Jessi Klein's NotBlog

So this past weekend I had to attend a memorial for my grandmother, who passed away recently at the age of 89.  She had a good life, I think, and while it’s sad she died I feel calm and OK about it.  It’s funny how people don’t know how to react when you tell them a grandparent died.  People are either really close with their grandparents, or not close at all, or it’s that thing inbetween where you love them but you know that they’re, frankly, old and going to die.  When I told people I was going home for my grandmother’s memorial they would usually look at me and say “I’m SO SORRY,” which comes from a nice place, but makes me feel like I have to comfort them about my grandmother’s death.  I’ll say, “Well, she was very old,” and then I become afraid that I don’t sound upset enough.  She and my grandpa used to take me and my siblings away to the Catskills for a few weeks in the summer, where we would eat fresh oranges and learn to swim and listen to them bicker.  One time I got stung by a wasp (I was always the one getting stung by something or being pooped on by a bird or stepping in dog shit, and everytime it happened my mom would make it seem like this was actually the best thing that could have happened: “You got stung by a bee because they know how sweet you are!”  “Getting pooped on by a pigeon is good luck!”  These are ridiculous things to say,and sometimes as I tried not to yack while washing green birdcrap out of my hair I’d be annoyed, but I realize how glad I am they were said.  I guess it’s the Jewish mom version of “when life gives you lemons make lemonade,” but it takes a great kind of moxie to so stubbornly insist on the good fortune of an encounter with animal dung) and my grandmother held me while I cried, and she put a cold compress on it and I snuggled into her and started squeezing the old loose skin of her elbow crook, which was soft and comforting.  Later, we drew penguins together.  She was a good artist.

In any case, she died, and I went to her memorial.  We took a limo to the cemetery,which I was dreading because it was in New Jersey, and my experience of anyone dying and being buried in the tri-state area is that the trip to the cemetery is a horrifyingly ugly, traffic riddled drive to some pit of a site, where you know you’ve found the cemetery because on the map you’re told to make a left directly after the nuclear reactor, or whatever those horrible things are you see where there’s just a series of huge pipes with fires bellowing out of them.  What the fuck are those?  What asshole dreamed those up?  It seems so inexcusably awful, that someone would ever feel the need to manufacture something in such a way that you’d need to involve a series of weird hell chimneys.  Whatever they are, in any case, they’re usually directly across from cemeteries, and you can’t help but make a morbid connection between the miles of ashtray like graves and the flames licking upwards from deep in the earth.  That’s the other thing, is that these cemeteries always seem to look and feel the exact opposite of peaceful, just people being stuffed into the earth in the same manner in which they lived, all crammed together in the grey city, as if you wanted to replicate in your eternal death pose the sensation of being on a packed rush hour subway. 

So that’s what I always think about these places.  But this cemetery was not that.  It was actually pretty beautiful.  The surrounding area had kempt, pretty houses and big graceful trees.  And in the cemetery itself there was a feeling of peace and rest, which was satisying, as that would seem to be the main point of a cemetery.

Anyway, we meet up with the rabbi who is going to perform the service, and he seems like a kindly old man, which is how I like my rabbis – I think because it’s a way to preserve something of that childlike belief that God is an old man with a long white beard.  When you inevitably grow up and go to Vassar, it’s not really cool to believe that anymore.  But at least an old rabbi with a long white beard gives you a little of the flavor of that, and I think if someone says they don’t picture God that way they’re lying at least a tiny bit.

So we walk to the plot, to my grandmother’s grave with the dirt freshly filled in, and he begins the service.  Despite having never met any of us, most notably my grandmother, he’s trying very hard to talk about how lovely she was, and his effort is appreciated, if at times a little over the top.  Like he says more than once, “She was a gem, a princess, a doll.”  A doll?  Hm.  Did he ever meet her at a bar in 1932?  Then maybe he shouldn’t call her a doll.  But it’s endearing. 

He takes a long detour to talk about Yitzhak Perlman, the famous violinist, and the night the rabbi’s friend saw him in concert and Perlman makes his labored walk to the stage in his leg braces and begins to play, and about fifteen minutes into the concert one of the strings broke, and the audience nervously tittered as they expected he would have to stop to get another string or maybe even another violin altogether.  But instead, he just decided to keep playing.  Everyone gasped, as they knew it would be impossible to make any kind of symphonic sound without the right number of strings.  But then, something happened – he played the most passionate, beautiful music anyone had ever heard.  The rabbi was not entirely successful in tying this story together with an aspect of my grandmother’s life.

So anyway after a bit he’s coming to the end of the service, the most solemn part where he’s going to say the Kaddish in Hebrew with my mother.  And they begin, and about fifteen seconds into it someone’s CELL PHONE GOES OFF.  You know how when someone’s cell phone goes off in the middle of a movie it just seems like the most mortally awful thing?  Well imagine the movie is about your dead grandmother’s funeral, and then imagine it’s not a movie, it’s real, and someone’s CELL PHONE GOES OFF.  That might give you a sense of what it’s like.  We’re all silently horrified, but it’s so unspeakably terrible that for a few seconds we can’t even look at each other.  Which one of us bares the device that marks us as the world’s biggest asshole?  We don’t want to know,  but I finally have to look up and I realize that in fact the cell phone belongs to the RABBI, who is not in any way breaking stride on the prayer and is just absolutely plowing through it.  The amazing thing is that we’re not talking about one or two rings that were then immediately hushed.  The rabbi, holding the prayer book in his old feeble hand, is using his other hand, which is also old and feeble, to slowly poke around his pockets and find the phone which he seems to be having trouble locating.  But he doesn’t seem in any kind of rush, which is, I think, just incredibly ballsy, especially if you know that his cell phone ring isn’t just any old tone – it’s the most classically grating series of tones in the world, that original Nokia ring – DUH NUH NUH DUH NUH NUH DUH NUH NAH NAAAH!!!!  It was the cell phone ring clearly invented by people in the early stages of cell phone inventing, when you could picture some scientist/engineer techie nerds, the kind with smarts but no understanding of people, standing over a phone prototype and saying, “The most important thing is for people to know beyond a shadow of a doubt when someone is calling the phone!  We need a sound that will be loud and differentiated from any other natural organic sound in the world!”

He finally finds the phone, and pulls it out and silences it, and my brother in law swears he saw him look to see who was calling.  I can’t confirm or deny that.  But the rabbi puts it away and finishes the service, reminding us that we should pray for all the troops around the world to come home safely to the United States and for peace on earth, and for my grandmother to rest in peace.

All in all, it was a great service.  In the limo on the way home, we moreover agreed that even with the cell phone incident it was somehow the right service.  It was a very beautiful spring day, with a wild blue sky and blossoms whizzing by all along the way to the George Washington bridge, and then after that, even blossoms in the city itself.  When we get home, we go to separate rooms to relax and be glad we’re not in a cemetery anymore.  After a bit, my father comes over and tells me that Yitzhak Perlman is playing the violin on channel 13.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 at 1:33 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.