by Mike Edison
I could barely figure out what that actually meant—buried him? What the fuck kind of euphemism was that? And why am I just hearing about this now? Oh, he was sick, and then he died. I am guessing there was a funeral, with a rabbi. And who sat shiva? This was a big deal. My father lived forty minutes away from me. He should have called me, but somehow he couldn’t be bothered?
Now at dinner he tossed off the news of his father’s death with such a lack of grace and humility that for the first time in my life I think I understood what grace and humility actually were, and found myself searching for a glimmer of them there in the void I was feeling while my father chatted up the waitress.
It was one of his worst habits, constantly interrupting dinner to bait service people into conversation: “Where do you go to school, dear? Oh, that’s wonderful.” Did he realize how condescending he sounded? I don’t know why his wife didn’t strangle him. And worse, unlike the suburbs and resorts where he lived and summered, waiters in fancy New York restaurants weren’t college students. This was their real job, or they were actors or musicians hustling to make a living, in which case they fell into the same category under which he filed me—namely “Never Gonna Make It.”
My relationship with my grandfather, whom we all called Papa Joe, was fairly simple. When I was a young child, he and my nana doted on me as best they could. He took me to Fenway Park and my very favorite place of all, the Boston Museum of Science, where I learned among other things about pendulums, photosynthesis, space travel, the internal combustion engine, and that in a vacuum, bricks and feathers fell at the same rate. They even had two towering airless plexiglass tubes in which they repeatedly dropped bricks and feathers to prove it. When I was eight, I could have watched that all day. Later, Nana took me to Howard Johnson® and watched me scarf down plate after plate of all-you-can-eat fried clams until I was practically shitting myself. I could not have asked for anything more.
They lived in an affluent Boston suburb in a giant house with an enormous out-of-tune grand piano that took up a mere postage stamp’s worth of real estate in their football field of a living room. I think I was the only one who ever played it, clanging away with the perfect glee of a child let loose on such a contraption, harmony and melody be damned. At that age I was pure in my dedication to the avant and the atonal.
After Nana died—I was fourteen—Papa Joe seemed to deteriorate quickly. My father sold their house—the one he had grown up in—and after the funeral I had one last chance to scour it for artifacts before it all got tossed on the scrap heap. I came up with an antique humidor, which I later used to store my pot paraphernalia; my father’s Flexible Flyer® sled, which I used to ride on the giant sloping hill out behind their house (one of the few times in my adolescence I can recall true bliss); and a beautiful edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination with gorgeous, tipped-in color plates by the great stained-glass artist and illustrator Harry Clarke. It is still the most beautiful book in my home.
And then my grandfather was in some sort of facility or another, where he lived with a woman, his contemporary, who was well enough taken care of to take care of him. I remember my father telling me the story of when Papa Joe had met her in the assisted-living home where he resided, and he had asked my father if he thought it was okay to kiss her before they moved into a room together. By that time, Papa Joe was well on his way to having lost all of his faculties to the dark murk of Alzheimer’s, but that didn’t stop my father from mocking him. Oh look, Papa Joe is asking about sex, how cute! He actually laughed out loud, and at that exact moment any doubts I had held about my father’s lack of compassion and twisted sense of empathy evaporated perfectly. He was profoundly, almost elegantly, fucked.
I thought a lot about all the times we drove to Boston from our suburb in New Jersey to visit Nana and Papa Joe. My father never seemed happy to see his parents—they didn’t have normal adult conversations or conversations at all, really. It was becoming increasingly clear my parents didn’t really like each other, either. They fought on the car rides there and back. Invariably one of the kids would get carsick and puke somewhere along the Merritt Parkway, which was somehow either his fault or hers, because why let an opportunity for a fight go by without leaping on it?
