White Hot Grief Parade Page 4

  The second they left, the house was filled with an immediate flurry of activity. We fussed ourselves with practicalities. Kent and I only let my mother make the phone calls that were necessary for her to make—family ones, sentimental ones, the ones where she could come apart in safety. The remaining 8,000 phone calls we did ourselves.

  Kent got my mom’s address book and asked whom “her people” were. Nancy—her college roommate. Amanda—her good friend in San Francisco. Uncle Mikey—her baby brother who lived in Kansas City. Fran and Ken—our best family friends who lived in the area. Assorted other local friends and neighbors.

  In the meantime, I went about calling a list of friends who were now spread all across the country, creating a kind of phone tree. The awkward conversations that followed went like this: “Hi there. It’s Al . . . I’m—not great. Sorry to kamikaze you with this but um . . . so my dad actually died . . . I—I know. Yeah, I’m pretty numb and in high-functioning mode. Yeah, don’t panic. I am sure that I will start feeling it at some point. But look, can you come to Detroit? The funeral is on Friday. Great . . . And can you call Haley and Neil and Aaron and tell them too? Because I don’t really want to. Thank you . . . I love you, too.”

  So the good thing was that my people were on the way. Lilly would be there later that night. Cristina and Courtney took the Greyhound from Pittsburgh. Jeremey was on his way from Minneapolis. Grey, one of my best friends from Interlochen, was to arrive late that afternoon. One friend was flying from Boston. Another—who had long ago promised he would be there when this inevitable day came—was coming in from Brown. Friends came in from Chicago and Salt Lake.

  And there was a whole busload of people still at Interlochen who were driving down just for the occasion. Michael Arden, fatherless himself, agreed to sing in the ceremony and cried on the phone (a rare occurrence), telling me “I felt like he was my dad,” followed immediately by, “Also, I love you so much, I’m flying Spirit.”

  As the information came in, Kent and I began compiling an exponentially growing list of all of the arrivals and of the people that would be fetching and delivering and housing those people. Before long there was a chart.

  “The funeral home called,” said Kent. “Apparently we need to show up and ‘deal with things.’”

  “How long do we have?” I asked looking at my mother and Kent.

  “We should take care of everything as soon as possible.”

  Which meant we needed to be there by noon.

  Kent continued. “Also, your grandparents called. They said your dad’s service needs to be done in a synagogue.”

  Okay, so I guess we should add “find a rabbi and a synagogue” to the To-Do list.

  If lions have their prides and fish have their schools, there was a screech of Silbers sitting in that dull, gray room at the funeral home later that day. This funeral home, though professional and all, did not so much succeed in showing respect for the dead as it failed to make you want to live. Or perhaps it was the company.

  First were my grandfather Albert—a lawyer and a silent, loveless patriarch, possibly an undiagnosed narcissist—and my grandmother Edna—a depressive, pint-sized former piano teacher and incredible sculptor who had once been a beauty and was possibly a pathological liar. The day before, my father had begged to see his parents at his deathbed. Both had refused. That morning, as his corpse lay in the bed, Edna managed to stand outside the doorway and look in for a few seconds before darting back down to the living room. Albert remained in the living room, refusing to even go upstairs. Then there was Uncle Eli, the second born, my handsome but slightly psychedelic-drug-addled uncle, an extremely gifted musician who played any and all forms of guitar. There was Aunt Deborah, the undisputed doyenne of American and Amish quilting, along with her extremely antagonistic life partner, Joyce. I had always liked Deborah—she had advocated for my theatrical interests, and she had even dragged her parents to come see me in plays.8 Deborah also went through a decade or so of deep hatred for her parents in early adulthood and was, in my memory, a fairly angry person.

  None of the Silbers were very pleasant to begin with. They were made less pleasant still when they learned that my father’s final wishes were for his body to be cremated. Ruh-roh.

