March 13, 2017--Ladies of Forest Trace: Not Resting

The Ladies are in a place of tranquility but they are not in repose.

I know this from my mother, who deserves to be at rest after more than 107 years of life. I discovered her state of agitation during a recent visit to Mt Lebanon Cemetery in Queens.

When I was a child we visited Mt. Lebanon regularly so that she could be with her parents and bring them news of the family and the world. We would sit together on the bench beside where her mother and father were and I would listen while she told them about Bertha's recovery from a stroke, Nina's trip to Israel, Eli's struggles with his creditors, Fanny's plans to move to Florida, news about Stalin, and how things were with my father.

About that, the state of her own marriage, she would whisper so I needed to lean close and strain to hear what she was reporting. Though I could not catch most of the words, I could tell from their tone and her trembling that things were not going well.

"He never . . . He always . . . ," she said and then tearfully would switch to Yiddish to protect me from being swept into her unhappiness. But from this and how she placed her arm around me and drew me close into the protective nest of her body, I knew her pain was real. And that to her I represented a sense of purpose. She was happy I was there with her, with the family.

More than sixty years later I again needed to be close to her and so, though I sat alone on that now crumbling bench, listening to the wind, I tried to pick up her emanations, the comfort she provided, and, on that chilly pre-spring afternoon, her still flickering warmth.

"The girls are so upset," she began. I could hear the pain in her voice.

"Tell me Mom."

"About him."

"Who?"

"Thump, Donald Thump."

I didn't correct her wonderful malaprops, which frequently revealed more than literal truth.

"You've been hearing about him?" I wasn't sure how information was acquired and shared by the Ladies now that they were no longer . . .

"All the terrible things he's doing. With immigrants--wasn't his own father an immigrant?--with minorities, with women, with health. And we are so afraid about Korea and Russia. Especially Russia. We know Russia. Two of the Ladies are from there and I was born in Poland, near the border. Russian Cossacks raided our village, Tulowice, when I was a little girl. My mother hid me and my sisters and brother in the root cellar below the floor of our log cabin. The evil things they did which I cannot tell you about."

"You can tell me, Mom. You can tell me anything."

"You're still young and I don't want to upset you. You should be enjoying life."

Only someone who lived to 107 would consider me to be young. It was this kind of affirmation that I loved and which I greedily still needed.

"You should have your rest," I said, reversing her lifelong admonition to me.

"As your father said, 'There's plenty of time for rest. Later, there's time for rest.'"

"Yes he always did say that. As I grow older I understand it more and more."

"Ruth, who marched so we could vote, the women, is so upset that a majority voted for him--I can't say his name--so many women that I am sure Wolf on TV is saying that if it wasn't for the women voting for him we would have Hillary. Not that she's such a bargain. But almost anything would be better. Even Mike Expense, the Vice President, who we all are hoping will become president. This person, Expense, who doesn't believe in women's health and is too religious for any of our tastes we are wishing for."

"I am hoping for the same thing. Maybe if there's an impeachment or . . ."

"We're both dreaming. The Republicans in Congress, who we know did not support him will keep him in office because he will sign anything they approve--health care, taxes, regulations, pollution and who knows what else."

"It's a long list."

"But, one of the girls, Rose reminds us things have been worse."

"How? He's been in office only two months, though it feels like years, so how can things already be worse?"

"She means in the past. When we and Negroes couldn't vote. They couldn't drink water here in Florida. They had their own colored fountains. We didn't have the Pill but we had world wars. We had Depression but didn't have Xanax for that." She paused to let me know she meant that to be funny. So I wouldn't worry more than I do about her mental capacities.

"And you are old enough to remember the gas chambers. We had family who survived Auschwitz. Cousin Malkie and her family who lived with Aunt Tanna and Uncle Eli when they escaped and came to Brooklyn. You heard those stories when you were seven years old. I tried to protect you from them but you insisted you wanted to know about the world. Even at its most evil. So I let you sit with us at the kitchen table while Malkie and her son, whose name I forgot but whose haunted look I will always remember, told us about the nightmare."

"I remember that. I also wanted to see the tattoos on their arms. I didn't want to be shielded from the worst that life could bring. But I know you felt otherwise and wanted me to have nothing but a happy childhood. One time you told me that was in part because of all the children who were forced to suffer. You wanted me to live for myself but also when I was old enough to try to do things that would make less fortunate children's lives better."

Recalling that I began softly to cry.

"I bring this up," she said, "because I want to remind you that Rose is right. Too many things were worse in the past. Not quite as much so for those who were blessed to be born here or came to America as hopeful immigrants and refugees. We survived and over time many things did get to be better."

"You always say this," I said, knowing I had come to Mt. Lebanon in large part to have her remind and reassure me about that.

"Of course, things here could get worse but worse than Pearl Harbor? Worse than the Cold War? The Depression? The lynchings? I could say more but I know you have to rush away."

"I have a little more time," I said, feeling a bit better, though not yet assured or optimistic, "So tell me whatever else is on your mind and making you and the Ladies so restless."

"This isn't enough?"

"But I thought you brought up the War and women to remind me not to get too overwrought with what is happening?"