I recall several Passover seders and some Friday night dinners, back when they still lit the Shabbos candles, and Papa Joe would do the prayer over the wine (the whole thing, not the shortened version everyone knows). It was like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” chanted in Hebrew in a dry Boston twang that fought a noble but losing battle against the guttural oomph of how his father must have delivered it every Friday night in his low-German accent. It was quite beautiful, a ray of antiquity shining through the gauzy New England ennui that hung like fog in their stuffy, formal dining room. But there was some darkness in it, too. Heavy times in Europe? I didn’t know what exactly, though it was very real and spoke to a family history no one had ever talked about. My father looked at Papa Joe’s prayer over the wine as some sort of parlor trick. Look! Look at the Old Man do his act! Papa Joe could have been an organ grinder’s monkey. I knew the feeling well.
At dinner, after the epic kiddush, the grandparents never had anything to say to the kids. They suffered from the same inability to relate to youth that my parents did, and I could see their own disinterest in having fun emerge in stark relief: Unless there was a ball game, a science experiment, or a plate of fried clams to distract me, they were pretty much useless as company. And my folks were obviously miserable and unable to explain just what they were doing there together. Mostly they just glared at each other.
Later they started shipping me to Boston by plane, the old Eastern Air Lines® shuttle from Newark. It was a fast forty-five minutes on a cool jumbo jet, and they gave you plastic pilot’s wings and a free can of ginger ale—heaven for an eight-year-old. I remember someone told me that Bobby Orr, the all-star defenseman for the Boston Bruins, was on my flight one time. I knew who he was—I used to go to the old Boston Garden with Papa Joe to see him play when I visited in winter—and I was excited to get an autograph, so I asked one of the flight attendants was it true, was it really Number 4, Bobby Orr? And if so, where was he? Meeting a celebrity athlete was wicked hot stuff for a little kid. “Oh, he’s the one with all the blondes around him,” I was told. And sure enough, there they were, buzzing like honeybees. It was the first time I had ever heard someone use a hair color as a gender assignment, and it was the first time I saw the power of fame close up. All of that potential sex was not lost on an eight-year-old boy, count on it.
I cherished all of those memories. And I instantly regretted that I had never made it my business to go see Papa Joe again after that one time I had visited him years before, when he was newly situated in the nursing home, even if he didn’t have a clue to who I was. But I was never encouraged or even asked to go, and at thirteen years old, that was just fine. The facility where he waited out his life smelled like oatmeal and death.
Still, when Papa Joe died, had I known, I would have climbed into whatever dress clothes I owned at the time, including the awful blue knit tie that I used to wear when I worked at Bamberger’s® department store for a while in high school, and showed up to a funeral for a grand-father who was at the very least a part-time participant in my scant preteen happiness. I had good stories to tell about him taking me to the ballpark and the science museum, and the time I met Bobby Orr.
And that was the first time I thought about my father dying, right there at the Ponte Vecchio restaurant on Thompson Street, while my father flirted clumsily with the waitress. How would I feel about it when he was gone? Even then, I knew it wasn’t going to be easy mourning for a guy who clearly didn’t like me very much.
I DON’T KNOW HOW my father reacted to the news of his father’s death or how he handled himself at the funeral. Did he cry, or was it just business for him—an unpleasant obligation, a bit of family business that needed mopping up? I have no idea who wa
s there or even where it was. And if he didn’t tell me, who else didn’t know? It was all very screwy and cold. He had enough aunts and uncles and cousins to fill a dozen P. G. Wodehouse novels. But after his mother died, I mysteriously never saw my father’s extended family again.
I had spent wonderful days in Boston. I was made to feel these people were part of his life and would be part of mine, but it was all a lie. When I visited Boston as a kid, they would all come around and drink gin cocktails and ogle me, the precocious little kid who flew in from New Jersey to do magic tricks and tell jokes. Jewish boys are often like that. And then all of a sudden Nana died, and they were all gone. My father cut ties to family and friends easily—he was the least sentimental person I would ever know. But I didn’t realize it then, and it was suddenly as if Boston itself had just fallen off the map.