  In Judaism, cremation is forbidden. By Jewish Law, Jews are required to bury a body as soon as possible after and as close as possible to the location of death. The respect and honor that must be accorded the body of a niftar (someone who has passed away) is in some ways greater than the respect we might accord that person when he was alive.

  For Jews, the human body is the physical element in a complex and ultimately spiritual being. The human body is not simply the housing for the spirit, it is part and parcel of the combined human being—a being that will ultimately exist in greater spiritual form in the World to Come, when the Messiah comes. The body, insofar as Judaism sees it, is more than a casing or a vessel for the soul; it exceeds the function of a husk and therefore demands our gratitude and utmost respect.

  And in that vein, a remaining living person must see to it that a niftar is buried with that respect. It is considered to be the ultimate good deed (or mitzvah), for doing a good deed for the dead is a greater deed than doing one for the living, because there is always the chance that the living person might one day repay you. A dead person cannot return favors. They are dead; therefore, anything you do for them is pure altruism.

  All of that is great and good and moral and righteous and many, many other things I respect deeply about Jews and Judaism and human nature in general. But as far as I understood it on October 9, 2001, no one in this room was an actual, practicing, religious Jew. No one.

  Albert and Edna Silber were secular Jews. Jew-ish, if you will—culturally Jewish, certainly, and as far as I knew at the time, they did not appear to observe or practice the faith-based aspects of Judaism regularly, or have a relationship with God. I don’t recall a single Shabbat, Hanukkah gathering, or Passover Seder, and I definitely don’t recall a Yom Kippur breaking of the fast. The Silbers took enormous issue with my mother’s non-Jewish status, not because I believe it actually bothered them, but because it might seriously offend their social circle. I believed at the time that the Silbers’ horror at my father’s wishes to be cremated did not stem from a truly spiritual objection. It was an objection to how the Silbers felt they might be judged by others. I say “I believe,” of course, because I will never truly know.

  As an ever-evolving adult, I realize that in the exploration of my own Jewish identity, I could not then, nor shall I ever, fully grasp what it means to be a first-generation Ashkenazi Jew in America, especially one coming-of-age in the middle of the twentieth century. Being an Ashkenazi Jew in America is (still) a double-edged sword—we have the undisputed privilege of being able to pass as “white Europeans” and benefit from all that appearance entails, a benefit those of other races cannot employ when convenient. But still: Jews are always on guard. Jews have been persecuted, enslaved, oppressed, kicked-out, and systematically murdered for millennia, and still experience Anti-Semitism today.

  All this, and then becoming thriving American adults raising children during the Holocaust? I can imagine being highly motivated—life-or-death motivated—to fully assimilate. This is still true today. I owe my grandparents a nod to that sociological complexity. I can disagree with their individual choices and overall behavior without that resentment being directed toward their Jewish identity. At eighteen, on that particularly terrible day, I was not a fully-realized expert on my family’s connection to a cultural history fraught with persecution and genocide.

  That day, in that room, all I cared about was my dead father and his final wishes.

  Dad spent the last six months desperate to breathe, frantic about suffocating, and he didn’t want to spend whatever concept of eternity he had buried beneath the earth in a box. He wanted freedom. And air. And a destruction of the body that he felt betrayed him. And all of that was fine by me. If God wa
nted to take it up with me, that would be just fine, thank you very much. I had a few more probing questions and choice words to take up with the Big Guy anyway. Just add this whole cremation business to the pile of minutia.

  This funeral guy got it. He said to me privately that this actually happened all the time, the battle over the body. But they had cremated their fair share of Jews. It was the twenty-first century. Just.

  “Sign here,” he said, placing the papers with an exactness particular to people who choose to professionally deal with death. “And here.”

  My mother signed.

  “Would you like to see Michael one last time?” he asked.

  “No,” Mom whispered.

  With that, the screech was silenced—at least for the moment.

