My father always had a tall, tottering pile of New York Timeses next to his side of the bed.  His filing cabinet in the basement was a dust covered mess– he really had no discernible filing system.   The steering wheel of the Buick Regal he drove into the ground before giving it to me as a gift was blackened.  I had to scrub it with some kind of solvent before I started driving it, and nobody would call me a fastidious man.

“Your father is pretty much a pig,” my mother would observe from time to time.  A much better housekeeper herself, the surfaces of her kitchen, bedroom and other rooms were always clear and clean.  Her drawers and closets were crammed with a jumble of things, but that is another story.

“You got that letter today from fecal bronze Obamacare, soon to be terrific, actual shit-bronze Trumpcare, about denial of payment to two of the doctors you were referred to and you’re taking it out on your dead parents?” said the skeleton.  

No, I was just giving a bit of meaningless preface for my uncle’s filing system, which was, by contrast, quite meticulous.  

“Yes, he was definitely the anal-retentive of the two of us,” said the skeleton.  

After your brother died my cousin and I were going through his neatly organized filing cabinet and spotted a file with your name on it.   I took that file back to New York, after flipping through it. There were receipts from the hotel in Peekskill where we stayed for the funeral and another one where we stayed a year later for the unveiling.  There were car rental slips, paid toll slips, restaurant receipts.

“Nobody ever claimed my brother wasn’t mad as a hatter,” said the skeleton.  “In fact, you could make a case he even looked a bit like a rabbit.”

In that file folder, toward the back, I saw the other day, was a copy of the draft obituary he’d handed me to place in the New York Times the day after you died.  I placed it not in the New York Times, but on a nearby coffee table, and never saw it again.   Trying to clean one of the cluttered surfaces at her farm the other day Sekhnet came across the file folder with your name on it.  

“Mazel tov,” said the skeleton, “now, get over the galling inadequacy of the fecal bronze health insurance you have, and call one of the two New York City nephrologists in the network, Dr. Wooin Ahn or Dr. Qais Alawquati, call one or both, find out where their office is located and go have a covered kidney exam, before it’s too late.   You don’t want to fuck with your kidneys, look what happened to me.

“And either try to forget about the odd numbness in your left arm, and the stiffness and flickers of palpitation in your slightly dilated left atrium, or find a cardiologist in your network, demand a referral and go see the fuck, it’s been literally months now.    

“But don’t forget what happened to me, with my genius team of specialized medical experts.  Like your friend’s father used to say: doctors and lawyers don’t think for you.  You have to ask all the right questions.  You might start with ‘What the fuck, yo?'”

Best to be as clear as possible, for my sake, for the sake of the skeleton of my father, and for the sake of anyone trying to make sense out of any of this.  

My father fought, until literally the last night of his life, the idea that people can change anything fundamental about themselves.  My position was that we can make many crucial changes for the better, with sufficient effort, and that the question of “fundamental” was not something that should shut down the whole vital enterprise.

“Without fundamental change you’re left with scraps and window-dressing, superficial, essentially meaningless tokens of change,” said the skeleton.  “You’re a student of history.  Are you going to argue for incrementalism in a time of existential crisis?”

You get points for consistency, dad, but we’re talking about meaningful, positive individual change not vast, intractable institutional ones.  Without hope of change, you have nothing but the unyielding misery that is.  Is this the legacy of your life you want for your children, your message to your grandchildren? 

I’m not talking about learned helplessness by itself, that shit happens, like passing on a genetic disposition to cancer, as you said the other day.   Our general powerless over many terrible things aside, do you really want your final position on working for change to be that no matter how fucked up things are, there is no hope for change?

 “Clearly not,” said the skeleton, “however it may otherwise appear.  Look, I told you that last night of my life how much I regretted not taking you up on your many attempts to start a real conversation with me, how bad I felt for not reaching back across the flaming no-man’s land I kept idiotically burning between us.  

“I told you how I could not forgive myself for having been too weak and rigid to realize how insane my intransigence was.   You know all this.  Yes, I waited until hours before my death, but yes, I also died with unbearable regrets that only faded as my kidneys finally gave out and I expired with one last short breath.”  

If I was a praying kind of person, I’d have been praying for you in those last moments, dad.  As it was, I did my best to make you feel loved and wished hard for your end to be as peaceful as it seemed to be.  

