In Memoriam
by Chloe Bollentin
You grab an empty three-seater and slide all the way to the window. The benefits of train travel in the off-hours: every car is the quiet car. If you encounter a rare disturbance, you won’t have to move far to escape it.
Inside your purse, a small, black leather-bound journal, appropriately somber. You flip it open to the most recent page. Your notes are a mess, but at least your handwriting is legible. Of course, your handwriting is only legible because there was so little worth writing down.
You like to get it down word for word as much as possible and smooth it out later. It’s usually not too hard. Usually, they’re slow to start because they’re still in shock, and the shock clogs them up. But if you nudge around enough, eventually you’ll dislodge something critical to the structural integrity of their bottled-up feelings and everything else will come tumbling out. That’s the key. Once you hit on that catalyst, the resulting avalanche of memories and anecdotes and beautiful mundane details supplies the raw material from which you shape the narrative.
There was no catalyst today. It was easy to get Miri talking, but most of what she said is unusable. That story about the ex-boyfriend and the deli, that could work, if you frame it right, but it risks making Deborah sound a bit unhinged. And maybe Deborah was a bit unhinged, but this is her eulogy, and there’s no place for that here: no place for bitterness, certainly, and rarely any place for nuance. Nuance has to be tiptoed around, executed just right. It takes so little to push the scales in the wrong direction. You’ve seen it before, many times: the sister who thinks she can disguise her jealousy with humor; the son who doesn’t realize how clearly his anger at his father’s emotional distance seeps into his every word. It would be like that if Miri were to speak at her mother’s funeral. You’re grateful, at least, that she has declined the opportunity to do so.
What stage of grief is this, you wonder. Not any you’re familiar with. If it’s denial, it’s well-disguised; Miri seems reasonably accustomed to the fact of her mother’s death. There’s certainly anger, but not for any of the right reasons. Bargaining? No. Depression? Maybe, but again, unrelated. Acceptance is barely a spot on the horizon.
You flip the journal closed, conceding temporary defeat. Already, the view outside the window is rolling to a stop at the penultimate station on your journey. The distance between the Weissmans and the synagogue is not long, but it feels even shorter than you expected, and infinitely less productive than you were hoping.
The funeral is tomorrow. You’ve always appreciated this facet of Jewish tradition—the quick burial, just one stage of many in the carefully mapped-out grieving process—but in this case it feels oppressive, this grim deadline boring down on you.
The task ahead of you feels insurmountable, disproportionately so. You wonder if you are still in denial.
Back in your office later that afternoon, you sit with the journal open in front of you, a yellow legal pad beside it. You prefer longhand for this task, the way it encourages you to take your time, to linger over every word, ensuring that each one is just right.
You have been sitting this way for approximately twenty-five minutes, the journal and the blank legal pad side by side on your desk, when the phone rings.
“Rabbi Sarah? It’s Miri.”
“Miri.” You frown down at your desk, at Miri’s whirlwind of unhelpful memories copied down in your journal. “Hi. Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine. I, uh . . . I just wanted to . . .” She pauses for long enough that you begin to wonder if she isn’t going to finish her sentence at all. But before you can decide whether it’s appropriate to jump in, she continues. “I wanted to apologize. For today. I, uh . . . I feel like I wasn’t very helpful.”
You hesitate, unsure how to respond. “You don’t have to apologize, Miri. I know this is a difficult time.”
“Right. Yeah. I know. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I feel like you were looking for something and I didn’t give it to you. I mean, I know you didn’t know her that well, and I feel bad that I didn’t . . . that I couldn’t be more helpful. You know?”
You know. You want to cry, to scream. You want to say, how dare you. You want to say, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Instead, you take a deep breath, inhale the unspoken words into your lungs. You’re moving from denial to anger: misplaced anger, albeit, but anger, nonetheless. It’s progress, you tell yourself. But this is not the time or the place.
“You don’t have to worry, Miri.” You speak slowly, laboring over your words. “You’re right, I didn’t know her well. But I know enough.”
And in Miri’s reality, this is true. In Miri’s reality, your brief, limited acquaintanceship with Deborah began the day she first stepped into this office, six-year-old Miri hugging her hip. You looked up from your desk, and for a moment, your face went pale and slack. For a moment, hers did too.
It was the last time she ever looked you directly in the eye. In an instant, she’d regained her composure, and her gaze settled somewhere by your right ear as she introduced herself and her daughter and asked about Hebrew school registration.
“Try to get some rest,” you tell Miri. “And don’t worry. I know exactly what I’m going to say.”
Under the circumstances, you can forgive yourself the lie. You set the phone down next to the legal pad and pick up your pen.
At home that evening, the legal pad rests on your kitchen table, filled with a series of false starts, half-finished and crossed out. Next to it sits a battered shoebox unearthed from the back of your closet, the one you promised yourself you weren’t going to touch tonight. Its contents won’t help your progress—if anything, they’ll hinder it—but you take them out anyway, one by one, lingering over each sepia-toned photograph, each curled-edged piece of letter paper with her handwriting scrawled all over it.
