On April 2nd my Nana passed away. She and I were extremely close and spending weeks tweaking the details of this image have been part of my grief process. Now it’s done, but the process isn’t yet. I suppose that means more work on some of these themes to come.
I actually wrote a eulogy as well for her funeral, so I’ve included it if you want to read it.
When my grandmother spoke to me about god, she spoke about feeding the ducks with her grandmother.
This story was probably related to the practice of casting your sins into the water as pieces of bread during the high holy days, or maybe last minute treif cleansing before pesach. But all I could ever remember were the ducks. They were the special part, for whatever reason, hers or mine. Even her grandmother, who I know she adored, took backstage to the ducks in this narrative.
This is how it began: my imagination took root in this story and a few others like it, and built a whimsical god and a theology of details. An interventionist god with tunnel vision and a disdain for labels left on bottles.
He was the guy who got angry when you dog-eared the pages of library books. He made plants green and blessed bleach as a kind of holy water for household chores. God’s advice when you go to the dentist: relax all your muscles and don’t be afraid of the pain, the pain will go away. Buy only educational toys, send five dollars to every single charity that ever sends you a letter, and wash the plate until it squeaks before you put it in the dishwasher. Oh, and read.
Read. Read. Read. It is one of the ten commandments, right? Magazines like National Geographic were treated with the same reverence as the bible. Science, just commentary on the torah. An entire room of hers that claimed to be a dining room was, in fact, the most majestic home library I’ve ever seen. It was filled with tomes on every university subject, old books, dusty books, Aristotle and Spinoza bumped shoulders with Einstein and Salinger. Countless textbooks, lavishly illustrated, stood carefully organized but mussed by children. This is the god that understands about the mess of magazines on the kitchen table. Mess is okay sometimes, if it is smart.
This is the god that understands if you can’t go to synagogue because your granddaughter is sick and needs to be visited, like her grandfather told her when he’d play hooky from shul on saturdays. She struggled with strep throat as a child and described herself as having been sickly, something I only half-believed seeing the vital and lively old lady that I knew. This is the god that says: if you are sick, tell it to go away.
I am not a spiritual person. Other members of my family are more graceful with the feeling parts of themselves than I am. Talk of god that isn’t either philosophical or whimsical makes me nervous. This is the god that doesn’t talk much about god.
And I have wondered in the last hours if this is the god who doesn’t prepare me very well for death.
It isn’t that I haven’t thought about it. I am an introvert prone to bouts of melancholia and I think of death frequently like some kind of ascetic ritual meditation. It’s just that thinking about death, and having feelings about my grandmother’s death, are very different things. Passing forlorn thoughts do not prepare me for the feelings of real grief beginning to surface.
My grandmother’s standards and expectations were unusually high. And I quote: “Your elbows are getting bony, you should use lotion twice a day. Nobody likes bony elbows.” The way she communicated these expectations, and the way I think that she understood them, was in a voluminous tome of thousands of tiny instructions, like the elbow lotion. There was no “big picture” ideal, I discovered, after trying for many years to puzzle one together out of instructions more numerous than stars in the New Jersey sky.
The genius of these instructions is that they are controllable. Following all of them may be impossible, but each one in and of itself is no mountain to climb. A multitude of one step projects. Too small to mess up and if you do, too small to be anything but funny upon failure. These are a kind of practical prayer. In this world full of the uncertain and the unpredictable, the little things made my grandmother brave. Brave in the face of fear and loneliness and pain. Brave in the face of the terribly dramatic and terribly normal problems that life presents to all of us, and their crushing accumulation over time.
To be clear, what shielded her wasn’t an avoidance. She faced the world. Anyone who knows her knows that she would take up a cause at a moment’s notice if she believed in it, and fight for it until her voice was hoarse. But when I remember her, I remember the details. She took pride in them. They mattered to her. She recognized that these instructions are life. That life is a series of small events, and that navigating these with grace and cheerfulness is the point.
To impart to you all the wisdom she gave to me we’d need 30 years of late night talks, gallons of herbal tea, and nearly constant instructions about minutiae.
Maybe this does help to prepare me for death.
Don’t forget to feed the ducks.
Today I am sick, I will tell it to go away.
My mess is smart. My elbows are bony.
I will deliberately relax and ease my pain.
The dish has to squeak, the nutrition is in the peel.
Most of all, a handful of little things are all that need to matter for right now.
