, I am redecorating the bunker.]
First credit card: only an endless loop of robotic voices. But I got it cancelled in less than 20 minutes.
I know what you are thinking, Blogger is a rock star. She is making this elder care seem like a walk in the park. And I am so feeling the need to put on my sunglasses on a cloudy day in New York.
Second credit card: Same company. This time a real person. Whoa. This will be a cake walk. I need darker shades because my light is so bright.
“I am sorry, but your information appears nowhere on this account.”
“I have power of attorney. I have had it for years.”
“I am sorry but we need your father on the line.”
After much back and forth about the information on the customer service computer screen and the facts of life, I conference in Dad.
It was the crazy ordeal you would expect. Heather got on the phone to make sure it was ok that Dad was talking on the phone about his credit card. [SOB, she redeemed herself.] Dad did what he needed to do and then hung up.
“Ok, we can cancel this card and issue a new card, but I will have to ask you a few questions.”
I am soooo ready for this. Sunglasses on. Check.
“What are the first three letters of your father’s mother’s maiden name?”
“ITZ”
Silence. It had to be right because I used it to cancel the card with robot customer service.
“That is not correct.”
What is this? F#$%ing JEOPARDY?
“Itzik or Itsik. It is my grandmother for Goodness sakes!! Itzik Itzik ITZIK
Silence.
“And it worked for the efficient robotic customer service that canceled my other [Bank name] card in a snap.“
Yep, I threw it down. Hard. I can be (sort of) charming and then, presto, like a light switch, not so much.
What am I, an idiot? [DO NOT answer.]
“You will have to answer the following [trick] questions so we can verify that your father’s authorization was really to his daughter and you are in fact his daughter and he is in fact the card holder [and totally mess you up and enjoy doing so].”
“I am not charging anything. I am trying to cancel something. But, ok, ask.” I shouldn’t have added that verbal swagger at the end.
What am I, a schmuck? [DO NOT ANSWER.]
“I am sorry but you answered one or more questions WRONG. I will need to conference in a security adviser.”
Brief hold with bad music.
“M’am, I have another person whose job it is to make your day miserable. She will need to speak to your father again to authorize this next level of security.”
Are ya kidding me?
“It would be too confusing for him. Aren’t there super-secret decoder ring-type questions you can ask me?”
“No, m’am. We need to speak to your father.”
“No, you will not.” And hung up.
What am I, the stupidest person ever? [DO NOT ANSWER. ZIP IT. ZIP IT.]
It was too much. I could not say why I needed to cancel the card. I was trying to gloss over my dad’s infirmities. I was trying to protect him. And me.
So, what did I do? I threw my phone against the wall and cursed in frustration.
This is a picture of my parents at Jamie’s Bar Mitzvah. Jamie is my second cousin once removed. I have seen him three times in my life. But he and his father, my mother’s first cousin, had special relationships with Mom. I get that. That Bar Mitzvah was probably a little over 30 years ago. Don’t Mom and Dad look great?
My son will be called to Torah as a Bar Mitzvah in June. My mother won’t be there in body. My dad will be there mostly in body only.
The only child of our Mom’s and Dad’s grandchildren to be called to Torah. And they should be kvelling (filled with pride), standing next to him, making the blessings before he reads from Torah.
I robbed my mother of this moment by having him so late in my life. Fate robbed me by taking Mom to her grave too early and by taking Dad’s mind from him.
My son’s Bar Mitzvah will be a joyous day but it will be incomplete. Because Mom and Dad will not be there — in the ways I imagined they would be — and I will miss what I imagine as their inevitable tears of joy and pride.
But I know that Dad will labor up the steps to the Bimah, with help. And he will say the blessings, from memory instilled long ago. And he will be present, infused by Mom’s spirit hovering over him, as he stands next to his grandson as his grandson reads from Torah.
And, in my mind’s eye, I will see Mom and Dad as they are in the picture. Vibrant and proud.
And I will cry tears of joy and loss.
Let’s be honest: hot flashes in the winter do not suck. Except they rarely come when you are walking in frigid temperatures with howling winds that chill your bones.
No, they usually come at night in your already over-heated dwelling.
Or during a meeting where someone mistakes your sweat for fear. Hell no, I don’t fear you.
In fact, I don’t fear anything when I am having a hot flash. I don’t have time.
Because I am too consumed by this and other indignities of aging that I wonder who are those damn happy retirees in the TV commercials?
And then I remember that the commercials are about erectile dysfunction, high blood pressure, sleeplessness, heart disease, having “to go” too frequently, not frequently enough, and dry-mouth. Ah, paradise. Oooooh, dream weaver ad men, how you read my fantasies. Right down to sitting in a random antique bathtub on the beach. [What is that in the Cialis commercial?]
SO, if commercials are to be believed [work with me here], then, in short order, I will be a diaper-clad, pill-popping, but, otherwise, extraordinarily healthy and vibrant looking, older woman who could wear a bikini if the hot flashes are really too much. No war on gravity; no arms that do the Hadassah-jiggle if I don’t work on my triceps for a few days. And I am driving my sports car. Now that is the part of this advertisement debacle that doesn’t suck.
And you wonder why I am not responding to you.
Interrupt me at your peril.