“I know, Elie,” said the skeleton.  

I want to make it very clear here that you are not some idealized version of your ungenerous, angry, bullying self now, all wise and Buddha-like just because you died with regret and are now a fucking skeleton.  

“I know that,” said the skeleton, looking absently to the left and the right “who the hell are you talking to here, anyway?”

I’m making it as clear as I can, in a world that’s often based on lies, sometimes called myths, sometimes called advertising, propaganda or the cost of winning a business deal.  You are not, even in death, fundamentally changed, so you can take some solace, if you like, in being right about that.  

At the same time, in many other ways, you were significantly changed by the insights you had as you confronted your rapidly approaching death.   Your character now is informed by the hurt you finally allowed yourself to feel at the love you denied yourself and your loved ones during your life.  What you learned in your painful death is not lost on you, or on me.

Sure, like anybody else, you wake up on the wrong side of the grave sometimes and take it out on the only person who talks to you.  But you are also capable, in a way you could only have dreamed of during your embattled life, of having a real, sustained, mutual conversation with your own flesh and blood.  

“You are having the conversation, not me,” said the skeleton.  

Nah, I may be writing it down, it may seem to be in my head, but it is a real conversation between us nonetheless, the kind you wished we’d had fifteen years of, as you found me quietly listening to your regrets as you were expiring.  

“Well, all anyone really wants in a conversation is to know they are being listened to,” said the skeleton.    

That’s all I was ever trying to say.  It meant a lot to me that my father, the abused infant, the eternally enraged two-year old, finally came to that position too, even if it was on the last night of his life, or even eleven and a half years after his death.   You understand what a crucial door that single realization opens?  

Your fundamental nature may have been warped by the nightmare you endured for your entire childhood, but there is also a deeper nature, a more fundamental one than the one you identify as your baked-in personality.  

That deeper nature is the miracle of the human personality, it has the resilient ability to believe in and work for evolution, even a kind of rebirth. Being listened to by someone you care about can make all the difference between belief or pessimism and despair.  

“Well, I never felt I ever had that growing up, Elie,” said the skeleton.  

I feel sorry for you, but, at the same time, when you were a grown man, going forward, it was your own fucking fault that you never figured out how to learn that.   

“I know that, Elie, believe me,” said the skeleton.  “Fostering mutual conversation between adversaries was part of the most exciting years of my professional life, for fuck’s sake.  You’re supposed to have some fucking sense…”  

My father was raised in a religious Jewish home, an orthodox Jewish home.  His mother, I always heard, was very religious.   She was, as far as I can tell, not from the merciful school of Hillel, where love of God and kindness toward others is taught with patience, kindness and a touch of humor.  My father’s religious upbringing was harsh.  It seems remarkable to me that he absorbed and transmitted as many of the deeper moral lessons of Judaism as he did, considering how they were taught to him.  

As a result of the heartfelt moral teachings of my father, I am compassionate toward the religious impulse.  It is right to be kind to the helpless, to be gentle, to treat animals well.  It is right to identify with the vulnerability of the dispossessed, the orphan, the homeless.  It is an excellent thing, probably the best single thing a person can do, to refrain from doing to others what you hate having done to you.  My sister and I were raised to feel solidarity with the oppressed, a certain awe about the mysteries of history and the universe, and compassion for animals and underdogs.  

As a result of my father’s distilled religious lessons, and the way they were often disjoined from the way he actually lived, I have little patience for the rituals of religion.  I’ve never shouted out “this is bullshit, you goddamned hypocrites!” during a religious service, but it’s very hard for me to sit through one, to rise, and please be seated, and please rise.   Obedience to God, as interpreted and demanded by men, is as repellent to me as obedience to any tyrant.  

“Whoa!  Whoa!” said the skeleton of my father, holding up a bony hand.  “Wait a second, there.  You’re writing a frame to set up a series of stories about my practice of religion and my feelings about it.  The reader doesn’t care about your opinion of religious services.  They want my religious life, mine, the protagonist.  

“You’re going to take the half dozen or more anecdotes you’ve written about my religious life and combine them into one chapter, combing out the repetition and giving as full an account as you can of my religious life.  You’re going to call it ‘My Father’s Religion’.  Nobody gives a shit about your editorial feelings as you begin.  Strike that whole paragraph about obedience to religious tyrants.”  