  When we returned home to 1367 Fairway Drive that night, the house had already taken on an eerie quality. It was still the house I knew—the walls, the carpets, the windows, the mementos were all the same—but it felt different. It felt off-center, like switching time zones as you drive through Indiana; like a zombie takeover where everyone looks the same but they could be a zombie; or like when you’re on vacation and Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! come on television in reverse . . .

  Or perhaps it was just that a soul was missing, a limb lost yet making its absence known.

  Grey arrived that night.

  Barukh atah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh ha’olam.9

  8 Also, in recent years, I hear she has seen me a few times on Broadway, but came and went without telling me.

  9 Blessed are you, Lord, our God, King of the universe.

  Grey

  There are many images of my life that I will likely forget—the majority of which I think I shall be happy to—but one that is burned permanently into my memory is the way that Grey arrived on our doorstep that night.

  Grey was toweringly tall, slim, and fair. He was also artistically bespectacled and wearing what he always wore in those days: slim jeans with long, pointed leather shoes, and a collared shirt below a fitted sweater of the finest material. He was an aesthete: a definitive appreciator of design, art, and beauty, and his clothing and personal appearance were no exception.

  I remembered a bright full-mooned night Kent and I spent tucked within the security of darkness in one of a dozen or so hiding spots that we had collected as we courted in secret. The moon was luminous as it poured light on the large, open Opera Field, and everything beneath its sphere was glowing like a poem. There was Grey: walking briskly around the Opera Field’s circumference discussing art and theater, planning the future of the art form with his roommate Michael Arden. Their hands painted the air about them with ideas, and their laughter filled the sky.

  Grey loved the theater, as he still does, and he viewed design as his personal contribution to the theater he loved so well. “Some designers love geometry, architecture, fashion, shape, color. I love the theater,” he would say.

  By the end of the school year, Kent and Grey were best friends (I believe they were even MORP dates!), and they were always off together planning one thing or another, laughing hysterically, without a care in the world whether anyone understood why. The summer after graduation when we all worked at the summer camp (because we couldn’t let go, let’s face facts), Kent and Grey roomed together in the dormitory called Picasso House, and one could hear their laughter not only all across campus, but likely across the majority of the Midwest.

  Hilarity aside, Grey was, in his way, the deepest of us all—his snobbery, haughtiness and all that inexhaustible laughter shielded the tenderest of hearts. He was sensitive, a Cancer (just like me—our birthdays are days apart), and one of my most important memories of the final days at Interlochen was holding Grey while he wept along the shores of Green Lake, his heart breaking from having to leave the only place that he—that any of us—had ever truly felt at home.

  He had just driven up from Cincinnati where he was two months into his freshman year of college. Whether it was the news of the occasion, the drive, or an abysmal college experience that was wearing him down was unclear, but the normally flawless Grey looked like absolute shit.

  “Hi,” he said, “I parked in front.”

  “Fine,” I replied. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Of course,” he said, looking me right in the eye before giving me a brief hug. “So I’ll get Felix to bring the bags in and we’ll get started.” Felix was his imaginary manservant, and that was going to be it for the emotions. We had work to do.

  The three of us—Kent, Grey, and myself—immediately gathered in the kitchen, which we would eventually come to refer to as the Situation Room. We made more lists and charts, a calendar and a map, and devised a complex strategic plan worthy of most military war teams. The route to the airport. The route to each Greyhound station. Driving instructions. Accommodations. Funeral business. And defense strategy for familial drama. Three hours later, we had a plan—a streamlined, 453- point master plan.

  Then we each grabbed our personal banana-sized cell phones, lifted the antennae,10 and called everyone on our lists, walking in a circle, a finger in one ear as we collected the details. Our calls concluded and our phones went down like falling dominoes. In the silent room, we laughed. We were in a modern day Carol Burnett sketch—Molière meets Frasier, but with Greyhound stations and grumpy Jews.

