April 10, 2007

• sad days

  My dear mother-in-law, tough and loving, died on Sunday morning.  She was just too worn out to get well, and too uncomfortable to stick around.  Because yesterday and today are the last two days of Passover and considered a holiday, we had to have the funeral, with a graveside service, on Sunday afternoon.  (Relevant Jewish facts:  any Jewish holiday has similar restrictions to the Sabbath.  Jews do not embalm and funerals are almost always the day after the death.)  On top of that, you can’t start sitting shiva (seven days of ritual mourning) on a holiday; usually, it begins immediately after the funeral.  So what this meant for us was that the funeral was on Sunday, there was one hour of shiva afterwards, and then shiva was suspended until sunset tonight (the end of Passover).  But since we mostly spent those last two days of Passover at Pop’s anyway, it’s kind of like an extra-long shiva.  (Shiva, which only applies to immediate mourners — Pop and Barry, in this case — has it’s own prohibitions in addition to the Sabbath-type ones:  you have to cover the mirrors in your home as not to promote vain thoughts, for instance.  And a few that have to do with making yourself less comfortable so you’ll remember that you’re in mourning:  you are supposed to sit on low, hard benches or boxes rather than a comfortable seat, men can’t shave, you’re not supposed to wear leather shoes, and so on.  Mourners are supposed to stay at home for seven days sitting in their uncomfortable seats while friends and family come to visit and take care of them, which usually translates into bringing food.  Mourners of course cannot cook during shiva, nor can they handle money, use the phone, etc.) 

  So now we all know more about Judaism. 

  Everyone cried plenty, not just when Mom died but in the several rough days before, and everyone worries about Pop.  Although we also worried about Pop all of the time that Mom was in the hospital because he was pretty lost without her at home.  65 years with a stay-at-home wife will do that to a person.  Actually, Pop is mighty good at housework, but can’t cook at all.  So he not only had to be kept supplied with food that required little or no heating up, it had to be kosher-for-Passover food.  My sister-in-law Elise and her sister Evette had come over before the holiday to get his house ready for Passover (short version:  you have to get rid of anything leavened or anything with legumes, and change to an entirely different set of dishes, pots, dish drainer — everything around food has to be changed to a set of stuff that you only use for Passover.  Paper plates and plastic cutlery make this is a little easier.  The everyday stuff has to be stored away.).  Anyway.  Elise stayed with Pop on Sunday and Monday nights (because she couldn’t drive on the last two days of Passover), and Leo’s staying with him tonight and tomorrow night.  Elise and I have to be available to do a lot of errands during shiva but of course most of the religious-oriented stuff she’s had to do.  (She arranged the entire funeral on her cell phone.  She’s fairly amazing.)  I had other kinds of errands the past couple of days, like going into Leo’s office to get his pay because we were flat broke.  And today I went back to Manhattan to buy pot because we were totally out and this was not the time to be out.  (Leo will be going without tonight and tomorrow since he’s staying at Pop’s — he even has to go outdoors to smoke a cigarette — but will be ever so glad for it on Friday night.)

  It’s crazy, our heads are spinning, that apartment is so empty of Mom, and Pop is just making lists and doing chores in a rather obsessive way, though his short-term memory is weak and maybe he doesn’t realize that he’s talked about how he has to take his pants into the tailor NINE TIMES ALREADY THIS MORNING.  I love Pop, he’s a fantastic guy.  But he gets very involved in planning and talking about these tasks and chores and won’t let it go at all until that mission is completed…I’ve probably spent more time with him in the past few days than I had in the past few months, and spending long stretches of time with him, Leo and I can see why Mom used to complain that he drove her crazy, before she got sick.  Leo was there at ten this morning, and by the time I got there at five, his eyes were rolling in his head, and he has a long stretch ahead of him. 

  Pop’s long-term memory is still pretty good, though, so we’ve been hearing a lot of his old stories for the 30th and 40th times.

  More later. 

  • 10:00 pm
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