Don’t be a religious tyrant, dad.  That kind of categorical certainty is part of what is so hateful about religious strictness.   God’s supposed insistence on you doing whatever incomprehensible thing God is urging on you becomes an unquestionable religious duty.  You take your religious leader’s word for it.  Or, if you’re really inspired, God’s word.

Take your first born son to a hilltop, tie him to a pyre, bind him so you can cut his throat, set him on fire and offer him as a burnt offering to the All-Merciful.  The boy will go along, docile as a lamb, because he’s righteous, and does as God will command be carved in stone, Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother, and you’ve taught him blind obedience to the will of God, and to his father.  

For your willingness to slit your first-born son’s throat and burn his body, you’ll become Judaism’s first righteous patriarch, oddly enough.  Your unflinching faith will position you for all time as the moral source of three major world religions.  Then for thousands of years y’all can kill each other over who most humbly and truly worships the All-Merciful King of the Universe.  

“Well, that’s your jaundiced view of religion,” said the skeleton.  

Like I said, I make the distinction between the religious impulse, the spiritual longing to connect to something higher and more wise than yourself, a worldview to help you behave justly, and religious ritual and dogma, propagated by blood-thirsty religious leaders with swords in their hands.  I think you made the same distinction yourself, increasingly so over the years.  

“Yeah,” said the skeleton with a sigh, “I did make the same distinction.  And increasingly so as I went along.   Those Born-Again morons in the prayer circle around me on my deathbed, I tried not to judge them too harshly.  I was too weak to judge them, in any event, but you know what I was thinking.  Sad idiots doing the best they could, somehow. Going to mega-church and voting for Dubya Dumbass Bush, righteously hating with God on their side, trying to convert dying Jews before forsaking the lonely widows of those souls they believe they’ve saved.  

“I’m not pretending I was a religious person, I just think you have to tell the story of my religious life better.  That’s all I was trying to say.”  

I read you, Rebbe.  I’m working on it.

It was, I see from a primary source (the eulogy) May 5, 2005, when my father’s body, in the plain pine box he’d instructed me to get for him when he died, arrived for burial at the First Hebrew Congregation of Peekskill cemetery.  It was a sunny day, blue cloudless sky, a perfect Spring day, completely comfortable for the dark blue suit, shirt and tie I was wearing.  

An oily character from the funeral home came up to my mother and me as the hearse pulled up.  He wanted to know if we brought the money.  He was wearing a sharp black suit, which on him made him look like a ghoul.  He counted the hundred dollar bills my mother handed him, to make sure there were eighty of them.  

This handing over cash at the cemetery before the funeral struck me as one of the crassest things I’d ever seen, but the merciless pricks at Hellman Funeral Chapel had insisted on it.  No funeral without the corpse, no corpse without the cash.  We have the corpse, do you have the cash? No checks, please, you understand.

The ghoul made a bit of small talk as my mother fished for the fat envelope of cash in her purse.  He asked what I did for a living.  His face lit up with a creepy smile when I told him I was a lawyer, which I still was back then.  “I used to be a lawyer,” he said, beginning to count the $8,000, “but I like this much better.”  

I’m sure you do, I thought, hiding my revulsion behind a smile almost as sincere as his.  When he was satisfied with the money count he asked me if I was going to identify the body.  I hadn’t realized I’d be doing this, but I walked with him over to the hearse.  A working man opened the coffin and I looked inside.   It was my father, all right.

 He had died as Shabbat, the day of rest, began on Friday evening, April 29th.  Jewish tradition is to hold the funeral as soon as possible after death, ideally within a day.  Since my father died in Florida, and his entire family had congregated in that hospital on State Road Seven, and his grave was in Westchester, New York, there’d been a logistical delay before we could get everyone to the cemetery.  Meantime, his body was prepared for burial and watched over for several additional days by the Chevrai Kadisha, the burial society, which probably added a grand or two to the sum my former colleague had counted.

I don’t know who’d made the decision, perhaps my uncle, but my father, sprouting the five-day white beard I’d heard old men grow after they die, had a shard of broken pottery over his lips and one over each eye.  I assumed this was some Orthodox Jewish tradition.  The winding sheet he was wrapped in, another religious tradition.  “It’s him,” I told the ghoul and the cover was placed back on the coffin.

