paper :: weight
I remember that winter perfectly, the way the cold hit and I crumbled like clockwork. It was Thanksgiving break of my freshman year of college and we had just buried my grandma in the shadow of a mountain that she had never climbed. I talked at the funeral about how she would never be a past tense to me because I’d take her wisdom with myself always and within the same day convinced myself I needed to get back together with my high school boyfriend because it was the only thing that could keep me warm. My dad’s grief was a gulf and mine was a levee; I needed to protect myself from him to avoid being overrun. So I skipped out on the shiva Saturday night to spend time with that boy and I don’t know if my dad has ever truly forgiven me. I wasn’t happy in the relationship but I’ve never held it against myself.
Two thirds of spouses die within a year of each other, a phenomenon known as the widowhood effect. I took incompletes in some of my classes and flew out to spend winter break trying to take care of my grandpa who frankly, did not want taking care of. We were simultaneously the best and worst people for each other to be with because we were both depressed as hell. Neither of us knew how to cook but we went to Monterrey Market anyway because that was what she would have done. He and I ate a lot of pasta, reheated the meals that had been hanging out in the freezer since their well meaning friends had dropped them off during her last few weeks in November. He hadn’t taken the Do Not Resuscitate order off of the fridge. We spent all our time walking aimlessly around the hills and watching procedural television and not talking. I think we preferred it that way.
A few weeks after I left my dad called me in the vice-grip of panic to tell me that my grandpa had fallen climbing up the misty grey steps in front of the house while coming back from his cello lesson. As he fell, he’d tried to catch the cello instead of himself. There is poetry, rudely, in the way we lose our balance.
When I was back at school, my dad and I found new ways to argue inanely. He kept a blog about his experience saying kaddish, that ancient Jewish prayer for the dead, that I couldn’t bring myself to read. I cried, wordlessly, every day until spring break. We both worried about my grandpa, stubbornly refusing surgery in the Spanish-style stucco house with all the stairs. In a rare moment of unity, we pressured him to move into her former office on the first floor of the house. Three glass purple lamps suspended over the wood-paneled desk. The glass clock with no markings, hands pointing into the void. He didn’t want to stay there, but there wasn’t really any other option. He never moved anything in there until he sold the house years later. Her immense collection of blown glass paperweights sat on the bookshelves, holding down nothing.
The only line from my dad’s blog that I remember is a frenzied, all caps: MY FATHER MUST LIVE.
The legend goes that my grandparents packed up a car and fled the tenements of the Lower East Side for California on a Friday afternoon in the summer of 1965. They had broken with old world judaism so vehemently that they chose to leave on shabbat; their parents summarily horrified. My dad grew up in an areligious household and tells the story of how my grandma’s mother came to visit them in Palo Alto and asked them for a chumash and my dad didn’t recognize the Hebrew word for the first five books of the torah. My dad’s judaism ran counter to his parents in the way that their break ran counter to their parents but we fought all winter because he couldn’t understand how my own break from judaism fit into the cycle.
I came home for Passover and took a walk around the block with my newly arrived, nearly immobile grandfather. He carried my grandma’s cane and I carried his arm and we stopped three times. We never said it but we both knew that something needed to change. A few weeks later, he had hip replacement surgery. The weather grew warmer and we installed a headstone for my grandma that described her as a woman of valor. Inconceivably, the grass had grown on her grave.
After our years long rift, my dad and I made up the summer after I graduated from college. I found my own flavor of judaism far from the traditions of the Pale of Settlement and he’s come to accept it although we mostly just don’t talk about it. My dad hosts a luncheon every early-late November and we share memories of my grandma’s life and never her death. We sequestered the spaces where we talk about that winter and let the rivers of snow-melt wash them away.
My grandpa took me to Vienna and Prague after he sold the house in Berkeley. He thought Vienna was a culturally irrelevant museum to the splendor of a decayed empire. He liked Prague better. He would take naps in the middle of the way while I wandered around the city. We went to the philharmonic and several art museums and ate fresh spaghetti napoletana.
Our third to last night I woke up at five in the morning to the thunk of his body against the hardwood floor of our hotel room. I called the hotel staff and they called an ambulance and his body bounced angrily in the stretcher as we careened over the cobblestone streets. He got mad at me when I moved our flight to take him home and get him to a doctor who could set his broken arm. He wanted to do a day trip to Český Krumlov. He still carried her cane.
This is a story about my grandma’s absence, in which I truly met my grandpa for the first time. They’re buried together, in the cemetery with grassy knolls that faces Mount Tamalpais. I miss them both every day.