One picture, from the summer you first met: both of you looking not at the camera but at each other, mid-laugh, her tanned-golden arm slung over your shoulders. Looking at it, you can still smell her skin, sweat and sunscreen, her hair, Farrah Fawcett shampoo and lake water. Behind the boat shed at the edge of the lake, her lips tasted like the coconut lip balm she kept with her at all times like a talisman, warding off chapped skin.
You were both eighteen, but she was a worldly eighteen, confident and mature, experienced in spending her summers away from home. Unlike her parents, yours couldn’t afford to send you to summer camp, and so you’d spent all your summers babysitting until you were old enough that the camp would pay you to come. One of the few counselors who hadn’t grown up as a camper, you were an outsider until she claimed you. She’d spent every summer there since she was ten; she knew all the lingo, all the secrets, all the hiding spots.
It lasted for three summers. The disparate chunks of time blended together into one long event, like a videotape paused for ten months out of the year. The letters that filled the void between, scribbled under bedsheets late at night, stoked the embers just enough to keep the fire burning.
By the fourth summer she had found a real job, and you went back to camp without her. It was the beginning of the end. Her letters arrived less frequently. When an invitation to her wedding came in the mail, you threw it away unopened. She stopped writing, and you did too.
You place the photograph down on the table, next to the legal pad filled with all the words that didn’t feel right. You suspect that most people, if asked, would insist that an honest eulogy is best: that the deliverer should speak from the heart. But you know, from a great deal of experience, that sometimes honesty is best only in the abstract.
Carefully, one by one, you place each item back in the shoebox in the same order that you removed them. Then you tear off the top sheet from the legal pad and pick up your pen.
Standing at the bimah the next morning, you offer a silent prayer and a silent apology: to Deborah, to Miri, to God, and to
yourself. You spread out the sheets of legal paper in front of you, smoothing the edges with your fingers.
“Today, we gather together to celebrate the life and mourn the death of Deborah Ruth Weissman.”
Inside your purse, a small, black leather-bound journal, appropriately somber. You flip it open to the most recent page. Your notes are a mess, but at least your handwriting is legible. Of course, your handwriting is only legible because there was so little worth writing down.
- I mean, she was a successful career woman, I guess. A good role model, you might say. Not that it got me anywhere, I mean look at me. At my age she was married with a kid and a great job and I’m single and unemployed and living in my dead mom’s house.
- She was like . . . I don’t know, she was like funny but not funny on purpose. She would say something ridiculous, and you’d laugh at it and then she’d get mad. She was that kind of funny. You know?
- Like one time I was eating a bagel with cream cheese and lox, and she was like, that doesn’t have any nutritional value. And I laughed and was like yeah ok. And then she yelled at me for laughing. So.
- Ok, ok, but I will say this. You didn’t want to be on her bad side, but if you were on her good side, she would do literally anything. And I know, because I was on her good side and her bad side like all the time. So, like, if she was pissed at me, it was like, watch out. But at the same time, like . . . like one time she ran into my ex-boyfriend at the deli down the street right after he dumped me and she cornered him outside and was like, I better not see you here again. This is our deli. And I’m pretty sure he never went back there, even though they have the best bagels, like objectively.
You like to get it down word for word as much as possible and smooth it out later. It’s usually not too hard. Usually, they’re slow to start because they’re still in shock, and the shock clogs them up. But if you nudge around enough, eventually you’ll dislodge something critical to the structural integrity of their bottled-up feelings and everything else will come tumbling out. That’s the key. Once you hit on that catalyst, the resulting avalanche of memories and anecdotes and beautiful mundane details supplies the raw material from which you shape the narrative.
There was no catalyst today. It was easy to get Miri talking, but most of what she said is unusable. That story about the ex-boyfriend and the deli, that could work, if you frame it right, but it risks making Deborah sound a bit unhinged. And maybe Deborah was a bit unhinged, but this is her eulogy, and there’s no place for that here: no place for bitterness, certainly, and rarely any place for nuance. Nuance has to be tiptoed around, executed just right. It takes so little to push the scales in the wrong direction. You’ve seen it before, many times: the sister who thinks she can disguise her jealousy with humor; the son who doesn’t realize how clearly his anger at his father’s emotional distance seeps into his every word. It would be like that if Miri were to speak at her mother’s funeral. You’re grateful, at least, that she has declined the opportunity to do so.
What stage of grief is this, you wonder. Not any you’re familiar with. If it’s denial, it’s well-disguised; Miri seems reasonably accustomed to the fact of her mother’s death. There’s certainly anger, but not for any of the right reasons. Bargaining? No. Depression? Maybe, but again, unrelated. Acceptance is barely a spot on the horizon.
You flip the journal closed, conceding temporary defeat. Already, the view outside the window is rolling to a stop at the penultimate station on your journey. The distance between the Weissmans and the synagogue is not long, but it feels even shorter than you expected, and infinitely less productive than you were hoping.
