I think of my father’s dire childhood, it actually is unthinkable.  How often was he hungry growing up?   Phrases to describe the poor kid’s misery pop into my head in the middle of the night, too perfect not to get up and write down, though last night I didn’t, needing sleep more than phrases.   Now I’m left with shards, like the ones on my father’s eyes and over his lips when they opened the coffin for me to do a positive I.D. at the cemetery.

Here is a thing that was impossible for my father:  turning off the brooding anger.  My sister said it right: the loss of a dime from the change he had received and put on the counter was the same to him as the loss of his entire family in Truvovich.   Every indignity equalled every other indignity, every tragedy, no matter how small, carried equal weight. Every disappointment enraged him.  Then we have the next logical step.  

“Nothing you ever tell your sister, no amount of praise you can give her, ever sinks in,” said the ‘dumbest Jewish kid in Peekskill’ on his deathbed, almost 81 years old, after a distinguished life as an intellectual who was half a dissertation away from a PhD from Columbia.  

“You had a temper tantrum at the rain,” observed my father when I was a boy.  He shook his head with one cheek creased in a smirk to underscore the idiocy of this tantrum.  Something I’d been looking forward to, possibly a day at the ballpark, had been washed away by a deluge.  I apparently ranted at the rain.   “You stood there hollering at the rain, you were inconsolable,” my father said sadly.

I’d like to think the skeleton of my father has the insight to reframe these two remarks.  

“I know what you want me to say,” said the skeleton, “‘Your sister, I’m ashamed to say… your mother and I never gave her the emotional support we should have, all we did was undermine her confidence.  Every kid needs to hear that she’s bright, and capable, and cute.  Your sister was all of those things, at the top of the scale for each.  We never gave her any credit, filled her with self-doubt at every step.  It’s a testament to her will, independence and intelligence — her character, really– that she has done all she’s done in her life.  It’s not something we like to dwell on– we were simply wrong and we fought like devils to convince you two we were never wrong.'”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.  

“Well, but that’s not how it works, Elie.  You can’t just rewrite all my lines and pretend I was ever capable of the insights you ascribe to me posthumously.”

Actually, as the living party of this partnership, I get the final say on how it works, though I take your point.  I don’t know that you’d be capable, even now, of saying the words I just put between your jaws.  Still, they are the right words for you to say.  Just like you could have said this about my bitter disappointment as a young boy, when I was, as you say, inconsolable and you just shook your head about it. 

“Look, Elie, I know how much you were looking forward to this and how disappointed you are that it got rained out.  Any kid would feel the same way.  I know it hurts.  We’ll do it next week.  Life is full of disappointments and one of the biggest challenges anyone faces is remembering that they are only momentary set-backs.  Everything will be fine later, you’ll see.  Come on, let’s do something now to take your mind off it, you want to go see ‘Son of Flubber’ today?” said the skeleton, grimacing to pronounce the fifty-two year belated words of consolation.  

“But, of course, much as you’d like to hear it, I would never fucking say any of that.  You really expect anyone to believe that just because I felt guilt and remorse as I was dying that I would have held on to the insights I had then throughout eternity?”  

I prefer to think that, yes.  

“Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not how the world works,” the skeleton squinted like Clint Eastwood, if you can picture it. “Prefer away, then, but it changes nothing, your preference.  You want to believe in a world where people are not self-interested pricks out for their own advantage over everything else?  

“Go ahead.  Believe that 75% of your fellow Americans did not vote for this American Mussolini you got in the last election.  Statistics may show you’re right, numerically, but there’s a lot of hate out there.  You think Germany in the twenties was some kind of historical anomaly?  The height of western civilization plunged to the depths of barbarism over the course of a few years.  Your boy Frank Zappa had that track in the late sixties, ‘It Can’t Happen Here’ with the guy asking pointed questions, rat-tat-tat, in a German accent.  Hey, even the Germans are alarmed by this guy you have now.  

“Any nation that could enslave millions for centuries and then persecute the ancestors of those slaves for over a hundred years after a bloody civil war led to the abolition of said ‘Peculiar Institution’… well, all bets are off for the grandchildren of the little kids who ate cotton candy and cheered as black men were jerking at the end of a rope.  I know you don’t need me to draw this picture for you, Elie.  It doesn’t matter what you believe, what you need to believe– it matters how you live, how you use your limited influence, the example of your life.  And even those things hardly matter.”  

You’re a warm fire of inspiration on a chilly grey day, dad.  

“Homo sapiens is distinguished by one thing, domination over others, over nature.  If dolphins ran the world, maybe there’d be a chance to save the planet.  But killer apes in charge?  Good luck, Elie.”  The skeleton looked around, that eerie smile/yawn on its face.  

“You want a happy ending here, a nice bow to tie this into today?  Sorry, Charlie.  No can do.  That’s not how this shits how works, you dig?  Get on with your life, make those six medical appointments you listed yesterday, meet the new doctors, do what you can to protect your life going forward.  

“God knows this motherfucker you have now is not going to do anything to protect anyone, except perhaps his reptile children, the heirs of his hideous DNA.  Didn’t you love his son, speaking to his bloody mouthed followers, describing how his father came from ‘nothing.’  I guess to a billionaire’s son a few measly millions, even forty or a hundred of ’em,  really are nothing.  A plague on them all, Elie.  Take care of yourself today.”  

You have a nice day too, dad.  We’ll talk again soon.

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.