No Regrets

Orphan Christmas

In times past a formal period of mourning—rituals, obligatory observances,  and a pass on social events—was de riguer after the death of a family member. I can see the point. It’s not so much that one is prostrate with grief, although that’s certainly an option; it’s that the task of striking the set after a final exit falls to those close to the departed, and it’s flat-out physically and emotionally exhausting. It sucks the chitchat right out the survivors, and sounds a muted chord of unreality behind everyday social interactions.
Separately, on either temperate coast and in the frostbitten heartland, my two siblings and I observed our first Christmas as orphans. Or not. My sister Christine and brother David ignored the season, which in the days following our mother’s death at the end of November seemed like a swell idea to me, too. But Answerjack and I have four adult offspring and obligatory seasonal rituals of our own; Jon and Mandra were ticketed to come west, and an improbably enormous tree was already purchased. It’s the first Christmas in our new house. With real reluctance I climbed on board for not quite Christmas as usual, and was promptly felled by a nasty bug that I interpreted not as an epidemiological event but as an injunction issued by a stern, Old Testament universe: thou shalt not be merry, or bright.
And I wasn’t, exactly. But in getting out of bed and getting on with life I was sustained, carried through the insistent raw awareness of the awfulness of mortality by a heightened appreciation of what makes life worth living. No one thing made it OK. It was an aggregate of minor and major pleasures:
the silly reindeer prance that the women of my family perform when we hear a certain Christmas tune. Jessica and John’s giddy excitement about Their First Christmas as Married Folk. Megumi, dancing with a wolf. Natalia and Mandra kicking ass playing Cranium. Answerjack, a tad schnockered and deeply content, our serial killer cat on his lap in front of the fire.
I also had lunches and dinners with friends, inhaled at that magical interstice deep in the nape of a baby’s neck, and while shopping had a wee (OK, big) weep over my mother’s Christmas wish list, found among the papers on her desk. She wanted a bottle of her favorite perfume, Patou 1000, and an electric pepper mill. I wished that I could still buy these things for her. But in the middle of the night, with Answerjack asleep beside me and the cats wound into compact spirals at the foot of our bed, I knew that at my stage of life the death of a parent is in the natural order of things, terrible and true and absolutely inevitable. I just thought there was more time. I’m pretty sure this is part of the human condition: when it comes to dealing with death, we all think we have more time than we actually do. I’m certain that the trick is to be fully present in the time we do have, and be both comforted and appalled that life, while going on within us, will also go on without us.

Christmas morning, hiking just outside our back yard. John took this picture—thanks!
Christmas eve dinner

Natalia rocks brain games. Another picture from John.

Jack and Murphy

My siblings and me in September 2008. Our mother is just out of the frame in this picture, sort of like in real life.

Happy Hanukkah, Asshole

Some time ago, I got it into my head to host a really swell Hanukkah dinner, despite the fact that I am a goy and a Cossack to boot. I did a fair bit of research on Hanukkah traditions and ferreted out best-of recipes for the compulsory food events. I endured an abusive interrogation about my cooking skills by a kosher butcher who was reluctant to entrust one of his stunningly expensive briskets to a Hanukkah amateur, got those little bags of gelt for the kids, and polished up the silver. I invited two of my oldest, dearest friends and my (now ex-) husband’s business partner and his fiancée, two couples who had never met but who I  just knew were going to get along like houses afire. Goy-ish or not, I was going to rock this holiday. 
And so I did, for the first 20 minutes of the evening. The guests of honor were introduced to each other and exchanged pleasantries as we all tucked into to a pretty terrific meal. I went wide into the Martha Stewart zone, graciously accepting accolades for the latkes and casting smugly approving glances at my interesting, attractive guests and my intelligent, adorable children, all so nicely lit by those flickering candles.

