The Joy Menu #55: Give

Such is the fabric of grief. Unpatterned, unremarkable, yet complete; it stretches over every surface, until it covers all — beyond the confines of even what it’s meant to memorialize.

Nov 21, 2021

Dear Creators,

At night, my grandmother Bluma would place a round, plastic coaster over the opening of her water glass — to keep it fresh for the morning.

Over time, as she got older, and was moved from the sky-high flat on the edge of central Antwerp to a ground floor flat in the quiet suburb of Wilrijk, an hour’s walk from town (or twenty minutes by taxi), these cups sat for longer, and multiplied — discarded refreshments seated next to one another, each with its little makeshift lid, bedside, or in a haphazard row on the coffee table where, when we visited a few times a year, we’d take tea.

When my grandfather died, her husband of nearly 50 years, I was barely thirteen. A bar mitzvah boy, immersed in the absurdities of that transported ritual, all I knew was my father’s grief — bitter and flattening. Not hers. When I saw her next, months later, at my bar mitzvah, she must have still been in the thralls of it. Yet what do I remember of her experience of loss?

(In contrast, my father’s grief: I can still see the purple cover of “The Jewish Way in Death and Mourning” on the floor of his car; I did not touch it, did not know how to broach the topic except to ask my mother, in grip of fear, if he’d ever return to his old self. His grief, like his anger, as frightening as the prospect of losing him.)

Here’s another thing about that grief: almost all my memories of Bluma come after she was widowed. Before Jack’s death, when they visited, I was a boy; while Bluma navigated the domestic spaces alongside my mother — preparing, critiquing, watching, making — I sat with Jack and enjoyed his (bawdy) jokes, counted the (few) remaining hairs on his long-bald head.

It was later that I knew her. By then she was in her late 70s and after. My sense of her, my memories — cherished, vivid, alive — are all of her in those decades.

But then: her characteristic independence and self-possession strain against the ever-more aggressive pull of age. First, she loses her ability to swim, then to dance, then to sweep into a room broad shouldered and proud — directing people to pick up this or that, ‘coo coo-ing’ her grandkids into the kitchen for an early-morning cup of tea — then, with her walker, in her wheelchair, in her bed, she turns inward, though never loses her poise or her precision. Until, of course, she does.

But where is Jack in all of this? A series of framed photos along one bedroom wall? A sweet circuit of childhood memories (hair counting, dirty jokes)? An imprint left in the cushions of the couch? A longing for more time, ungranted; more intimacy, ungifted; more anything, ungiven, ungainly, ungained?

Such is the fabric of grief. Unpatterned, unremarkable, yet complete; it stretches over every surface, until it covers all — beyond the confines of even what it’s meant to memorialize.

How can we understand our parents at all, let alone as young lovers? Figures buoyed by their own interests, their own youthful desires, their own fears and hopes and dreams.

My father always made me feel safe, so I can project this from him onto my mother — but that’s not real. That’s not narrative; it’s conjecture.

They met at Thanksgiving.

My father was a student at the Art Institute of Chicago, still wore his beard long from his days in the military; he was still married, technically, though his wife had run off — moved out West to date women, leaving him on his own to assimilate to her country.

My mother was a young teacher in the Bronx, a New York native with no plans (or desire) to leave the city which had raised her and nourished her sense of place in the world.

My father knew no one except his ex-wife’s best friend who lived a state away with her new husband — who happened to be my mother’s brother. (You catch that? Need a chart?)

My mother, come to see her brother and his wife, an old friend, to enact that most American of Thanksgiving rituals: the benediction of a new family; gracing the new unit with a visit from the old.

The story goes (hers), before departing, she tells him, half a gesture of invitation, half to shake him off: “If you’re ever in the city, say hello...”

And then, soon after, when flowers are delivered, the card says, simply: Hello.

Who is this funny-accented man who’s taken such interest in her?

Where is the life they’ll build, and share, and lose together?

And who is she now, almost fifty years later; now that he is gone, that the life they found and formed is gone as well?

Grief, again, a sheet tossed out to cover, to drape, to hide.

An imprint on the couch, a wall of photos, a water glass topped with a coaster.

I will forever know my mother now, this way — without him. And her grandkids will only know her this way at all. What a shame that we only know such elided versions of each other — even those we love the most.

(Bluma, too, was once a young woman, who met a man and dreamed with him into a life.)

What a shame, to struggle to tell their stories, as if the stories themselves make up for unlived life.

As if the stories, told and retold, revised and rewritten, tell anything other than an outline; a winding hatchback, not the mountain; a cover version of a song unwritten that you can never hear.

All of it, every chord, every leaf, every particle of unkissed dirt, shrouded in an unseen grief, an undocumented loss, an unfelt tremor of an earth whose quake creates neither remarkable damage nor unusual dust. Just life, lived — that’s all that this is — just another lived life.

Onward toward creative joy,

Joey