Eulogy, completed
On April 2nd my Nana passed away. She and I were extremely close and spending weeks tweaking the details of this image have been part of my grief process. Now it’s done, but the process isn’t yet. I suppose that means more work on some of these themes to come.
Etsy, etsy, and etsy.
You can go back and look over the WIP gallery or the category of blog posts to see the process.
I actually wrote a eulogy as well for her funeral, so I’ve included it if you want to read it.
When my grandmother spoke to me about god, she spoke about feeding the ducks with her grandmother.
This story was probably related to the practice of casting your sins into the water as pieces of bread during the high holy days, or maybe last minute treif cleansing before pesach. But all I could ever remember were the ducks. They were the special part, for whatever reason, hers or mine. Even her grandmother, who I know she adored, took backstage to the ducks in this narrative.
This is how it began: my imagination took root in this story and a few others like it, and built a whimsical god and a theology of details. An interventionist god with tunnel vision and a disdain for labels left on bottles.
He was the guy who got angry when you dog-eared the pages of library books. He made plants green and blessed bleach as a kind of holy water for household chores. God’s advice when you go to the dentist: relax all your muscles and don’t be afraid of the pain, the pain will go away. Buy only educational toys, send five dollars to every single charity that ever sends you a letter, and wash the plate until it squeaks before you put it in the dishwasher. Oh, and read.
Read. Read. Read. It is one of the ten commandments, right? Magazines like National Geographic were treated with the same reverence as the bible. Science, just commentary on the torah. An entire room of hers that claimed to be a dining room was, in fact, the most majestic home library I’ve ever seen. It was filled with tomes on every university subject, old books, dusty books, Aristotle and Spinoza bumped shoulders with Einstein and Salinger. Countless textbooks, lavishly illustrated, stood carefully organized but mussed by children. This is the god that understands about the mess of magazines on the kitchen table. Mess is okay sometimes, if it is smart.
This is the god that understands if you can’t go to synagogue because your granddaughter is sick and needs to be visited, like her grandfather told her when he’d play hooky from shul on saturdays. She struggled with strep throat as a child and described herself as having been sickly, something I only half-believed seeing the vital and lively old lady that I knew. This is the god that says: if you are sick, tell it to go away.
I am not a spiritual person. Other members of my family are more graceful with the feeling parts of themselves than I am. Talk of god that isn’t either philosophical or whimsical makes me nervous. This is the god that doesn’t talk much about god.
And I have wondered in the last hours if this is the god who doesn’t prepare me very well for death.
It isn’t that I haven’t thought about it. I am an introvert prone to bouts of melancholia and I think of death frequently like some kind of ascetic ritual meditation. It’s just that thinking about death, and having feelings about my grandmother’s death, are very different things. Passing forlorn thoughts do not prepare me for the feelings of real grief beginning to surface.
My grandmother’s standards and expectations were unusually high. And I quote: “Your elbows are getting bony, you should use lotion twice a day. Nobody likes bony elbows.” The way she communicated these expectations, and the way I think that she understood them, was in a voluminous tome of thousands of tiny instructions, like the elbow lotion. There was no “big picture” ideal, I discovered, after trying for many years to puzzle one together out of instructions more numerous than stars in the New Jersey sky.
The genius of these instructions is that they are controllable. Following all of them may be impossible, but each one in and of itself is no mountain to climb. A multitude of one step projects. Too small to mess up and if you do, too small to be anything but funny upon failure. These are a kind of practical prayer. In this world full of the uncertain and the unpredictable, the little things made my grandmother brave. Brave in the face of fear and loneliness and pain. Brave in the face of the terribly dramatic and terribly normal problems that life presents to all of us, and their crushing accumulation over time.
To be clear, what shielded her wasn’t an avoidance. She faced the world. Anyone who knows her knows that she would take up a cause at a moment’s notice if she believed in it, and fight for it until her voice was hoarse. But when I remember her, I remember the details. She took pride in them. They mattered to her. She recognized that these instructions are life. That life is a series of small events, and that navigating these with grace and cheerfulness is the point.
To impart to you all the wisdom she gave to me we’d need 30 years of late night talks, gallons of herbal tea, and nearly constant instructions about minutiae.
Maybe this does help to prepare me for death.
Don’t forget to feed the ducks.
Today I am sick, I will tell it to go away.
My mess is smart. My elbows are bony.
I will deliberately relax and ease my pain.
The dish has to squeak, the nutrition is in the peel.
Most of all, a handful of little things are all that need to matter for right now.