(no subject)

[seekingferret]

Today's my grandfather's yahrzeit and, as I do every year, I am struggling to figure out the appropriate way to mark it.

I paid a shiva call last night on a neighbor who lost her mother and as I walked home afterward I have to admit I was feeling a little bit smug about how awesome Judaism is at handling mourning. I mean, no matter what, it's going to be really hard to cope. The shiva house was by no means a happy place. But it was filled with friends and family for the whole week after the death, filled with so much food that the mourners were desperately trying to force it on their guests.

And last night afterward I talked to Susannah and she was lamenting how Christianity doesn't have a concept like yahrzeit, how her mother struggles each year to handle that anniversary and doesn't have a structural framework to view it through. Judaism is good at that. But it still doesn't make it easy.

So to ponder my grandfather for a while, it's been 12 years and I still miss him. and my dad misses him even more. We tried to get him to tell his life story before it was too late, but there are still missing pieces. It's an amazing story- he came over from Poland with his father when he was 12 years old, with neither of them speaking a word of English. When they earned enough money, they were able to send for my great-grandmother and my four great-aunts. From age 12, my grandfather worked in the garment district. He served in World War II, then came home and married my grandmother and went back to the garment business. He eventually owned his own tailor shop and made a comfortable living for his family. He self-taught himself how to play the stock market and that was something he always had a gift for. He was one of the smartest people I've ever known and he was entirely self-educated.

We found some new information about the story this year, things that filled in gaps. At my great-aunt's unveiling last summer, her son told us that she'd told him that on her trip from Poland to New York to meet up with her father and brother, they'd stopped in London. And in London, she'd eaten her first banana. He told it as a joke, but it nearly provoked a fight right by the graveside. My grandfather's only living sister, who was born in New York after that trip, had never heard the story. She'd never even known that they'd stopped in London. Their whole family, she said, never talked about life in Poland. They'd just embraced the New World with as much vigor as they could.

When my father listens to Klezmer music, he's grasping for a world his father denied him ownership of. I think he's determined not to cheat me out of my heritage.

And then we have encounters like the one my dad had a few weeks ago with one of his mother's cousins. She told us about how they used to celebrate Passover in Brooklyn in the 1930s together, and certain comical elements of the family dynamic have not changed at all since then. My dad was incredibly gratified and excited to learn that he was, without realizing it, continuing family traditions.

So those are my thoughts on the Yahrzeit this year. I don't know that they make sense, but it helped me to write them out.

Comments

[sanguinity]

Thank you for sharing that story.

:: He told it as a joke, but it nearly provoked a fight right by the graveside. My grandfather's only living sister, who was born in New York after that trip, had never heard the story. ::
:: Their whole family, she said, never talked about life in Poland. ::
:: When my father listens to Klezmer music, he's grasping for a world his father denied him ownership of. I think he's determined not to cheat me out of my heritage. ::

These details resonate very strongly with me, as my own family has/is doing something quite similar. The things people don't talk about except at graveside; the things kids reach for that the parents had tried to put aside.


Re Jewish traditions around death: they do sound as if they provide comfort -- or if not comfort, a net to catch you in what otherwise can feel like a bottomless fall. Knowing that there's a net there, that's a good thing.

[seekingferret]

I think what they do, above all else, is tell the mourner that it's okay to feel the way they do. Like, most of the time, the things that the Jewish mourning process requires are things that you'd want to do anyway. But our process says "It's okay to do this. It's not a show of weakness. It doesn't diminish how you feel about your loved ones."

[sanguinity]

My mother's family seems to be developing a tradition of going stoic and all but ignoring someone's death. (Which. Just. I don't. Even. Gah.) No memorial, no nothing but someone arranging for cremation and collecting the ashes, and someone else executing the will. As fucked-up as this is going to sound, I'm hoping that her connections with my cousins on Dad's side are strong enough that when she passes, they will show up for the memorial and bring some good old-fashioned graveside-tackling with them (funerals on Dad's side are, um, colorful), because lord, I cannot deal with the thought of having to take her death all stoic and stiff-upper-lip-like.

:: "It's okay to do this. It's not a show of weakness. It doesn't diminish how you feel about your loved ones." ::

Absolutely.