“Everything you love will be taken from you.  Piece by piece, and finally all of it.  The passive voice will be used, it will be nothing personal.  They will do it inexorably, the worst, most innocuous, seemingly normal  people you can imagine,” cooed the skeleton of Irv from his snow covered grave.

“The more trivial the kick to the balls, the more it will hurt, sometimes” the dead man said, nodding with great understanding.   “There is the kick itself and what it represents, the larger insult and injury of it.  Each kick is a stand in for the final one– we are taking the breath from your body and you are now dead, bitch.”

“You wrote a beautiful piece about your mother recently, she would have laughed and cried to read it.  Her ashes are sitting in that cardboard box still smiling now, they really are, she’s qvelling.  You sent it to a few people and they all loved it.  It was soulful, honest, heartfelt and funny, I can put it that way.  A hack editor slash mediocre writer slash publisher bought it for $250 but never published it — or paid you for it.  You followed up.”  

“He wrote back that it was indeed beautiful, but, perhaps, I know it sounds funny to say it, the witless fellow said,  too personal.  He wrote that he thought he’d told you it was too deep for him to publish on his superficial site.  So you did good work, work you should have been proud of, had printed on-line with a link to send happily to your friends as you try to move forward through life and– a pile of shit animates itself like a golem and takes a greasy shit on it instead.  You want a few endorphins and a token cash payment, pussy?  Here, take this heaping token of my fucking esteem, I don’t need it in my colon anymore.”

My father always had a way with words.  

“You remember those bitches at Haddassah?  When I was National Director of Young Judaea, and director of Tel Yehudah, they showed how much they valued my work, these upper middle class and wealthy volunteer executives, by countering my request for a raise with an offer that was less than I was making.  You remember that, don’t you?”

I did remember it, well.

“And you recall my impotent rage, and how my psoriasis flared up, and how I told those fucking Haddassah ladies to take their abusive counter-offer and shove the job up their collective asses.   Benjy, who ran all the business operations for the camp and had saved the organization tens of thousands of dollars, had a similar experience and he quit around the same time.  Then we opened Tain Lee Chow and the rest is history.  But the point is, people who by rights should have no right to even have an opinion often become the Deciders, like that insane dry-drunk imbecile Dubya.  You know I’m right,  I know, and I know I’m pouring salt, along with sympathy.”

He didn’t have to say it, because the conversation was already taking place in my head, but those same Haddassah bitches, or their daughters (it was twenty years later), somehow learned that my father was dead and were soliciting donations for the camp in a fund named for him as soon as his body was in the ground.  I got one of their solicitation emails immediately after the funeral, cc’d to me and hundreds or thousands others.  

During a time when mourning Jewish families are supposed to sit for seven days, unmolested and waited on, while the community visits, brings food and company, distraction and love.   Instead of empathy and nourishment (or even a personal note saying ‘sorry for your loss’) these creatures were doing what their type does: sucking blood, marketing, taking the dead body of a well-respected man they’d treated very badly, and putting it on a poster to solicit funds for the camp he directed for many years.

“I admire your restraint there,” said the skeleton who was once holding up my father’s body, helping him move through life.  “I know how you struggled not to be hateful, not to refer to them as ‘cunts’ and you didn’t do it.  There’s no word to describe these ‘creatures’, they… ah, you know what I’m saying.  Nice bit of restraint, though, and I also dig the sly reference to Voltaire’s footnote asking readers to note his discretion in not suggesting that the person in question was in fact the actual bastard son of the sitting Pope.”

Yes, there’s that, old man, our one defense, being wittier than the many syphlitic fondlers out there.

“A lot of good it did them on the edge of that ravine in Vishnivetz,” he said, shaking his skull.  

Well, moral superiority is not a boat you want to try to cross the ocean in.  I remember my old friend’s response when I cc’d her the email I sent to those bitches at Haddassah a couple of days after I buried my father.   She told me I was over-reacting, that they were showing their respect for him by using his name to solicit money, that the woman who’d signed the email was a friend of hers, and a very decent woman.  I once again had to exercise restraint.

“You always have to exercise restraint,” said the skeleton, “and it will cost you years of your life.  You remember I was sometimes hospitalized with psoraisis, my skin would literally burst open from the constant exercise of restraint.”

Your long battle with psoraisis I will recall in detail.  I just note here that you suffered from a very extreme case of it for decades, from the age of 32 into your seventies.  Then I remember in Florida, a few years before you died, mom was scratching your back, you were both lying on the bed, and she pulled up your t-shirt to give you a good raking.  Your skin was clear, for the first time in my memory there were no scales, no redness.

“Yeah,” you said, pointing to it, “since I’ve been retired and living in Florida, in a warm climate with no stress… the psoraisis is gone.”

Well, I guess it had served its purpose by then, dad.

“Yep,” he said, leaning to the side so my mother could reach the rest of his back.