Honoring One’s Parents: a selection from Wayfarers

The Body Is a World Also

It is the evening of Yom Kippur, the famous Kol Nidre service. The shul is a courtroom. All sinners are invited to enter. The judge will soon appear. My mother is bobbing her head beside me. Her wheelchair and helper are stationed outside. Anytime you want to leave, I tell her, just say the word. I’m hoping to skip out early, but for once she seems happy. A neighbor passes my seat and presses my shoulder. Save me a place next to you in heaven, she clucks. You’re going to Gan Eden for sure! 

I doubt it. In order to induce my mother to die, I’ve started to imagine her funeral. I think about which shirt I don’t mind ripping at the cemetery, something nice enough, but obviously, not a favorite. I make elaborate plans for sitting shiva, who will organize the food, what to do with the dogs. I make a copy of the burial plot deed for my brother. No time will be wasted. We are both ready. For a few minutes I am free. 

When my mother was still healthy, she decided to buy a burial plot. The Jerusalem cemetery was filling up fast. The municipality had been adding towers of cement bins filled with dirt, nicknamed “the parking lots.” There were almost no real graves left. She needed to grab one fast. I had to come with her and help. 

A member of the Chevra Kadisha meets us at the entrance. He has a little golf cart and a map, which we would be lost without. I’ll be right over there he reassures us. The plan is to walk around and check out the available spots. Somewhere out of sight, I hear a group of real mourners crying. But this part of the cemetery is quiet and green. An occasional bird lands in the branches above. 

No, not there, my mother says. Too many steps. To the left is an empty valley, with a shooting range at the bottom. I hear the periodic sound of gunshots. Police? Army? I like this row, she calls out, pointing to an empty patch next to the bottom step. It’s close to the road and underneath a tree, so people can stand in the shade. Yes, everyone will be happy, I agree. We’ll all want to visit. 

There are lots of articles that explain dementia. I haven’t read any of them. My brother lent me a book about the rewards of honoring one’s parents. I dropped it in the middle. 

My mother is blissfully ignorant of her deterioration. It’s other people who are mistaken, who can’t remember anything, who get mixed up. Once she wandered into my bedroom in the middle of the night and demanded to know why I was in her house.

One day I find her waiting in our living room instead of the meeting point we had arranged. It kept being three fifteen, she explains. I take her in the kitchen and point at the wall clock. What time is it now? I ask. There is a flash of panic on her face. Then it’s gone.

I buy her a digital clock with big numbers. A year later I replace it with a specialty item that simply announces “IT’S TUESDAY MORNING.” 

I see old women everywhere. They head straight for me, eyes fixed on a point in the distance or painfully get out of a cab, bones folding. There can’t possibly be this many elderly hobbling about, but somehow I inhabit a world full of them.

The last time my mother got on a bus, the driver closed the doors on her. She fell to the sidewalk and ran home embarrassed. The last time my mother left her book club, she rode the elevator to a different floor. She was lost inside the building. She was lost outside the building. The last time my mother set the table, she circled it several times. Every half circle she put down a fork, or maybe a knife.  

My mother is not a whiner. My mother does not complain. My mother has long sharp fingernails that curl inwards.  

My mother is losing language now. What’s happening inside will stay there. Today she is lying on the couch staring nowhere. She is concentrating very hard on this. Once she had a garden on her balcony, a tree to attract hummingbirds, plastic snakes to scare away the ravens. Now the ravens come and go as they please, and the neighbors no longer complain about the leaks. 

Family Archive

For uncle Mattie, who called me Gravel Gertie 

and uncle Abe who gave us orthodontia for free, 

for all the aunts I no longer remember, the relatives 

arriving in Gary, Indiana, for I never knew their names 

but heard there were many, dispersed and gone, 

for the brown eyes and fat cheeks that come 

from my mother’s side, for now that I have questions 

everyone has died, for my mother who drove me 

to riding lessons on weekends and sat there in the days 

before cellphones, did she read the paper, did she have a book, 

for the remnants of my parent’s dinner parties 

dishes left on the dining room table, for we got up 

early and watched cartoons on Saturday and also Sunday 

and my brain seems just fine, for the borders of child-

hood that stayed intact, sturdier even than when I lived

there, for I have photos on a disc now, everything 

we took out of all those boxes, except the slides 

and Super 8 movies, no one knew what to do with those.   

