Undelivered Eulogy

Hearken a Beloved Tree, felled in the Pandemic Forest.

Eight white knuckles. Two thumbs curled tightly around the wheel at 10 and 2 o’clock, like my father taught me so many years ago. Rivulets of water assaulted the windshield, two wipers on their highest setting like metronomes, beating desperately to clear the glass. I followed two dim red lights, snaking along a rush hour Long Island Expressway eerily devoid of vehicles in a mini monsoon, praying for safety.

I’d tried two hours earlier to postpone this treacherous folly, driving from our home in New Jersey out to eastern Long Island in a torrential downpour, but was told no. The grave was already dug. The hearse was already on its way. The burial was scheduled for 12:30, and if we lost our spot in the queue, it could be weeks before we got another opportunity. I called the rabbi at 9:30.

“Are you OK to drive in this weather?” I asked. I’d known this gentle soul for 25 years. I ruminated if it was irresponsible to ask him to drive over two hours on such a day.

“I’m OK,” he answered.

Technically, she was my husband’s aunt, but after 32 years of marriage, she was also mine. But even more, she was my sons’ beloved Aunt Jackie, their love affair having been established at birth. Childless, Jackie became their “Auntie Mame,” filling the role of grandmother in countless ways, my mother-in-law having moved to Florida years ago and eventually becoming gravely ill and passing away. Jackie went to high school in Brooklyn with my own mother, graduating from Lafayette High School the same year and eventually finding common cause in their shared adoration of my three children. An Anglophile, Jackie and my mother took my oldest son, Alex, to London when he was in second grade, keeping a whirlwind pace, sharing Jackie’s favorite city with a 7-year-old Harry Potter fan. Together, two 60-ish women matched Alex’s youthful energy. All three delighted in London’s charms, and in each other.

Sixty-mile-an-hour winds buffeted my car. Terrified, I blinked my eyes open. Twinkling traffic lights swayed and bobbed in the distance like those in Gatsby’s lighthouse. My husband drove the first leg of the trip to the city, as I slouched in the passenger seat. After driving through the Lincoln Tunnel to drop off food for Alex, we changed places so my husband could take a work call. Heavy wind gusts rocked the car. Sheets of rain struck the windshield.

Breathe, Susan. Despite a 20-year yoga practice, I failed to tune out the Masters of the Universe bellowing from my husband’s phone. I sat up straighter, as if improving my posture would enable me to see better. The pouring rain blurred an empty West Side Highway. “Non-essential” cars made their way amid all the “essential” trucks on the Cross Bronx Expressway.

But this trip was essential. We needed to bury Jackie.

A week earlier, we’d sent Alex on a horrible errand.

“Aunt Jackie has pneumonia,” my husband said. “The hospital sent her home. You need to go to her.”

Jackie lived alone on the Upper East Side, a fiercely independent woman of 81. She lived on the first floor of a high-rise building on 93rd and Third for 30 years, the proud owner of a large studio our children visited countless times.

I grabbed my husband’s phone. “Alex. Please, wear a bandana. Be careful.”

Alex took the crosstown bus and did a CVS run, depositing his haul in Aunt Jackie’s doorway. I’d given him strict instructions not to cross the threshold.

We spoke to her that night.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I’m one-hundred percent better, she said. “I saw Alex today.”

Before Alex had left Jackie’s apartment that afternoon, he said, “Aunt Jackie, you sleep late and I sleep late. I’ll see you tomorrow around 11.”

I lay awake that night and cried. Cried because Aunt Jackie was alone. Cried because I felt so helpless. Cried because we had to send our 27-year-old son to do something we should have been able to do. Cried because neither we, nor Alex, could know what tomorrow might bring.

The next morning, Alex was alone with the driver on the crosstown bus. He got a key from Jackie’s doorman and raced up the flight of stairs to her apartment. Alex knocked. And knocked again. And again.

The summoned super let himself in. From his restricted view in the doorway, Alex could see her, lying on the floor next to the couch. I got the call around noon. “Mom,” his familiar voice quivered, “she’s unresponsive.” What a horrible word. A word that would never have described her, a woman who always had a response to everything.

When we lost Aunt Jackie, we lost a vast trove of familial knowledge. She was a deep repository of memory who gave us her time, her energy and her love, with unselfish abandon over many years. To be known is a gift, and Jackie gave it wholeheartedly. She knew things, personal things, private things, things about all of us that we’d each chosen to share, things which she patiently and eagerly listened to, a world-class listener who was sparing with her words of advice, but shared them when asked.

Jackie delighted in our sons when they were small, but was remarkably successful in transitioning to being what they needed and wanted in her when they became young adults. Alex’s friends from Yale all knew Jackie. She loved taking them out for dinner at Fiorello’s, Alex’s favorite restaurant, or holding court at high tea, opportunities for Aunt Jackie to marinate in their creative energy, their youthful exuberance. She was more than just a fly on the wall, though. They sought her company. They enjoyed her enthusiasm, her delight in their twenty-something exploits.

Alex stood sentry for seven hours that day, hovering in the hallway outside Jackie’s apartment and standing in the lobby, awaiting the parade of EMTs, detectives and medical examiners to proclaim what was already known, but needed to be made official. We waited in our house for information, steeped in silence, punctuated by angry, desperate tears. My husband paced the kitchen like a caged animal, frustrated by our circumstances, his natural impulse to go, to fix, to help, all stymied. The sweet, pungent smell of the holiday brisket my sister and I had made hours earlier filled the house, a reminder that Passover loomed two days away. Time would go on, but Aunt Jackie would not.