"That's my attention. But, yes, there is something else that is very disturbing to us."

"Please tell me."

"You know your history better than we do so I'm sure you have examples."

"Of what?"

"About what I am going to tell you."

"Sorry."

"And it's not all his fault. Though he is the beneficiary of it."

"You're starting to lose me."

"The hate." I waited but she didn't continue.

"The hate?"

"I'll give you a for-instance. When they talk about health there is so much resentment, so much hate for poor and elderly people who will have it taken away from them. They talk as if it's about how much it costs the government but what we really hear is how much the Republicans--and it is them--feel it is people's fault that they are poor and need help. They say they are making the wrong choices about how they spend their money--as if they had so much. Did we hear this correctly--sometimes communications to where we are are not so good--that someone in Congress, Jascha Heifetz, said that if people had enough money to have a telephone . . ."

"Jason Chaffetz, from Utah."

"I don't have my hearing aids with me. But that's him. He said if they have money for those phones they could give them up and use the money to buy health insurance."

"I did hear that. He really did say that."

"In the meantime if so many millions lose insurance how many will die from that? Who was it who talked about death panels? This is like that. Worse."

"Congresswoman Michele Bachmann."

"Who was also running for president. But all this meanness and resentment about struggling people--about children and old people--is very sad and tells us what these Washington people really think. They are so full of anger and resentment and this makes it acceptable for him to say the ugly things he has for years been saying. About Obama, about women, about Negroes, about Mexicans. And what's really worse when he talks this way is that many of the people who support him, who are filled with fear and hate, want to hear this. They give him encouragement and permission to say the ugliest things. They cheer loudest when he does."

"There has been hate and fear at other times in our history, that's true. About the Irish and Italian and Jewish immigrants. And obviously black people. You experienced that when you were a young girl and woman. People are this way when there are hard economic times. And when . . ."

"I'm sorry to interrupt but whatever was or has been is no excuse."

"I agree."

"About that, by now, we should know better."

To that I had nothing to say.

"We're all gone now," my mother whispered, "There is no room left here for anyone else. All the places are filled. Everyone from the family is here. And the Ladies are scattered like leaves. Ruth to her daughter in New Jersey. It's so cold there. Ruth was always shivering. And Rose next to her beloved father also in Queens. In Mt. Hebron. Adele, poor thing, is by herself. She lost all her family in Russia and never married. Never had children or grandchildren. I love her so much. How she made such a good life for herself. The first woman to become a school principal in Brooklyn."

"She was remarkable," I said.

"I could talk all day, but I know it must be getting dark and they close the gates soon. And you don't like to drive after the sun is down. You were such a good driver," I noted the past tense, "When you would take me to the doctor or out for Chinese, I felt so secure. And now . . ." Her words trailed off. Her breathing slowed. I didn't want her to strain herself.

It was time for me to go. I was feeling better. If not about the state of the world about her and how loved and safe she still made me feel.

"And remember, as I always say, be sure to wear your sweater."

It was as if I could see her smiling.

October 10, 2016--Bar Mitzvah Boy

I'm taking a day off from Trump-Clinton 24/7.

*  *  *

So--
Even casual readers of Behind know my mother died last year at 107 plus three days. I am sure I am deluding myself when I think I can equal or outdo that. But 110 or more feels within reach.

I know . . .

But, when I read that Yisrael Kristal waited 100 years before being bar mitvahed at 113, since I also have not been ritualistically admitted to the Jewish version of adulthood (that lack I have been told is obvious), I thought there was no rush to find a rabbi willing to take on someone incorrigibly like me if I want to fill that gap in my Jewish resumé.

But then I read, also in the New York Times, that new studies of aging are coming to conclude that 115 years is looking like the ceiling for human life expectancy. Some, including me, have been thinking that with modern medicine there is no limit to how old we can get. What kind of life one would have at 130 is another matter.

A little thrown off my pins by these findings, I did a little quick calculating and, considering my age, I thought I had better get on with my Torah training if I want to be alive for the blessed event. I also thought to turn to Mr. Kristal's life story to guide me.

His life turns out to be so unique, so incredible that I can barely find anything specific to steer me but inspiration.

At 113, the world's oldest man according to the Guiness Book of World Records, he was born in 1903 in the small Polish village of Malenie--as it turns out not far from where my mother was born just five years later. Since World War I was raging when he was 13 he could not be Bar Mitzvahed at the traditional age.

After the war, with an uncle, he moved to Lodz and opened a candy store. In 1939 Lodz was overrun by the Nazis and his wife and two small children were killed. Five years later, with his second wife he was sent to Auschwitz and somehow managed to survive, the only member of his extended family to do so. When the camp was liberated he weighed just 82 pounds.

He emigrated to Israel, married, and raised another family. He now has two surviving children, nine grandchildren, and 30 great-grandchildren. Most of them were at his Bar Mitzvah. He is reported by them to retain most of his capacities.

Looking around at the family who gathered for his bar mitzvah, one of his granddaughters said, "All these people from one person. Imagine how many rooms could be filled if six million had lived."

