Alef: The NEXT Conversation

Grave Recollection

By Isaac Shalev

CRUNCH.

“Shit!”

“Have some respect!”

“It’s not like they can hear me.”

It was late in the morning on Friday, I was driving in a graveyard, and I had just rammed my car into what I desperately hoped was not a tombstone, especially not anyone’s I knew. My wife, knitting quietly in passenger seat, was not amused by either our predicament or my remark. We had departed from the eulogy service for a relative of mine – a 90+ year-old, short, white-haired, gruff man named Shaya. He was my grandfather’s uncle, or maybe my grandfather was his uncle, or they were cousins once- or twice-removed. My grandmother had explained the genealogy to me countless times, but the relationships between all those faceless ghosts from Warsaw and Lublin was ephemeral, and I never remembered them. I always knew Shaya as the old man who used to talk to my dad in Yiddish and who was the patriarch of the only American relatives my Israeli immigrant family had in the United States. Whenever we met, he showed me the faded blue numbers burned into his arm and asked if I still remembered what they meant. I never forgot.

The only reason I’d even hit anything was because we had gotten separated from the funeral procession. I had no idea where we were going, and between fumbling with my phone, bluetooth, GPS, and looking every which way at once to try and find a burial party in the sprawling Montefiore Cemetery in Queens, I whacked what turned out to be a low white stone, one of many lining the paths between the graves. At least it wasn’t a tombstone.

I finally made it to the right spot, to the smell of fresh dirt on a spring day, and the finality of a hole, a pine box, and a shovel.

This is how we say goodbye.

When the last spadeful had been added to the mound that now rose up where a hole once was, when the last “Amen” of the Kaddish had been recited by Shaya’s daughter, and the last tear had been shed by his grandchildren, my father and I raised up our eyes and saw, not a stone’s throw away, the Ohel – the burial site of the Lubavitcher Rebbe. We paid a short visit, recited a quick Psalm, and returned to our cars. Even on a Friday, now past noon, pious Chabad Hassidim gathered in prayer and supplication. My family was not Lubavitch, and my father had never taken me to the Rebbe while he was alive to get a blessing and a dollar bill. But the Ohel was right there, right near Shaya’s grave, so that visiting the Rebbe just seemed like the thing to do. That Shaya, a Jew who never forgave God for the Holocaust, would find himself buried so close to the Rebbe, in a plot probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more) to the Rebbe’s followers, felt oddly meaningful, but I can’t say I understood exactly what it meant.

I got back to my car, and noticed, at last, the dent. It was in the the rear door on the driver’s side, and the corner of the door had bent into the frame of the car. It was a pretty nasty dent, but I felt strangely calm about it. Going to the funeral, honoring the dead, placing a rock on the headstone, these felt like important things to do, even if I didn’t feel it while I was doing them. If God wanted me to do a little body work to earn my role in the ancient rite, that was okay with me. I knew at the moment of impact that there was going to be a dent. I just didn’t know where I’d been hit.

…

Photo by Isaac Shalev.

Tags: Cemetery, Family, Funerals

Posted by Sarah, Monday, January 4th, 2010, 1:06 pm, Death and Tragedy.