Standing by the open grave at the top of the hill in the small cemetery, I heard the words I’d written for the eulogist being read by an excellent reader, an actor with a great voice who also chanted beautifully.  As well as he read, I was impressed most by his pauses. He had inserted brief pauses, each one in the perfect place to set off exactly what I’d written.

My niece, I noticed, was standing by herself, crying.  I nudged Sekhnet, who went over to the girl and put her arm around her.  They both cried, as birds sang, and cars crunched past on Oregon Road, not far from where we were standing.

“You ask me if I have royal blood and I’ll give you a definitive answer,” said the skeleton.    

Do you have royal blood?  

“Possibly, but you’re definitely giving me a royal pain in the ass,” said the skeleton.  

Do you have royal blood?   

“Why not personally examine my royal hemorrhoids for the magisterial answer to that one, poseur?” said the skeleton. 

Do you have royal blood?

“Possibly, but I could increase my odds by drinking all of yours,” said the skeleton.  

Do you have royal blood?    

“Why, are you thirsty for a rich drink, unlanded vampire?”   

Do you have royal blood?   

“I don’t know, let’s compare it to your’s.  Come on, out with it, all of it, bloody bastard.”

Do you have royal blood?  

“Get on your knees when you ask me that, peasant, and call me ‘Sire’.” 

Do you have royal blood?  

“Not necessarily, though I do have hemophilia,” said the skeleton. 

Do you have royal blood?  

“Beats me, but I do have a swollen royal blue asshole, I might be baboon royalty,” said the skeleton.

Do you have royal blood?  

“I don’t know, but it’s rushing to my head, and when it gets there, I’m going to order you and your family out of your home and have you hunted by hounds and nobles on horseback,” said the skeleton. 

Do you have royal blood?  

“I know you are, but what am I?  OK, that’s enough of that, Elie.  This was really stupid.  Not only a waste of time for everyone involved, burping out these semi-snappy MAD magazine-style rejoinders to a stupid question, but not even something I’d do when I was alive.

 “Wait, I know what you’re going to say– I have that power now absolutely–  ‘well, you’re not alive, and you’ve grown up since your death’– and that, I can tell you, 100%, is complete bullshit.  I haven’t changed a bit, except for that night when it began to dawn on me I’d be dead in a few hours and I thought it only fair to give you what I’d withheld from you for your entire life.  

“I’d been consistently unfair, taken advantage of your better nature to make everything your fault, make you shoulder the entire weight, and blame, for our long, relentless war.  It was only fair for me to say, before the little candle of my light winked out, that it hadn’t all been your fault.   I went a step further, since you were so mild about it by my death-bed, and took all the fault.”  

The leaves on the trees around the grave, once green, now orange, yellow, brown and red, trembled in the light breeze.  The wind made a quiet whistling sound, to accompany the rustling of the dry leaves.  There were no cars on the road.

“The Holy One, Blessed be He, threatened those who were hostile to Him with uncontrollable terror at the trembling of a leaf.   ‘The sound of a windblown leaf will make you run in terror, as if hunted by a hoard of your enemies, you will flee, heart pounding, though nobody pursues you,’ or some such poetic phrase, in your beloved Leviticus 26.   You know, as the days grow shorter and the temperature cools off, nights suddenly frigid, older, sick people tend to die and babies who are not fated to live long also begin to sicken and die.  

“The coming of winter is a living metaphor for death and humanoids recognized that thousands of years ago.  The holidays around the winter solstice all involve the lighting of candles, the miracle of the Hebrew zealots kosher oil burning for eight days, the Christmas lights, Diwali, a hundred primitive religions that time has forgotten, or whose practitioners have been wiped out by religions who had deadlier weapons.  

“Look, man, in fairness to yourself, you can’t just get up and come in here and expect much to happen every day.  Some days you are just going to be swinging an unstrung racquet at a nimble baboon’s unwashed ass. Today may be such a day.  No matter how you wiggle, and jiggle, and dance, the last three drops go down your pants.  Face it.  You can write all the lines you want for me, some days, this is all you’re going to get.  As for me, shit, I don’t mind in the least.”

