From the cemetery, we had gone straight to my parents’ living room, where we spent the afternoon sitting shiva. Shiva is the Jewish tradition of spending the days after the passing of a loved one surrounded by friends and family. It was comforting to spend the afternoon around the cousins I see only when someone dies, eating the kind of deli platter I see only when someone dies. I’ve had corned beef at my parents’ house six times total, always following the death of a relative.
It was the first time Maris had met most of my family, and a funeral wasn’t the ideal circumstance for light introductions, but where else are you going to meet a third cousin? A wedding, I guess, but that’s even worse. At least at a funeral you get fewer questions about when “you two are going to tie the knot.”
That evening, as cousins had begun to trickle out of the house, Maris and I borrowed my mom’s Prius to go into Boston. I’d had a few stand-up shows scheduled that night, and I didn’t want to cancel them, because I get stressed out backing out of obligations, and also because doing comedy helps me feel like myself. It’s not that what I say onstage is like therapy. Generally, I think comedians who claim that comedy is “like therapy” for them are bad at either comedy, therapy, or both. But I started stand-up when I was nineteen, and I do it most nights, so it feels routine to go out to a show, the way that if you have an office job, it can make you feel normal to go to an office. Here I am at work, life going on the way it does, and such. I didn’t want to be Family Me anymore. I wanted to put on jeans and take a break from explaining internet things to people in their seventies.
We hopped in the car and, having no other music option, turned on the radio, and the first song we heard was “Caress Me Down” by the band Sublime. Sublime is not a good band. They’re like a skateboard that you listen to. They are, in my experience, taken very seriously by people from California, much like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, fresh avocados, and the low-grade fear of being swept into the sea by an earthquake. “Caress Me Down” specifically is a very bad song. And yes, it’s a cover, but they do it very Sublimely.
Maris started singing along with the radio, and I couldn’t stop laughing. What did me in was the impassioned performance of the lyric “Kiss me neck and tickle me fancy!” (A line that sounds innocuous on its own but is part of a run of almost-rhymes that includes the word “horny.” Gross! Keep “horny” out of your song lyrics!1 “Horny” is a word for drunk text messages only, IF THAT.)
The commitment with which Maris bellowed the line cracked me up, and it made the day a little less gloomy. We bounced between the three shows, which I will not describe in detail, because describing a stand-up show is barely more tolerable than describing an improv show, which is barely more tolerable than describing a dream.
By the time the last show wrapped up, it was after midnight, and we’d been fully on since nine in the morning. For the moment, exhaustion smothered the grief. We got back in the Prius and headed back to my parents’ house. When the radio came on, the first song we heard was once again “Caress Me Down” by Sublime, which was jarring. The song was, at the time, sixteen years old and had never even been released as a single. Hearing it twice by chance within a few hours felt like some kind of wizard’s curse. What terrible fate is about to befall us? I wondered.
This time, we joined the song in medias res, at the Spanish part. Maris, not knowing Spanish, but refusing to back down from her earlier bit, did an enthusiastic, fist-shaking dance at me, as if I’d just denied her a mortgage or dinged her car while pulling out of a parking spot. Again I laughed. It was very kind of her to give such a full-throttle performance of such a terrible song, all for my benefit. I loved her very much.2
We arrived home just before one in the morning, depleted. We tiptoed up the creaky stairs, peeled off our cold-weather clothes, and burrowed under the covers. I lay on my left side with my right arm draped over Maris’s body across the crease where the two twin mattresses met. I didn’t intend to pass out like that. It is, at least for the two of us, impossible to sleep while spooning. It’s a fiction from romantic movies, the same as falling in love with your greatest business rival or meeting your soul mate after she spills a cauldron of soup (charmingly!) onto your computer. But that night, wrung out of emotion and energy, I had started to drift into sleep while snuggled tightly against Maris, relieved to have made it through the day, and nervous about the wellspring of feeling that awaited me in the morning. I feared the turbulence that lurked beneath the busyness and tiredness.
