Sh'ma Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ehad (Two Doors and a Window Part 3)

“Two Doors and a Window” is a series of essays that I wrote in 2020.

When my mother died, I had a music column and a personal blog. I was as much of a Capital-W-Writer as perhaps I have ever been. But writing about what happened in that room, what happened before it, and how everything felt afterward was too much. Processing it through my personal writing felt cheap and selfish. Why would I write this down? For eventual publication? This was before I understood the value of processing for the sake of my own sanity, and how writing was my way of doing that, different from how other people did it — talking to their friends, working up a sweat, drinking it away. I was 29. It would be at least another decade before I truly understood that I had to do things my own way for my own sake and even today, at 48, I sometimes stray from the comfort that knowledge provides. Meryl’s death may have been the beginning of that understanding, but at the time she died I still felt far apart from and unaccepted and confounded by the world.

When my father died, Trump was more than a year from becoming president. In 2016 I often joked that the presidential race would have killed Harv anyway. My stepfather, Sid, liked to gamble at Trump Casino in Atlantic City — he was a gambling addict and they would comp him rooms. I think he lost a lot. Trump reminds me of my stepfather, Sid. My dad hated them both.

When my mother died, the Twin Towers were still five months from coming down. When 9/11 happened, I was glad my mother wasn’t alive to see it.

I had gone down to South Florida from Tampa for a Passover seder just a week or two before she passed. She was supposed to be there, at home, but was in the hospital instead. Meryl had been sick with cancer on and off for many years at that point. When the call came to come back down, I got right on a plane from Tampa to Fort Lauderdale. My big sister picked me up at the airport and, though neither one of us was a fan of weed at that time in our lives — me in my late 20s and my sister in her late 30s — we got stoned. I don’t know why. She had weed and we were scared. So we got high and then we got lost in a shopping center parking lot, driving around trying to figure out how to get to a Circle K to buy water. When at last we got to the hospital, my mother’s caregiver — a German woman similar to her in age named Helga — came catapulting at us in the hall. “You girls are selfish,” she spat. My sister huffed. I was embarrassed.

(Witch Going to the Sabbath [1957] by Remedios Varo : I love this painting, which was the first Varo that I encountered, and which fit my headspace in 2020 when I was writing these essays.)

We got to the room and it was clear that my sister was not prepared for what was about to happen. It must have been my brother who called me: the middle child, the only boy, the family man by nature. Because I knew we were there to take Meryl off life support. I knew because he had told me. My sister did not know somehow, maybe because she didn’t want to.

My mother’s eyes were open but she couldn’t speak. She looked scared. My brother sung the Sh’ma — the most common prayer in Judaism, traditional for Jews to say as their last words. The Talmud says that the great Rabbi Akiva, after having his skin torn off by Romans with iron combs, died reciting it, pronouncing the last word of the first sentence with his final breath. My brother sang it for Meryl, those key first lines in a thick, lovely voice. Then, as is tradition, he chanted the rest of it quickly, more quietly. And then she was gone.

I put a version of this scene in a short story once, a story that was published in a magazine. In that version, the protagonist — me — is screwing a medical professional in a utility closet shortly before the moment of death. At the time, I was writing personal essays regularly, being very frank about my sex life. But I wasn’t ready to write about my family in any real way. I still needed that distance. And other than that iteration, I haven’t written this story down since. Because that scared look in my mother’s eyes is the thing I see when I go to my darkest place, when I can’t sleep and every decision I’ve ever made seems wrong, everything I’ve ever said seems dumb and obnoxious. It’s the boogeyman in my dark, the fearsome reason at the bottom of the bottomless well of my own thoughts — this look in my mother’s eyes, her inability to talk as my brother sings — it’s waiting for me.

So now that I’ve written it, what happens? Does the sadness stop? I don’t think so. Because the more I dig, the more debris flies loose. When I first moved to Oakland, people would ask what brought me here. I would laugh and say “I heard there was gold in these here hills.” But the truth is that, when we sat shiva for Meryl, someone said to me: “Your mother told me you were moving to California.” I have decided over the years that it was the woman who did my mother’s nails. I honestly don’t know if that’s true, though that person did come to pay her respects. But what was definitely not true at that moment was that I was moving to California. My first move to California — to San Diego after college — was a failed, 11-month-long experiment, and I had returned to Tampa and done all right since, starting a writing career and sowing my twentysomething oats as a big fish in a small pond (or a big farm girl in a small field, perhaps). I had told my mother earlier that year, however, that I was itching to leave again, with lots of places under consideration: Brooklyn, Chapel Hill, Austin, San Francisco, others. I do recall at one point telling Meryl that California was high on my list, but I didn’t want to be so far from her when she was sick.

“We can fly you home from San Francisco just as easily as we can from North Carolina,” she’d said.

When my mother died, she thought I was moving to California. So I spent the money she left me on a U-Haul truck rental and another drive cross-country, and the rest of it on six months’ rent in advance on a shitty apartment because I wasn’t working yet and, in 2001, Oakland was a landlords’ market. She died and I moved here because she thought I was, and I spent her money to get started, and now I’m still here, through recessions and gentrification and wild rental markets and a pandemic that still rages on. I arrived here at age 29 and built my world back from the ground up: I stepped off the sidelines of the music scene and played in bands. I found a writing community. I found a romantic partner. I adjusted my day-job expectations and therefore managed to move through a few career iterations before finding one where I could excel and affect change. In short, I created, at last, a stable foundation in a town known for revolutionary movements, in a state whose tectonic plates have hundreds of active, dangerous faults.

I am thankful for Meryl. That is the thing that has made me sad for years, long before I found myself mourning any loss of an adult relationship with her: That I am thankful for that kick in the ass westward, for the opportunity and inspiration her death provided.

Then why am I still so goddamn angry?