White Hot Grief Parade

by Alexandra Silber

  POPULAR SENIOR: (continued) . . . . if your Dad wanted to play Frisbee with us.

  (Pause.)

  POPULAR JUNIOR: (from the background) So is he coming?

  FRESHMAN AL: Let me . . . um . . . get him. One second.

  POPULAR SENIOR: Well, we’re actually, like, down the street. Can we just come over?

  FRESHMAN AL: Sure. I’ll let my dad know.

  (Hangs up. Yells upstairs.)

  FRESHMAN AL: Dad!

  DAD: Yeah?

  FRESHMAN AL: The Popular Boys wanted to know if you want to play Frisbee with them. Did you say you’d hang out with them?

  DAD: Well . . . Um, yeah. (AL displays further disbelief) Can I go? I promise not to say anything embarrassing. I’ll be really cool, I promise!

  FRESHMAN AL: Dad! They are the most popular boys! This is so ridiculous!

  DAD: But, Al, I really want to play Frisbee! Please?

  FRESHMAN AL: Oh, God. Fine.

  (Doorbell rings. AL answers the door.)

  FRESHMAN AL: Hey.

  POPULAR BOYS: Hey. Um, is your dad home?

  FRESHMAN AL: Yeah. I’ll go get him.

  (AL turns around and sees her dad right beside the door looking really anxious to go and play with the boys. Like a kid.)

  FRESHMAN AL: Oh, go ahead, Dad. For heaven’s sake!

  DAD: Thanks, Al! See ya!

  POPULAR BOYS: Later, Al.

  That was pretty typical. A group of über-cool teenagers thinking my dad was the absolute best. Of course the über-cool teenagers could get in line, because everyone thought Mike Silber was the absolute best.

  Back in the auditorium, Dave Breen stood immobile before me.

  “Oh my God Alex, I am . . . ” He looked at the floor, his hands in fists within his winter coat pockets. “I am really so, so sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s OK,” I replied without thinking.

  I wanted it to be OK. For him. Despite the fact that we had never really been friends, I wanted him to come out of this conversation unscathed. I imagined I could hear his heart crumbling from an arm’s length away.

  I reconsidered. “I mean, of course it is not OK,” I said. “But . . . Well, anyway, thank you.” I could feel the acid rise in my throat.

  “I, uh . . . ” he hesitated. “I really liked your dad.” Dave’s eyes were moist, and locked on the bizarrely bright carpet on the floor of the theater. “A lot.”

  “Take care, Dave.”

  And I left him there, alone in the emptying theater.

  Rabbi Syme

  “Dr. Marvin. You can help me. For the first time in my life

  , I feel like there’s hope. I feel like I can be somebody.”

  —What About Bob?

  Two months after the funeral, I went back to see Rabbi Syme.

  I’d known Rabbi Syme for approximately two hours, but I was in need of some kind of guidance—spiritual or otherwise—and I didn’t know where to turn. I walked into Temple Beth El ready to order up a super-sized platter of spiritual solutions. Despite the brevity of our relationship, I felt inexplicably close to him, compelled beyond logic to spend time in the company of the sweet, wise man who had, in such a brief collection of minutes, given me the ultimate gift of the eulogy.

  By the time I walked down the hallway and reached the rabbi’s office, at Temple Beth El I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. Not only did I barely know him, but I knew so little of Judaism and had railed so harshly against it my whole life because I had only ever associated it with my horrible grandparents. I thought about fleeing, but I entered and sat across from him. Two almost-strangers in two chairs.

  “So. How are you doing?” he asked.

  What was I supposed to say? “Fine, thank you, Rabbi.”

  I wanted to tell him about everything. About my grandparents and my family and the disowning. About dropping out of college and my mother and Kent. About the life-altering decision I’d made the other day. About that.

  “How is your mother?”

  What was I supposed to tell him? I thought. Do I recount the real blood and guts of living together in the house where my father had died? Should I confess that we were holding on by the single fiber of a thread?

  “Better than can be expected,” I said.