“Josh,” she whispered, so gently, so sweetly, her voice like a snowflake landing on a dog’s nose. “Kiss my neck?”
And in that moment (and of course in many moments since) I would have done anything for her, whatever I could do to make her life easier and more comfortable. Kiss her neck. Scratch her back. Rub her feet. Whatever she needed, she’d been so wonderful to me all day under such stressful circumstances, and I was ready to pay her back.
I curled toward her to plant the tiniest, tenderest kiss on the back of her neck. And as I did, she turned to face me, making eye contact with one eye, like a hammerhead shark.
“AND TICKLE ME FANCY!” she blurted out. She Sublimed me. In my childhood bedroom. On the day of my grandmother’s funeral.
And I don’t know what they call that where you’re from, but in Stoneham, Massachusetts, that’s called a keeper.
A Good Game
I spent the first February night of 2015 huddled with friends around a disproportionately large television in a tiny Brooklyn living room watching the Super Bowl. The game was close, but the nerves I felt on account of the Patriots’ evaporating lead were coagulating into a thick, bigger-than-sports sadness.
Not again.
That was the text my dad sent me after Jermaine Kearse, the Seahawks’ receiver, bobbled the ball over his entire body like a contact juggler before holding on to it inside the Patriots’ ten-yard line. My stomach pitched and lurched. I sank down into the couch like loose change.
“Hey, this might sound weird,” I said to the party, “but however this game ends, I think I’m going to start crying. My grandmother died. I’ll explain after.”
It was embarrassing to admit to a room full of cosmopolitan New York writers and media professionals (in other words, nontownies) who felt more vicarious embarrassment for Katy Perry’s rhythmless Left Shark1 than attachment to any football team. Nobody expected to be in the presence of an actual Sports Maniac, the kind of person whose happiness depends on the score of a game played thousands of miles away. Until that fall, I hadn’t even known I was one of those people.
And then Nana Kay, my last surviving grandparent, got sick. Well, she’d been sick, but in October we found out what it was. The pain in her legs, which had grown unbearable around her eighty-ninth birthday, wasn’t arthritis; it was lymphoma. Suddenly, she needed twenty-four-hour care from her three children, which my father and his siblings dutifully provided in shifts, even after she was admitted to Newton-Wellesley Hospital outside Boston.
Although my grandmother was a strict parent and abided my grandfather’s kosher diet, as a nana she had grown away from religion and was almost unbelievably permissive (unbelievable primarily to my father, who had known her as a mom). She participated in my bar mitzvah, proudly, but with no sense of comfort or familiarity around the Torah.
On the other hand, a few years earlier, I’d given her a recording of a stand-up comedy show I’d done. “There’s some adult material on here, and if you have any questions about what it means . . . never talk to me about it,” I said.
A week later I got a one-sentence email (a feat in itself) from her. It was brief and sarcastic: “Oh, I get it.”
She’d been so healthy up until her diagnosis that the doctors spoke of her condition in terms of “full recovery” rather than “years, months, or days left.” Still, the time in the hospital wore on her. She was used to being independent; she’d been retired less than a decade, working into her eighties doing patient billing for
hospitals to finance her trips to all seven continents.
When you’re confined to a hospital bed, there aren’t many appointments you can make. You await visits from friends and family members. You enjoy the coconut ice cream they smuggle in. You tolerate the erratic and invasive visits of doctors and nurses, hoping that one of them will bring you closer to going home. But you don’t have a lot of control over your social calendar. During my grandmother’s hospital stay, the NFL schedule became the one event she could make an appointment for herself. Physical therapy and visits from cousins came according to the whims of everyone around her. Patriots games were her time.
“I wish I’d been able to stay up and watch the second half,” she told me with a sigh over the phone the morning after one game, the frustration with her illness boiled down to a single point of practical concern.
