The Ritual

The red earth from my grandmother’s graveyard stained my white sneakers. I wiped it off later, with a damp paper towel, crouching in my parents’ laundry room while my brother and parents were all busy elsewhere. I had imagined doing it in the middle of the night, in the dark, after everyone else was asleep, but each time I had forgotten or fallen asleep myself first, and so it only happened when I finally needed to wear those sneakers back to my apartment in the city several days later, and by then it was daytime and bright.

That whole time those shoes had sat unnoticed in the laundry room with the edges of their soles darkened, almost indistinguishable from their normal dirt and grime. The paper towel came away red when I pressed. I needed two to get it all off. I am wearing those shoes now as I write. Is it strange that I wish they were still stained?

My father reached for my hand, which I can never remember having happened before. She was his final parent to die. The size of the coffin: I could see it all and imagine her inside of it, and the fact that it could contain her was strange, because when a person is alive the body seems less like a container and more like an expression; but this was just a container.

The coffin teetered just briefly as it was drawn out of the hearse, and the lid lifted a fraction of an inch, but I could not see anything. I wish I had gone with my aunt to identify the body.

What is the feeling I am trying to capture?

The problem with death is it makes everything trite. Everyone has had the experience, and so there is nothing left for you to write that has not already become a cliché. I think that is why it is better to default to a person’s faults when remembering—the charming ones at least, if we do not wish to be rude. My dad did well with that at the eulogy. Yet even that was too pat.

The juxtaposition, the question that I keep coming back to, is whether my grandmother is gone or not. Whether she is in fact contained in that box beneath the red earth that we threw on her body one by one with the same shovel in the Jewish cemetery, visions of Schindler’s List dancing like sugarplum fairies all through my head, or whether she was whatever she left behind that is not in that box. Perhaps, that is the purpose of the box: to make it clear that everything outside the box is still here.

Where does the ritual end?

The notification upon my return from vacation that my grandmother had had a small stroke; the need of my parents to afford me my enjoyment in Argentina; the reassurance that she was still all right even after. The checking in day by day, and then her having another, more significant stroke; was the stroke a part of the ritual too? Not knowing when the end would come and having to be told by my boyfriend that I should go to see my parents at once despite the uncertainty, my chronic self-centeredness. The fact that I no longer regard that self-centeredness as a flaw but a fact. Deciding what to put in my bag when I went, unsure if I should bring a suit, and deciding not to, but to wear a neutral outfit at least. A dark one, except for the shoes; I do not have good comfortable dark shoes that are warm. Arriving at my parents’ house to find only my mom, my dad in New Jersey with my grandmother; he would be there until she had breathed her last breath. The notification that she had, that my father had watched, he and his sister both, the two of them only; is it strange I am happy for them? I hugged him when he came in, really hugged him, not just the token normal one. Thinking about it now, I wanted to stay there for longer. I was afraid to stay there for longer because he would think that I needed it; but I did. Why was I scared? His tone as he told us about it, his strange, normal tone in which he describes everything, “it is what it is,” “that kind of a thing,” my irritation with it then immediately suppressed. Why was I irritated? No reason: because I was his child; because I still am.

We had sushi for dinner that night. The next morning I found out that my brother, who was at the end of a long trip abroad for work, would be able to make it back for the funeral the following day, taking two flights overnight from Rwanda to La Guardia, which relieved me somewhat because I had been worried he might not forgive himself if he did not manage to be there; his sense of obligation has always been so strong. I didn’t know if I should call it a funeral, or service, or memorial. I have not looked up the difference and will not. I slept poorly that night and every night thereafter that week, not because of my grandmother but because I overeat when visiting my parents: I stuff cheese and crackers and whatever else I can find into my mouth late at night and then lie down on the too-firm bed and feel like my midsection is solid rock no matter which way I turn and then sleep.

