Devotion

by Dani Shapiro

  Jacob has just learned to ride a bicycle, and on weekends either Michael or I take him to the campus of his school, which has wide empty parking lots and gentle sloping hills. Jacob came a bit late to the skill of bike-riding, mostly because he didn’t want to fall.

  “You can’t learn without falling,” I told him. “I fell. Daddy fell. Everyone who ever learns how to ride a bike falls.”

  Where does he get this tendency? I fear he has inherited it from me—this feeling that everywhere lurks imminent danger. The chain ganglia, as the osteopath explained. It’s hereditary. You think you’re under attack, even when nothing is there at all.

  Most weekends I sit in my car near the ice hockey rink, listening to NPR or reading a book, keeping half an eye on him as he makes bigger and bigger circles. He’s gotten his balance now—no longer afraid of falling—and waves to me from a distance as he rides off, disappearing from view. He’s gone from nervous to cocky in no time at all.

  One, Mississippi, two, Mississippi, three, Mississippi. I notice how long it takes for him to come around the other side. I roll down my window, listening. Four, Mississippi. There he is, pedaling madly. Another few seconds and I would have driven around the side of the building to make sure he’s okay.

  He pulls up to the car, red-faced beneath his helmet, breathless.

  “There’s a jump down there, Mom. It’s sick!”

  He sounds like a teenager.

  “Can I try it?”

  “Oh, honey—you’ve only been riding for a—”

  But then I stop myself. I think of all the ways I’m going to have to learn to take my eyes off him for more than a few minutes. The ways we’re both going to have to learn to let go. Today it’s a bike ride. Tomorrow, a sleepover. This summer, sleepaway camp. Every day there are small leaps of faith. He is no longer my baby with the storm in his brain. Which is only to say that now he’s in no more danger than the rest of us.

  He makes another circle. Disappearing, reappearing. Gliding up to me.

  “Come on, Mom. Can I?”

  I bite my tongue to stop from saying, Be careful. Instead, I reach out the car window and brush a sweaty lock of hair from his forehead.

  “Sure, honey. Go for it.”

  98.

  According to the legend, the Buddha was a man of twenty-nine when he left home in search of enlightenment. Until that point, he had been protected and nurtured by his adoring parents; he grew up surrounded by wealth, beautiful things, ease of life. But as he began to experience the pain of being human—impermanence, the inevitability of loss—he grew restless. He saw that beauty fades. Possessions disintegrate, given enough time. Love surely leads to suffering and grief. The Buddha—or Siddhartha Gautama, as he was then known—longed to join the ranks of homeless ascetics and monks who lived in the forest next to the Ganges River, all searching for what they called “the holy life.”

  The Buddha slipped away in the middle of the night—afraid to say good-bye to his wife lest she try to convince him to stay. After all, his infant son was only a few days old. But the Buddha wanted nothing to do with his child. In fact, he gave him the Pali name Rahula, which means “fetter.”

  This is how the Buddha and the spiritual seekers of his day saw the ties of domesticity. Fetter: to shackle, manacle, handcuff, clap in iron, put in chains. Fetter—a verb, an active thing: to restrict, restrain, hinder, hamper, impede, inhibit, curb, trammel. Or informally, to hog-tie. It was very clear. Having a family—loving and nurturing a family—was incompatible with a life of seeking.

  Not much has changed, really, since the time of the Buddha. The monks had another word for all forms of attachment: dust. As in grime, filth, smut, soot, fine powder. To love is to have one’s vision occluded. To live in the material world is to see life through a lens distorted by frail and tender human longings. Whether the Buddha and his forest monks or Merton’s Christian hermit or Thoreau’s journey to Walden to transact his private business with the fewest possible obstacles, those who seek the purest spiritual knowledge do so alone.

  99.

  The mezuzah we bought in Venice remained in the satin interior of its box for a very long time—so long that when I was finally ready to affix it to the doorpost of our house, I had no idea where it could possibly be. Michael and I combed the kitchen. We had left the box on the butcher-block counter for so many months that it almost seemed to belong there, with other accumulated stuff that had no proper place: Jacob’s handmade ceramic tortilla chip bowl; an extra set of car keys. But now the mezuzah was missing. After hours of searching, Michael found it in the laundry closet, in a drawer full of spools of thread and a collection of hotel sewing kits.