Before Nana Kay was diagnosed with cancer, I thought I was done with the NFL entirely. I had walked away, and I had no regrets. Between the league’s dismal handling of domestic violence issues to its resistance to effectively addressing the brain injuries sustained by its players, I couldn’t watch a game with a clear conscience. Also, the Patriots looked bad. Like, really bad. Smoked 41–14 in late September by the lowly Kansas City Chiefs on Monday Night Football bad.
It was disappointing because I had a long history as a fan. In 1986, my dad squeezed infant me into a “Squish the Fish” T-shirt for good luck . . . right before the Patriots got crushed by the Bears. I’d celebrated the team’s three Super Bowl wins and agonized over the three losses in the big game. Where I’m from, this qualifies as “casually following” a team. I wouldn’t call myself a “bro,” but I would say I’m a “hardened twerp.” Plus, kickoff always reminded me to at least text my dad.
Honestly, I had never really thought of my grandmother as a sports fan; the rest of her personality was too vibrant and far ranging to be defined that way. Kay Gondelman was adventurous and candid and acerbic and giving. She always brought family members a souvenir from her latest trip to Asia, but she never hesitated to tell someone how the birthday gift they’d gotten her had missed the mark. During the summer of 2011, as I was preparing to move from Boston to New York, I took my grandmother out to lunch. Afterward we went back to her apartment, where she had baked a cake for dessert. We sat at her dining room table and talked about everything you’re not supposed to talk about with a grandparent. Abortion, religion, even (gasp) Israel. She told me, for the first time, how she hadn’t believed in God for decades. She couldn’t believe that a benevolent force would allow the horrors of the world (I don’t need to list them here) to persist.
It was comforting to hear her thoughts, because I’ve never felt attached to Judaism in any traditional way. I’m not religious. But I’m also not spiritual. I used to drive home from New York to Boston for Yom Kippur and Passover at my mother’s request, but over the years, my motivation to make those trips has dwindled. At this point, the most Jewish thing about me is that I still love the Beastie Boys. I appreciate how central religion can be in the lives of other people, but it has never resonated with me. I imagine this is how lots of people feel about things I love, like rap music or, it turns out, sports.
I didn’t quite realize how important the Patriots were to Kay’s life until I got a text from my mother near the end of October saying she’d delayed a cancer treatment to guarantee she’d feel well enough to watch the Pats play. That is, in my estimation, the strongest possible commitment to a sports team. Forget waking up at five thirty to tailgate or even getting a mascot tattooed on your ankle. There is no more impressive show of team spirit than postponing chemotherapy to watch a game. Tears crept down my cheeks as I sat, overwhelmed by my grandmother’s commitment to living her life exactly as she chose even in spite of her own doctors.
She started chemo the next day, but it didn’t take. The doctors were able to manage the pain, but there were complications, and those complications interrupted the treatment, and the cancer spread. But the NFL season continued unhindered. By this time, whatever moral high ground I’d taken against the NFL had eroded. While my job in New York kept me physically distant from my grandmother most of the time, keeping track of football gave us something to talk about on the phone. Watching ESPN highlight packages gave me the comfort I imagine people derive from murmuring a prayer over rosary beads.
When I visited in November, I brought a Tom Brady jersey. My father duct-taped it to the wall of the hospital room. I told her about my plans for the time off over the holidays.
“I’m going to finish writing my book.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard you say that a lot,” she replied.
By the time I came home for Thanksgiving, the doctors had given up on the chemo and sent my grandmother home. My family ate Thanksgiving dinner at her house as we always did, but she wasn’t well enough to leave her bedroom. I sat with her before returning to New York.
“I love you,” I said.
“I love you,” she whispered. I squeezed her hand and walked toward the door.
“Don’t party too hard!” I called to her over my shoulder, which I maintain was a pretty solid bit.
