After a long drive on Arizona freeways, a stone archway heralds where the Jews are buried. The car windows are shut and cold air blows. I face the glass, stare at the grass and trees and flowers unraveling along the sides of black ribbon. Next, headstones, announcing lives beginning and ending; unfolding, folding, like the paper fans I’d made as a child.
I am a Jew by birth, but I do not know what my faith means to me. This blankness is a flaccid muscle, waiting to contract. Right now, it’s smooth and white and still, a sharp pebble in a cold stream. I touch my eyes. They are dry. My husband strokes my hand. Tells me his love.
We get out of the car, pass through a field of silent stones to a grassy area covered by a canopy. I can see the casket, a row of chairs, a cluster of people. The rabbi is there, and someone else is handing out yarmulkes and black lace caps. I take one, my mother pins it to my hair. It is the first time she has touched me since I came home two days before. I stare at her, but now is not the time to talk.
She turns away and I do too and go over to the canopy, the chairs, the casket suspended on a winch. A tidy pile of dirt frames the scene. I can’t see below the coffin. I don’t want to. It is enough to stand there and look. See the casket, the canopy, the chairs. Sit in a chair, under the canopy, stare at the casket. My sister sits down next to me. My cousin rolls her chair around to the other side. They each take a hand. My sister’s is ice cold, like a water glass, clammy. Robin’s is hot and coarse, and I think of the rubber treads on her chair, the groove it makes as it creases soft flesh. I wonder what tales a palm reader would spin about the scores and tracks that etch her hard dry hands.
The service begins. Robin squeezes my hand, my sister twists mine. I want to pull away but I don’t. I look at her sideways and I can’t hear the rabbi. I want to say “I don’t like you” and I want to say “You are not my friend” and I want to say “I never will speak to you again” I want to say “You are a horrible broken person and you do not have a right to treat me the way you have our entire lives” and I want to scream “Get out of my sight, you are an ugly soulless bitch,” but I don’t.
I let my sister pinch my hand. She cries. I stare at the casket. I don’t.
The rabbi is leading us in The Lord’s Prayer, and I am surprised. I did not know this as a Jewish utterance; thought only Christians owned the rights to these words. I am embarrassed. I don’t know the verse, yet I hear my parents speak without hesitation. I want to yell at my mother, at my father, for hiding my heritage, for shaming me in front of grandpa.
He is before me now in a simple gold-colored pine box emblazoned with a Jewish star. I don’t know what to say, what to do, what to expect, how to be. I am at my first funeral, and I am lost.
The only thing I can do is feel and I feel. Angry. Hurt. Cheated. Bad. They raised me to be a Jew not Jewish and there is a difference and it is all before me, in this box where I am told my grandpa lies, naked, wrapped in a shroud, his tallis around his neck. I didn’t know he had one, and I wonder if it’s the same one he got after his bar mitzvah, and if he kept it, protected it, honored it, all his life, despite fleeing the Nazis, living in exile, finally coming to America. I wondered if this is the tallis that was packed in his suitcase during the long ocean voyage or did he buy a new one in his adopted country.
I thought about the tallis, a sacred prayer shawl Jewish men wear after they achieve manhood, tried to match this image of religious devotion with my grandpa, who denounced people and religion and God when I was part of his life, and I think of him now, lying naked in a box wrapped in a gauze shroud and his tallis. I look at him, suspended before me, and realize I know nothing.
The prayer ends, a moment of silence. I watch the coffin rock slowly back and forth, a cradle with my grandpa inside. There is no lullaby for this moment. It is a void. He is going into a void. He has entered the void; he is lost to me and I don’t know where he is but I do know I will never see him again. I cry a little bit, remember he was ready to die, that he was 90 years old and in poor health and he’d accepted what was and was ready for what wasn’t.
The winch turns; the cables creak. I stand on my toes, arch my neck, follow the progress of the coffin into the bottom of the hole. It slides through the opening, a slim gap on either side. My grandpa is inside this beautiful pine box; he fits in the coffin, the coffin fits in the hole. Soon the hole will be covered and a headstone will stand in front of it. This is not frightening or bad. It fits.
We form a line, my parents, my sister, me. We walk up to the edge of the hole, told to take a handful of dirt and shake it over the coffin. It’s our last chance to say something, see something, know something. My mother goes first. I can’t hear what she says but her face contorts, her mouth unhinges and she slides to her knees. My father grabs her, he is holding her up, and his grip on her looks painful.
He goes next: Lets go of my mother, turns, grabs a shovel. He looks mean around the mouth and his green eyes squint down behind glasses. His large hands grab the shovel, he digs, swings around, dumps. His face is blank, his mouth is still. “And stay there!” is what I see in the line of his shoulders, his arms, his hands. He sticks the shovel back in the mound, dusts off his palms and walks back to my mother. He takes her by the arm and they return to their chairs.
My sister steps forward and with a white shaking hand scoops up the brown and walks slowly along the edge, flicking her wrist as if she were a gardener planting grass seeds. I watch her lips move. I stare at the black lace cap crunched down over her thick short hair. Although I can see her clearly, she seems to fade against the bright green grass and the shadows under the canopy. She moves slowly; when I look for her again she has gone back to her chair.
Now I am looking at the pile of dirt. I can see that it is reddish-brown, not as dry as I’d thought. I stoop, place my hand on the rounded loaf, my palm rests briefly and I feel the cool chill that will cover my grandpa. I take a handful and stand, my wrist shaking, let fall a rain of red dirt. I walk slowly along the edge and look down.
Six feet doesn’t seem that far. The gold of the casket is sprinkled with dirt, but it still looks clean. I cannot see the Jewish star anymore. I look, and I see: The casket is inside the rectangular hole in the ground. The casket fits the hole. There is a little bit of room on each side and it fits. It still fits. It is fitting.
My grandpa is in the hole, in that casket. I believe he looks as he did in hospice: an old man sleeping. I don’t think about his face, his eyes, his nose, his mouth, covered in a gauzy wrapper. I step and I step and I sprinkle and I say “Good-bye grandpa, I hope I see you in a better life.” I don’t mean heaven. I mean another round on earth. I mean another chance for both of us.
by Susan Rich, (c)2014 All Rights Reserved