I didn’t go back until a dozen years later, when I had a gig with a porn magazine to do a story with an X-rated rock star who wanted to cruise the Combat Zone, which once upon a time was their sadly inadequate answer to Times Square. It was a great assignment, but what I really wanted to do was go over to the science museum and watch the feathers and bricks fall timelessly in those giant plexiglass tubes, then find a Howard Johnson and stuff my face with fried clams.
After the dinner with my dad, when he told me that he buried my grandfather, I walked a couple of blocks to Washington Square Park and cried and cried.
8
REQUIEM
After my very last moments with Dad in his Arizona hospital room, I left for New York. It didn’t seem like the old man was in any immediate danger—after all, he had enough wind in his sails to blast me with his gale-force litany of disgust, now also known in family lore as the “You Suck Soliloquy.” Unfortunately, that was about all he had.
When I arrived home I got the news that he had pitched his final inning and was being taken out of the game. He was in a coma. The next day they unplugged the machine, and he was gone. I prayed, as best I could, that he was in a better place. Anger in the afterlife seemed like the first condition for a haunting, and I wanted no part of that—I’d had enough of the earthly version. I didn’t need any freaking phantasms coming around rattling chains or opening up my kitchen cabinets in the middle of the night just because I dropped out of college once or twice upon a time.
There would be no funeral, I was told—he had decided that funerals were ostentatious. He would be cremated, and there would be a “life ceremony,” basically a posthumous banquet in his honor. Like a bar mitzvah, but without the crappy band.
I have to admit that I was fairly shocked by the decision. Cremation is strictly forbidden by Jewish law, and many Jews feel that to burn a body in an oven in the era after the Holocaust is also pretty tacky. It’s a big party don’t. Jews famously bury their dead quickly after death. “Life is for the living” is a very strong maxim in Judaism, which doesn’t mean we don’t mourn or carry the loving memories of the deceased in our hearts; it just means that traditionally we throw the fuckers in the ground, we say kaddish, we sit shiva, and we mourn, ritually and personally and profoundly, but there is a very high degree of closure and sense of moving on. There is no greater act of kindness than burying someone you love. And there is no such thing as a Jewish wake. Mostly, as a culture we just don’t drink enough to make it worthwhile.
Frankly, I have no moral stake in this decision. Obviously everyone has the right to decide what happens to their bodies after they die. I have friends who believe in Eastern traditions of cremation and reincarnation, and I have agnostic friends who have given up on the church but want to hedge their bets on getting into heaven with proper Christian burials. I have one fabulously gay friend who has already put money away to hire several dozen professional mourners, all dressed like Jackie Kennedy. Actually, I think he has the right idea, and if he could get one of them to sob uncontrollably and hurl herself into the grave on top of the coffin and really make a scene, all the better. But who am I to judge? I might like to be blasted off into space—which, by the way, is still kosher. I checked. There are some loopholes that can be exploited, as long as the body is intact. After the kaddish, everyone could watch me take to the stars. And then sit shiva and eat a mountain of bagels and lox. I’m not without my ego, either.
When my father died there was no traditional, shared experience of grief, and no matter our relationship, I found that terribly sad. Who said kaddish? Also, I was raised and brought up in an emphatically Jewish household. I was told my whole life that this stuff matters, and then at the end of the day you break kayfabe and tell me it was all bullshit? I hate that kind of hypocrisy. It chafes. Then again, I saw how he dealt with the death of his own father, so I shouldn’t possibly have had any expectations.
Ironically, I was the lucky one—I got my closure. The second he told me I was “a complete disappointment,” we were done. Well, it did screw up my head for a long time after that, or else you and I wouldn’t be here having this discussion. But at least I wasn’t waiting around to say a prayer for him. His wife, though—and my brothers, whose experiences with the old man were wholly different from mine—didn’t get that cold comfort. With this pending life-ceremony megillah, everything was held up in the air. And four years later, the ashes are still in her house, which I guess technically makes it a mausoleum.