The funeral is tomorrow. You’ve always appreciated this facet of Jewish tradition—the quick burial, just one stage of many in the carefully mapped-out grieving process—but in this case it feels oppressive, this grim deadline boring down on you.
The task ahead of you feels insurmountable, disproportionately so. You wonder if you are still in denial.
Back in your office later that afternoon, you sit with the journal open in front of you, a yellow legal pad beside it. You prefer longhand for this task, the way it encourages you to take your time, to linger over every word, ensuring that each one is just right.
You have been sitting this way for approximately twenty-five minutes, the journal and the blank legal pad side by side on your desk, when the phone rings.
“Rabbi Sarah? It’s Miri.”
“Miri.” You frown down at your desk, at Miri’s whirlwind of unhelpful memories copied down in your journal. “Hi. Is everything all right?”
“Yeah, everything’s fine. I, uh . . . I just wanted to . . .” She pauses for long enough that you begin to wonder if she isn’t going to finish her sentence at all. But before you can decide whether it’s appropriate to jump in, she continues. “I wanted to apologize. For today. I, uh . . . I feel like I wasn’t very helpful.”
You hesitate, unsure how to respond. “You don’t have to apologize, Miri. I know this is a difficult time.”
“Right. Yeah. I know. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I feel like you were looking for something and I didn’t give it to you. I mean, I know you didn’t know her that well, and I feel bad that I didn’t . . . that I couldn’t be more helpful. You know?”
You know. You want to cry, to scream. You want to say, how dare you. You want to say, you have no idea what you’re talking about.
Instead, you take a deep breath, inhale the unspoken words into your lungs. You’re moving from denial to anger: misplaced anger, albeit, but anger, nonetheless. It’s progress, you tell yourself. But this is not the time or the place.
“You don’t have to worry, Miri.” You speak slowly, laboring over your words. “You’re right, I didn’t know her well. But I know enough.”
And in Miri’s reality, this is true. In Miri’s reality, your brief, limited acquaintanceship with Deborah began the day she first stepped into this office, six-year-old Miri hugging her hip. You looked up from your desk, and for a moment, your face went pale and slack. For a moment, hers did too.
It was the last time she ever looked you directly in the eye. In an instant, she’d regained her composure, and her gaze settled somewhere by your right ear as she introduced herself and her daughter and asked about Hebrew school registration.
“Try to get some rest,” you tell Miri. “And don’t worry. I know exactly what I’m going to say.”
Under the circumstances, you can forgive yourself the lie. You set the phone down next to the legal pad and pick up your pen.
At home that evening, the legal pad rests on your kitchen table, filled with a series of false starts, half-finished and crossed out. Next to it sits a battered shoebox unearthed from the back of your closet, the one you promised yourself you weren’t going to touch tonight. Its contents won’t help your progress—if anything, they’ll hinder it—but you take them out anyway, one by one, lingering over each sepia-toned photograph, each curled-edged piece of letter paper with her handwriting scrawled all over it.
One picture, from the summer you first met: both of you looking not at the camera but at each other, mid-laugh, her tanned-golden arm slung over your shoulders. Looking at it, you can still smell her skin, sweat and sunscreen, her hair, Farrah Fawcett shampoo and lake water. Behind the boat shed at the edge of the lake, her lips tasted like the coconut lip balm she kept with her at all times like a talisman, warding off chapped skin.
You were both eighteen, but she was a worldly eighteen, confident and mature, experienced in spending her summers away from home. Unlike her parents, yours couldn’t afford to send you to summer camp, and so you’d spent all your summers babysitting until you were old enough that the camp would pay you to come. One of the few counselors who hadn’t grown up as a camper, you were an outsider until she claimed you. She’d spent every summer there since she was ten; she knew all the lingo, all the secrets, all the hiding spots.
It lasted for three summers. The disparate chunks of time blended together into one long event, like a videotape paused for ten months out of the year. The letters that filled the void between, scribbled under bedsheets late at night, stoked the embers just enough to keep the fire burning.
By the fourth summer she had found a real job, and you went back to camp without her. It was the beginning of the end. Her letters arrived less frequently. When an invitation to her wedding came in the mail, you threw it away unopened. She stopped writing, and you did too.
You place the photograph down on the table, next to the legal pad filled with all the words that didn’t feel right. You suspect that most people, if asked, would insist that an honest eulogy is best: that the deliverer should speak from the heart. But you know, from a great deal of experience, that sometimes honesty is best only in the abstract.
Carefully, one by one, you place each item back in the shoebox in the same order that you removed them. Then you tear off the top sheet from the legal pad and pick up your pen.
Standing at the bimah the next morning, you offer a silent prayer and a silent apology: to Deborah, to Miri, to God, and to
yourself. You spread out the sheets of legal paper in front of you, smoothing the edges with your fingers.
“Today, we gather together to celebrate the life and mourn the death of Deborah Ruth Weissman.”
Chloe Bollentin is a writer and proofreader based in New Jersey. Her poetry has appeared in Ghost City Review and Blue Moon Literary & Art Review, and she is currently revising her first novel.