  Why had I been avoiding this? I mean, we had schlepped the mezuzah all the way home from Italy—it would seem it could have made the last leg of the trip from suitcase to doorpost. But I had been taking baby steps. Ambivalence, even laziness, played a part. But more than anything, it was the same paralysis that had visited me that day while we were in the Judaica store. How could I affix just a single mezuzah? What was the blessing? Where was the rabbi? There was a right way and a wrong way to do this, and instead of risking doing it wrong, I had done nothing at all.

  Finally, I sent Burt an e-mail asking for help. I was secretly hoping he would offer to come over and do it himself—but it turns out that affixing a mezuzah doesn’t require a rabbi, or even a screwdriver. Within moments, I had his response:

  Affixed to the doorpost to your RIGHT as you enter; on the upper third of the upright doorpost. Upper side is to be tilted toward the inside of the house. If the doorpost is not wide enough for a diagonal tilt, affix Mezuzah upright.

  Can be affixed with nails, glue, two-sided tape…

  The brachah for affixing a Mezuzah:

  Barukh Attah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh HaOlam, Asher Kiddshanu

  BeMitzvotav VeTzivanu Likboa Mezuzah.

  So simple, really. I wondered why it had taken me so long to ask about the protocol. The early evening sky was a soft, dusty pink when Michael marked the spot on the kitchen doorpost and drilled two holes. I had printed out Burt’s e-mail so we could say the blessing. Then I called Jacob away from his Red Sox game.

  “Honey, come outside for a minute. We’re putting up the mezuzah.”

  “What’s a mezuzah?”

  “Remember when we were in the Jewish ghetto in Venice? We went into that store?”

  The three of us stood on the front porch. On one side of us, the remainder of a cord of wood. On the other, a weathered bench, a basket overflowing with balls and sports equipment. The dogs sat at attention, watching to see whether there was any fun in this for them.

  I showed Jacob the filigreed silver, the openwork revealing scrolls inscribed with minuscule Hebrew lettering.

  “All of that is handwritten,” Michael said.

  Jacob examined the mezuzah.

  “Does it light up?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Does it do anything?”

  “Well, no.”

  I could see he was disappointed, but nonetheless Jacob recited the transliterated blessing along with me. Barukh Attah Adonai…

  Michael tightened the screws. I thought of what Burt had told me that day at the seminary: They say if you wrap yourself in tefillin and place a mezuzah on your door, you’re protected from harm. He had paused then. His voice was wistful when he concluded, almost as an afterthought: Would that it were so.

  I didn’t think the mezuzah was going to protect us, any more than I had faith that the metta phrases offered any kind of specific immunity. I was pretty sure there was no parking-spot-procuring God, swooping down from on high, helping out in a crisis—or even a traffic jam. I wished I believed that—but I didn’t. I simply didn’t. Still, here was a form, a ritual, a fulfillment of an ancestral commandment. It was something, rather than nothing. Another daily reminder—right there on the doorpost of our house—to stop for a moment. To take a breath. To pay attention and listen well.
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br />   100.

  Michael, Jacob, and I wandered through the cemetery looking for my mother’s grave. It was a damp, foggy day; the rain had grown ever steadier during the drive from Connecticut to New Jersey, and was now pouring down on us. I held Jacob’s hand and helped him over a puddle. The ground was muddy, rutted, our feet leaving deep impressions along the narrow pathways.

  “There it is.” Michael spotted a modest family tombstone engraved with my mother’s maiden name, Rosenberg. She was buried here alongside her parents and sister, only a few miles away from the chicken farm where she had been raised. I hadn’t remembered how close to the edge of the cemetery her grave was—right near the chain-link fence. In fact, I remembered very little about this place. I had been numb and somehow shocked the day of my mother’s funeral, even though her death had not been a surprise.

