I had nothing to do with the inscriptions on my grandparents’ tombstones.  My father’s parents were gone long before I arrived, and my mother’s parents, buried in a section marked by a monument to the slaughtered Jews of Vishnevitz,  got the standard beloved parent and grandparent things chiseled into their headstones.   Thinking about it now, they were the only two family members of their generation to be buried in coffins.  

It was my father’s parents’ headstones in a parched area of the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill cemetery that got me thinking.  My grandfather was immortalized in Hebrew as a “simple, straight man.”   I don’t recall at the moment what is carved into my sainted paternal grandmother’s stone.  It was “simple and straight” that I read and translated off my grandfather’s headstone that caught my attention.

“Yeah, Ben came up with those epitaphs,” said the skeleton, from his grave on top of the hill, closest to the road but also above all the other graves in the cemetery.  “He was a rabbi, he knew Hebrew.  I guess with my father that was the best Ben could do.  You notice they’re buried in a crowded little area at the bottom.  That was the pauper’s section, you see how the stones are crammed together down there, some of them are crooked?”  

I had noticed that.  I also took care to come up with accurate Hebrew epitaphs for my parents after my mother picked out their headstone.  My father is immortalized on his headstone as “איש צנוע ונבון” a modest, brilliant man.   My mother’s inscription, which I labored long to find, reads “לב  של משוררת” heart of a poet.

But this is years earlier, when Yetta died a long, painful, clawing death from colon cancer.   She died in the bedroom I grew up in.  I remember how deathly her feet looked after she finally gave up the ghost.  They seemed unnaturally long, stretched, the toenails dark.  My parents were at that time considerably younger than I am now.  I went with my father to the funeral parlor on Queens Boulevard.  

The solemn salesman in the dark suit took us into the coffin showroom.  He guided us toward tasteful, beautifully finished coffins, with polished brass, or even gold, handles and trimming, some costing thousands of dollars.  Years later Sekhnet’s cousin, who died suddenly at 62, was buried in one of these Cadillac coffins, a stately mahogany model that gleamed next to the open grave.  It appeared to be top of the line.  His grieving sons had a lot of money and his dying wife, who had never expected to have the love of her life go before her, probably endorsed the expenditure.   

“This is a beautiful model,” the salesman in the black suit said.  My father and I pretended to inspect a $4,000 model, my father cutting his eyes toward the price tag and nodding to me.   We eventually selected a more modest one, I don’t remember the price, but it was one level above the plain pine box.  The coffin salesman, who clearly worked on commission, was disappointed.  When he saw where this sale was heading, he had pointed to a shoddy looking particle board coffin behind the door and said, dismissively, that it was their least expensive option.

“Did you see how that floor model of the particle board coffin had a warped lid?  I mean, you couldn’t even hammer the pegs in to get that sucker to close,” chirped my father cheerfully as soon as we left the disappointed ghoul at the funeral home.  We laughed about it, and the whole solemn dance the respectful slug in the black suit had performed for us.

“When I go, I want a plain pine box, remember that,” said my father that summer day in 1979.  

I did.