She died the following Monday. My mom called to tell me, and I stoically made plans to return for the funeral. An hour later, I got a text saying that my grandmother was going to be cremated with the Tom Brady jersey. Then I cried, thinking that if she hadn’t just died, my grandmother could be elected mayor of Boston on that platform alone. I later joked to my parents that I couldn’t control my tears because I’d paid like a hundred dollars for that shirt. I think she would have appreciated it. But really I was crying because the shirt and the team it represented hadn’t provided a strong enough foothold against the relentless current of her illness.
So two months later, when the Seahawks seemed poised to clinch an improbable Super Bowl victory, everything felt so unfair. Nana Kay’s death, but also the score of the game itself. Don’t you accrue some kind of sports karma when you are laid to rest, ashes intermingled with officially licensed team apparel? Does such fidelity mean nothing? And then, when Malcolm Butler jumped a route and intercepted Russell Wilson’s pass over the middle, reclaiming the game for the Patriots, I was overwhelmed by how unfair everything still felt. My grandmother, who showed unbelievable devotion to her team, missed its most thrilling moment, which was even more unfair than if they’d lost. Of course it felt bad. Any result would have probed the wound of the loss of Nana Kay. No football score could have erased it.
Even in my excitement over the result of the Super Bowl, I didn’t feel like my grandmother was present or watching over me. I felt her absence in an acute, urgent, painful way. Because she wasn’t present. She was dead, and she’d missed out on something that would have brought her a lot of joy. Tears leaked down my face on the long subway ride home. I realized I might never be able to watch football again without missing her. I realized that might be a good thing. Despite its flaws, the NFL has given me a wonderful gift of remembrance, which is how I imagine a lot of people feel about religion.
I quit the NFL a second time after that Super Bowl. It’s not like my grandmother’s death had solved the structural problems with the league.2 Then team owners started to crack down when players like Colin Kaepernick began using the playing of the national anthem as an opportunity to kneel in silent protest of police violence against people of color. And, of course, there was the public friendship between then-candidate Donald Trump and Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and Bob Kraft (the Patriots’ star quarterback, head coach, and team owner, respectively).
It had become somehow even less acceptable to root for the Patriots, an endeavor which, even before 2016, felt a little like watching Beauty and the Beast and cheering for Gaston. Yes, he has a perfect butt-chin, and maybe you grew up cheering for him, but come on. He’s a pitchfork-wielding vigilante who probably already has the small French village equivalent of five Super Bowl rings.
And it was not just more frowned upon, it was also
less appealing to cheer for the Pats, too. It almost seemed like a dare, as the reasons to abandon both the sport in general and the team specifically piled up. As the 2016 season continued, I felt sure that someday soon photos of Charles Manson with a Patriots logo prison stick-and-poke tattoo were going to emerge.
So, in the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election, I once again jumped ship on professional football, which was easy. There was almost no reason to watch. And at the time, my job kept me in the office on Sunday afternoons, when most NFL games are played, so even casually enjoying the season would have been a hassle.
But then, as fall became winter, the Patriots once again marched their way toward the Super Bowl behind the arm of Tom Brady, which was still as true and unerring as his friendship with a certain casino failure/reality star/POTUS was public and unnerving. When I read his blithe explanation for the Make America Great Again hat he had in his locker in late 2015, it made me want to uncremate my grandmother, or at least sift the jersey out of her ashes somehow. And it’s like, how dare this handsome, square-jawed goober remind me so much of Nana Kay? The nerve of him. Every slight felt like a desecration of my grandmother’s memory. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her death, and so I couldn’t stop thinking about the Patriots.
Once again I was sucked back in, the looming Patriots Super Bowl appearance and its now-complicated connection to my family history pulled me back to football, the way defensive coverage warps to account for the unignorable presence of Pro Bowl tight end Rob Gronkowski.3 And yes, that makes me a fair-weather fan, but in my defense, sports teams are the only sources of entertainment we’re supposed to support even when they’re bad. No one calls you a fair-weather picnicker if you refuse to spread out a blanket and eat sandwiches in the rain. No one doubts your love of science fiction if you don’t know the script to John Travolta’s debacle Battlefield Earth verbatim.
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