Devotion

by Dani Shapiro

  45.

  On the morning my father died, his younger brother—my uncle Harvey—arrived by taxi from New York. He found me in the hospital corridor outside my mother’s room, making calls.

  “Who’s with Paul?” Harvey asked. He was breathless, his grief wild and angry, leaving no room for my own. I had never been close to Harvey, but still, I wanted to collapse into him. I wanted him to recognize that I was still practically a kid. I don’t know how to do this, I felt like saying.

  “I asked the doctors to leave him in his room,” I said. “Until we—”

  “No one’s watching him?” Harvey wheeled around and raced back down the corridor to the elevator bank. My father’s room was in another unit, two floors up. I hadn’t been aware of the sacred tradition of shmira, in which the body is not left alone—not even for a single second—between the moment of death and the moment of burial. Later that afternoon, my uncle would inform me—in an accusatory tone, as if I should have known better—that my father had been intubated, that a tracheotomy had been performed in a last-ditch effort to save him, and that the various tubes and equipment had been left in his body in a way not consistent with Jewish law.

  You fucked up, was the subtext. And you can’t fix it now.

  My mother was fighting for her life. Given the scope of her own injuries, she wasn’t expected to survive the shock of this—the loss of her husband. Sedated, on painkillers, she drifted in and out of consciousness as the Shapiro family descended—an Orthodox SWAT team. There were precise, choreographed steps to take: the appropriate funeral home to be contacted; the paid death notice announcing the location of shivah; the summoning of the chevre kadisha, a holy society consisting of Jews who cleanse and purify the body, and recite the required psalms and prayers asking God to forgive all sins and grant eternal peace to the deceased.

  Riverside, I heard through the thick, cottony wall of my own grief. Shivah at Gram’s. Wait a minute. Riverside Chapel was in Manhattan. As was my grandmother’s apartment. I looked at my mother, her shattered legs scissored in traction. Her face still lacerated, black and blue. She looked frail in her bed, surrounded by my father’s family—a group of people with whom she had barely been on speaking terms for most of the twenty-eight years of her marriage. She stared at the ceiling as they discussed different rabbis. Names—Shlomo Riskin, Isaac Swift—were floated. Plans seemed to be happening all around my mother, but they did not include her. And then, as if issuing a news bulletin from a faraway land, my mother spoke:

  “The service will be here in the hospital,” she said. “I’m going to attend my own husband’s funeral.”

  The next morning, my mother was transferred from her bed to a stretcher, then wheeled through the hospital’s main lobby, past the gift shop and into the auditorium for my father’s funeral. Her cardiologist, internist, and trauma specialist were all nearby. Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die was my mantra, the ceaseless whisper in my head. Any horror seemed possible—no, more than possible. Likely.

  I held my mother’s hand and stood next to her stretcher. The service was about to begin. The auditorium was filled to capacity: Wall Street bankers in business suits, neighbors I remembered from years of backyard barbecues and pool parties, my mother’s tennis buddies. The previous night, my mother had asked her own brother, a college professor, to speak at the funeral. Not Harvey. She had also asked a senior partner at my father’s firm to speak. Not some famous rabbi. At this modern funeral service orchestrated by my mother from her hospital bed, my father’s family had no role. They clustered together in the front row, their dark coats and prayer books setting them apart.

  After the service, a line of black cars idled near the hospital’s main entrance. Of course, my mother couldn’t make the trip—not even by ambulance. I had to leave her behind to go bury my father. I watched my cousin Henry, Shirley’s younger son, climb into the hearse, siddur in hand. He davened the whole time. He wore a fedora and a dark overcoat; a muffler covered the lower part of his face. Henry, a member of the chevre kadisha, had stayed with my father the night before. I kept my eyes trained on the hearse as we snaked down the leafy suburban streets near the hospital. I was afraid of losing sight of my father as we sped along the wide New Jersey highways of my childhood, crossed over into lower Manhattan, then made our way through downtown traffic to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Finally we emerged at a massive, old cemetery in Bensonhurst where my grandfather and great-grandparents were buried.

  I had never been to the Shapiro family plot. I had, in fact, never been to a funeral of any kind. The only ideas I had about funerals came from the movies—and this wasn’t anything like that. From dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. An Orthodox burial takes these words from Genesis seriously. The body, as prepared and purified by the chevre kadisha, is wrapped in a white shroud and placed in a plain pine box. No Astroturf covers the earth around the burial site. Cremation is considered abhorrent. Embalming is expressly forbidden. Viewing, flowers, incense are discouraged. In the starkest possible manner, the dead are returned to the earth.

  My legs were unsteady as I followed the pallbearers—my cousins—through the crumbling paths of the Brooklyn cemetery. The el train rattled overhead. Somewhere, a dog was barking. My cousins paused a number of times along the way. I thought they were lost. I didn’t realize that the pausing is customary—a sign of reluctance to depart with the dead. I didn’t know the prayers, or their meaning. What was happening? My father was inside that flimsy box, and his family was burying him at his own father’s feet. In the midst of their sadness and shock, they knew exactly what to do. Here, I was out of place. An interloper.

