I'd be a fool if I tried to argue that my father dying when I was ten didn't have a profound effect on me. It was, as I say in my song For My Boys, a dream from which I never quite awoke.
My father, Kenneth Siegel, was from Brooklyn. He met my mother, Bernice ("Bim") Block, a Winthrop MA native, in New York in 1955. They married and soon moved out to the suburbs. We lived at 15 Adrienne Drive, Old Bethpage, Long Island, in the little ranch house my parents bought for $19,500.
When he died on July 4th 1968 (thyroid cancer, service-related, long story), I did not cry. My mother elected not to take my sister Amy and me to the burial at Wellwood Cemetery in Farmingdale. These twin events—not going and not crying—became cudgels I used to beat myself with for years.
Regarding the first, at some point, probably in my thirties, I told my mother that it was time I corrected the aberration that I'd never visited my father's grave. She looked at me with a puzzled expression, and replied "Why do you think you never visited his grave? Yes, I felt you and Amy were too young to take to daddy's funeral, but I think I took you for the unveiling [the Jewish tradition of placing the gravestone a year later]. Plus, both of daddy's parents are buried in that same plot. You were there for both of their funerals, and I think for both unveilings. That makes as many as five times. Maybe you weren't there for all of them, but there's no question you've been there." As she said it, a memory upwelled of my usually-staid grandfather breaking down at the gravesite as he eulogized my grandmother as "the perfect woman."
Boy. If you're going to beat yourself up for something, at least it should be something that actually happened.
However, learning that I had been there let me off the hook for feeling that I should go there. I've let myself off the hook for many things during my life. Sometimes that's good. Sometimes not. Of course, I've put myself on the hook for many other things. Maybe it averages out.
And that brings us to the second cudgel—not crying when he died. Boy, that's a bitter pill to swallow. And I was convinced that that was exactly what I'd done—make the bitter pill, swallow it, force it down, bury it, internalize all that pain. Whether this is even true is still something I don't know. When I saw a therapist to try to work it through, he said "Let it out. Right now. I'll stand with you here and now and hold you." Nope. Wasn't happening. Why not? Who knows. People aren't light switches. And as brilliant as Timothy Hutton's scene with the therapist was was in Ordinary People (or, more recently, Matt Damon's in Good Will Hunting), things need to unfold in their own time.
We all hear and read little aphorisms and bits of advice, reject what doesn't apply to us, and absorb some of what does. One thing that resonated deeply with me in my forties was hearing Carl Jung's assertion that most problems in life aren't solved; they're merely outgrown. Over time, the whole "I'm a bad person because I didn't cry when my father died" thing gradually faded into the background like the MacGuffin in a Hitchcock movie. I realized that the last thing I am is a stone. To the contrary: I am a person who feels things deeply. I cry over big things, small things, odd things at odd times, but it's rarely out-and-out blubbering (though James Carroll's eulogy to Ted Kennedy in The Boston Globe got me close), and it sure as hell isn't on command. That's okay. It's not a fucking contest.
A year after my father died, my mother moved us out of Old Bethpage to Amherst MA. I loved Amherst the moment we got there. Initially, there were regular visits with my grandparents in Brooklyn and quite a bit of contact with childhood friends in Long Island, but over the years, with my grandparents gone and no other family down there, that connection faded. Other than keeping in touch with the children of a few of my parents's oldest friends, the ties to Long Island naturally withered. My being "from" Long Island soon became an academic footnote. It certainly wasn't anything I was nostalgic about. (Although, as a singer/songwriter, you are required to write a song about where you're from. You can find mine here. I'll agree that I almost sound retrospectively wistful.) On Facebook, I list that I'm from Amherst. That feels right to me. It's the place where, when walking or driving through it, feels like home.
When my mother turned 80, Amy and I took her into New York to see a show. While we were in the city, we did the tour past where she used to live on 14th St with her friends Millie and Yochoved before she got married, as well as to my grandparents' old place in Brooklyn at the corner of Flatbush and Troy Ave. The next day, we went out to Long Island and drove past the house on Adrienne Drive. At this point, it probably had been 15 years since our last visit. When we'd lived there, my father had planted a cherry blossom tree in the front yard. In past visits, that tree was the touchstone for connection, especially for my mother. But this visit, although the little ranch house was unchanged, not second-storied or McMansioned like many others, the cherry blossom tree was gone. The three of us felt wounded. The connection to the house had been severed. As we drove away, there was the unspoken knowledge that we would never go back there, at least not together. Move along. Nothing here to see.
