some incomplete thoughts

Yesterday was our first day back in Vermont after a good long while -- eleven days. I have mixed feelings about coming back just as I did about going down in the first place. My dad died on the eleventh of some combination of an asthma attack and a heart attack. He was forty-five years old, and he died at home at around three in the morning. It still seems not quite real. I wasn't as close to him as Chelsea was, but I still feel strange that I only feel it at certain points, while most of the time it's just unreal.

It was awkward for me before the funeral because I felt like I should be acting the most upset, but I wasn't. I kept thinking of the funeral as something for everyone else, and then I'd deal with my own stuff later, on my own time. It was too soon, maybe. I couldn't come up with anything to say at the funeral, but it worked out well because Chelsea had written something that she didn't feel like she could read. The funeral was refreshing, although that sounds strange to say, compared to the other funerals I've attended. It was unsettling to see my Great Grandma Geneva and my Papaw Jerry at their open-casket funeral; David's dad's funeral was probably what Grace, David's mom, needed, but it wasn't what I would have wanted for my dad; my mom's friend Mary's funeral was sort of a shock -- very Catholic and liturgical, although Mary was evangelical through-and-through, she was only born Catholic. I think her (still nominally Catholic) daughter arranged the funeral.

There's actually one other funeral I've been to that just came to me now. A woman who attended my old church several years ago died of breast cancer -- I don't know how old she was but her daughter was in her early twenties. But there was no mourning at her funeral. Everyone was happy that she wasn't suffering any longer and Sabrina, her daughter, found comfort in knowing her mother was with God.

My dad's funeral was the only Jewish funeral I've been to, and even though he was never religious it oddly seemed to suit him. There wasn't a tent or chairs set up at the gravesite, we just stood around it and my Grandma Molly sat on a box. They pinned the little pieces of fabric on the wrong sides of some people (my cousin told me it was supposed to be on the left side for Chelsea and I, and on the right side for everyone else), but the rabbi was a very nice man and very eloquent, and for me shovelling dirt onto the grave did actually give me some closure. It made the ceremony seem less like something that I was witnessing and more like something that I was a part of, that I could participate in and in a way that I had to participate in. Like he wouldn't be buried until I helped to bury him. I don't know how to convey, though, that this was a positive thing.

The rabbi said two things that stood out to me -- both, I think, quotes from Rabbi Mendel Kotz (?), who was also a Polish Jew: What kind of a God would he be if I could understand him? How could I believe in him if I understood him?

We didn't exactly sit shiva, but the thing that we did that we called a shiva I also appreciated. After the funeral everyone went back to Aunt Michele (my dad's sister) and Uncle Paul's house for food and to be together. My grandparents had brought old photo albums with them, two of pictures from just after the war when they were in Israel up until sometime in the seventies, when they were in Brooklyn, and one professional photos from my dad's bar mitzvah. I didn't even realize he had been bar mitzvahed, but he was -- 7 December 1975. Pearl Harbor Day. Aunt Michele also brought out her wedding album, from 1992.

I also learned (or re-learned?) my dad's and grandparents' Hebrew names -- Dovid and Malka, and his was Reuven Shlomo. At the funeral the rabbi at one point spoke directly to my Grandpa Dave in Hebrew -- aside from my cousin Tamara, I think he was the only one there who could understand him (although some of my grandmother's siblings might speak Hebrew as well). It was something, I think, about what an upset of the natural order it is to lose a child and how my Grandpa Dave has already lost so much already; his mother Regina and brother -- I think his name was Joseph -- were killed in the holocaust. He and his father Vigdor were the only ones of his family he knows to have survived.

We're now working on settling dad's affairs -- obviously, he hadn't made a lot of plans for his death yet, so there are monthly bills to pay and car titles to transfer and bank accounts to straighten out. It seems like Silver and I are going to be able to pay off our student loans -- which is on one hand an amazing gift, but on the other hand my initial feeling was that I didn't want it. I felt, oddly, like I had rather I got two hundred dollars than some substantial amount. Mom said that it's because it's not worth his life, and because I feel like I'm benefiting from his death. A woman in Florida whose blog I read went through a similar situation; she almost died from medical equipment left inside her after a c-section, but when she received the check from the settlement she had the irrational impulse to tear it up.