His daughter, Kristal Kuperstoch say her father has prayed every morning for the past 100 years and attributed his longevity to that and his diet--he eats modestly but when he does, almost every day, he has a helping of pickled herring. Until his late 80s he also had a taste for wine and beer.

The herring and beer sound pretty good to me.

Bar Mitzvah Boy Yisrael Kristal

July 4, 2106--A Year of Mourning

I am by nature skeptical. Especially about things that involve ritual or belief. I am more comfortable with evidence-based reality. Or, at least, my version of what constitutes "evidence" and "reality."

And so when my mother died a year ago Friday, at the time a close friend said it will take a full year of mourning to reach "closure" and for me to be able to fully "move on."

From what she said and how she said it it should be obvious that my friend is a therapist, a good one, but on occasion speaks psychobabble-tinctured English.

"And," she added, "though I know you are not a practicing Jew, in your tradition, an entire year is devoted to mourning. The rabbis," she winked, "determined that and as you know--as a believer or not--they could at times be wise in the ways of the world and the heart."

I chose just then to avoid a theological discussion, thanked her for her views but, as I said, I am skeptical about these kinds of matters.

As it turned out, she--and perhaps the rabbis--had it right.

Until this year I was naively oblivious to the annual procession of holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. Passover, for example, is a holiday that since early adulthood I did not practice. But this year, knowing that if my mother were still alive, she would have been observing it at the Passover seder at Forrest Trace where she lived the last 20 years of her life, I wanted to be there with her, reconnecting to the ancient prayers, chants, and songs. And of course the matzoh, three cups of wine, and the rest of the traditional meal.

On the first night of pesach this year, I surprised myself by unconsciously intoning the Four Questions, the Fir Kashes, as I used to do when I was the youngest male at the extended-family seder. Those words, likely mispronounced, taught to me by my mother when I was six, brought more tears than I was expecting even before I got to the second question.

Mah nishtanah, ha-laylah ha-zeh,mi-col ha-leylot 

Why is this night different than all others?

Theology aside, the answer this past year was that that night was different because it was the first one for me that did not include the living presence of my mother. And it came with the realization that it never will again.

Mah nishtanah: "Why," indeed.

Then this past Saturday, in the Pemaquid lighthouse keepers' cemetery, just up the road from us, Rona and I participated in digging a grave for our great friend, Boyce Martin's ashes.

When his wife, our beloved friend, Anne Ogden told us, "You do not have to participate. You can decline . . ." I cut in to say, "If it's still all right with you, we want to help."

"In the Jewish tradition . . ." I said and then interrupted myself, a bit confused, when I realized that after a year of my mother no longer being with us, more than ever, I find myself unexpectedly referring to things Jewish.

Still I persisted, "In the Jewish tradition there is the mitzvah system. A hierarchy of good deeds or mitzvahs, that Jews are expected to perform. For example, at a Jewish burial, family and friends are invited to help fill the grave. Doing that is a mitzvah of the highest order because it is one that the 'beneficiary,' having passed away, is unable to thank you for."

"I like that," Anne said--she has a strong spiritual and ecumenical core--"So in that case do that mitzvah for Boyce."

My mother would have agreed.

And so we did. Now I am the one feeling blessed.

Anne Ogden

Boyce Martin

June 28, 2016--Lady of Forest Trace: Mom at 108

Yes, I'm greedy.

Today would have been my mother's 108th birthday. She came up 362 days short, having died on July 1st last year. A great run, especially considering she was still pretty much her essential self well into her 107th year.

How amazing. What good fortune for her and these many of us who loved her and found inspiration in how she lived her extra-long life.

You would think that getting to my own advanced age and still having a mother to talk to and visit and be inspired by would have satisfied me. Or anyone.

But I hasn't.

I wish I could call her today and talk about Brexit and Hillary and Trump and Orlando. I wish I could be there to celebrate even if being there toward the end was more to sit with her and hold her hand as she lived out with dignity her final months and days.

A smile is all I really need. Not just today, but since I am certain I will have the same greedy feeling on every one of her future birthdays, for as long as I go through my own late-life dramas.

March 31, 2016--Heading North & A Prediction

It's coming to the end of our snow-birding for the year. It has been a little intense--the first time in nine years we've been coming here that we won't be able to say goodbye to my mother.

As a distraction, I can't resist one more political prediction--

Donald Trump will not win the Wisconsin primary.

He may even come in third.

That will herald the beginning of what will by June turn out to be an ugly, so-called "open" GOP convention. It will be anything other than open. All deals, deals, and deals behind closed doors. Think House of Cards.

December 15, 2015--Ladies of Forest Trace: Mt. Lebanon

We visited my mother on Sunday at Mt. Lebanon Cemetery. It was a little more than five months since her death. It was a beautiful, unseasonably warm day and she was at rest amid the graves of her parents, among her bother, sisters, and their spouses, and next to my father.

Being there reminded me of earlier times at Mt. Lebanon. In truth, often happy, secure times for me when I was a young child. I wanted nothing more than, in one way or another, to be with my family.