I slept poorly and then drove down with my mother the next morning, following my father, who had already gone to pick up my brother. My mother drove, which was a mistake; then I drove, which was also a mistake. I got out after parking at my grandmother’s retirement home, finally, needing to walk around in a circle in the sun and breathe slowly to decompress. My mother will read this and focus only on any part that portrays her unkindly; I love you, Mom, and think the world of you, please do not worry.

I did not hug my brother, which was reassuring, because we never hug; we do not need to. We know what we mean to each other. I love him. I am growing sentimental as I write this, realizing it is because of my grandmother; or perhaps that is just me. But me is also her in a more indirect way; I am from her, and she was warm-hearted but unsentimental person, and this is how that now manifests in me.

I went inside the retirement home, and met my aunt, and cousin, and her husband, and made conversation and caught up, which was nice and was awkward in exactly the same measure as always. We waited for the 96-year-old priest whom my grandmother liked and who would be saying a few words at the service to arrive; my father and aunt had chosen him instead of some, and I quote, “rent-a-rabbi,” despite the priest’s obvious lack of Jewishness, because he knew her in life, and the two of them liked each other; it was the right choice. He did a good job at the graveyard, after we all had parked in our myriad cars in the driveway that ran through the modest cemetery from which you could still hear the cars speeding by on one of the nearby highways that compose the north Jersey landscape; people were crying. I was not. I helped carry the coffin. After the priest spoke, my father did, and I was the tiniest bit worried it would rhyme (don’t ask), and prepared myself to forgive him if it did, but thankfully it did not; he spoke of her foibles first and then her nice parts after. I liked the foibles especially. Those felt like her; they took this act out of the realm of the general and they made it specific, while the gravediggers politely waited across the driveway in their sweatshirts, chatting out of earshot; what a strange job that must be. Good for you, I thought in their general direction; those must be extremely well-adjusted people. Or perhaps spectacularly ill-adjusted ones, but these ones seemed nice. They were all men; are there female gravediggers? There must be, what a strange thought; now there’s a glass ceiling no one is talking about. My mom and I left her pocketbook with the car keys in my dad’s car accidentally afterwards, and had to wander the cemetery for ten minutes while he and my brother returned the priest to the retirement home and then came back to save us.

There was a pizza restaurant where everyone went for lunch, which had pictures of classic Hollywood bombshells in pinup poses pasted all around the urinal, seemingly encouraging inappropriate behavior; my mother told us later that the women’s had the same thing but inverted, with shirtless men staring at her from black and white vistas while she peed. My extended family posed for a picture after lunch, which was a strange thing to do, but no less strange than not doing it. Now there is a picture of my father’s family and my aunt’s all together, smiling in this pizza restaurant an hour after we buried my grandmother. The earth was so red. My earth-stained shoes are blocked by a table in the photo. My brother and I drove back to my parents’ together afterwards, and then all of us spent all of the next two days together, more or less. It was good; it was important; it was extremely normal. The second night together we watched the movie Eileen. It wasn’t bad; it was missing something.

I took a Steuben crystal penguin that had been my grandmother’s back to Brooklyn and put it in the cupboard, next to my wineglasses, because I liked the idea of it living there like a little secret; I did not send a picture of its location to my family the way my brother did with the mezuzah that had been my grandmother’s and which he put on the door to his office, because I knew that someone would ask why I did not put it in a more prominent place, and I did not feel like answering. I had tried, briefly, putting it on a table in my living room; but it was wrong there. It was the wrong ritual; it was the wrong monument. Not the penguin itself, but the penguin in that location; it was not the way my grandmother fit into my life. I don’t know why, I don’t know. It was too static, I think. When I kept it in the cupboard next to the wineglasses it became a ritual again, a shrine to which I may pay homage not by lighting incense or making offerings, but by drinking wine, something whose quality and enjoyment is already inextricable from its provenance; it made this ordinary and enjoyable activity into a remembrance in a way that I did not mind. It felt right to me, for me. I don’t know. Then I went to the gym and bought a sandwich, and realized at some point around there that I wanted to wake up the next day and write this.