A vision of Jackie’s 5-foot self, the Betty Boop bangs she trimmed herself, her all-black no-nonsense wardrobe, bouncing into our kitchen on a holiday, appeared before me.

“What smells so good?” she’d always ask, before giggling and peeking under the aluminum foil, tasting the brisket. “Delicious!” Her green eyes twinkled, her voice sometimes squealing with delight. She would settle herself at the kitchen table, her tiny feet not even touching the floor, before asking, “So, what’s new?”

Ordinarily, Judaism commands that we bury the dead as soon as possible, but nothing is ordinary in a pandemic. During a time of overwhelming death, we got a coveted slot at the cemetery a week later. My husband went into his efficient, executive function mode, making arrangements. The cemetery allowed no more than five people at graveside, including the rabbi. Choosing two of our three sons was unthinkable. My husband and I would go alone.

My breath came more easily when we finally arrived at our destination, the winds having reached 60 miles an hour but the rain having suddenly abated. A line of hearses waited patiently, outnumbering the cars in their wake. An assembly line of death.

The rabbi had already arrived. He stood in his trench coat and mask, waiting for the funeral director. I parked the car and stepped out into the wind, shouting, “Bathroom?” He pointed to the Port-a-Potties. The funeral home was locked. I went, grateful for the toilet paper inside.

We waited.

My husband consulted his phone. “Looks like we have about 90 minutes before the rain begins again.”

Finally, an hour later, our turn came. The rain mercilessly held off. We followed the hearse and the rabbi’s car, a pitiful procession of what would normally have been a long, snaking line of vehicles, reduced to a pathetic three. When we reached our destination, I glimpsed a freshly dug hole next to a mound of sandy earth. The rabbi beckoned. We slipped on our masks and emerged into the wind. Only three souls to officially mark Jackie’s passing. We climbed to the site in between two headstones and gazed down at the pine box with a small Star of David. I shivered.

A few words. A few prayers. More than a few sobs. A Mourner’s Kaddish. Three masked mourners standing in the wind.

“Do you have hand sanitizer?” the rabbi asked. We nodded. He gestured at the shovel next to the mound of dirt. He and my husband took turns. I plunged my fingers into the mound, clutched a handful and let it fall through my fingers. The wind whistled.

“Rest in peace, Aunt Jackie,” I muttered into my mask.

“This is not the way it’s supposed to be,” the rabbi said.

I shook my head.

“You can go,” the rabbi said. “I’ll wait while they finish.”

We thanked him again for doing this, but he shrugged off our thanks.

“Drive safe,” he said.

“You, too.”

I slid into the passenger seat, flipped my husband the key and glanced at the dashboard clock, taking off my mask while pumping hand sanitizer. We’d been there eight minutes. Only eight minutes to say goodbye.

She deserved more than this. We deserved more than this. Our sons deserved more than this. In the car, we called them to say the deed was done. Matt, our middle son, our wild child, was angry. Along with my mother and our babysitter, Aunt Jackie stayed with him when he was 12, while the rest of us went away. Three babysitters for one pre-teen All-Star baseball player. Matt basked in their attention. Aunt Jackie playfully teased him, and he loved it.

Aunt Jackie was the only one who called Daniel, the baby of our family, “Danny.” He could do no wrong in her eyes, and he knew it. They all knew it. Each of them would sprawl on the couch, underneath an afghan, and prop their bare feet up on Aunt Jackie’s lap for her to tickle, which she invariably did. My sons range from 6’2” to 6’4”, with long arms and legs, and huge feet. Unlike Aunt Jackie, they take up lots of space. She took up just enough.

The rain returned. We made our way westward toward my parents’ house near Exit 50 off the LIE. After depositing another load of food on the floor of my parents’ garage, my husband and I retreated to sit on two chaise lounges near the open garage door, a safe distance away. My father, who is fighting cancer, sat in the doorway to the house, while my mother retrieved our shopping bags.

“I’ll miss her,” my mother said. She and Jackie both loved to travel. Mom and Jackie traveled several times to Europe together, and sometimes, they would bicker. Mom preferred to shop, and Jackie preferred to go to museums. Somehow, they managed to find a compromise.

“We’ll all miss her,” I said.

The ride home was uneventful. Two tunnels. Two windshield wipers. Two mourners, silent. I clutched the Shiva candle the hearse driver had dropped into my back seat. Not only no funeral, but no Shiva. No stories told. No comfort given. No one would hear how Jackie was an excellent ice-skater, a passionate photographer, a lover of Tic Tacs and my banana bread. I watched all the “essential” vehicles on the highway flash their sirens. Who and what are considered “essential” in a pandemic? To our family, Aunt Jackie was most certainly, essential.

We arrived at home around 4:30 that afternoon. I stepped weakly into my kitchen and inhaled the familiar aroma of chocolate chip cookies.

“Sit,” my sister commanded.

I collapsed at the kitchen table. She set down a steaming mug of ginger tea and a warm cookie before plopping down beside me. I dunked the cookie and luxuriated in the comforting taste of chocolate, of sweetness, of love. Tears filled my eyes.

“No one ever makes chocolate chip cookies for me. I’m the one who makes them for everyone else.”

My sister smiled. She knows that I live in a sea of testosterone. She also knows who takes care of whom in my family. I’m grateful to be spending the pandemic with her, as she is living apart from her doctor husband to avoid catching the virus.

Aunt Jackie provided another burst of feminine energy in my life. We, too, would sit at the kitchen table, talking about my husband, about his mother (her sister), about the boys. About anything and everything. She enjoyed chatting, and I was always a willing partner. I’ll miss the way she actively listened, paid attention to the little things. I’ll miss her twinkling green eyes, her giggle, the way her tiny feet would never quite reach the floor.