Essays by DAR

A Thousand Shades of Life

(First published in Obit Magazine)

Who is a eulogy for? Ordinarily we assume it’s for the benefit of the bereaved, comforting us in our time of loss. But given the right circumstances, a eulogy can also do something for the person being eulogized, or at least for the legacy she leaves behind. This is especially true when the deceased has suffered a long decline before dying, fading everyone’s remembrance of what she was like in her prime.

When my three siblings and I recently eulogized our mother after 12 years of her mental deterioration, something close to a miracle occurred: We reconstituted her from her damaged ghostliness. Right in front of our eyes in the funeral parlor, she was brought back from the vapors of oblivion into which she’d disappeared, ready at last to become a full-fledged memory in all its gloriously complicated 3-D.

One quarter of that reconstitution, my eulogy, follows …

A memory. One morning when I was in sixth grade my mother told me that a man named Fidel Castro had just nationalized Cuba, and I was going to skip school that day and train with her to New York to go to the United Nations. She wanted, she said, to give me a taste of the real world, and show me how much larger and more exciting it was than the world of Cub Scouts I was so involved in. We got to the U.N. where anti-Castro demonstrators were yelling at the pro-Castro demonstrators who were yelling at the TV cameramen. I was pleased to see that the larger world had nearly as much commotion in it as my relationship with my mother.

Memory two. A few months later, I wanted to show her something of my world, and I finally convinced her to accompany me to a Cub Scouts parents’ night, which consisted of many sets of proud parents watching teams of Scouts conveying a ping pong ball across the room on the flat of a paddle. It was a lot of fun, and hard, too. Hey, you try racing a ping pong ball across the room on the flat of a paddle. When we got home, my father peered up from his Freud and asked her how it was. “Edifying,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Easily bored, my mother wanted mothering to be edifying. If it was merely tedious, she didn't have the patience for it. Instead of plying me with food like the stereotypical Jewish mother, by my teenage years she declared that she was so sick and tired of answering my incessant questions about what food was on hand that food was thereafter off limits as a topic of conversation between us. From then on, she proclaimed, she and I would speak only of literary matters.

"So," I would say, sauntering into the kitchen and opening the refrigerator door, "do you think Camus liked bologna? Think Sartre would have enjoyed it if there’d been any mustard to go with it?"

She would cackle and call me a horse's ass. And in my dubiously affectionate fashion, I had a name for her, too. I called her "The Duchess." For she was also the most refined person I knew, sensitive to language and music and art, attuned to every nuance of expression and gesture. In the way that some computers can read thousands of colors, my mother was of a fineness that could detect gradations of life. Nothing was ever black or white but rather of a thousand shades. With her six languages (French, Flemish, Yiddish, German, Spanish, and English), words meant more than one thing at a time.

She was the most subtle person I knew. I called her "The Duchess" because when she wasn't being disgusted with me for resisting her French lessons or threatening to take her future grandchildren off in a red Fury convertible, she had the cultivation of a natural-born aristocrat. It was as impossible, for instance, to imagine her watching an afternoon bowling show as to imagine Jackie Onassis doing so. She created and ran two art galleries, published a dozen children’s books, flirted with garage mechanics, and never looked into a camera lens without first whipping off her glasses to strike a noble pose that any son worth his salt would ape. Mercilessly.

But her mothering was spotty, full of static-y offs and ons, like a wire in a loose connection -- sometimes yes, more often no. My other name for her was "Motherly" -- because she wasn't, with me, anyway. We had a shortage of tender moments between us; they were usually more operatic -- high hilarity, or threats and recriminations. But there was one moment that was so gentle that even years later it shines with a dull glow.