I thought to share again something I wrote a few years ago about her final resting place, the family plot in Mt. Lebanon Cemetery--

Shuttling between cemeteries is the way I spent much of my childhood.  One was Mount Hebron, my father’s family’s place of final rest; the other, my mother’s family plot at Mount Lebanon.  Just three miles apart, in the borough of Queens.  It felt like being pressed between the pincers of two grim parentheses.

My mother’s family, the Munyas, arrived in the America in about 1912 from a shtetl town in central Poland, Tulowice.  Her father, Laibusya Munya, was a paymaster in a forest.  This was a job for Jews—they were trusted with the money but not the physical labor of cutting down trees.  That was for the goyim.  Grandpa Laibusya went into Warsaw each week to pick up zloties and brought them back to the forest to pay the men who cut down the trees and schlepped the logs to the river.  With his wife, Frimet, my eventual grandmother, he lived in a log house with his six children, including my infant mother.  When the pogroms became more frequent and bloody, he began to make plans to leave.  As with so many before him, he went first on his own to the New World, established himself as a baker on the Lower Eastside, saved money by existing on rye bread, and then sent for the rest of the family.  They settled within a community of other Polish Jews, most of whom came from the same part of the Pale of Settlement.

They moved from apartment to apartment whenever the landlord raised the rent, but once they were all huddled safely in America, they found a more permanent place to live (a rent controlled third-floor walkup in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn), a store for groceries (Beckman’s, down the block), a butcher (Fleishman’s, next to Beckman’s), a fruit store (Willy’s, across the street), and of at least equal importance, they formed a burial society—a Landsmanshaftn, or a home town association.  There was no time to waste—as my grandfather would say in Yiddish, one never knew when having a plot would come in handy.  And through the years it turned out to be as he predicted--before I was of legal age more family members resided in Mt. Lebanon than Bensonhurst.

Even before finding suitable burial sites, the members of the Landsmanshaftn elected officers—a president, vice president, secretary, and especially a treasurer.  Especially, since the treasurer was responsible for what little money there was—money to pay the cemetery the annual maintenance fee and to write checks for the “perpetual care” for the ground around and on the graves.  Also, the treasurer, because of these fiduciary responsibilities, was the only one who was compensated.  At first five dollars a year.  And thus it was a coveted honor and contested fiercely, particularly as time went by and the annual stipend was raised to $25. Real money when a dollar was still a dollar.

The Tulowice Landsmanshaftn somehow managed to strike a good deal with Mt. Lebanon in spite of great demand-side pressure: Jews were arriving in New York in such numbers during the first two decades of the twentieth century, and dying at such a rate thanks in part to the unchecked influenza, that more and more dairy farms in Queens were being converted into cemeteries and plots were gobbled up as fast as pastures could be converted into graves. 

Mt. Lebanon was established in 1919.  Perfect timing for the Tulowicians who were able to get in on the ground floor during the year of the most virulent and deadly flu epidemic.  They were able to buy a reasonably contiguous cluster of thirty or so plots in a desirable, hilly, shady corner.  It came with a pine tree and a view of the new Interboro Parkway.  As evidence of how desirable a location, Richard Tucker, the famous cantor turned Metropolitan Opera star came to occupy a nearby plot of his own as did Nathan Handworker, founder of Nathan’s Famous in Coney Island.  So the family was in good company and assured of eternal upward mobility.

Exactly what they had come to America for. The streets may not have been paved with gold, but to forever be across from the “biggest” tenor and the hot dog king showed that they had “arrived.”

On the other hand, the Zwerlings, my father’s family, claimed they came to America from Austria, not from the downscale Pale in Poland (although there are in fact no extant papers to prove this assertion).  Full of pride they boasted they were from Vienna, spoke German, and arrived well before those Eastern European shtetal Jews showed up at Ellis Island with their cardboard suitcases.  In fact, unlike the Munyas, who had the good fortune to have had an Irish immigration officer convert Munya to Mooney, the Zwerling needed no such transmutation—the German-sounding “Zwerling” was fine just as it was.  Though hardly of the Our Crowd crowd, the Zwerlings prided themselves on the fact that they were born in America, owned their own house, and didn’t understand Yiddish, much less speak it.  So when it came preparation for dying, they had a different approach than the Malones. 

The cemetery they selected and in which they bought real estate (that is how they viewed it—as a real estate transaction), Mt. Hebron, was founded by assimilated German Jews in the late 1880s.  In contrast to the other Mount, there were no burial societies, none of the carving on the tombstones were in Hebrew--everything in Mt. Hebron was ostentatiously in English--the roads weaving among the graves were wider (Mt. Hebron families had cars), there was abundant parking, the above-ground mausoleums were more elaborate and spacious, and there were even well-tended restrooms.

However, though in all other ways the Zwerlings and Mooneys lived cultural worlds apart, they did share one thing in common—an absolute obsession with illness, dying, death, and above all their final arrangements.  And no one was more obsessed with final matters than my father. 