  Years had gone by. I had been afraid of coming back here. This fear masqueraded as indifference or even laziness, but deep down I knew it was more than that. The cemetery had written to inform me that her footstone had been installed, but I had never arranged for a proper unveiling. Who would come? Her brother, who had barely spoken to her in years? My father’s family, from whom she had been estranged? With each passing anniversary of my mother’s death, it seemed less likely that I would ever visit her grave. This felt like a failure on my part. What was I so afraid of?

  I thought of the black crows pecking at my front yard. There’s Irene. Did I feel like she could reach out and grab me from beyond the grave?

  I walked over to her footstone and waited to feel something. I was here, now. I had finally felt strong enough to make this journey. “Whatever you think you can do or believe you can do, begin it,” Goethe once wrote. “Action has magic, grace and power in it.” Jacob stood very near me.

  “That’s where Grandma is buried,” I said. “See the inscription?”

  Jacob looked down. Beloved and loving daughter, wife, sister, mother. Was it true? Had she been beloved—or loving?

  “Someone has been here,” Michael said. I noticed, then, that the other footstones—my grandmother’s, grandfather’s, and aunt’s—all had small rocks and pebbles placed on top of them, as did the larger family tombstone. Someone had visited, and observed the Jewish tradition of leaving stones—a sign of permanence—instead of flowers. Only my mother’s grave was unadorned.

  I bent down and pried a sand-colored rock from the wet ground and handed it to Jacob. It was the size of the inside of his fist.

  “Do you want to put this on Grandma’s grave? And maybe say something quietly to yourself—like a prayer, or something you’re thinking?”

  He walked over and with great dignity laid the rock next to my mother’s name.

  We circled the footstones of his great-grandparents and great-aunt, and I said their names out loud: David Rosenberg, Anna Ruth Rosenberg, Rosalyn Copelman. He was having trouble keeping them straight, and who could blame him? They were abstractions to him. They were practically abstractions to me. I dug around for more stones to leave behind.

  I placed pebbles on each of their graves, still feeling nothing. No longer afraid. No longer angry. We had driven three hours in terrible weather to come here, and I was just going through the motions. My inability to feel anything felt like a defeat. I stared at the ground. Whatever physical remains of my mother were left in this world were right beneath me, and I couldn’t muster a single tear.

  The rain had turned torrential. Michael’s shirt was soaked, and Jacob was shivering. His bright red Crocs were caked with dirt.

  “Why don’t you guys wait in the car? I’ll just be a minute.”

  I watched the two of them stepping through mud and puddles on their way out of the cemetery. They walked back to the car parked on the other side of the chain-link fence, hazards flashing.

  I stood near my mother’s footstone. I didn’t think I would ever come here again, and now I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave. The rain beat down even harder. And then—though I hadn’t planned on it and didn’t know whether it was appropriate or might even be sacrilegious—I began to recite the Mourner’s Kaddish.

  Yitgadal v’yitkadash shmei rabah.

  The tears came with the Hebrew words. B’alma di v’ra khirutei v’yamlikh malkhutei. I stumbled my way through the kaddish, hearing a chorus in my head. My father’s voice, reciting it for his father. My grandfather and great-grandfather reciting it at the grave of my great-great-grandfather in the Polish shtetl. The candles that burned each Yom Kippur on our kitchen counter for my parents’ dead parents, that now burn on my own kitchen counter: twin flames.

  O’se shalom b’im’romav. I was crying hard now.

  Beloved and loving daughter, wife, sister, mother.

  She had been beloved. It was this I hadn’t wanted to feel. This—beneath the anger, the numbness, the fear. She was my mother, and I had loved her.

  I turned away from her grave and walked back out the cemetery gates, back to the rest of my life. My husband and son were waiting for me.

  101.

  This morning I wrote a condolence note to an acquaintance—a mom of one of Jacob’s friends—whose elderly father passed away. It is one of several such notes I’ve written this year. This is the natural order of things—the time of life we’ve now entered. The afternoon, as Jung called it. Thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life. Are we unprepared simply because preparation is not possible? It’s hardly an exam we can bone up on. We learn—if we are lucky we learn—as we go.

