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Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother
Take the shovel, the minister said. He said it with his eyes. I was to toss dirt onto my mother's coffin, which was half-lowered into the grave. My mother, the minister explained, had witnessed this custom at Jewish funerals and had requested it for her own. She felt it helped mourners accept that the body was gone and they should remember the spirit. I could hear my father chiding her, saying, "Posey, I swear, you make it up as you go along."
I took the shovel like a child being handed a rifle. I looked to my sister, Roberta, who wore a black veil over her face and was visibly trembling. I looked to my wife, who was staring at her feet, tears streaming down her cheeks, her right hand rhythmically smoothing our daughter's hair. Only Maria looked at me. And her eyes seemed to say, "Don't do it, Dad. Give it back."
In baseball, a player can tell when he's holding his own bat and when he's holding someone else's. Which is how I felt with that shovel in my hands. It was someone else's. It did not belong to me. It belonged to a son who didn't lie to his mother. It belong to a son whose last words to her were not in anger. It belonged to a son who hadn't raced off to satisfy the latest whim of his distant old man, who, in keeping record intact, was absent from this family gathering, having decided, "It's better if I'm not there, I don't want to upset anybody."
That son would have stayed that weekend, sleeping with his wife in
 Orcbride · Sat Nov 18, 2006 @ 10:03pm · 0 Comments |