I woke up the next day and I wrote, slightly uncertain at first, but did not waste time on the uncertainty, moving ahead anyway; and then I went back home afterwards. I bought groceries, about seventy dollars’ worth, which seemed like a lot but also somehow is not; it is just what I needed after not being in my place for a week and then also pickles.

The next day was my birthday. Went to my birthday dinner with friends, a small selection, the ones with whom I always look forward to spending indefinite amounts of time individually, was how I described it to them. Ignored the remnants of the cold I had been fighting off from getting my mouth too close to the karaoke mic (do not sing Billie Eilish, I learned, her songs are lovely but too soft for karaoke), and drank slightly too much but not too too much wine. I woke up the next morning slightly bleary but not terrible, and if you are not going to drink a reasonable overmuch at your self-arranged birthday dinner four days after your grandmother’s funeral, really when are you going to drink?

I took Sunday off; from what, you ask: from everything. Did nothing, I tried to do nothing; perhaps texted my friend with whom I have sex sometimes to see if he wanted to have sex; my lover had been out of town for too long, and I needed a release.

I woke up on Monday, which was the second-to-last week at my job; I had given notice five days before my grandmother died, after she had had her second stroke and I had known it was imminent, but I was not going to let a little thing like my grandmother’s death disrupt quitting. Did actual work—work for money I mean—because they were still paying me, and it wasn’t terrible, and was made even less terrible by knowing that I would not have to do it for much longer. I pitched pieces in between; neither of the pitches I sent out that week were an immediate success but neither were they immediate failures either, which is the way things go in reality—I was finally learning, after thinking for most of my life that if success was not immediate then it did not count as success, that success truly belonged to those who knew how to capitalize on early marginal successes. That will not fit on a T-shirt.

The weeks passed; I left my job at long last. My lover returned; I went to see him before he returned from DC, see his body and the play he was in, feel his body against mine, in mine; both of us had missed it, desperately. I had never missed someone else’s body the way I missed his; never fantasized about someone I was already with the way that I fantasized about him, about things that we already have. He returned a week after my visit. It had been two months. And I was free, and he was free, and somehow, at nearly forty I was at last living the unmoored artist life that I always had dreamed about when I was younger but on different terms entirely, with a stack of mostly self-earned money in the bank that meant my life as an artist was anything but starving; I thought of my grandmother again. Not because of the crystal penguin next to the wineglasses, which did make me think of her a little every time I drank; but because I wondered to what extent the strange freedom I was feeling had to do with her being gone. It did not have much to do with it, I think, but it was hinting at the greater loss and freedom which I was approaching at some point in the medium-distant future, when my parents followed suit and then I would be on my own, at last, an orphan well past middle age. I fantasized about it; less than I had when I was younger, in truth; but I now acknowledged more openly those earlier fantasies of freedom, the fantasies of the greatest and most significant set of guardrails around my being finally being removed. I hated myself for the fantasy.

I got married; it was the happiest day of my life. Talk about another instance where the general overwhelms the specific and we succumb to cliché, sheesh. Every day with him was the happiest day; every time I was with him all the relentless whispering in the back of my head fell silent, no more connections to the past present future imagined fantastical except for the ways that they manifest in the person I was in that moment.

There was a ten-minute pause between the previous sentence and this one; I got lost in the reminiscence for a moment, or the imagining; is that muscle the same?