But first I need to say more about how my mother’s family devoted themselves to their sixteenth of an acre of American soil.  First, with a name like Mooney they had to convince the Mt. Lebanon authorities and that they were in fact Jews and thus eligible to be laid to rest in ground consecrated exclusively for people of the Old Testament.   With their Irish-sounding name they were suspected of being goyim and had to show not only their Ellis Island papers but also those they brought along with them from Poland that identified them as Munyas, and thus Jews.

After successfully making that case to the Mt. Lebanon council of rabbis and being allowed to erect a tombstone with the gentile name “Mooney” chiseled on it, they then needed to consider how to care for the plot itself.  There was the “Perpetual Care” option, but neither the family nor the Landsmanschaftn as yet had the hundred dollars necessary to arrange for it.  That would come later when Uncle Jac did well enough and could afford to underwrite the tending of all thirty plots.  Even then, because of their experiences with pogroms and subsequently the Holocaust, the Mooneys were suspicious of institutions, including cemeteries (after all they too were businesses) and thus were congenitally incapable of trusting them to provide care perpetually (enough of them by then knew English sufficiently to understand how long perpetual in truth was) much less trust the cemetery owners not to run off with the hundred dollars before the clock on perpetual ran out.

Thus, during the spring and summer growing season, we went to Mt. Lebanon every Sunday.  Not to visit Grandpa and Grandma Mooney, who at the time were the only ones in permanent residence, but to care for the gravesite itself.  As the youngest and most agile that meant I was designated to crawl around among the tombstones to pull weeds and cut grass with the pinking shears my Aunt Tanna always had in her pocketbook.

Sitting on the bench to supervise, her sister, my Aunt Fay, would watch with pride as I scampered from head- to foot-stone, kvelling, “Look at him, look at how little Steveala is clipping Papa’s grass and plucking Mama’s weeds.  He has such hands.  With those hands one day he could be a surgeon, be rich,  and make everyone proud.” 

At her older sister’s words praising my skills and predicting my promising future, my mother would swell with maternal satisfaction and say to me, “When I am buried here, Steven, with the family, I know you will come to take good care of me.  And you will tell me about your own wife and your own children and grandchildren.  And about your patients and their appendectomies. Just like I talk to Mamma and Poppa.” 

Though this was more than I wanted to contemplate, any aspect of it—I was already burdened at school with spelling and the six-times table--I nodded and continued to clip away. I moved among the grass and weeds as if born to the task, wielding the pinking shears, which I was told were the only scissors in the family with enough heft to cut through thistles.  So when I had completed my pulling, chopping and cutting with those slotted shears it looked as if the grass had been Marcelled.  As a result, the Malone wavy gravesite was reputed to be the envy of the two burial societies that owned adjacent plots.

In truth I loved this first adult responsibility.  And since none of us had the wherewithal to ever get to real mountains during the hot weather, going to Mt. Lebanon was our version of a trip to the country. 

While I scooted among the tombstones, my aunts would sit on the bench and talk to their Momma and Papa, telling them about what had happened during the week.  There was a lot to report since the family apartment was the site of a constant shuffle of relatives and friends from the Camps in Europe, distant New Jersey, and even the occasional refugee on the way to Palestine.  For the latter, Aunt Tanna would collect money for their passage or to help them buy a car or icebox.  All that news was duly recounted to my grandparents at rest nearby.  But since it was in Yiddish, I could gather little of what they reported.  My ears perked up, however, and my nearly non-existent Yiddish improved, when they whispered about “That Rifka. Not quite a relative but a distant cousin of a friend of my grandparents, Rifka was someone they referred to as a nafke, which even with my limited Yiddish I knew meant tramp.  I made a mental note that when I was old enough I would make an effort to meet that Rifka.

My father’s obsession with his family’s cemetery, however, was of quite a different sort. 

Among the Zwerling, he was the only one preoccupied with the family plot.  To the others it was just that place in Queens where they might eventually have to be taken after marrying off the children and retiring to Florida.  But to him it represented a different order of reality.  Again, in the tradition of the Zwerling, it was more about real estate than visiting the departed and reporting to them life’s quotidian events. To him it was a matter of being sure there was a physical place for everyone entitled to be there.  And that the arrangement of those places, the individual gravesites, were appropriately hierarchical. 

Proximity to the family patriarch, Louis, his father, my grandfather, and mother-grandmother, Anne, was, as it should be, where the hierarchy began, with the sons and their wives and the sisters and their husbands arranged in descending tiers by birth-order and gender.  As the oldest, the first-born male of a first-born father, this meant my father would reside right below his father and mother, and so on down the Zwerling family genealogy.

An awareness of the shape of the Zwerling Family Plot would immediately see that the task my father set for himself was not so easily accomplished.  If they had been able to purchase a plot with hierarchy and primogeniture in mind, they would have bought something more in the shape of a pyramid.  But in the gridded-out reality of Mt Hebron, obtaining a family plot in this anthropological configuration was impossible.  So my father, the arranger, had to work with the rectangle that was bequeathed to him by his father, Grandfather Louis.