  “You know,” he said, “delivering a eulogy gives a person an extraordinary head start when it comes to healing. You should know that, I’m sure you do. But I hope you are being patient.”

  “I’m doing my best,” I replied. I hoped I was.

  “And your family?”

  Well, well, well, Rabbi Syme. This is all getting a bit personal! I usually wait until the third date to list my favorite Mandy Patinkin roles in order of sexiness, intensity and beard length, let alone discuss my batshit bonkers family. But I suppose I can make an exception here. Although, how does one explain one’s grandparents when “that one time Edna kidnapped me” is only the sixth most dysfunctional story on a very long list?

  But I didn’t say that. Instead, I just said, “I don’t really know.”

  Rabbi Syme nodded. “I sensed as much. They were . . . unusual.”

  Rabbi Syme’s Spidey skills for the win.

  We talked for a long while that day, Rabbi Syme and I. Rabbi Syme was more than just my first spiritual advisor. He was the first adult who was more interested in my cultivation of wisdom than of knowledge. Knowledge is information—a collection of facts. Wisdom is the poetry inside those facts. Wisdom relies on more than mere description. It is the difference between a photograph that captures exactly what something looked like in the moment and a photograph that captures exactly the way it felt. Memory through a lens.

  “Do you know the Shema’ Koleinu,” Rabbi Syme asked.

  “Rabbi, I wasn’t invited to many Bar Mitzvahs. I’m kind of a Cashew.”

  He stared at me blankly.

  “A Catholic-Jew,” I explained. “An interfaith secularization situation.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “But I was invited to both the Steinman kids’ parties and, for what it’s worth, I played Golde in Fiddler sophomore year of high school—”

  He put up a hand to stop me, kind but swift. “I understand. Let me explain. The Shema’ Koleinu is the sixteenth paragraph of a central prayer of Judaism called the Amidah, which is the core of every Jewish worship service. It reads:

  It is translated as ‘Hear our voice, O Lord our God; spare us and have mercy upon us, and accept our prayer in mercy and favor.”24 ‘Hear our voice’ is the essence of this prayer—and I sense that your voice has always been heard, both of the spoken and the sung variety. The eulogy proves that.”

  I nodded, not entirely understanding where he was leading me. All I knew was that I was willing to follow.

  “What do you think of the passage?”

  No one had ever asked me anything remotely like this. I grew hot and uneasy, fearing I would offend him or say the wrong thing.

  “I really don’t know how to respond.”

  “There is no right or wrong here, Alexandra,” the Rabbi said. “It’s just a simple question. One of the beauties of Judaism is this ancient tradition of the dialogic process. Jews recognizing that understanding comes from meaningful exchanges and from challenges—not only with one another but with God Himself.”

  A light bulb went on. “Oh! Like in Fiddler how Tevye has a kind of dialogue with God!”

  “Exactly like that. God and Tevye have a very personal relationship.”

  “I really like that.”

  “So do I,” he said with a smile. “So? What do you think of the call to ‘hear our voice?’”

  “We all . . . want to be heard.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we all struggle to listen?”

  “I think so.” He leaned in. “‘Hear our voice’ is a very simple request that shows we want to engage beyond ourselves. It acknowledges the desire to be heard, and it validates that desire. And that’s why you are here today, isn’
t it? To be heard?”

  It certainly was. I nodded wordlessly.

  He continued. “The prayer goes on: ‘Renew our days, as of old.’ It’s almost as if the speaker is a little skeptical. Alexandra, do you think it is possible to recover the days of the past?”

  “No, but . . . ” I hesitated. And then I saw.

  My father was dead. That was the fact. But if I could turn these days of pain into lessons, that awful fact could become poetry that would continue for the rest of my life. Yes, the past is “passed”— it is unrecoverable and none of us can live there. But the wisdom gained by reflection upon that past is why we are alive. To make meaning. To understand better. I got it. If prayers were only knowledge, prayers would fail.

  I looked at Rabbi Syme.

  “Do you believe, Alexandra?” he asked.

  “I believe you.” I did—it wasn’t an evasion.

  “You know what I’m asking.”