  Jung defined midlife as over the age of thirty-five. I know people who don’t consider themselves middle-aged at fifty. It doesn’t really matter, except in this regard: however we think of ourselves, we are in the center of the stream. Much has already happened, and has formed the shape of our lives as surely as water shapes rock. Much lies ahead of us. We can’t see what’s coming. We can’t know it. All we have is our hope that all will be well, and our knowledge that it won’t always be so. We live in the space between this hope and this knowledge. Every morning, when Michael and Jacob leave for the ten-minute drive to school, I call after them: Drive carefully! And Jacob calls back to me: We will! Is it a superstition? Perhaps. Do I believe it will make a difference? No. But still, I say it—because saying it is all I can do.

  Two women I know—both in their forties—were diagnosed with serious cancer this year. They have kids Jacob’s age. In an instant, their lives became about doctors and surgeries and chemotherapy and odds. The husband of a dear friend had testicular cancer and major surgery. The outlook is good for him. A woman in the Torah group lost her ten-year-old son to a rare form of brain cancer. Friends have had biopsies that have turned out to be nothing. A good friend is having twins. People my age have kids in preschool, kids off to boarding school, kids applying to college. Anniversaries have been celebrated. Trips taken. Jobs and retirement funds lost. Quite a few parents are ill. A number of parents, aunts, and uncles have died. There have been car crashes, heart attacks, falls. There have been phone calls piercing the night.

  This too, this too, this too, Jack Kornfield said. Life keeps coming at us. Fleeing it is pointless, as is fighting. What I have begun to learn is that there is value in simply standing there—this too—whether the sun is shining, or the wind whipping all around.

  102.

  I sat cross-legged on my bedroom floor, trying to listen to my breath. Inhale, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four. I was having trouble concentrating. It had been a hard couple of days. My uncle Moe had died one morning as my cousin Henry was preparing him to lay tefillin, and even though Moe was ninety-three, even though he had been suffering and very ill for many years, still I was grieving.

  At Moe’s funeral near Boston the day before, hundreds of mourners filled the sanctuary. A succession of eminent rabbis gave eulogies. I learned things about Moe that I hadn’t known before. He had been president of the Orthodox Union, and the authentication stamp on kosher food had been his idea. In a rap
idly assimilating postwar America, he saw the need to circle the wagons in order to keep Orthodox customs alive. He had traveled the country in support of mechitzot—the partitions that keep men and women separate in shul.

  I sat with Michael and Jacob in the rows reserved for relatives. In front of us, a familiar-looking young woman—a cousin?—rifled through a siddur affixed with dozens of brightly colored Post-its. Everyone except for us seemed to know what to say and do. We were alone—my little family—an isolated, rogue cell within the larger organism of Moe’s family. I didn’t mind, really. I was used to this particular discomfort. Before we got out of the car in front of the shul, Michael had turned to me, squeezing my hand: Remember, he said. It’s okay to feel like an outsider. You are an outsider.

  Thoughts clouded my mind as I tried to count the breath. What would Shirley do now? Would she stay in the vast, empty house in Brookline by herself? Would she move in with one of her children? Shirley was keeper of the flame, and her house contained within it everything that was left of my grandparents—of my father’s childhood life. Now it would be further dispersed until, one day, it would disappear completely.

  Inhale, two, three, four. Exhale, two, three, four. My mind stubbornly refused to quiet down. Jacob had wanted to attend the funeral—in fact, he insisted on it. He felt a sweet connection to Moe. He’s my family, Mom, he said. Before we got to Boston, I tried to prepare him. I was nervous that the Orthodox funeral would be too much, but it didn’t feel right to keep him away. He was right. They were his family—and I had so little to give him in that regard.

  They believe in God differently than I do, I had told him. Feeling, at least, some comfort in being able to say that I believed in anything at all. But once in the sanctuary, watching my relatives as they entered the prescribed orchestrated rituals of mourning with an almost choreographed precision, it seemed to me that they had a lock on God. They had certainty. I would always have doubt. They had one set of rules and rituals; one rabbi after the next referred to Torah-based Judaism. They lived—literally—by the book. I lived by an eclectic array of rituals, by many different books. They had continued on the path set by my grandparents, digging deeper as they went. And I—Michael was right—I had chosen life on the outside. I was an outsider.