He spent endless hours with an outline of the full plot inscribed on a large sheet of oak tag, and within it, using an architect’s triangle and ruler, drew a series of perfectly scaled grave-shaped rectangles, in various combinations and permutations until he had it laid out as appropriately as he could, considering the restraints imposed on his grand design by the unyielding boundaries of the plot.  And when he had his plan worked out as much as possible in primogeniture order, he made a final rendering, using draftsman’s indelible ink; and at a series of family meetings with his brothers and sisters and their spouses, he got each to initial the rectangle assigned to them until all were duly filled in and signed off on.

And thus the responsibility his father bequeathed to him was done. . . . 

That is until his sister, my Aunt Madeline began to upset the scheme by marrying a series of husbands who in turn died shortly after each wedding, and, most critically, were buried, one by one by one, side-by-side in the Zwerling plot.  

By the time Husband Number Three was interred, my father began to worry.  As you by now would expect, he worried not so much about his carefully crafted plan, but, in frankness, more about his own eventual fate.  If Madeline mainatined her current pace, by the actuarial time my father would need the full services of Mt. Hebron, there would no longer be room remaining for him.

Thus, he convened an urgent Zwerling family gathering and laid out the issue squarely and frankly.  Madeline was understandably distraught, having lost her third husband, Morty, just the previous month. He had jumped off the roof of their apartment building—it was well known that she was not easy to live with. 

But in spite of Madeline’s grief, with at least the appearance of sympathy, my father was able to forge ahead and succeeded in mobilizing a majority of sibling and spouse votes to let Madeline know there were no more places at Mt. Hebron for subsequent husbands.  That is unless she was willing to relinquish her own plot.  Or, perhaps she would prefer to have my father arrange to move one or two of her husbands to a different part of the cemetery. 

Considering her options, Madeline agreed that though there would likely be more husbands (that was not open to family discussion) there would be no more places for additional deceased husbands.

That should have been the end of the story.  But again there is more.

As it turned out, there would be room for two more husbands because my father, when his time arrived, did not after all require his place in Mt. Hebron. Nor would my mother.

When a Jewish person dies, it is considered desirable that the person be buried as quickly as possible.  The dust-to-dust imperative is very strong indeed and thus the sooner the better.  As might be expected, to expedite the process, my father had arranged for a prepaid funeral. For him it was also an opportunity to shop for his own casket and arrange for the limousines and memorial service, including that there be nothing that involved a rabbi or any prayers in any language—he was an outspoken lifelong atheist.

His place next to his father’s side at Mt. Hebron awaited, but my mother had a different plan in mind—something more indelible than the ink he had used to make the oak tag diagram.

During their 60-year marriage, she had participated in dozens of discussions about Mt. Hebron.  Or, to put it more appropriately, my father’s plans for them at the Zwerling plot.  She had only hinted to my father how much she did not look forward to spending eternity with The Zwerlings.  It was an era when wives hinted at things that concerned them. She, in truth, dreaded the thought that she would not be with her parents and her real family.  She also hated the idea that she would have to spend her afterlife listening to the Zwerlings arguing, talking simultaneously at the top of their voices, literally forever. 

And so she directed the funeral director--“Let’s put him in Mt. Lebanon.” 

Fortunately there was still room.  Again, in the informal shtetl ways of the Tulowice Landsmanscahftn, without the existence of a notarized plan, she was able to get her remaining siblings to agree to find a space for him and one beside him for her. 

She did feel some guilty that this new arrangement placed him right next to his family rival, brother-in-law Harry.  They had been in a series of failed businesses together and had not only fought about money but about such things as how many spare light bulbs to have on hand—my father thought six were enough; Harry always believed in buying by the gross. She knew, as a result, that there would be family tension right there at Mt. Lebanon. About light bulbs and also who was at fault for driving customers away from their last deli. (She personally blamed my father.)

But she also knew she would be in the warm vicinity of Mamma and Papa. And, when her time came, being separated by my father from Harry, would bring her more peace than she was accustomed to in life. In any case, she assertedly thought--Who cares. Let them fight.

July 29, 2015--Farewell to the Ladies of Forest Trace: Stuff

The receipt arrived yesterday from the charity to which we gave much of my mother's furniture, housewares, and clothing.

I believe all will be put to good use.

For tax purposes, I suppose, the receipt itemized the donation--

Under furniture they listed two upholstered chairs (one of which was the one my mother sat in for decades when we visited), a sofa, two end tables, six shelves, a desk and chair (where my mother sat to balance her checkbook), two patio tables (one of which held her orchid collection), three mirrors (who know what ghost images are contained therein), a large breakfront, a mobile bar (which held a dozen unopened liquor bottles--my mother didn't drink even sacramental wine), two twin beds (one my father's the other the one in which she spent her last days), a dresser (on which there were framed pictures of her immediate family--these were not donated), and a convertible sofa (where Rona and I slept restlessly when in years past we visited).

More reflecting the reality of my mother's final years, the receipt listed a shower stool, a "handicap bath set," two canes (which she began to use when she turned 95), two walkers (needed five years later), and a wheelchair (which during her last two years she eventually required).

The ladder of years indeed.

She was not a shopper but since she kept virtually everything she ever bought in meticulous, perfect condition, at the end, the itemized list stated, her clothing filled fully 17 bags. In addition, there were at least two dozen pairs of shoes. All in their original boxes. (Not enumerated in the receipt. The IRS will figure it out).