**

In my father’s house there is only one toilet.

The rest are taped shut. 

He doesn’t like repairmen or expensive faucets. 

He has been naming the squirrels. He prefers the dark. 

In my old bedroom, spiders come down to take a look.

I sleep on the couch, protected by Aunt Bess’s afghan.

The house opens its mouth.

There is a stack of reused plates on the microwave.

A collection of plastic forks lifted from some cafeteria.

There is china that stayed the color of bones.

A green lamp slowly fed from its timer.

A captain’s barometer that measures nothing.

My father grew up in the Great Depression.

He cooks for one and freezes the leftovers.

He always heats his plate before he eats.

Sometimes it’s so hot he can’t touch it.

When it burns, he knows it’s ready.

**

I ate what was offered to me.

But never brains and other unmentionables. 

I ate fried potatoes and chopped salad, because that’s where the driver wanted to stop.

I ate the sluggish grinds at the bottom of my cup. It was a mistake. I hadn’t learned 

       the physics of Turkish coffee. 

In Cairo I only ate breadsticks.

I didn’t eat the small bird served with beak and wings. 

No one else thought it was cruel.  

I ate my mother’s cooking, she relied on margarine and paprika. The kitchen table 

       was round and we each had our place.

Once a year I walked home with my teacher. We ate canned tuna and mushroom 

            soup on toast. 

On Passover, I ate the dull grey livers my aunts shoved through the grinder. 

            I don’t know where it is now, no one does that anymore.

I ate nothing and drank coffee instead. 

I ate with a man who could make a soufflé. It seemed like a lot of trouble. 

I never learned.

I ate quickly, without chewing and never choked.

I ate, like a survivor, to free my appetite.

I braided white bread and salted the mundane. 

I ate and remembered the cows, the sheep, the goats, the twitching tails of animals.

I ate, but I didn’t apologize.

**

My father is deaf in one ear, 

he won’t fix the hearing aid in the other 

and to the drivers honking he yells 

Fuck Off! He hates the phone,

and I, the television, with its blasting 

roomfuls that old people use 

to scare away any robbers. I am told

the left kidney is shaped like an ear. 

I suppose it can listen to anger 

collecting drills and whining metal 

the banging edges of other people’s 

lives. Even a fetus can feel the double 

beat, Mozart or its mother’s curses. 

For nine months I watched my mouth 

and thought about goodness, so my child 

would emerge from pure echoes of life  

into unfiltered sound. Now I simmer along 

with my organs as my father turns off 

all the lights he can reach, but keeps the volume on.

**

My father called me a fucking asshole and I never forgave him. We were arguing about the microwave and he boiled over like a teapot, but I had my own knife. 

I never saw himafter that. I sent presents instead. 

He didn’t like them, but made sure to thank me. For in my childhood he was cold as glass.

Did you get the ice treatment? We would ask each other. 

For my skin has come undone, only cotton and silks now. 

After he died we found my mother’s thesis on marriage counseling. We threw it out along with her bathrobe, empty boxes of jewelry.

For I am just like him, but in my dream he is happy, at least smiling. 

When he broke his hip, his girlfriend took care of him. We didn’t know he had one. 

Her name was P. She already had her own chair in the kitchen, even though my mother’s underwear still filled up the drawers.  

**

I will scratch down 

to the light 

and let it out again.

Skin is not light.

Scales of bark. Even a garden

snake can leave itself 

behind.

       Flat kingdom of itching.

Light bleeds everywhere,

anywhere. Welcome the dark

close up the palace 

of the heart and let the liver 

harden and be crowned.

         Lie flat and breathe.

Think of dew. Don’t touch.

The veins are rising 

from their paper valleys

a blister hatches.

          Take it back.  

This pale palette

flanked by heel and palm

worn out, uncertain fence.

Let me slither it off.

I am already halfway there. 

**

My father knew how to depart. I’m living minute by minute now, he told us. We laughed, until the hospice nurse said He’s actively dying, which made a big impression, the dying had arrived. It rose up from the mattress and floated down the stairs, took over the whole house then leapt six thousand miles through the telephone lines, surrounding the table where I was sitting outside, holding onto my plans. It hooked me like a fishing line. We better get the body over here, we repeated, even though there wasn’t a body yet, just a room full of people reciting psalms, but the dying knew I was watching out the window, like someone waiting for a package to arrive.