I am writing this after attending a memorial service for a murdered colleague. Rob was a journalist who was killed for being a journalist. He was 59. I am going to try to make this funny.
The amazing thing about the service is that just about everyone who talked about Rob — his friends, his siblings, his colleagues, his children, his widow — made gentle fun of him. It was so direct and honest and affectionate that it could only have come from a well of boundless love and respect. And that made me remember the first and worst funeral I ever attended. I was 15. It was the funeral of my grandma Bessie. I think it soured me on organized religion for the rest of my life.
This was during a time when, for whatever reason, relatives tended not to speak at funerals, so the only person we heard from was the rabbi. He roared and thundered and simpered in what was clearly well-rehearsed sanctimony, a speech he must have given all the time for people, like my grandmother, whom he’d never met and knew nothing about. I remember that he called her “a deeply pious woman,” which was appalling inasmuch as she never went to a synagogue or even believed in a deity. Her only contact with religion occurred every Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement and fasting, when she’d draw the curtains in the dining room so our neighbors couldn’t see us eat.
Anyway, attending Rob’s service made me long to return to 1966 and speak at my grandma’s funeral to give her the send-off she was denied. This is what I’d say:
Dearly beloved, I speak to you today about my grandma Bessie Shorr, who was a complete pain in the butt. Late in life, she lived with my family for 15 years or so, a persistently cranky and dyspeptic presence who would begin each day around 6 a.m. with a loud “oy.”
This reverberated through the house, a wake-up call for all of us, like the crowing of a particularly annoying rooster — an “oy” that began an uninterrupted litany of physical complaints that would intensify during the day and that were, to the best of my understanding, largely imagined. Each body part failed serially and colorfully, invariably eventually including her “pupik,” which is a Yiddish word. She may have been the only person in the world who claimed to have a painful bellybutton. She lived into her 80s, convinced, for most of her adult life, that each day would be her last. And yet, she was in some ways indelible.
Bessie was something of an alchemist. She was constantly making chicken soup for our family of five, cooking it in a pot not that much larger than a Ring Ding. The pot would boil and hiss and bubble on the stove, filled to the brim and beyond, straining the science of surface tension. While it boiled, bizarre chicken parts would pop up one after another: Feet. Kidneys. Pupiks. Whatever. But in the end, somehow, we each had a large bowl of incomparably delicious soup. It was like the bottomless magic of a clown car, or the loaves and fishes, or, more appropriately, the miracle of Hanukkah.
Bessie spoke English just fine, but her language of choice was Yiddish — I think because it was so colorful and confounding. Here’s a curse she would use when she was mad at someone: “Vaksyn zoltsu tsibele mittn kup in dr’erd.” It means: “You should grow like an onion, with your head in the ground.” Also: “Ale tseyn zoln bay im aroysfaln, not eyner zol im blaybn oyf tsonveytung,” meaning, “May all his teeth but one fall out, and it should have a toothache.” She also used an expression — “Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik,” literally, “chop me no teakettles” — which I knew was a rebuke of some sort, but she would never explain it, as though it were a deep family secret.
I did not give Bessie credit when she was alive, but now I see I owe her for giving me an appreciation for irony and absurdity and all around cussedness, characteristics that have not been incidental to my life. I guess my point is that I miss you, Grandma, and I wish I’d said it sooner.
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