Do you have royal blood?  

“OK, I’ll let you in on a little secret I’ve never revealed to anyone.  I was a King.  This land is mine, God gave this land to me.  That is what made it so intolerable to me to be treated as an asshole, no different than the rest of you fucking peons.  

“Do you realize, when a little king is whipped in the face, the cataclysm that is rendered in the heavens and down here on the earth?  My divine right to rule, contested by an ignorant and vicious commoner, with a crude but effective whip in her hand, over and over with all her raging might, into my tiny face?  Do you understand what this does to the order of things?  How can you possibly understand that?”

Obviously I can, I have royal blood.

There is a website that periodically sends me an email asking, as a come on to try to get me to open their email, if I have royal blood.  I hit delete, but they are persistent.  When I say “they” I’m not talking about an individual, of course, it’s a robot of some kind, a snappy spambot, programmed on behalf of a company that you can pay to have trace your ancestry.  “Do you have royal blood?” the bot asks me, every week or two.  

There is nobody to say this to directly, so I may as well send it out like a spambot, into the darkness of cyberspace.  A paragraph or two may come in handy for my proposed Book of Irv.

My family does not have royal blood.  If it did, the faces of those royals were many generations ago scraped from their tomb walls, their bones scattered to hungry scavengers.  In my memory, and the handed down and painstakingly unearthed short history of my family, I know only this much:

 My mother had twelve aunts and uncles and her grandfather on her  mother’s side wrote to her and sent her Russian coins when she was a girl.  Of these people none survived events in their Ukrainian town during the dark winter of 1942 into the summer of 1943.  Any of them, or their children, who made it through the starvation and disease was marched to a ravine on the northern end of town one warm summer night and in that ravine their misery was ended.

On my father’s side, a few hundred miles away, it happened a year or so earlier.  By July 4, 1942 it was all over for everyone but Aren and his little sister Chava, both of whom were in America, far from the killing.  The hamlet they came from in the marshes just south of Pinsk disappeared without a trace, along with all its inhabitants.  When I say “disappeared without a trace” I mean that nobody who has researched it has found any trace of where the little settlement was on a map.  As for its former inhabitants, don’t ask.

So, royal blood?  Most likely I don’t need a thorough check of my ancestry, which, except for two framed photos, can go back no more than two generations in any case, to answer that one.  Royal blood? No, thank you.    

There is a large framed photo here of Azrael Gleiberman, Aren and Chava’s father, and one of his wife Leah, but those haunted-looking, life-sized portraits are all that remain of them.  Azrael is referred to as Reb Azrael on his daughter Chava’s gravestone in Peekskill, suggesting he was a learned man, or at least a very religious one.  Only Aren and Chava, among Azrael’s children, ever got a grave stone.   Royal blood?  Let me see.  It looks somewhat unlikely, romantic as the idea undoubtedly is.  

It might be nice, in a fairy tale sort of way, to believe that the rage of Chava, the frequent unreasonableness of Yetta, the fearfulness of Sam, Eliyahu’s devil-may-care attitude, were all caused by the high octane spirits of royal blood.  You know, the reason Yetta drank so much vodka sometimes, and acted so headstrong and impetuous– she was a former royal living in exile in a worker’s apartment in the Bronx.  Unbearable!   Sam, once a prince who dressed in the Russian fashion, shaken to his core by the surprise assassination of his father the King and fled from the lands he once ruled.   Chava, the youngest member of another royal family, forced by cruel circumstances into marriage in an alien land with a man whose wits and constitution had been damaged beyond repair by generations of royal inbreeding.

Why else, really, would these people have acted so crazy?  It has to be royal blood really, no?  

I think of the history of the world, how it continues to be written in blood, so little of it royal blood.  Which is a shame, really, since no less an expert than Thomas Jefferson believed that the Tree of Liberty needed to be watered periodically with the blood of patriots and tyrants.  And who more fit to be a tyrant, and to provide sustenance to that noble tree, than a ruler pulsing with royal blood?  

The Divine Right of Kings, Manifest Destiny, Indian Removal, Separate But Equal, Racial Purity.   Do I have royal blood?   If we have ever spoken, you already know the answer to that one, comrade.