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| My mother, sister, and me in front of 2201 Troy Ave at the corner of Flatbush about ten years ago. My grandparents would've been so pleased that we went back and took this photo. |
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When my mother passed away last summer at age 89, her instructions were that she was to be buried in Wellwood Cemetery on Long Island next to my father. Amy and I of course followed her wishes to the letter, but part of me thought it was a shame that she wasn't being buried with the rest of her family in the Jewish cemetery on the Everett/Revere line. As we worked the logistics with the funeral home, we learned that there was a minor complication with Wellwood: As was commonly the case, my parents had purchased a plot in the late 1950s through their temple in Old Bethpage, and due to the changing demographics of Long Island and declining enrollment, the temple had long since closed. Fortunately, in terms of burial, this turned out to be just a paperwork issue handled by the funeral home.
We arranged for a temple service in Boston on a Monday, with interment on Long Island the following Tuesday. I rented a 12-passenger van so both my and Amy's families could all drive down there together after the service.
At 11:00 at night, after a long drive at the end of a long and emotional day, we found that there was a screw-up with Amy's family's hotel reservation. I drove them to a different hotel. By utter chance, the route between the two hotels took us directly through our neighborhood in Old Bethpage. Waze had put us onto Haypath Road, a street whose name I knew. A light fog had settled in, giving everything a dream-like soft Edward Hopper-ish quality. Suddenly I saw a cluster of commercial buildings, and recognized it as "the stores," the place where the old five and dime, supermarket, and movie theater had been. We were only about a quarter mile from our old house. Amy and I would often tell our parents "We're going to the stores" and ride our bikes there to buy chewing gum. I bought my first single, "I Can't Help Myself" by The Four Tops, in that five and dime. I saw Jack The Giant Killer, a really cheesy stop-motion animated movie, in that theater. Well, I saw part of it; I was so terrified that I had to be escorted out.
I asked my family to indulge me on a quick drive-by of the house. My mother's passing, the service, the long drive to Long Island, the lateness of the hour, the exhaustion, the fog, the fact that this was the first time my family was seeing where I grew up... it was surreal.
The next day, we met the hearse at the cemetery and followed it out to the gravesite. Even taking into account my earlier faulty memory, it was my first visit in almost 45 years. We walked through the entrance markers for the section for Temple Beth Elohim, the long-gone synagogue where I went to Hebrew school and attended my father's funeral service. There, on the right, was the headstone for "Siegel." Beneath it was the freshly-dug grave for my mother. The footstones for my father and grandfather were visible, but my grandmother's was obscured by the dirt mound.
You know how, when you see someone or something you haven't seen in eons, your mind takes a fresh snapshot of it and compares it to what it's got stored? Sometimes you can actually feel it as your brain goes through the pattern-matching process, adjusting both images, getting them to line up, choosing points of reference in each, comparing them and interpolating as necessary. (Maybe it's just me; my software engineering history is showing.) If it's a place you recognize, you say "wow... this place... I remember when we did such-and-such" as I described when I unexpectedly saw "the stores" at night in the fog. If it's a person, you go "Bob!" and hope his name actually is Bob.
At the cemetery, that didn't happen. At all. None of it. Zero zip nada. Instead, it was like Gandalf saying "I have no memory of this place." Nothing about it seemed familiar. The fact that I'd been there multiple times before was academic. Emotionally, I certainly hadn't been there before. It only reinforced my feeling that, while this was where my mother wanted to come to rest, I no longer had any connection with Long Island. This old Jewish cemetery felt like an artifact of long-gone 20th century immigration patterns and anachronistic demographics, built during the period when over 12 million people came through Ellis Island, the city was bursting, white people moved out to the suburbs, and there were endless potato farms on Long Island that could be re-purposed to absorb both the living and the dead.
In addition to immediate family and life-long friends, there were three unexpected attendees at my mother's burial. The first was the Kunoffs, a family who lived around the corner from us on Old Bethpage in a house with the identical floor plan to ours. The second was my mother's cousin Phyllis and her husband Jeff, both of whom I've always loved but hadn't seen much of since they moved out of Boston. The third was Bill Magaliff, the son of Millie Magaliff, one of the women my mother shared the apartment on 14th St all those years ago. Their presence was extraordinarily meaningful to me. Bill mentioned that his family's plot was there also, so at least he had no trouble finding the place. I didn't think much about this at the time; there was a lot going on.