  Mordechai sang “El Malei Rachamim.” My cousins lowered their uncle by long straps into the ground. Someone handed me a shovel and pointed.

  I lifted a shovelful of dirt and spilled it onto my father’s casket. My half sister did the same. Then Shirley, Harvey, their grown children. The men shuffled. Their voices rose and fell; now a murmur, now a wail. They were schooled in this ritual, and the very fact of it gave them a kind of solace. The washing, the wrapping, the standing guard, the praying. After my father’s coffin was no longer visible, the small crowd formed two parallel columns, as if in a square dance. The immediate family was meant to walk through. As we did, the prescribed condolence was offered: Hamakom y’nachem etkhem b’tokh sh’ar aveilei Tzion v’Yrushalayim. May God comfort you among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. I felt no such comfort, but I did know one thing: this funeral was precisely what my father would have wanted.

  46.

  Writers often say that the hardest part of writing isn’t the writing itself; it’s the sitting down to write. The same is true of yoga, meditation, and prayer. The sitting down, the making space. The doing. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Unroll the mat. Sit cross-legged on the floor. Just do it. Close your eyes and express a silent need, a wish, a moment of gratitude. What’s so hard about that? Except—it is hard. The usual distractions—the clutter and piles of life—are suddenly, unusually enticing. The worst of it, I’ve come to realize, is that the thing that stops me—the shadow that casts a cold darkness across the best of my intentions—isn’t the puppy, the e-mail, the UPS truck, the school conference, the phone, the laundry, the to-do lists. It’s me that stops me. Things get stuck, the osteopath once said with a shrug. He gestured to the area where the neck meets the head. The place where the body ends and the mind begins. Things get stuck. It sounded so simple when he said it. It’s me, and the things that are stuck. Standing in my way.

  47.

  We don’t get a lot of unexpected visitors. Our driveway is a quarter of a mile long, and cars don’t turn into it accidentally. Every once in a while, though, an unfamiliar vehicle pulls up to the house. If I’m home alone, I tend to get a little nervous. I hold the phone in one hand, ready to call 911 as I peer out the window.

  Recently, a car full of young men dressed in black suits and white shirts drove up to the house on
a Sunday morning. They didn’t look like ax murderers. An older woman wearing a tweed skirt and Shetland sweater was with them; she was the one who knocked on our front door.

  “Michael! It’s the Seventh Day Adventists!” I yelled. I didn’t like dealing with proselytizers. I never knew what to say. We’re all set. No thanks—really.

  Michael walked outside, the puppy at his heels. He actually liked engaging these people. I watched through the window as he chatted with the woman. What could they possibly be discussing? She handed him some sort of pamphlet, then waved good-bye.

  “We talked about the dog,” Michael said when he came back in. “She didn’t want to talk about religion. She wanted to give me this. Oh, and they weren’t Seventh Day Adventists.”

  “Well, what were they?”

  “I’m not sure. Witnesses, I think.”

  Michael had only taken the pamphlet to be polite. He tossed it into the recycling bin. I fished it out. The pamphlet was titled Would You Like to Know the Truth? Inside was a list of questions:

  Does God Really Care About Us?

  Will War and Suffering Ever End?

  What Happens to Us When We Die?

  Is There Any Hope for the Dead?

  How Can I Pray and Be Heard by God?

  How Can I Find Happiness in Life?

  I definitely wanted to know the truth. I glanced through the pamphlet, which also contained photographs: a bandaged child, a graveyard, a woman clutching a prayer book to her chest. How can I pray and be heard by God? This question in particular interested me. According to the pamphlet, the Bible—this would be the New Testament—teaches that we must not say the same things over and over again in our prayers. If we want God to listen, we must pray in the way that he approves. To do that, we need to learn what God’s will is and then pray accordingly.

  The pamphlet cited Matthew 6:7, which I promptly looked up. After all, I was an equal-opportunity seeker of wisdom. What did I care where it came from? And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand praying in synagogues (ouch!) and on the corners of the streets, so that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. (Double ouch!) But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut the door, pray to your Father, who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.

  I liked the idea of prayer as something private and fluid. I thought of the High Holiday services of my youth. The ladies in their new outfits, the men squirming uncomfortably. The children playing outside as the adults did their duty. Then I thought about my own yoga practice, and the way, sometimes, the phrase from that old Dunkin’ Donuts commercial would pop into my head as I began my routine sun salutations: Time to make the donuts, I would think as I bent forward, then jumped back. Time to make the donuts.

  But maybe there was good reason for the routine—for repeating the same gestures, the same words, again and again. As my father wrapped his tefillin around and around his arm, the familiar action was a meditative one, a preparation for prayer. Could he have gotten there without it? When I unroll my yoga mat and place my hands in namaste, I may be making the donuts, but I am also performing a ritual that allows me to enter a contemplative place—a place in which I might come upon something wordless and profound. Maybe the rituals are a doorway to prayer. But I spent most of my life confusing them with prayer itself.