  “I do. I can’t believe I’m saying it but I do. I believe in something.”

  “Well, good. ‘Something’ is possibility. ‘Something’ is something.”

  I thanked Rabbi Syme and left. I would not see him again for seventeen years. But his impact would be with me, his name forever synonymous with integrity.

  24 Translation from The Standard Prayer Book by Simeon Singer (1915), public domain

  The Protagonist Wishes to Express the Truth,

  However Cryptically: A Cryptogram

  Full

  Isnuck off to be alone. I took the car and drove to town as though it called to me, drawn toward secrets, lost in the tide of reason. I bypassed GI, drove right past the familiar—like a wife about to slip into someone else’s bed.

  Walking through the doorway of the unfamiliar place, I scanned the room for the flash of a familiar face, and, when I did not find one, I slid into a corner table and hid from view. I did not know why I was there. It was as though I had come coerced by the notion of relief.

  This diner was Greek too—Greek American restaurants known as a “Coney Island” restaurant, are established and plentiful in Detroit. Coney Island restaurants center around the (absolutely freaking delicious) Coney Island hot dog, which is loaded with chili, diced onions, yellow mustard, and sometimes relish. It is usually referred to simply as a “coney” and named after the similar hot dogs served at the actual Coney Island which was one of the first stops of immigrants after leaving Ellis Island. Greek brothers established coney restaurants in Detroit around 1915, and they have been an establishment in Michigan ever since. With dirtier walls, cheap but delicious fare, and a gray-countenanced wait staff who stank of being, this coney was nothing like GI. The tables were sticky, the air thick and greasy on my cheeks, the walls lined with posters of greatly varying Hellenic achievements—the Parthenon, Sappho, Zorba, Maria Callas, the Olympics, and—last in the row—Irene Papas as Electra.

  Electra—the Argive princess and daughter of King Agamemnon, the father she worships and has lost. She must avenge his death. She cannot live until she has. Electra laments in her grief, Evil is all around me, evil / is what I am compelled to practice, Sophocles wrote.25

  The teenage waitress interrupted my distraction, and I ordered a pathologically healthy omelet—egg whites, spinach, mushrooms, no cheese. No toast, nor any other accoutrement of diner breakfast food.

  I waited.

  Electra called again, her expression goading me toward viciousness: In such a state, my friends, one cannot / be moderate and restrained nor pious either.

  The omelet arrived: wet. Sickening. In careful squares, I inhaled it. The first in an oncoming surge of secrets.

  Father, father, father! Your perpetual excuse!

  I ate.

  Well-fed.

  Surfeited.

  Satisfied.

  These are the things that one normally feels after the feeding of a hunger. I’m full, you will say. I am sated.

  No other form of satisfaction can compare to the profundity of a body replete.

  But there is another kind of fullness, one replete with nothing but disgust.

  One might think that in the wake of all that had been lost, one might feel an emptiness. But that is not the case.

  Even an empty stomach is ripe with bile, enzymes, and digestive juices. Ready. Excitable. Impatient to pounce on and devour any new artifact it encounters, absorbing the good and excreting the bad—hot acids pummel the contents of the guts, as detergent pummels grease in a pan, turning it to energy and waste.

  So it is with grief.

  You lie there empty, but your guts are primed and full to bursting with this acid. It’s the same sharp acid you watched dissolve your hands and navel and inner organs, the one that has evaporated you many times over. That acid does not live in your guts alone; it has seeped up into your throat, taking away your voice. It sloshes within you as you move through life, burning away your brain as you dream.

  You are so full of the tart and pungent stuff that any further introductions are not merely unwelcome, but impossible. The slightest scrap or sliver or slice of nourishment becomes intolerable.

  There lies the paradox: though empty, you are too full. Crowded. Crammed. Bursting with the acids of anger, shame, self-loathing, guilt, and deep, unabating wretchedness.

  Food could not be tolerated—too full was I of everything else.

  The pent up feelings had to be released, in the most violent, punishing way possible.

  And o’er this gloom / No ray of pity, save from only me.