One of the things Amy and I discussed was whether or not to include the Jewish tradition of having family and friends participate in the burial, with each taking a turn with a shovel, turning it upside down, placing dirt on the back to show that burying a loved one is hard, emptying it onto the coffin, and then voluntarily joining in to begin filling in the grave in earnest. The sound that the first few shovel-fulls of dirt make when they hit a coffin, particularly a traditional unadorned pine box, is a deep, resonant, and unforgettable dum. Over the years, I've grown to find "the dirt part" an incredibly loving, intimate act (how much more loving and intimate can you get than burying a loved one?). Amy, however, surprised me by saying "Well, we know ma didn't want the dirt part."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"You don't remember the whole 'no dirt on ma' thing?"
I had no idea what she was talking about.
Amy recounted that, about ten years ago, when the three of us went to the funeral of an old friend, when it came time for the shoveling part, my mother expressed sharp distaste for it. "The last thing I'd want," Amy recounted her saying, "is my family throwing dirt in my face." She expressed it so strongly that I apparently took out a mock notebook and mock pen, licked the tip of the mock pen, and mock-wrote down "Okay... no dirt on ma." The memory came back once Amy told me the story. Now, my mother was not in the least squeamish, or afraid to get dirty (she was an avid gardener). Whatever she'd reacted to, for whatever reason, she'd felt it strongly, and obviously Amy and I followed her wishes.
So, no dirt on ma.
(There was actually a funny bit of fallout over this. When I saw my mother's cousin Phyllis, and expressed my gratitude that she was there, she said "Of course I came to help bury your mother." I sighed and said "Well, about that... funny story...").
Instead, we brought two dozen roses, a third of which were pink (a sentimental nod to my mother's having made the word "PINKS" ("you know... reds, blues... pinks") in our final game of Scrabble). Each of us at the gravesite was given a rose, and at the conclusion of the ceremony, we filed past the grave and dropped them in. What none of us expected, however, was that when the first few roses hit the coffin, they made a sound remarkably similar to dirt—that same deep resonant dum. It was solemn, haunting, and oddly beautiful.
The immediate family stayed until the cemetery workers had put all the dirt back in the grave and tamped it down. And with that, I had a surprising reaction: My mother's death and burial were, obviously, excruciatingly sad, but it was unexpectedly comforting to have fulfilled her wishes and see her, finally, at rest, where she wanted to be—next to my father. The fact that I felt no connection to the cemetery was irrelevant. Her 13 short years with my father were the core of who she was, even half a century after his passing. This was where she belonged.
We had one final task. On the way home, we—this time, all of us, including Amy's family—stopped at the house in Old Bethpage. I'd held onto the last two roses from the gravesite so we could place them on the front lawn. While parked across the street from the house in our giant rented Ford Transit van with "Watertown Ford" graphics all over it, Amy and I briefly discussed exactly how to do this. Should we ask first? What happens if they say no? Was there even anybody home? There was a car in the driveway. We decided we'd ring the bell, introduce ourselves as the children of the original owners of the house, and ask if we could lay these two roses in tribute. If no one answered, we'd do it anyway. We didn't really have a plan for what we'd do if we asked and they said "no."
So, still dressed in our formal funeral clothes and holding the vase with the two roses in it, Amy and I held hands and walked up the driveway of the house we'd grown up in and had moved out of 50 years ago. I shall always treasure this mental image. I only realized afterward that we probably looked like cult members.
The doorbell was now one of those modern ones with a camera in it. We rang it, and waited. There was no response. We rang it again. Nothing. A third time for good measure. Crickets.
So, what the hell, right?
We walked back down the driveway and motioned everyone to come join us. The remaining nine well-dressed people spilled out of the van and walked across the street. We all stood on the sidewalk in front of the house.
I, who makes my living these days from words, had none. I'd spent every day of six weeks writing my mother's eulogy, but although I'd planned this moment and was absolutely adamant that it was going to happen, come hell, high water, traffic, or alien invasion, I'd prepared nothing to say. Choking back emotion, I squeezed out something about a moment of silence to honor the twelve years my parents had in this house and the love they shared there, and laid the two roses, crossed, on the front lawn. The eleven of us stood silently. It was perfect.