The receipt also noted--COW 1 Hour. I assume that's an acronym for about how long it took the men to remove Mom's things. One hour. A lifetime resolves itself, this aspect of a lifetime, in just one hour? Would two have made me feel any better, that she had had a richer life? And then of course I wondered, how many COWs will it take to cart away my remnants?

But it's hard to imagine she could have had a richer life. Accomplished, respected by all, generous, loving, loved.

It is a cliché to say a life well-lived is not about things. Stuff. Though perhaps in some cases, if there is little else, it is.

But with my mother, her life was about what she did, the people she embraced, her pride, her ambition, the mark she left on the world, and how she lives on--not in anything tangible or quantifiable like a list of things, but in the hearts of all who knew her well enough to feel the awesome power of her love.

July 7, 2015--The Rabbi

We were about to leave for Anne and Boyce's annual July 4th lobster bake when the phone rang.

Sensing my disinclination to answer it, Rona said, "Pick it up. With everything going on it might be important."

"The caller ID says 'Unknown Caller.' Anything important would be coming from someone we know."

"Oh, answer it. We have time. If we leave now we'll be early."

So I answered it, "Hello. This is Steven Zwerling."

In a booming voice, the caller said, CONGRATULATIONS!"

"Did I win something?" I asked. "Like from Publishers Clearing House or from whoever it was earlier this week who called to say, 'You have been selected for a cruise to the Bahamas'?"

"No, this is Rabbi ____ ."

"Rabbi what?"

"Rabbi ____ . I will be conducting your mother's service on Tuesday."

"Oh," I began to comprehend. My mother came from a traditional background and the family thought she would want a rabbi to preside over her graveside service.

"It will be my honor," he said.

"What a strange way to begin this conversation," I said, settling into a chair.

"I'm not following you," he said.

"The CONGRATULATIONS business. Why are you congratulating me? My mother died three days ago. Are congratulations in order? I mean, she died at 107 and three days. Not anything resembling a tragedy, but still . . ." I trailed off sorry I had answered the phone.

"That's my point," he said.

"Your point being?"

"That you are to be congratulated for having a mother who lived such a long and meaningful life. Actually, she is to be congratulated."

"She did have a very long life and indeed it was meaningful in more ways that I can describe."

"I hope you will try to do that for me."

"Do what?"

"Tell me about her meaningful life so I can talk about that at the service. I won't pretend to have known her but will refer to what you and other members of the family tell me about her. Does that sound all right?"

He was a rabbi after all and I am sure he picked up that I was still not comfortable with the way he began the call and so I said, "I still think you got off to a bad start with me. But of course I am willing to talk with you about her."

"I am deeply sorry if you took it that way. Perhaps I overstated how I was feeling about what I already had come to know about her. I was overcome with joy when I began to learn about your mother. And maybe I was a little envious of you. My mother . . . Well, that's another story  fro another time."

As he was talking, in his own way apologizing for upsetting me, I began to think about what he had already said, as if intuiting the joyousness that I had been secretly feeling.

I had been feeling joy and had not spoken about it out of concern that I would appear to be not caring, not sufficiently sad. Yes, I am sad, how could anyone not be after the loss of a wonderful mother even after so many years. Is it greedy to want more? Yes, I thought, but still I wanted more. Now I am left with memories and feelings. Enough to fill a lifetime, true, even if I am fortunate enough to live as long as she, but greedily I still wanted more. Want more.

"Are you still on the line?" I had lapsed into silence.

"Yes, I'm still here."

"Can we proceed?"

"Of course. It's just that it's taken me a moment to assimilate how you began."

"I understand, The congratulations part."

"Yes. But, you are right. And thank you for helping me to be more honest about the way I am feeling about her death. More important, about her life."

"So, congratulations are in order?"

"Yes, indeed they are. This is all so complicated."

From two years ago

July 3, 2105--My Favorite "Ladies of Forest Trace" Story

As you might imagine, I have been doing a lot of thinking about my mother. She died two days ago at the age of 107 plus three days.

During the past 7 or 8 years I've written more than 50 stories about her and posted them here with the running title, The Ladies of Forest Trace.  I have received comments from people far and wide, mainly strangers, who have written things such as--

Thank you so much for sharing your mother with us all these years. She is a treasure, and will be part of so many people's memories. I am so sad that she will soon be leaving, after all this time. Clearly it is inevitable, but I did begin to wonder if she might be immortal . . . and I guess, in a way, through these stories, she is.

So here, at the end of her amazing life, is my favorite Ladies story from June, 2008--

Henry Cross

When visiting with my mother on Saturday to celebrate her 100th birthday, I did one of those silly things one is inclined to do on such occasions.

Rather than asking her which invention or technological development that occurred during her lifetime was, in her view, most consequential--electric lighting, radio, TV, airplanes, the Internet--instead, I asked what single lesson she learned that she felt was most important in guiding her.

Without missing a beat, she said, "Do unto others as you would have them do to you."

