1 Year ago

3.22.07 is the first year anniversary of my mother's death. She passed away at Calvary, a hospice in Brooklyn, 10 minutes from my apartment. She refused to live with me and husband.
She refused to accept first husband, her five grandchildren "I dont feel like a Grandmother" and refused to accept my second marriage. She refused to accept that after my father died she might have to work and support herself and her daughters and keep us together. She told me and my sister she as she packed up to move to her mother's home in Jersey, come there or do as you like. I was almost 18 and my sister was 15. My sister stayed with friends in NYC, I went to Israel. After a year on kibbutz right after the Yom Kippur war I returned to work as a short order cook and then left for Crown Heights. I was escorted back to Jersey to collect my belongings, clothes and some books and left everything else for my mother. She said I had been brainwashed, running away to be religious. After three years I was matched by a shaddchun with my first husband, a Polish immigrant and called her excited that I was engaged. She wasn't interested and said she didnt know if she would be able to attend the wedding, she didnt have a dress. I offered to buy her a dress and bring her. When it was clear she wanted no part in my marriage, the wedding was moved to my husband's family in Missouri.

We brought our first son to see his grandmother before his upsherenish. She never came to our home in Brooklyn. The next time she saw her grandchildren was when she had come to live with me and my daughters came to visit. Her grandmotherness was too difficult and depressing for her. When I thought only great joy to see what beautiful grandaughters she had, would thrill her, it simply depressed her and distanced us more, if that was possible.

I separated from my husband in '86. I did not want to be in relationships outside of marriage and was terribly lonely. Working at a university I was completing my Masters, friendly with both teachers and students. But it was confined to classrooms because outside of class it seemed all roads led to sex, either discussions or doing it. I was totally isolated and didnt fit in. I was in my early 30s, older than alot of students, a mother, divorced and just beginning my life again.
I felt religious but was no longer part of a jewish community. Anything outsdie of chassidus seemed like a shadow of the judaism I lived and frankly wanted. My mother would call me daily, 2-3x to talk. She wanted to know if she should marry this person, live with that man. Her brother pulled some strings and got her a garden apt for seniors while still in her late 50s and she settled into a life of being the youngest lady in a house filled with seniors, mostly women.

I graduated from college with my bachelors and she never asked what I studied or what I was interested in, what I was doing. I was the first one in the family to obtain a college degree. Then by 91' I had a Masters...both done fulltime while working all day to support myself. I had left high school at 16 in NYC to work at Woolworths as a cook to help my father. My father was 32 years older than my mother. He was 65 when I was born, was very wealthy in the garment industry and gambled it all away at Acqueduct. I know because most Saturdays he took me with him to sit at his table with a crowd of his gambling buddies. On Sundays we went to Murrays Smoked Fish Store on Broadway. Murray would bring me up into his office and ask for a kiss on his cheek. He always smelled like a smoked whitefish. Murray had the saddest blue eyes, as if nothing he ever saw truly made him happy, his sadness was so profound and dark. But making people happy with fish, bagels, made his dark eyes twinkle. A kiss brought 2 huge bags filled with bagels, sturgeon, huge whitefish, sliced novi, lox bellies, jams, biscuits. Then we went to see Pussy down on Riverside Drive.

Pussy was my father's bookie. Pussy was about 5'2, bald and never wore anything but a dark blue silk bathrobe with white polka dots. As my father held the bags, we waited for 6-7 minutes for Pussy to unlock the 10 Segal locks on his front door...one by one.

Pussy's wife Margie had cancer and never left her pink bedroom. I saw her once...a quiet lady with dark bouffant hair in a sea of pink ruffles all around her bed. She kept telling my father how beautiful I was and to bring me everytime to visit her.

Not long after my father lost his money at the track and in business...most of the people he knew disappeared. So did our chaffeur and housemaid. One old business connection gave him a job. I heard him on the phone with Jack. Jack owned the largest trucking fleet on the East Coast for clothing manufacturers and show rooms. My father was begging him for any kind of work to take care of us and was already in his late 70s. Jack let him sit early morning as the trucks came in and just check the names off a list. The younger men did all the grunt work. I dont think my mother ever met Jack, ever thanked Jack. One morning a rack of dresses rolled off a truck and hit my father, knocking him down and rolled over his then frail ankles. His ankle, badly bruised and his heart was humiliated had to be carried home in the arms of a tall strapping back man, not much younger than my father. Jack paid him for about another year as he remained home, then tried coming in by taxi to 'earn' his living until Jack said, enough, go home and rest now.

