Liminal Nights - by Masha Savitz Keys
When I realize, during a phone conversation with my mom, that my father, suffering from heart failure, will be spending the first night of Passover alone in a hospital as the rest of the family and friends participate in the holiday seder that he had always led, I act quickly.
My sister finds me a cheap flight from LA, to NJ that she she books the day before. My brother I. drives me directly to the hospital from the airport.
This night, when we customarily ask, ‘how is this night different from all other nights’, and when bitter herbs mixed with sweet charoset, there in his private dimly lit room, my father and I will enjoy a few rare uninterrupted hours together that will never be repeated. In a few years, he will be stricken with a series of strokes that will render my very commutative father, unable to speak.
This night reminds me on another night- the night we sat shomer for my youngest brother.
Shomer, the 2,000 year old tradition of watching over a body before burial, to chaperone or accompany the soul, believed to linger near their bodies until burial.
He had suffered childhood brain cancer that caused him to be under or oddly developed physically and mentally, but perhaps, tuned better for matters of spirit. So I think this is what my brother would want.
I ask the funeral home if I would be allowed to spend the night. Because they know and work with my father, a local rabbi in the community, they make an exception.
Most of my family thinks this is ‘creepy’, but this night, my father decides to join me, sharing a definitive moment of hallowed peace and space in between the weeks of tumult before Jeremy’s death, and the following throngs of visitors over the seven days of grieving of shiva, yet to come.
These moments with my father are liminal.
Like they are this night in the hospital.
He asks about the book I am writing. I share my stories with him. I tell him of the old lady and her discarded belongings.
He want to hear more.
‘All of the belongings of an elderly woman in my first Boston apartment, who has just died, are heaped onto the Commonwealth Avenue curbside; a lifetime scattered on pavement.
Rushing to catch the trolley, or T, to my morning painting class, I pause and pay homage to this life I never encountered. Her possessions, the compilation of a life lived, considered, grieved, cherished, reconciled and savored, are now strewn for the picking. So I do.
Rummaging through her things, I discover a formal wedding party photo with a somber groom in a WW ll uniform that will become a large painting with a disturbing sense of military, matrimony and memory, depicted in rose and steel grays. I slip the black and white mat photo into to my bag.
I also salvage a small, carnation pink, leather address book- its lines unmarked. This little book, pages yellowing and brittle, the frayed binding now secured with packing tape, is filled with the significant names of my life, and each time used, recalls the women I never met and the single pink thread that stitches the stories of my life to her hers, and now, to all the others.’
His eyes widen as he recalls his grandmother who lived with him growing up. He explains that she too was troubled by a similar experience as her neighbor’s things were tossed to the street upon her death.
He continues to tells me that his bubbi, Razil could not stop talking about the incident which so rattled her.
“I haven’t heard anyone ever speak about this until now! That is so strange!.’ He reflects.
He seems confounded by this ‘coincidence’ that bonds me to my great grandmother, connected by DNA and my father, the witness to our stories, connecting time and space as the full moon of Nissan floats across that early spring night, still cold on the east coast, visible in the large hospital window.
And at the end of the night, with great excitement, he says, ‘I feel like I am meeting you for the first time!’
I will sit shomer for my dear father a few years later with my sister she finds us Chinese food near by that we share on a freezing November night, winds howling outside.
After having spent many consecutive nights by his side of the palliative care wing of the hospital, shomer feels comforting, intimate,
Masha Savitz is a painter, documentary filmmaker and journalist. With a BFA from Boston University, and Masters in Rabbinic Studies, she writes and teaches, while frequenting local cafes and Irish pubs near her home on Venice Beach.