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shiva in New Rochelle
Wednesday, September 23 2009
The father of our friend Penny died the other day after a weekend of apple picking and most (though perhaps not all) of an exciting Giants football game. So today Gretchen and I drove down to New Rochelle (just north of the Bronx) to attend the memorial. We arrived just as it was beginning.
I've been to very few funerals and those were of dearly departed Christians, mostly in my early childhood. My father's side of the family is German Catholic and preferred the tacky open-casket thing, whereas my mother's side is from New England Puritan roots and preferred no-fuss cremation. Penny's family is Jewish and I'd never been to a Jewish funeral. Strictly speaking, though, this particular even was neither Jewish nor even a funeral. The deceased would end up being cremated, a procedure that lay outside of Jewish funereal practice even before the Holocaust supplied it with further negative baggage. And, as Gretchen pointed out to me, an actual funeral includes some sort of procession, either to a cemetary or a crematorium. Instead, this was a memorial service. As with a funeral, the body of the deceased was present and he lay in a simple closed pine box (this is a Jewish custom).
Another first with this memorial service was that I had never met the deceased. I'd never even seen the guy in photographs. I'd heard only a few stories from Penny, whose major parental focus has been on her mother (who has been recovering from a stroke for years now). It's a little odd to learn about a person mostly at his memorial, but this isn't too different from reading the obituary of an obscure famous person in the newspaper. How many people, for example, will read the full Wikipedia entry on Daniel Schorr before he dies?
As with an obituary, a memorial service presents the positive highlights of the life of the departed. For Penny's father, these included a great deal of generosity, whimsical rapport with children, and the sort of honesty that doesn't lend itself to success as a businessman. Close family members got up to share their memories, and every now and then one of his favorite songs would be played. To my ear, the first two songs resembled unknown pop music from about 25 years ago and thus sounded a lot like Christian contemporary music. The last song was Sinatra's "My Way," which, we were told, was the song the deceased had once specifically mentioned as a good one to play at his funeral. It's not a bad song for this sort of occasion, aside from the fact that it has become to funerals what "Happy Birthday to You" has become to the milestones of aging that don't kill us. (Sarah Vowell touched on this during the This American Life episode on Frank Sinatra.)
Every now and then the ceremony would drop out of the personal and return to timeless Jewish protocols. A rabbi would come out and lead the assembled in the recitation of Hebrew prayers (particularly the Kaddish). Gretchen is something of a SuperJew and seems perfectly fluent when reciting Hebrew prayers, but others nearby took a more phoneme-by-phoneme approach. It made me wonder what English will sound like some day after it becomes a dead language and is used only in religious ceremonies, perhaps by the Mormons or Scientologists of the distant future.
After the ceremony, we all carpooled over to the apartment Penny's father had been sharing with his second wife. There we'd all be participating in the Jewish ritual of shiva (or the truncated form practiced by the sort of Jew who would keep shrimp in his freezer). There was a sticker on the front door that said something about being proud to be an American, reminding me of something Penny had once said about her father being something of a Republican. Or something.
Funerals pay respect to the dead, but ultimately they are about the living and the patching of a tear that has appeared in the social fabric. And so it was that soon after the small apartment had filled with well-wishers, a bunch of sweaty guys from an Italian restaurant (the deceased's favorite) showed up with aluminum trays full of food. This being a Jewish function, the food was the main benefit extended to the mourners, though there was also plenty of wine, beer, and even booze. Little or nothing was vegan, of course, so Gretchen had brought her own aluminum tray full of noodle bake.
On average, every human being dissipates 100 watts of heat continuously. In the tiny apartment of the deceased, the number of kilowatts being dissipated was equivalent to several ceramic heaters. The day was hot anyway, and that extra body heat, added to the oily humidity rising off the trays of pasta, soon rendered the indoors an unpleasant socializing environment. Gradually the bulk of mourners moved outside to some additional folding chairs (I believe Penny's husband David had arranged all these things; in another life he'd done this sort of work professionally). From that point on, it felt like the final hour of a wedding. Most of the people were dressed nicely and were either strangers and vague acquaintances. And our conversations were informal and largely unrelated to the death we'd gathered to mourn.
On the way home, we dropped off AV (one of Penny's friends whom we know) at the train station and continued on to Trader Joe's, our favorite place to buy non-perishable foods. We managed to fill two grocery carts with things we needed (corn chips, bread, pasta sauce, pasta, pre-packaged Indian food, bulk nuts, etc.). This ended up costing $260 and was such such a mindfuck to the Chase anti-fraud algorithm that my card was declined. I had to use my credit union ATM card, whose backend apparentl lacks an anti-fraud algorithm.
Trying to find our way back out to I-287, the Tappan Zee, and the Thruway beyond, we got a little lost and ended up randomly coming upon yet another Trader Joe's. Westchester County, it seems, has two of them, though there isn't a single one further upstate.
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