He spent his last years between the living room and the bedroom in almost total silence. He had stopped drinking the fifth of scotch he drank that terrified us with subseqeunt rages and destruction. I never knew what I would find in the morning after finally falling asleep as they screamed and threatened each other, him always disclosing he knew what she was doing, he had her followed. One morning her beautiful face and neck was sliced up from a bottle he smashed and attacked her with, one day the beautiful cream colored sofa was splashed by pots of boiled coffee he made to destroy her home she wanted and decorated. He ate little and spent hours writting a book about his life. He had only finished 3rd grade but wanted the world to know he 'coulda been a contender' and in fact had been. With no education and mostly moxie and G-ds help, he made an lost two huge fortunes. He was friends with made men of the profaci family and much of the antiques, oil paintings, jewelry were gifts received from underlings and given to my mother. He sent me on errands to get him2-3 composition books from the corner candystore as he wrote, crossed out, revised. He named his book "She Couldnt Shoot Straight" in honor (!) of my mother. And then at age 82 tried finding a publisher. A man came to the house and offered to publish the book for $5,000 in 1972, without even reading it.
Having stopped drinking 10 years earlier my father discovered pills would hold back the stabbing pains in his stomach and the two nice jewish doctors on each side of our lobby gladly wrote duplicate scripts every time my mother paid each of them a visit. Then filling both at separated pharmacies. Demerol, Tuinol. One of each and he'd get morose and call me in to have a serious discussion about 'the future' and what me and sister going to do "after I go?"
My mother would stop her nail filing to tell him he wasn't going, so to change the subject. My sister was never home, so the existential issues were left for me to deal with.

He was sorry he hadn't been able to set aside money for us, had gambled it all, lost it in some bad business decisions and was grieving for the mess he was leaving the only family he had. Of all the hurt and destructiveness, there was never a moment as a child and young woman that I doubted my father adored me. I was not tiny beautifull and frail like my sister, he saw his own Russian sisters in me, brawn and brains. No one ever saw the fraility in me, that came from taking care of all of them.
He died in '71. The rent was $225, the apartment was filled with expensive antiques, I was at Hunter College completing my first year open admissions after obtaining my GED and working as a cook. My mother called my gay cousin and they both were like giggling kids going thru his things. His pearl handle gun, cuff links, ties, fedoras, custom shoes, camel coats...and then a nice estate lady visited and bought our stuff for $5,000. This within a week of his death and cremation. A cremation I tried to stop and was overruled by rabonnim.
I was at a friends house when my mother called to say my father had passed away. I walked outside and the sun was bright, like on 9/11. But there was a sharp stillness and I couldnt hear anything as everything around me moved. I called a taxi and told the driver my father had just died, could he please take me home. And he did and asked me if I needed anything.