My mother died at last when I was in my sixties. It was so much different than I had anticipated; I was so much different than I had anticipated. It turns out that being thirty-seven does not prepare you for being sixty-four in any particular way. In the supremest of ironies, my father outlived her, despite her extreme health-consciousness, all of us gathering to say goodbye to her in a strange echo of my grandmother from all those years ago. I remembered not to wear white shoes. The earth was not red. It was me and my husband, my brother and his wife and their child, which they have had at long last, turning her into a grandmother just barely, but barely was all that she wanted; and my father, who could not stand on his own, floated in his mobile, eyes red, protesting that he was fine, but not as resistant to feelings as he used to be. He was not fine; he was maybe fine. I cannot imagine what he was in that moment. It is hard to look at him, it is hard to not look at him; I look at the ground, at the dirt and the grass, and realize all of a sudden that all this is wrong, that my mother did not wish to be buried but cremated; and the scene changes. We gathered elsewhere; where will she want her ashes to be spread? On the lake, I think, and if that does not turn out to be the actual truth, it is close enough, it will suffice. That is where we gathered, on the edge of the lake, which is serene, painted with the blue of the skies all above, fringed with the green and brown of early spring. My brother did it, and thankfully that thing that is always happening in movies where a gust of wind comes at the last minute and blows the ashes all over everyone’s faces did not happen. She was a slowly spreading circle of ash in the water, floating for what felt like too long, a nearly uncountable number of minutes, until the edges finally became waterlogged, and she sank. It is difficult to write about; it is difficult to watch. There had been a long lead-up to this point; I was grateful for that time to prepare, but nothing can really prepare you for the unavoidable awareness that you will be the next generation to go. I hoped that in death she found some of the peace that always seemed to elude her in life; that she was proud of me at last. I can hear her protesting even now, she was proud of me already; I know, Mom. We arrived back at my parents’ house, which they had been planning to vacate for the last fifty years without making good on that promise; I took off my shoes and put them just where I did when my grandmother died.

That night, while my husband was asleep, I went back downstairs and picked up the shoes and took a paper towel and wiped the dirt off them gently. There was a noise; my brother’s child was standing there and watching; he asked me what I was doing. Cleaning, I told him; Do you want something to eat? He was not a child anymore—he could not have been—too many years had gone by; but I cannot help imagine him as one, it is already stretching the limits of my imagination to imagine him at all, to imagine any of this happening, and so forgive me if I stall him in eternal childhood; he wore the pajamas that I wore as a child in that house, they had Aladdin on them and they glowed in the dark. We ate crackers together, tears on my face not then but now as I write; eventually I told him, Enough, and put the crackers away and brought him back to his room, the guest room. My brother and his wife in my brother’s childhood room, and me and my husband in mine, my father in what used to be my mother’s office on the ground floor because he could no longer make it up the stairs. I turned away from my sleeping husband and went to my parents’ room and looked at the now-empty bed. Sat where my mom used to sit and fell asleep with the light on like she did—

—and then it is my turn. I do not know who is there, I do not have it in me to imagine it. It has taken a lot from me to imagine this much already, but it needed to be taken. There I am on my bed, eyes cloudy, rheumatic, and ready to die because finally my faculties degenerated to the point where I could no longer write. Until that moment I was fine; my degenerating memory did not stop me from writing, nor did my joints, nor my body, there are many ways to overcome those things and record words these days; but something happened in the last month or two, and the writing no longer makes sense, I simply do not understand how the words fit together, and once that ability is gone I no longer understand the point of living. My husband is there, or he is not but he feels like he is; I can see him looking at me with all the love that has always been in his eyes, still there, stronger than ever; and I relax because I know that no matter how far I go I will not be alone, because part of what I am is the relation between us, and that relation exists whether he is there or not, and so wherever I go, he will go too. And it occurs to me now that he is not the only person with whom I have that relation; that, even if more complicated, even if I take it for granted, there is that distinctness of relation with all the other people I have kept in my life; that what I am with them is the space in between. I feel so sure of this: I feel sure that I have lived my life in such a manner that these relations exist.

This is the story I tell myself; these are the stories we tell ourselves; the fact that this one is fictional does not mean it is any less real. The stories finally overwhelm whatever is left of the unstoried me, and I am breathing my last breath, and then all that is left is the ritual, but this is my ritual and I am back where I started: I do not know how to love you, Grandma, without loving myself. I miss you.

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