  48.

  I didn’t know how to pray. I knew the Hebrew words and melodies of my childhood—I could recite the entire siddur by heart—but I didn’t know what any of it meant. Despite my yeshiva education, the language was elusive to me. Oh, I could pick up a few words here and there. Melech meant “king.” Olam meant “world.” But basically, it was gone. How could I have gone from fluent to nothing? Perhaps Hebrew itself was a samskara. Perhaps one day, while in a deep yoga pose, it would all come flooding back.

  But honestly, I was glad I no longer understood. Even in English translation, the prayers themselves disturbed me. I didn’t want to plead with God, or bargain with him, or flatter him. I wanted to access him. To find a way to speak to him without feeling ridiculous. When I was in shul, I sang, and the singing itself stirred something within me: memory, intense longing. If nothing else, it was a deep connection to the past. But it didn’t feel like prayer—or at least, what I hoped prayer might feel like.

  Each day, I kept making the donuts. It wasn’t simply the yoga practice, the attempts to meditate, the reading and thinking and enforced daily solitude. By doing each of these things, I was creating an environment, I hoped, in which I might continue to explore and deepen my perception. “The great spirits of religious traditions do not solve all questions but live in the questions, and return to them again and again, not as a circle returns, but as an ascending spiral comes to the same place, each time at a higher level,” writes Rabbi David Wolpe. Each day, when I unrolled my mat, opened a book, let the phone ring, sat still instead of jumping up and reacting to whatever was going on in my mind, I was attempting exactly that: a return to the questions.

  Some days were harder than others. At times, I was convinced that I had made a huge mistake, delving this intensely into spiritual matters. Was I becoming one of those earnest, humorless people? Who did I think I was, anyway? I was a novelist. If I was good at anything, it was at making things up. Writing fiction—following the line of words, as Annie Dillard once put it—was the closest thing I had ever known to an act of faith. I kept moving in small steps, both forward and back. With each step, I had no certainty that there would be ground beneath me.

  But on rare occasions, I felt something else. Something different. It was a sense, not of presence, but of oneness. There was no difference between me and it—nothing separating me from the invisible fabric that made up everything around me. When this happened, it did not feel revelatory. There were no violins, no exploding lights. There was nothing epiphanic, orgiastic, ecstatic, about it. It was a very quiet sense of knowing. The words accompanying this knowledge did not strike me as ridiculous. They did not strike me as anything at all, but rather, emerged from a place beyond self-consciousness. Please allow my heart to open to all that is.

  49.

  In Connecticut, on our hilltop, life was quiet. Gone were the city sounds: the sirens, hisses, street fights, car alarms, the teeming, throbbing, ceaseless pulse of life. Our pace slowed. A different kind of pulse surrounded us now. I noticed the reddish hue of bare tree branches as they began to bud; the silvery frost at dawn. Baby chipmunks darted into the cracks under our front steps. We were surrounded by crickets, field mice, bats, hawks, frogs from the pond across the way. A gray fox roamed our meadow. There were reports of a bear. At night, coyotes howled in the distance.

  Suddenly, there were enough—more than enough!—hours in the day. There was no traffic. It took exactly sixteen minutes to drive Jacob to school. No more, no less, barring the unforeseen event of being stuck behind a tractor pulling hay. It took nine minutes to get to the market, eleven minutes to the little French bakery. The thriving metropolis of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was precisely an hour, door-to-door. It was quiet, all right. So quiet that we could hear the sound of a truck straining uphill a mile away.

  In the silence, something shifted. I had left a certain kind of anxiety behind, back in the city. The urban life I had loved for so long—the constant motion, the sense that there was always something exciting happening somewhere—that life had turned on me, once I became a mother. (Or perhaps once my child became so sick. The two events—new motherhood, the near-loss of Jacob—are grafted together in my mind so that it is impossible to think of one without the other.) In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein, startles easily. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn’t known was there. No wonder I had been running as hard and as fast as I could! Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, ter
rible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself.

  Who was I, and what did I want for the second half of my life? I mean, I was in the middle of life, the middle of midlife, the middle of a midlife crisis. I had been shaped by choices and decisions, not all of them conscious. I had turned left instead of right; had taken (or not taken) the trip, the flight, the challenge, the chance. Everything I had ever done had led me here—and while here wasn’t a bad place at all, it also wasn’t enough. Some essential piece of me was missing, and in the quiet of the country I had an opportunity to figure out what, exactly, that missing piece was.

  50.

  Lacuna (manuscripts): a missing piece of text

  Lacuna (music): an extended silence in a piece of music

  Lacuna (linguistics): a lexical gap in a language

  Lacuna (law): the lack of law or of a legal source addressing a situation

  Lacuna (histology): a small space containing an osteocyte in bone

  Lacuna (geology): a large gap in the stratigraphic record

  Lacunar amnesia (psychology): amnesia about a specific event