Then, one of my nephews said "I just saw the curtains move."
"Run!"
Keystone cops-style, the eleven of us cheesed it back to the van, leaving the current owners of the house with a mystery.
I later drafted a letter to the homeowners (after all, I knew the address :^), explaining who we were and why eleven of us got out of a Watertown Ford van and laid roses on their lawn, but when I ran it past Amy, she said "Hey, they could've answered the bell." She is the older sibling. I followed her implied directive, as I nearly always do.
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| If there are other photos of all four of us as a family, I've yet to find them. My father usually took the photos and thus wasn't in them. This was taken in the driveway of 15 Adrienne Drive, probably around 1960. I have no idea who took it. In the visit to the house last July, Amy and I walked up exactly where we're standing. The roses were laid to the left of where my mother is. |
In December, about five months after my mother passed, Bill Magaliff e-mailed me to let me know that his mother, Millie Magaliff, one of my mother's mates in that 14th St apartment and her life-long friend, had died. I went down to New York for the funeral. The temple service was in the Bronx, followed by burial in Wellwood Cemetery on Long Island, just like my mother. I brought my black cashmere dress coat and a black fedora. The hat has the advantages that a) it's warm, b) it stays on fairly well in wind, c) it keeps rain off your face, and d) it is acceptable headwear that can take the place of a traditional Jewish yarmulke both inside a temple and at graveside. The fact that the fedora also resembles the kind of hat many orthodox Jewish men wear, and that, combined with the black dress coat, my 61 years, and my now-gray hair and salt-and-pepper beard, I suddenly looked more like many people's image of a Jew than at any time in my life was not lost on me, but these were largely practicality-driven decisions. It did, though, result in my being treated with a level of deference inside the temple that I definitely did not deserve.
One of the eulogies was from a woman who'd met Millie later in life and spent a lot of time with her when she was in assisted living. This woman talked quite a bit about "the apartment." I chatted with her afterwards. When I introduced myself as the son of the 3rd woman in the apartment, she said "You're Bim's son? Oh my god. I never met her. I'm so sorry about her passing. The way Millie talked about that apartment! Everything was "Me, Bim, and Yochoved." I wonder what actually went on there. She hinted at certain things, but never revealed them. The implication was one of parties, liquor, and powerful well-connected men."
My jaw hung open.
My mother was working at this time for Abba Eban at the Israeli delegation to the the United Nations. What she told Amy and me, though, was couched in language of their "open-door policy" and the diverse cross-section of humanity that came through the place.
Another woman at the temple told me "Millie used to say 'We were like three young witches living in that apartment.' "
The only living eyewitness is the third apartment-mate, Yochoved, who is fading, and was not at the funeral. What actually went on there will probably remain a mystery. But whatever it was, it sent out a blast of energy large enough that people who weren't even there are still talking about it nearly 70 years later.
The fact that Millie's burial was at the same cemetery—Wellwood in Farmingdale—where my parents are was part coincidence, part big historical sweep. That is, since the plots were associated with synagogues, and since hers and my parents' were different, you could say it was coincidence. On the other hand, you can see how the tides of being Jewish on Long Island in the 1950s likely swept them up, and, 70 years later, caused them to be interred in the same cemetery a few hundred yards apart. But, whatever the reason, it was a beautiful thing that Bill and I, who'd only seen each other a handful of times during the past 50 years, attended each other's mother's funeral out of respect for their deep lifelong friendship, and that they were resting so near each other.
When Millie's burial was complete, Bill asked me "So, are you going to stop off and pay your respects to your mother and father while you're here?"
"I hadn't really thought about it," I said, which was, in fact, true. I was there for Millie and Bill. I'd been there for my mother's burial in July. I'd be there next July for the unveiling. I was neither thinking that a visit was something I needed to do, nor avoiding it because it was too raw and too soon.
"Maybe. If I can find it."
"Do you have the block and section numbers?" Bill asked. "If you do, I think you can just find it by reading off the placards."
I accessed my e-mail on my phone, and found that I did indeed have that information in correspondences with the funeral home. I said my goodbyes to Bill and set off to find block 21, section 2, lots 232-253, gravesites #201 through 204, whatever that meant.
