My Grandmother's Husband: Some Sort of Eulogy
I feel awkward resurrecting this journal just to write about a dead man, but since I didn't want to put it on my regular blog, and it is, indeed, quite personal, here it is, in case anyone reads it.
My grandmother's husband died yesterday afternoon. He'd had heart surgery last week, and first he was doing well, and they extubated him and he was awake for a little while. Then he got an infection and he wasn't breathing well on his own, and they re-intubated him (with all the concomitant sedation) and they had to put him on dialysis, and then suddenly he was brain-dead. When my father emailed me yesterday morning, they said he was dying, and would probably die within a few days. I emailed my boss about needing some time off at some point next week to go to the funeral (it'll be in his old shul in CT, where he's a past president, and where he and my grandmother were married last year, the same place that took me in so generously and warmly when I was on breaks from college). He was dead around the same time that I finished CPE for the day.
So the funeral is going to be on Sunday. It's going to be a really weird Purim. Not that Purim is one of my favorite holidays, not that I tend to feel so comfortable with your standard Purim party. We were just going to do things fairly low-key already. But going from whatever Megillah reading on to a funeral and all that goes along with it is going to be, well, one of those really sharp turn-arounds. This is (among five or fifty other reasons) why I didn't want to be a pulpit rabbi. But in your own life, you don't get to choose- things just happen. And I'll manage, and it'll be another note in our Purim associations from now on. And that'll be ok, that'll be the way it is.
But I wanted to say something about Eli, and about who he was in my life, because for all that we were never very close, he was a part of my life for longer than my grandfather was. Pop Mel died when I was 9, and he's still somehow a foundational part of my picture of who my family is. Eli was with my grandmother for something like 15 years, and married to her for the last year and a bit of that, and when I was younger and they were more frequently local, I saw him fairly often. But I don't have a lot of specific memories of him. There's the fact that every time Amie Roz sent us a card, he sent one too- separately, in a different envelope, with a separate check enclosed, because he wanted to be a part of my life too. I have a couple of books that he gave me, when he was cleaning out his library- his Encyclopedia of Jewish Concepts is on our shelves now, although I must admit that I haven't opened it in years. And years ago, when I visited them in Florida for a weekend and wanted to go to shul, he took me to morning minyan on Friday (I remember all the guys having shnaps and herring on a Friday morning at about 9am afterward), and then drove alongside me as I walked to shul on Shabbos, because he was worried. At the time, it annoyed me, because it felt so over-protective (and I was worried about his driving- he was diabetic, and his fingers were mostly numb by that point, already). But I have this image of him in my head now, pulled up on a patch of grass between the sidewalk and the road, waiting for me to catch up and pass him, and then he'd drive another couple of blocks and wait for me again. And then he sat with me at a shul that was nearly High Holidays sort of full, with a truly dull hazzan, and then we did the whole thing in reverse, going home. To quote yet another of my sci-fi favorites, "let that memory lighten grief".
My grandmother's husband died yesterday afternoon. He'd had heart surgery last week, and first he was doing well, and they extubated him and he was awake for a little while. Then he got an infection and he wasn't breathing well on his own, and they re-intubated him (with all the concomitant sedation) and they had to put him on dialysis, and then suddenly he was brain-dead. When my father emailed me yesterday morning, they said he was dying, and would probably die within a few days. I emailed my boss about needing some time off at some point next week to go to the funeral (it'll be in his old shul in CT, where he's a past president, and where he and my grandmother were married last year, the same place that took me in so generously and warmly when I was on breaks from college). He was dead around the same time that I finished CPE for the day.
So the funeral is going to be on Sunday. It's going to be a really weird Purim. Not that Purim is one of my favorite holidays, not that I tend to feel so comfortable with your standard Purim party. We were just going to do things fairly low-key already. But going from whatever Megillah reading on to a funeral and all that goes along with it is going to be, well, one of those really sharp turn-arounds. This is (among five or fifty other reasons) why I didn't want to be a pulpit rabbi. But in your own life, you don't get to choose- things just happen. And I'll manage, and it'll be another note in our Purim associations from now on. And that'll be ok, that'll be the way it is.
But I wanted to say something about Eli, and about who he was in my life, because for all that we were never very close, he was a part of my life for longer than my grandfather was. Pop Mel died when I was 9, and he's still somehow a foundational part of my picture of who my family is. Eli was with my grandmother for something like 15 years, and married to her for the last year and a bit of that, and when I was younger and they were more frequently local, I saw him fairly often. But I don't have a lot of specific memories of him. There's the fact that every time Amie Roz sent us a card, he sent one too- separately, in a different envelope, with a separate check enclosed, because he wanted to be a part of my life too. I have a couple of books that he gave me, when he was cleaning out his library- his Encyclopedia of Jewish Concepts is on our shelves now, although I must admit that I haven't opened it in years. And years ago, when I visited them in Florida for a weekend and wanted to go to shul, he took me to morning minyan on Friday (I remember all the guys having shnaps and herring on a Friday morning at about 9am afterward), and then drove alongside me as I walked to shul on Shabbos, because he was worried. At the time, it annoyed me, because it felt so over-protective (and I was worried about his driving- he was diabetic, and his fingers were mostly numb by that point, already). But I have this image of him in my head now, pulled up on a patch of grass between the sidewalk and the road, waiting for me to catch up and pass him, and then he'd drive another couple of blocks and wait for me again. And then he sat with me at a shul that was nearly High Holidays sort of full, with a truly dull hazzan, and then we did the whole thing in reverse, going home. To quote yet another of my sci-fi favorites, "let that memory lighten grief".