My mother wound up in Calvary because she asked a neighbor to take her to the nearby hosptial emercency room. It didnt matter that my husband had his visa and we were living around the corner from her, visiting every week for 3 years. It didnt matter we bought her television, food, visited. She didtn want us at the hospital. I didnt fully understand why until I got there. She had been forgetting things, sometimes my name, which was always happening calling me by sister's was a lifelong joke between us...sometimes she threw in a cousin or two before getting to my name. But husband said, she doing it on purpose, like a fox, to play games with us. I bought her a new summer wardrobe in her only favorite colors, black and white so she could look elegant in her small walks around the neighborhood. Sometimes jewelry because her black jet beads were getting shabby when the diamonds used to sit 30 years earlier. In the emergency room, she wasnt sure who I was. I asked for a pysch evaluation. The young doctor spoke with her privately as we waited. He came to tell me she had severe dementia and should not live alone, but was too sick to go anywhere. How had I missed dementia? I saw her 2x a week and thought the forgetfullness was just a part of being 84. She wasn't enjoying the news, it was depressing, as were the daily papers. She only ate vitamins, yogurt, grapes trying to fend off the inevitable end. She wanted to see a doctor and then each time an appointment was mad she refused to go, refused to be carried down the stairs and put into a car. REfused everything and anything. She had refused all chemo for the cancer at 79 saying jesus loved her and would protect her. Then her brother, the brother that was more of a husband because she loved him with a passion one would love only a husband, died of hodgkins. he called while she was still living with me, his son was at his side in the hospital bed holding the phone for him to say goodbye to his sister. She refused to take the phone. She refused to say goodbye. When her nephew called to say her brother died, I thanked him and agve her the news. She curled up and moaned for days under her covers. In a fetal position staring at the wall, she refused to eat. I called in senior grief counselors the city offers as a mobile service. They prescribed Paxil and tried setting her up with a nearby senior center. She was enraged I called psychs in to help her with the grief. She said, "you will never love anyone the way N. loved me and I loved him, that why you can't understand what I lost."
Within a few months I met my second husband. I was introduced to him as someone who might be interested in translating some of my poetry into arabic. He was, but someone else did the work, he stayed to talk...and talk. And then ask for marraige. I said no, you're too young. He pulled every cliche out of the book and I cut the conversation with I cannot have any more children and you're young enough to have a family. At which point he told me had in fact had a 5 year son, we woulde raise him as as family together.
When you tell a women who lost her father who loved her, a woman who gave up her own five children to live with a REAL big jewish fam ily with cousins and aunts and insuring their grandfathers inheritance, when you tell that woman that she have a family again, that maybe this is like a gift from Hashem, that she is needed by this man and his son, it was in my mind we would make a courageous and strong unit together. I had no one else. As soon as my mother heard I was engaged, she packed her 3 suitcases. I left for Egypt, got stuck as the Iraq war started and stayed for 3 months. When I returned as a married woman with a scarf on my head, it wouldnt ahve mattered if it was a shmmatah as she called it or a hijab. My attention was back to work and the arrival of my husband and all the issues I knew he was need help with when he got here. I cooked at night and we ate together , she watched tv and I went online to talk to him. Any I love you to him was met with grunts, hisses and obscenities from her while Alex trebek was cheering contestants. I told her in May he was expected by the end of June, his visa had been approved. 2 weeks later I came home and found her and her things, gone. Where does a 77 year old woman on social security go? She went to the neighbor bodega and the lady who she shared coffee with every morning said she had an extra room. She parted with 3/4 of her SS check plus food.

so whenI heard dementia, my second reaction was what a damn relief, now I can take care of her instead of hearing 'no one tells me what to do,' The doctors basically allowed me to make all further decisions. There was an opening in Calvery10 days later and her cancer was so advanced she was accepted and taken to the other side of the hosptial. It was a gift from Hashem, a gift I could never have afforded to offer her, to spend peaceful days near a courtyard garden, with nice people, a social worker to speak with, spiritual counseling. ALl day at work and direct to her room for 3 months. She couldnt eat and her mental state growing worse daily. The chaplain gave me and my sister pamphlets of tehillim.

I started saying tehillim. my mother refused to speak about god except to say days before she died she was an atheist. Sunday afternoon when I went to bring her the soup she had requested after not eating anything, I found her slumped down alone and dead. But it must have been so recent, her body was still warm when I picked her up to shift her in the bed. They didnt want me fussing and to say bye and leave. How do you say bye and leave? How do you leave a body, alone? I asked for some time and washed her all over since I couldnt perform chesed shel emet there and dressed her in the gown she loved. I put the picture of the brother her heart broke over losing and some lipstick on. I brushed her hair and pinned it. I said goodbye and a year later I read something or see something and still think I have to see her later and tell her, how she'd laugh...

4 weeks after I sent her ashes to my sister, to 'make peace' I was cleaning the apt and putting the mess of papers in files. I found greetings cards I knew were nt from me and opened them. There was my husband, posing with a very large blond woman and her two sons, in one of the Sears 'family' portraits. 4 differeent poses and one pose of her smiling needly eyed at the camera holding her arm with her hand, something glinting on her finger. The jewelry receipt with the pics showed a diamond ring. The cards were written out to my Darling Husband and Dear Stepdad. I dont know if they married while he was married to me, muslim men do whatever they want with women that became clear.

But what I did...is another post. This was about my mother, who toiveled to marry my father, who orthodox rabbi had her toivel in the atlantic ocean, not a mikveh and wtihout witnesses or brachas, so when I went to chasidus and shared this bit of news, I was informed I was not a jew and must toivel to bring the neshomah hovering about me, into the keli. And so, it was done after getting permission from the Rebbe and asking for a name change (not granted).

What I didnt write is what I learned in this year.