“Shiva”

Recently, I reread this piece I wrote in high school, the year 2000, five years after my mother’s death. It had been sitting on my computer’s desktop, but unread. Like my memories, I revisited this reflection on my grief intensely for a period before leaving it for a while, overlooking it even though it was in front of my nose and nested in my brain.

I would write it differently now, less angry, more accepting of people’s comforts, but that is not where I was at seventeen. I was pissed off. That year, in particular, I also resented what I felt was an obligation to wear a Jewish skin. (I recall a particular outburst around Yom Kippur, which I felt was forced upon me and therefore burdensome and meaningless.) Also, I had just read Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things which I rather fancied; when I wrote this, it was a conscious influence on my style. Having not read it for eight years, I cannot say if I got anywhere near Roy’s poignant language, but I can say this is one of the pieces of writing I am proudest of, both for the prose itself – which was an accomplishment for me at the time, and for succeeding in an expression that I had not, up to that point, allowed myself.

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After my mother died, my father sat shiva. I was twelve and fled the oppressiveness, deadness of a house in mourning, someone talking in grave-dampened tones, the musicless, laughterless, lifeless life of sitting, sitting, sitting. It was as if the dead demanded that the living accompany them on a honeymoon into the next life. It seems to me now as if for that precious week of my life which I denied the dead, my father was blessed with a lifetime of memories and emotions of my mother. His blessings took the form of running crystal balls, tears and the salty moon-trails they left behind. They wavy streaks glistened on his wave-lined cheeks.

Instead of sitting shiva, I played basketball with my friends, missing the netless rim as usual. I was afraid to go back; I think my father was glad to get me out of the house. My energy was too buoyant, it kept forcing him to rise to his feet. His legs wanted to mourn along with the rest of his body. He did not sit shiva in the orthodox way, but even though the mirrors retained their empty reflections (none of us preened even when we were celebrating), he didn’t laugh. Instead, he talked quietly with visiting friends, solemnly sitting, keeping him company for a week.

They cooked, solemnly, so we wouldn’t have to, and they offered their condolences, solemnly, so we wouldn’t feel alone. But I knew that their condolences were solemn lies. I felt more alone when they tried to console me than before.

“I know how you feel. My mother died two years ago.”

They had no idea how I felt, and so they lied. Even though I saw through their lies, their condolences drove a knife of jealousy through my heart. Although the beating muscle was tight and hard enough to deflect steel, it was powerless against anything as sharp as jealousy. I wished that they knew how I felt, for then we would have felt the same. I needed to know that I was not alone in my dry-eyed, relieved silence.

My father’s grief isolated me. The old traditions which seemed to stimulate his life and sorrow were mirages of comfort. Every Saturday for a year we went to synagogue, where I watched him mournfully praying the mourners’ prayer. Yitgadal ve yit-kadash sh-mae rabah. The prayer never once mentions the dead; rather, it comforts the living by reminding them: It is God’s will. Glorified and sanctified be God’s name throughout the world which he has created according to his will. My father said that prayer on the anniversary of my mother’s death for the last five years. Whether his mourning is driven by faith, love, duty, or necessity I do not know, but it frightens me. I have not said Kadish for my mother since the first anniversary of her death. My rote recitation scares me too much; my father’s sincerity makes me feel like a hypocrite. Be not afraid of sudden terror, nor of the storm that strikes the wicked. I have made you, and I will bear you; I will sustain you and save you. Ve-Yimeru, Amen.

Three times a year there is a special Yitzkor service for the dead. While I methodically read the meaningless words out of the book my sideways glances show me that tears still silently grace my father’s face as he huddles, shrouded under his prayer shawl. Three times a year I am shown that grief is the most beautiful thing in the world. Three times a year I wonder why I don’t feel it.

Maybe I don’t mourn because I don’t remember how my mother looked, before she got sick. When I see her face, cancers crabbing at her cheek, eye, and neck, staring at me from my memory, my mind screams: That is not my mother! That is not her face! I can remind myself of how she looked by looking at the picture downstairs, but when I do it only stares, smiling, out of my eyes from under my hair; the picture of my mother is a picture of myself, only forty and female. What I do remember is parts of the brief conversations we had about life after death.

“No one will ever take your place.”

“No, but there will be other places.”

Brief conversations about my life, or hers, after she died. I learned that she wanted to be like the stems of the plants she gardened, visible but not flashy, holding me up. I didn’t want to be held up; I wanted to experience the sensation of falling, air and adrenaline rushing through my chest, neck, and groin. She told me to live after she died, but she never told me to grieve before the creased, salt beauty was locked forever under a beating, shrinking heart. My father’s week of silent grief terrified me, but at the funeral, it was my dry silence, not my father’s wet one, which frightened me. My silent, desert eyes still confuse me, frighten me, leave me with a sense of inadequacy. I rarely tell anyone about my mother, and when I do, it is usually because I am feeling reckless. My personal tragedy extends far beyond her death; I am ashamed that I have never cried for her.

My father tried to help, but when he asked questions about how I felt I replied with such ice that it froze his good intentions and frightened his heart into his mouth. I strangled his attempts at comfort and he couldn’t breathe. Once he told me that it is harder for Christians when someone dies because they don’t have a ritual mourning. He’s wrong. Christians do have a mourning ritual: watching plucked and dying flowers bruise and die, a thousand reminders that the dead only met their inevitable fate. Time was my father’s flower. Each dying second, each dying minute, each dying blood-red sunset was a reminder of my mother. For me, each dead evening was, and is, just another grey June night.