Last night I was at a friend's daughter's wedding, this morning at a friend's father's funeral. Three dear friends of mine lost parents this past week. You hit a certain age, and this is what the landscape starts to look like, the odds tipped towards death. I understand. (But I don't have to like it.)
Everyone who died was quite old, in their eighties and nineties. They had rich, full lives, a long run, loving children and grandchildren by their side. These things are all good. These deaths are sad, not tragic. I know.
And yet, as a daughter who has lost a mother, I feel it all so keenly, the tears streaming down my cheeks for men and women I barely knew but whose daughters' hearts are currently breaking, as they now face the world motherless or fatherless for the rest of their lives.
Even the wedding was not free of minefields for me. It was a lovely affair, the bride in her 20s, our friends - her parents, so proud and happy. There was food and wine and dancing. After the hora, the DJ hit a nostalgia pocket, and when he dropped the needle on "In the mood" I suddenly fell to pieces, quietly sobbing on Danny's shoulder.
I had suddenly been transported back to my childhood,my mother teaching me to lindy-hop in the kitchen -- table pushed back against the egg-yolk yellow walls, kicking up our heels on the gray linoleum tiles, the cats looking on in bemusement from their warm perch atop the water-heater cabinet.
I loved and missed her so much right then.
It comes in waves like that, unexpected, never unprovoked, sometimes unwelcome, sometimes a gift. They are entwined, like that -- the loving and the missing.
And for now, I'll take it, since its all I've got.
It is the 8th night of Hanukkah tonight, and so we're done. Hanukkah came early this year, putting us at a bit of a disconnect with the rest of the country. We'll be well all done before the Christmas frenzy is in full bore. But so it goes some years.
Last year Christmas Eve was the 5th night of Hanukkah, the holidays overlapping nicely. Next year, thanks to simultaneous oddities of the standard western and Hebrew calendars, Hanukkah will actually cross paths with Thanksgiving, beginning the night before!
I'm still weaving in and out of my seasonal ennui, some days lighter, others darker. Holidays are always about family, family, family and I am missing some members of mine. This week the universe conspired to remind me of my father constantly, now gone nearly three years.
I sat down to get a cup of coffee in the middle of the day on Wednesday and gather my thoughts, when I noticed the man seated next to me in the cafe, heartily enjoying a bowl of potato leak soup, one of my father's favorites. I just had to get a some myself, the silent tears dripping off my face and dropping into the bowl rendering it a bit on the salty side. Just how Dad liked it.
I was thinking about the last months of my father's life, how even up until the very bitter end, when he was barely eating anything, becoming more of a skeleton day by day, I could still often get a little soup into him, if nothing else.
Nabeyake udon or vichyssoise, pasta fagioli or avgolemono, clam chowder or chicken noodle, goulash or gazpacho; the man loved soup. And every time I make some, I conjure Dad up, if just for a little while.
And then on Thursday night, my husband and I got to spend some time with dear friends who are a generation older than we are (but young, so young in spirit and full of life). I love them to pieces and we had a wonderful dinner and lively conversation and I enjoyed every minute of it while simultaneously feeling so sad that my father is gone and my mother fading fast. And there was our friend Al (OK, I'll name drop: Al Jaffe) a year older than my mother, but still working, still living completely independently (yes, it probably helps that his lovely wife Joyce is a decade younger, but still, that makes her no spring chicken herself).
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OK, this post was supposed to be going up yesterday, on & about the 7th night. I had written this much by Thursday and was going to finish Friday. But then I came home from my intense all day appointment in Brooklyn (the impartial hearing concerning Jacob's schooling) having been pretty much in a bubble all day, to find the news... the school shooting... all anyone can talk about, think about. And I froze.
How can I write about a cheerful holiday, about missing my father who got to live a long, fulfilling life and become really, really old before he died, in the wake of this immense and senseless tragedy, in the wake of twenty dead children? And yet, there were my thoughts, up until Friday evening.
And so I am walking around dazed and shell shocked today; doing what I have to do, boys to basketball, lighting the final menorah, feeding everybody and washing up the boys weekly five loads of laundry. Because life, for the living keeps going on.
I cannot write about Newtown yet. I don't know if I ever will. There is no sense to be made of it. And, for once, I truly have no words. Except to say that we need vastly better mental health services in America, and with less stigma attached to getting them when we need them.
And so I'll end here, rather abruptly perhaps, because there is no way to stitch this into a smooth and seamless post. There was regular life, skipping, trudging, shuffling along. And then... the thousand ton boulder dropped into the middle of it. And aftermath. There's always aftermath.
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To conclude: last year I shared the Maccabeats & Matisyahu's wonderful Hanukkah song with you, this year I'm sharing a new song from Matisyahu... and hoping everyone had as happy a Hanukkah as possible, in spite of all the insanity and tragedy in the world.
It's now my third Fathers Day since I lost Dad. But that has barely registered on my internal seismic meter, so immersed am I in taking care of my nearly 90 year-old, now quite frail mother who fell three weeks ago and broke her hip.
As this so often ushers in the beginning of the end for the elderly, like my Mom, I have been swirling in much worry and sadness. I have also been awash in memories of the end of my father's life as the precipitating event of his final demise took place at the same hospital, in some of the same wards, that my mother has resided at in these past three weeks.
Backwards and forwards and timeless hospital time all converging in my mind as I sit and sit.
So while I am not so much feeling the sharp piercing pangs of missing my father this year, the dull ache of his absence suffuses all.
Yesterday my mother seems to have turned a major corner in her recovery. (I say "seems to" because once or twice I have left her in apparently much better shape and returned the next day to find her slipped way back down again.)
Mom was lucid and rational, present inside her eyes in a way she hasn't been since the fall. My Facebook status posted on the way home:
She was still sad when we talked about my father. "I miss him." she said quietly, tears slowly dripping down her cheeks, after I had shown her some pictures of their life together. She looked up, her eyes seeking mine, "He was my best friend."
I put my arm around her, gently squeeze, kiss the top of her gray head.
I was out and about the city today; places to go, people to meet, errands to run. And my handy little iPhone camera came with me.
I just shot the things that caught my eye.
I like things that look like other things - a shrub that takes on the shape of a mighty tree, a sidewalk crack that becomes a textured abstract painting. Familiar objects whose graphic qualities please me.
And people too, with heads or without.
Woman on the M79 bus
Reflection
completely random stranger in motion
And of course, some flowers. There will always be urban flowers.
Photographing like this makes me think of my father. Until the very end, he was never out and about without his camera, viewing the world with the eye of an artist.