"I totally agree," I said, once again amazed by her mental acuity and what she chose to offer as her guiding principle.

"I think, without your preaching it to me, that by your example, I learned that Golden Rule and hope I also have been at least partially inspired by it."

She smiled at me as if to say, as I hoped she would say, that she feels I for the most part have been a good person.

To test that, I asked if I could tell her a story about something I had never before revealed to her that has been troubling me for more than 60 years. 

She continued to smile at me.

"A few years after I was born, you returned to teaching and needed someone to care of me during the day. You hired Bessie Cross to do that. You remember her, don't you?"

She nodded and said, "Of course I do. She was wonderful. And do you remember she had a son, Henry, who was about two years older than you?"

"Yes. Of course I do. In fact, my story is about him. Henry Cross. And it is relevant to mention that he was black.”

With my heart beating faster, I continued, "One summer because Bessie Cross had to return to South Carolina to take care of her mother, who still lived on a plantation where she and Bessie as a young girl had picked cotton, Henry came to live with us.

"And since at that time I was an only child and our apartment had just two bedrooms, he slept on the daybed in my room. At night, lying side-by-side, we shared stories while waiting for sleep. 

He became like a brother to me. I liked to hear about his family, especially his Aunt Sis and Uncle Homer who tended the coal-fired boiler and steam heat system in the basement of an apartment building not far from our house. They lived in that basement too, and I loved to visit them with Henry. Aunt Sis would make us chocolate milk and pecan cookies that I can to this day still taste. They were that good."

"I remember your bringing some home for me one day. I had them with a cup of tea. They were delicious. Made with love."

"After his mother returned from South Carolina, for years Henry continued to stay with us on weekends and the two of us would join our friends in street games. Since he and I were good athletes we were among the first to be chosen when it came time to choose up sides.

"When we were done playing the whole gang of us would go to one of our mother's houses for milk and cookies. This went on for some years. But then a terrible thing happened."

"What was that darling?"

"What I never told you about." I took a deep breath. "One Saturday, after a punchball game, we were invited to Stanley Shapiro's house for our usual milk and cookies."

"I remember his mother. She was such a nice woman. I wonder if she is still alive."

"Probably not. That was more than 60 years ago.” We sighed together about the effects of time. “Well, all of us, including Henry, walked over to her porch where she had set up a card table with pitchers of cold milk and stacks of oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies.  As we were passing these around, Mrs. Shapiro came over to me and whispered that she had something she needed to tell me.

"'In the house,' she pointed.

"Puzzled, I followed her inside where her 14-year-old daughter Rosalie was hovering. Mrs. Shapiro leaned close to me and said, 'It is of course all right for you to stay. You are always welcome in my house; but your friend,' she hesitated, 'he has to leave.' Protectively, she glanced over at her unhappy-looking daughter."

"That sounds terrible," my mother said.

"That's only half of it," I said. "I went outside again and saw Henry waiting his turn to get a glass of milk. I took him aside and told him what Mrs. Shapiro had said.

"Henry did not look back at me nor did he say a word in response. Rather, he turned and raced down the steps and then along East 56th Street toward Church Avenue."

I heard my mother inhale.

"I never saw him again," I said, tearing up. The memory of that sweltering summer day rushed over me as if it were yesterday.

When I gained control of my emotions, I confessed that I did not follow after him because I chose to stay behind with my neighborhood friends. I had trouble continuing the story.

"Here's what I've wanted to ask you," I managed to say to my mother on her 100^th birthday. "If I had asked you later that day what I should have done after what Mrs. Shapiro whispered to me, what would you have said?"

Again without hesitating, this time in her most loving voice, my mother said, "You should have gone with Henry."

July 1, 2105--Lady of Forest Trace: Goodbyes

My mother is not very good at goodbyes. Actually, she is exceptional good with them. Long ones. Very long ones.

Here's one example from about five years ago--

Her niece Esther was again hosting a New Years party for family and friends. My mother was of course invited but told Rona and me not to come to pick her up to drive her there because as a 102-year-old she went to bed well before midnight.

When we told this to Esther, in her usual wonderful way, she said, "So let's have an early party. We'll do the countdown at 9:00 and after that you can take her home and she can get to bed at about her usual time."

My mother agreed to this but said, "Don't do this for me. If the young people want to have a party later in the evening I'm fine to stay home."

We assured her that we weren't any longer that young and would be happy not to have to stay up past midnight.

The party was joyous, so joyous that my mother, ignoring the clock and her normal bedtime, stayed on and on. So long, in fact, well past midnight, that Rona and I were wanting to leave so we could get to bed at close to our bedtime.

"Mom," I whispered to her, "It's getting late. Very late. I think you should say goodbye so we can drive you home."

She agreed, but clearly was not entirely happy. She was having that good a time and was full of amazing energy.

I sat down on the sofa, knowing she would not be done saying goodbye for at least a half-hour.

Well, that evening she outdid herself, saying goodbye to those still lingering until 2:00 in the morning!

She now is in the process of saying her final goodbye. It has taken her 107 years to get to it, but we know that she is down to her final days or even hours.

As I said, she is especially good at very, very long goodbyes.