Then it all slid south, with astonishing swiftness: a slightly heated discussion between Old (Boy) Chum and the Fiancée suddenly combusted, and within nanoseconds insults were hurled, fits were thrown, and tears were shed. People fled the table to hide in the loos. The children were entranced.
I, however, was not. My due diligence about Hanukkah customs failed to turn up any mention of celebrants addressing each other as “asshole.” What would Martha do?

I believe that pity for the hosts, plus the fact that there was no way out of the house except through the dining room, finally lured everyone back to the table to finish the festive meal, the remainder of which was conducted with agonizing politesse. Food was the only safe topic of conversation, and every bite was praised with desperate enthusiasm while being consumed with an urgency like unto that of ravening wolves. When the last latke disappeared, so did the guests, leaving me with a plateful of untouched rugelach and a painful case of hostess interruptus.
At work the next day, Robert’s partner politely asked him not to invite them back to our house when the other couple was going to be present. My chum never lived down his role in the debacle, thanks to constant reminders by his wife and me, and an abbreviated version of the evening being featured in a little cookbook.
Over the years the Hanukkah Asshole Disaster has aged into an amusing anecdote. My old friends are still dear; we watched each other’s kids grow up and they saw me through a scorched-earth divorce. Now they’re good friends to Answerjack, too.
I’d fallen out of touch with Robert’s partner and his wife after the partnership dissolved; I’m pretty sure that Robert cheated him at the end. I ran into them last month after many years. They're doing great. We’re going to get together to catch up in the new year when it's safely past the Hanukkah season. Maybe I’ll make a plate of rugelach.

Red Purse

Shortly before leaving Florida for Jessica and John’s wedding in September, my mother bought a new purse, bright red faux leather with a little gold-plated plaque stitched to the outside: “Strada,” which on the planet of handbags rhymes with—well, you know. She was pleased with her purchase and its vague designer connotations, and showed it off at a family dinner before the big event. Red was definitely her color.
When she was hospitalized  in Jacksonville a couple of weeks later, the red purse became my responsibility. I’d take it with me when I left her bedside for the night and bring it back when I returned the next morning, early enough to catch her doctors on their rounds. She didn’t really need it at the hospital, but a purse is a key female accoutrement, decorative and functional, and it was filled with her important stuff: insurance information and credit cards and an eyebrow pencil and medical appointment reminders filed neatly in her wallet. A picture of her with my father, dead these 16 years.
After she was discharged, the red purse stayed on her nightstand at home. She’d reach into it to hand me the keys to her Buick as I headed out the door to pick up prescriptions or dog food or Cherry Garcia ice cream. My sister Chris rigged a woven basket to our mother’s walker; in went the red purse when Mom left the house for outpatient tests and procedures. The stuff inside was still important: Medicare ID, her checkbook, a hair pick to fluff up her ‘do, Revlon’s Cherries in the Snow lipstick. She took the purse with her into the lawyer’s office when she signed the papers finalizing her will the day before Thanksgiving.
Less than 48 hours later, the purse and its contents were artifacts of a vanished life. Little bits inside in the purse had brief half-lives of waning relevance: credit cards that needed to be canceled, the phone numbers on reminder cards for appointments she could not keep. Then it all meant nothing at all.
I felt like a little kid playing in her mommy’s purse as I went through all the formerly important stuff inside. I twirled up the lipstick, its tip worn to the shape of her lips, and sniffed its familiar scent. I noted the coins and the five-dollar bill in her wallet. The keys to the Buick went on a hook shaped like a mermaid near the door to her garage, handy to grab if any of us needed to run errands as we started the process of sorting through her things and preparing her house for sale. Emptied, the red purse went up on the high shelf in her closet, ready to be given away with her clothing when we can bear to make the call.

The really important stuff, which has nothing to do with her purse or any other thing, I took with me back to California. I get to keep it, forever.
Here is a picture of my mother Doris on our deck in Marin County at Jessica and John's wedding, September 20, 2008. She died peacefully at home in Florida on November 28. She was a few months shy of her 80th birthday. Safe journey, Mum.

"...There, rest. No more suffering for you. I know where you've gone, it's good."

—Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish Part I