I drove to the general area I where I remembered my mother's burial being. At first I thought I could recognize it by sight, but it became apparent that that was ludicrous. The place was far too big to simply stumble about looking for headstones that said "Siegel." I then began looking at the little placards off to the sides of the narrow roads. I found what appeared to be block 18. The next placard I found said 23. I searched thoroughly between them for 21, but could not find it. I repeated this process several times, and each time came up empty.
It was a Sunday in December, so the office was closed; there was no one to ask for help. The time was moving in on 3:30. I had easily five and a half hours of driving ahead of me to get back to Boston. I shrugged to myself, thought "Well, I tried; I'll be back in July for the unveiling anyway," and headed toward the exit.
But as I was leaving, I came upon a cemetery worker, an old gentleman in winter work clothes sitting in a pickup truck. I showed him the documentation on my phone. He shook his head and, in a thick eastern European accent, he said "Those no good. You know worship name?"
"Worship name... you mean the name of the temple?"
"Da."
"Temple Beth Elohim."
He thought for a moment.
I said "She was buried in July."
"Ah," he said. "I know. Is near tree. I take you."
I followed him in my car. He rolled down his window and pointed to the granite Temple Beth Elohim stones on the left. I flashed my headlights in thanks and parked.
This time, I recognized the area immediately. It had weathered in a bit since my mother's burial, though her plot was still dirt, not grass. There was now a temporary marker for her.
It was clear and sunny, but also windy and cold. I was still wearing the black cashmere dress coat and black fedora, looking like the Jew I've spent my life not being. Alone, and with the low sun at my back, my shadow, complete with the fedora and the wind whipping the hem of my long coat around, was projected larger than life onto my family's gravestones. It couldn't have been more cinematic if I'd scripted it.
The times I was there four or five decades ago I barely remember, due apparently to my adolescent desire for self-flagellation. The last time, at my mother's burial, I felt glad that she'd come to rest where she wanted to be, but it wasn't a place I felt any connection with whatsoever. This time was viscerally different.
As I stood there at my mother's and father's graves, I experienced something completely unexpected, bone-level, and singular—the knowledge that there is one and only one place on the planet where both of my parent are buried, and this is it. And I don't mean this in a macabre sense. I'm talking earthly remains + final resting place = hallowed ground. And I'm standing on it. I'm standing directly over them. I felt an intense, organic, root-like binding with what was beneath my feet. Of all the places I've been, I'm not sure I've ever felt so connected to a six-by-six-foot patch of Earth in my entire life. This is where I'm from. And it has nothing to do with Long Island. It was as obvious as the damned sunrise, and just as profound.
Still back-lit by the falling afternoon December sun, I dropped to my knees and cried. For both of them.
I stayed until the operatic shadows lengthened to infinity, then flickered out. I said things to them. I sang them "Try to remember (the kind of September)," the song I wanted to sing at my mother's burial but knew I'd never get through it. I didn't get through it this time either, but I did my best. The "Deep in December" verse was tough.
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As Carl Jung said, most problems aren't solved; they're outgrown. I'd like to think that, at this point in my life, I no longer need to outgrow much, if anything. My mother used to say that, when things were difficult, she took solace in the passage of time. Perhaps this is part of what she meant, even without realizing it.
I don't know that I'll ever go back to 15 Adrienne Drive. And that makes me sad. But I can't imagine a better goodbye. And my sister was, of course, correct—I love the idea that, maybe, the current owners occasionally turn to each other and say "Remember when that crazy van pulled up, those two Jehovah's Witnesses walked up the driveway with roses, then like 20 people got out?" "Yeah. I wonder what was up with that?"
I know that I will go back to the cemetery, and not out of guilt or obligation or custom or some attempt to solve something. Epiphanies and transcendent moments are exceedingly rare. I don't expect to feel the universe flow into my head, out my feet, and into hallowed ground the same way I did in December. But what's there is unique, precious, and irreplaceable, and I look forward to going back with all the love in my heart.
But more than anything, I want to know whether, on a still night at Wellwood Cemetery in Farmingdale, if you tune your mind to the right emotional frequency and listen carefully, you can hear the psychic projections of my mother and Millie swapping stories about what went on in that apartment.
(© 2020 by Rob Siegel. All rights reserved.)