One weekend morning without warning she took me on an excursion to visit the temples of the region and see which might be appropriate for our family to join. There weren't a lot to choose from in our corner of Connecticut in those days. We went to a dilapidated Orthodox one in downtown South Norwalk that smelled like open cans of salmon. It was painted a cheap shellacky kind of yellow inside, and the pews were dotted here and there with sleepy old men who seemed to rustle to life when my mother and I walked in. "Come! Stay!" They reached eagerly for me -- "good boy, nice boy" -- flaring their nostrils and smacking their thin lips and plucking at me as if the skin on my neck was able to give them sustenance.

I knew these sinewy gentlemen from my mother's Old World relatives in New York. They had crabbed toes. They pointed, aggressively, with their middle fingers. They had problematic breath, walked around with crumbs on their grizzle, and were a factory for the making of spittle. Come see spittle being manufactured before your eyes! Showrooms open to the public! Yet I felt loved. My mother held back to watch as their eyes feasted on me and their hands jabbed forth to touch my shirt, my shoulder, my ears; as they winked and smiled their wrinkled faces to each other, full of the significance that I was the future of their faith, that it was for such a young Jew like me that they kept the covenant. I felt shy and flattered that they thought I could serve as the seed to carry Judaism forward into another generation.

But we left. Their faces, so quick to be filled with hope, were cast into despair. They were baffled by my refusal to stay, when they were offering me so much. An age-old faith! A tradition to live by! And I was spurning it. But it was inappropriate and even cruel, in a way, to stay. There were no children my age at the temple, no children of any age. Only these gnarled and needy oldsters. No sense in giving them false hope. They had the wrong boy.

Later that morning we found a Sunday School that was the opposite of the Orthodox temple: young and Americanized. It was so Reform that it took place in a public grade school building that was loaned to the congregation on weekends. My mother stood behind me in the squeaky-clean gym during assembly while I watched the kids horse around as they sang. Just like in regular school, the teachers were hunting down anyone passing notes or pulling ponytails. Interesting concept, a Reform School for Jews: The young rabbi looked moderately radiant, pink-cheeked and full-lipped, a warden I could have fun rebelling against. For better or worse, that’s where we signed up.

Afterwards, my mother and I drove home to Rowayton. I was still feeling shy, from the attention of the Orthodox oldsters and from being an outsider at the Jewish Reform School. My mother was also quieter than usual, having observed her son trying to find a place in the world, and she was clued into a soft part of herself. A Handel string piece was on the radio, and my mother suggested we not go home right away, and we parked in a boatyard overlooking the Five Mile River and she gazed out atop the masts and halyards and let the music wash over her with the soft breeze blowing in from the water. She was still, and it was amazing to dissolve away our usual melodrama and allow her such a stillness. It wasn't a rapture, it was quieter, it was just my mother feeling her life, appreciating her own-ness. What a private wonderful thing, and for once I sat there respectful, hushed before her. After a while, I slipped out of the car and respectfully left her there, overlooking the boats, and I walked home myself.

So now I feel that's where she is. Or somewhere similar – not a temple but a boatyard, perhaps, someplace unaffiliated with organized religion where she can be prayerful in her own proud, singular, fiercely defiant fashion. I have somehow been foolish or lucky enough to retain a young boy's sense of God and the afterlife, and I cannot be sad on this funeral day. I am relieved for the Duchess. I feel she has released herself after long hesitation, and she is where she wants to be at last, perhaps overlooking the boats of the Five Mile River, perhaps joyously greeting others she loved so passionately and lost so bitterly too soon in her life: her dear parents, Bonmama and Bonpapa, and her older brothers Aaron and Schmiel and Moishe, and her husband's parents, Nana and Gampeddie, and her friends Joan Wilson and Mary Booth and Marcia Peterdi and Fidel Castro … ok, maybe not Fidel.

With a young boy’s simple belief I do believe she's there, and soon enough we'll be there, too, racing ping pong balls on the flats of our paddles and resuming our eternal conversations where they left off: “Do you think Sartre might have preferred mayo to mustard?”

Motherly, Motherly: Be at peace, Mom.