My father, a brilliant and prickly character, prone to anger and armed with a great sense of humor, died on April 29, 2005.  He was supremely defended while alive and tended to dictate the scope of any conversation he participated in.  

Since his death he has become much more interactive, far less given to the brow-beating he often resorted to.  I have enjoyed months of honest, back and forth conversation with him since January of 2016 when I began writing the first draft of The Book of Irv, the story of my father’s life and times.  

When he first popped out of his grave on the outskirts of Peekskill to contest something I’d just written, I thought little of it; it appeared to be something easily enough fixed in the rewrite.  It seemed kind of a stagey conceit, having the protagonist pop out of his grave to contest his biographer’s assertion, try to correct the record.  I thought it was a bit idiotic, frankly.  But the skeleton was soon back, intent on participating fully in the telling of his history.  

It was oddly organic, the way our conversation began.  He seemed to insist on it.  Being by nature a collaborative improviser, I went with it.   I soon found myself looking forward to our almost daily chats.  

“Don’t you wish we could have had a few of these when I was alive?” said the skeleton of my father, smiling that odd, sardonic smile they all have.  

Obviously.  And cruel as it would have been to say while you were alive, it was almost inevitable we wouldn’t have a much better relationship until after you died.  I want to underscore who you were, who you are now, as your own skeleton, and who you’re not.  

“Well, clearly, I was always the proponent of people not having the ability to change their inner wiring to any significant extent,” said the skeleton.  

Which was convenient, I realize now, because that belief kept you from taking responsibility for your sometimes brutal actions, things that were hard-wired in and not amenable to your will to control, according to your rigid belief that people can’t fundamentally change.  

“So you dragged me out here to fight?” said the skeleton.  

Nah.  I dragged you out here to show that, while you have evolved to an impressive extent since your deathbed regrets and the absolution I tried to give you as you were dying, you remain, in many ways, and as you always insisted, unchanged.   You get defensive, you attack when feeling cornered, you prickle, and startle, express your fear as bravado, and so forth.  

“So you dragged me out here to mock me?” said the skeleton of my father.  

Well, only to the extent that it’s funny to hear from such an opinionated skeleton.  Most people, when they die, are simply dead, I suspect.   In fact, you yourself would be completely dead now, but for my exertions here as I creep inexorably toward my own extinction.  

“Well, it’s nice of you to indulge me this way, then,” said the skeleton.    

It’s nice to talk with you in light of your improved insight.  The regrets you had while you were dying gave you a perspective you hadn’t consciously acquired in eighty years.  

“Better late than never,” said the skeleton.  

Indeed.   The insightful Jeanne Safer wrote about the new ongoing dialogue that is possible once a parent, no matter how problematic, dies.   I never thought I’d find myself in a silent room tapping out actual conversations with the skeleton of my father.  

“Well, shit happens, Elie.  It seems to me you’ve gotten a lot more out of this process than you ever did out of sitting week after week with that earnest little unsupervised idiot in the Brief Psychotherapy Program who started off trying to teach you what she’d learned about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy before secretly switching to a ‘relational’ approach a few weeks in,” said the skeleton.  

She wasn’t an idiot, she was just an unsupervised grad student.  Yeah, look, this process is certainly the best use of my time right now.  Unless I could get an appointment with someone like Jeanne Safer, who I believe is writing full-time and no longer seeing patients, it’s pretty pointless to look for the help of people who just want to be normal and successful.  

“Two things nobody could accuse you of being, Elie,” said the skeleton.    

Hardy-har-har.  You know, you haven’t lost that deft touch you always had, even when foam was forming on the corners of your mouth.  

“Foam never fucking formed on the corners of my mouth,” said the skeleton indignantly, unconsciously wiping at his molars.  “You’re thinking of Eli.  Now there was a guy who could turn purple at will with spittle foaming at the corners of his mouth.”

Eli is another can of worms.  

“Not anymore, he’s been dead ten years longer than me.  The worms have moved on.   He really deserves his own book, you know,” said the skeleton.  

He certainly does.  Now, to sum up:  

The skeleton is a combination of my father in life, a man who remained stubbornly unchanged, and the man who underwent a certain transformation in the last hours of his life, as he was seized by countless regrets.  

“I literally could not make an accurate tally of my regrets,” said the skeleton, dry eyed.

I know, and I take a deep lesson from that.