Adventures in Shiva sitting - part 1
Thursday morning at 5 am, I drove over to chez parent's house to carpool to the airport. We needed to help the daddy-llama packing his suitcase. Mommy-llama was reading Harry Potter in Hebrew, Zach-llama was helping me wrangle daddy. It hadn't really sunk it that we were going to a funeral (even though I was wearing a dress and a hat, not normal airplane clothes for me.) The parent-llamas had hastily purchased tickets Wednesday night, for a thursday afternoon afternoon funeral for Grandma Fanny (my mother's mother) in New York. (Jewish funerals tend to be as soon as possible because we don't embalm, though in an age of refrigerators, having it within 24 hours is not completely necessary if relatives have to come in from far away.) For more on Jewish funeral customs, check out http://www.religionfacts.com/judaism/cycle/death.htm. (Completely unrelated, but interesting fact from the same website, did you know that dogs are holy in the Zoroastrian tradition?)
We got into La Guardia around 10:30am Eastern, rented a car (Daddy-llama put me on as a secondary driver), and went to my dad's sister's house in Long Island. Wellwood cemetery, where Grandma's family plot is located, is part of the Pinelawn cemetery meganecropolis on Long Island, so Aunt Robin's house was conveniently close. (NB: Wellwood Cemetery also hosts the graves of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who come up in a google search of "Wellwood." ) Grandma was coming up in the hearse from Maryland (where she'd moved from NYC several years ago to be close to my aunt), with my mom's sister and her family following in the limo. My sister and another cousin were coming from NYC, other family was coming in from New Jersey.
Everyone met up at the cemetery around 3:30pm, after fighting traffic on the highway. It was a pretty small group. The weather was gorgeous, the sun was shining, it wasn't too hot. It wasn't particularly creepy. The cemetery residents were just very, very quiet. We followed the hearse to the graveside, which was a very narrow excavated rectangle, surrounded by a pile of dirt. The open grave was nestled between the graves of my grandma's mother and my grandfather (whom I never met),and flanked by the graves of my grandma's sister and husband.
My cousin Marc (my aunt's son-in-law) had the do-it-yourself funeral book, and being on the self-appointed expert on things, directed the rest of us in conducting the funeral. He directed my larger male relatives as pallbearers, loading Grandma (in a plain pine box held together with wooden pegs) onto a metal frame, using wide woven nylon strips (the kind movers use to secure furniture) to lower the box into the grave. The box looked so tiny. Grandma must have weighed all of 80 or 90 lbs, and was not even 5 feet tall.
Marc helped my mom and my aunt Merrily cut their shirts so they could tear them as a sign of mourning. Then, after reading some of the traditional Jewish funeral verses, Marc took one of the several shovels planted in the pile of dirt and started tossing dirt into the grave. Then the rest of us took turns using the shovels to fill in the grave. I grabbed a shovel, which was heavier than I expected and tried to gain purchase on the loose dirt and pebbles in my clogs, to start hefting clods of earth back into the grave. I got a good deal of soil back into grave before I started breathing hard, and then I started sobbing. (Which upon reflection was strange, because I didn't feel sad, it was just a physical reaction to seeing the dirt pile up on the top of the box.) We all took turns using the shovels, and pretty soon, the grave was nearly full, and the caretaker was raking in the dregs of the dirt clods that we missed. It was an extremely cathartic experience, being able to engage in focused physical labor when we were all feeling lost and bewildered.
Marc read the 23rd Psalm ("The Lord is my shepherd..." in Hebrew and in English. I started crying again when he got to the "cup runneth over" part in Hebrew...in hindsight I think Grandma would have agreed with that verse. She led such a full life and vibrant one, and while she could "prepareth a table" like nobody's business ...though I'm not sure about " in the presence of my enemies" part..unless they're talking about Lee Atwater. (Note: Grandma practiced a unique form of political voodoo known as the "putting a Lee Atwater" on someone, usually a particularly unsavory politician. Lee Atwater was President Nixon's Hatchet Man who gleefully went around spreading rumors to destroy other politicians careers. Grandma thought he was terrible. Then he died horribly of a brain tumor. Hence "putting a Lee Atwater" on someone.)
My cousin Sharon read an email from her brother Ari (they're my aunt's kids) in Israel, whose wife was about to give birth to a baby any day. Ari told classic funny Grandma stories (including how to pour orange juice, "You have to be aware", and the time she stayed in his extremely messy bedroom when she came to visit and left a note on his pillow, "Bend your ass and pick up your clothes.")
At this point, I looked down at the loose dirt I was standing on, catching movement out of the corner of my eye. There was an earthworm squiggling in the dirt. Llama-blog readers will know about my enthusiasm for my worm-farm composting. Grandma Fanny was my only family member who really appreciated it. So I cupped my hands and picked up the dirt and worm, and gently tossed it into the grave. (My cousin Ruthye saw the worm, too. "I didn't want Grandma to be alone," I explained. Ruthye gave me hug.)
My mom said Kaddish, and then we escorted everyone back to the cars. Except it was sort of like herding cats, because the cemetery is actually very interesting and we were looking at all the different graves in the "Greenberg Family Circle" which is my grandmother's maternal relatives (and there are a lot of them!)
Before we left the cemetery, we washed our hands (which was practical, because I was kind of covered in dirt from shovelling, but was also symbolic- washing away the impurity of death?) We then went back to my dad's sister (aunt Robin)'s house, where she laid out this incredible spread of food (including hardboiled eggs, which are also a traditional mourning food.)
From Aunt Robin's house, we split up. Merrily and my mom took the limo back to Silver Spring MD (suburb of Washington DC) to Merrily's house, where the 7 day period of mourning called Shiva was to take place. Daddy-llama, my sister-llama, the Zach-llama and I took the rental car and hit the road. We paid tolls up the wazzoo as we crossed over various bridges, and toll roads. On the New Jersey Turnpike, we stopped at the Walt Whitman memorial rest area, where we bought gas and M&M's, but the M&M machine ate my sister's 50 cents and refused to give her any more candy. We decided it was an offering to the spirit of Walt Whitman and left it at that.
My sister llama and I were getting increasingly punchy in the back seat, singing songs and telling jokes.
At the Maryland state line, my dad and I switched drivers in the rental car. Zach was navigating with our newly purchased Garmin Nuvi, dodging the weird lane changes and forced exits on 1-95 and the washington beltway. Finally, we got off the Beltway at University Blvd less than a mile from my aunt's house, and came to a stop light. There were two choices in the right turn lanes: the rightmost lane where the sign said "okay to turn on red" and the left-right turn lane where "no turn on red." I stopped, then double checked the signs, and scooted forward, and stopped again to check outcoming traffic...when we heard a large clunk. We'd been rear-ended at the stoplight...by a cop car! There was no obvious damage, but he had to call another officer out to write up the report. It was 12:30 am, the cop was obviously at fault, but we were quietly freaking out. Talk about adding insult to an already pretty awful and bizarre day. Eventually, the 2nd officer let us go (but followed us back as I drove very, very slowly to aunt merrily's house.)
To be continued....