  With that task concluded, Grey went outside and made several trips back and forth to his black RAV4. Before long, he had brought in every last one of his belongings from Cincinnati. I think we all knew he was never going back. He moved into the downstairs room where he would remain for the next four months.

  Of my central circle of friends, Lilly was the last to arrive.

  She arranged a leave of absence, and caught a Greyhound bus up from Oberlin the following morning, arriving around lunchtime. She didn’t arrive at the house until dinnertime, however, because despite our Black- Ops-worthy planning, we somehow forgot to pick her up. For three hours and 24 minutes—not that anyone was counting.

  “I’m so sorry,” Grey told her when he finally pulled up to get her. “I don’t know how we missed you, Lil. We had everything planned down to the millisecond.”

  “It’s OK,” Lilly laughed. She was tired, but not even the tiniest bit irked. “I understand. I was just a little freaked out.”

  “Because you were a young woman alone in the Detroit Greyhound station? No worries there.”

  “Right,” she said. Even her laugh was still sunny and Southern.

  It would be the first of many identical journeys Lilly would take up the I-75, sometimes on the bus, but most often in her huge pale blue Dodge caravan, which made it look she was either dropping middle schoolers off at soccer camp or hauling a slightly “past-it” folk band to the latest Renaissance Festival. Lilly would be the only one of us who would return to college at all—Grey and I would drop out of our programs, and Kent hadn’t even gone in the first place. 1367 would become the place where all of us reassessed the next move. And joked about being college dropouts. Because, for the moment, we were.

  Grey and Lilly finally pulled on to Fairway, and entered 1367.

  “Hi,” she said, meeting my gaze with her huge, hazel eyes, “I brought Oboe.” Obviously Lilly was going to play at the funeral. Obviously.

  “Come in,” I said. And she did.

  We arranged the sleeping situation. Grey and Kent would sleep downstairs in the lower guest room, which had previously doubled as my mom’s design studio. It had its own bathroom, a dark window facing the River Rouge, and a trundle daybed we bought because I had seen one once on The Price is Right and thought the enthusiastic models made it appear outstanding. Lilly and I would share my room amid the fragmented souvenirs of a now forever-lost childhood. Mom felt understandably unenthusiastic about sleeping in the Bed of Death and thus took the spare bed in my dad’s former office—an office he hadn’t used in months as the disease took full control—where she’d remain for weeks.

  Lil and I settled into my
room. She put her bags down, pushed the hair off her weary face and sat next to me on the bed.

  “Al?” she said.

  “Yeah, Lil?”

  The air was thick with swallowed tears and steadied nerves.

  When she spoke again, her voice was quiet, but sure. “I’ve got this. We’ve got this.”

  “I know,” I replied.

  “You’ve got this.”

  “Thank you, Lilly.”

  She hugged me. That said it all. We immediately went downstairs and got to work.

  There was an entire extended family of unhelpful people to play offense with. There were 7,000 people to pick up from Wayne County Airport, the Greyhound station (which we later discovered to be, in fact, three Greyhound stations, all sixteen miles apart). There were people to call, housing to arrange, people to feed. And oh yes: a funeral to plan.

  And four eighteen-year-olds would do it all.

  And so, as my dad’s life ended, our life together as “the five of us” began.

  10 It was 2001, after all.

  Let Me Tell You About My Grandparents

  Do you remember Grandpa Joe and the bed full of wonderful, adoring grandparents in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory? Or Shirley MacLaine in Terms of Endearment? Or Peter Falk as the grandfather in The Princess Bride? Or Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond? These grandparents were perpetually bathed in afternoon sunlight, continually clad in earth tones, and all unendingly gentle as they spent time with their grandchildren in a fuzzy glow of adoration, charming life lessons and storytelling.

  Well, my grandparents were just like that. Only instead of adoration, my grandparents offered something called “conditional love,” and, instead of bedtime stories, I’d fall myself asleep not counting sheep, but counting what money was owed to whom, grudges, and grandma’s pathological lies.