It strikes me as a bit spooky, keeping the cremains around. I mean, it is a lovely home, but not a speck of dust has moved since his passing. All of his stuff still hangs in the living room, flawlessly announcing his highly curated version of good taste. It’s as if he had constructed an air-conditioned crypt at the outskirts of the desert.
I’m not saying it’s creepy or kooky like Great Expectations, or deluded like Sunset Boulevard or anything like that, but the fact that years later his voice is still on the outgoing voice-mail message on their house phone does strike me as somewhat ghoulish. I can imagine it must be traumatic to erase it, but imagine how people feel hearing it? When I want to call his wife to check in—and I do—I always call her cell phone. I can’t handle the old man telling me to leave a message—or do anything, for that matter—from beyond the grave.
I think of Dad’s widow often and hope she finds lots of love and light in her new life. I’m comforted to know she has her old friends and her new old friends—people whom my father had banished from their inner circle because he didn’t tolerate people who liked to talk about their children—but how could anything replace the terrible void of losing her husband? They were married for thirty years and took amazingly good care of each other, walking in perfect lockstep, in an isolating and weird but loving co-dependency. Actually, she is much better away from him—easygoing, not quick to judge, genuinely interested in the lives of people around her—and she deserved to have the comfort of a traditional Jewish funeral. That’s my feeling, anyway. (I have no doubt that later I will be told that I am wrong.) But given that my dad was a master of planning—he had every minute of his life worked out in advance; there were no audibles on the line of scrimmage for him, no going off-book, ever—and knowing, as we all do, that you don’t get out of this world alive, the posthumous party-for-self seemed a hell of a lot like a calculated victory lap. I don’t want a funeral. I’m not that important. Instead we’ll have this nice event, with canapés and a slide show.
Golda Meir once said, “Don’t be humble… you’re not that great.” But I have to hand it to him: For a guy who needed to let everyone know how awesome he was while appearing to be the Neoplatonic model of humility, it was a very good plan. The ultimate kayfabe.
* * *
THE DAY AFTER DAD DIED, I called his wife and offered to come out to Arizona right away and sit shiva. It felt like the right thing to do. At that point it wasn’t about the dead; it was about the living. She told me not to come—it was too hot in Arizona in the summer—and just to wait until the life ceremony.
I wrestled with the decision for about ten minutes before deciding, with no further equivocating, th
at there was no way in hell that I was going to get up on a dais and talk about what a great guy my dad was.
My biggest conundrum at that point was telling his wife that I wasn’t going to be joining them, in a way that expressed my very real sympathy for her but without coming right out and calling her dead husband a prick. Down the road we could talk—she wasn’t an idiot; she knew we had our issues—but right then I owed her a note, at least.
I wrote that letter in my head every day for a week, over and over again. I started with a long version, explaining everything I ever felt about my dad. In my mind’s eye, I could read all eight pages of the missive I had planned to write, as if it were a finished movie (I understand Hitchcock worked the same way). But then I decided it was way too much. For whom was I writing this: her or me? Maybe I should pick up the phone. And so I walked around the city for a couple of days thinking about how that conversation might go, and decided that it would open the doors to a long talk neither of us wanted to have. Anyway, I didn’t really need to put her in a place where she would be forced to defend her dead husband.
Of course, I also spent the better part of two days trying to find the perfect stationery to write this letter on, because my usual motif of writing notes on the backs of old punk rock flyers was certainly not appropriate, and I had to find something that was warm—but neither happy nor maudlin—that would hold the ink of the old-fashioned fountain pen I intended to use to write the note. When one strives toward menschdom, details matter. Satisfied that I had found the correct, non-too-effete nature print silk-screened on thick eggshell vellum, $5.99 for one sheet with matching envelope at the local artisanal stationery shoppe, I chose an appropriate stamp (never metered postage for intimate correspondence) and composed a short note that was sturdy and unambiguous, telling her how deeply I felt her loss and how fortunate my dad was to have her, and that it was with great regret that I would not be there for the life ceremony, such as it was. No explanation was offered, because after everything, I realized none was needed.