  But I was not standing before the house of Agamemnon. I was alone, a body still recovering in the filthy toilet of a diner— fluorescent lights flicking, staring downward at shreds of trampled tissue, face filled with broken blood vessels, eyes shot and soundlessly weeping, taking in an unspeakable sight. But for a moment—and only for a moment—relief.

  Living creatures will suffer anything for a morsel of comfort. Isn’t that a funny thing? Doesn’t that just make you want to convulse at comic truth?

  One thing I have learned about comfort: do not dare mistake it for hope.

  I purged the omelet.

  It was the start of a battle that would rage a decade, like the Trojan War itself.

  I would fill and empty over and over again, for years, in secret. I would face my broken blood vessels, I would lose bone density, and fill many teeth. Not until pressed to breaking point, not until forcing a choice between what I loved and what I had come to require to regulate the war within, would I truly heal myself. Just like every war, it would be caricatured, cannibalized, ignored, raged, made commonplace, dehumanized, continuously lost, then ultimately, one day, won.

  25 Translation. Anne Carson

  Star of Wonder, Star of Night

  I’d attended Jewish preschool when I was very little, but the overwhelming holiday memory of my childhood is Mom’s Christmas. That provides wave after wave of shiny memories—glittering trees, dancing in a pink tutu in the living room with Dad while The Nutcracker played on our Sony television set, a sea of gloriously wrapped boxes beneath the tree (Mom was always extraordinarily gifted in that department, Dad extraordinarily handicapped). Christmas morning was nothing short of exhilarating, and then we (OK, I) spent the rest of the day in a sugar-induced coma of excitement, collapsed in front of Frosty the Snowman, clutching my beautiful bounty.

  I remember buying Christmas trees. We’d narrow our choices down, presenting each contestant as if it were a beauty pageant, eventually settling on one and even naming it.

  I remember in particular Christmas 1995, watching the very first hairs fall from Dad’s head at Christmas Eve dinner at a neighbor’s house—so gently and silent. It was stirring, but something we could not speak of in company.

  I remember the following year, when he surprised us by coming down the stairway stark-ass naked in his woolen cancer hat singing “NYC” from Annie while Mom and I rolled on the floor at the bizarre flippancy of it all.

  We Silbers had always liked the holiday
s. We liked hope. And joy. Comfort and joy.

  Not so this year. A bleaker and darker December there had never been before or since. We weren’t exactly having one of those Christmases you see in the movies. No angels got their wings, no Grinch’s heart exponentially grew. This wasn’t even jerky animation Rudolph, though that felt a bit closer.

  The motherfucking holidays.

  It was not only our first holiday without Dad, it was the first holiday after September 11. So many were mourning in addition to ourselves. And still the world churned on; we hummed songs of the season in as throated a voice as we could muster. For now, the planet circled the sun, unrelentingly turning upon its axis, opening itself toward the light—light that could only be felt and seen on the other side of this darkness.

  It was becoming clear to us that life had to move forward. The five of us had to move on; we had to make decisions about the future. But we didn’t have answers, just a great many questions that led to more questions.

  Yet one thing was certain: after the New Year, we would no longer be living together at 1367. As we felt the year itself ending, we also felt life, as we knew it, ebbing away—like a radio station flicking and fading as you drive farther away from the signal on a highway.

  We bought our tree.

  We did our best.

  Indulging in Christmas spirit felt a little like taking a drink from a fire hose. Grey and Lilly returned to their homes, but Kent stayed with us for Christmas. Mom handwrote a note to Santa, which she folded into a tiny ball and left next to a few cookies and some carrots for the reindeer. It simply read: “Dear Santa, Thanks for stopping by. I think we need a little extra help this year.”

  There were a few gifts—mostly handmade, small. I learned somewhere that there is a corner of the NASA website where you can buy the stars in the sky and have them named after people—a process completed with a certificate that comes in the mail. As if you can really own a star, I thought as I clicked the screen, scoffing as I went ahead and did it anyway. I not only bought the star, I bought into the beauty of the idea that no matter where I walked or wandered, I could, at some point, look up and see that star named after my father, burning in the night sky.