Devotion (11 page)

Closure (business): the process by which an organization ceases operations

Closure (computer science): an abstraction binding a function to its scope

Closure (psychology): a state of experiencing an emotional conclusion to a difficult life event, or, a point in the development of an artifact where social understanding and interpretation reaches consensus

Closure (psychology, visual perception): the fact that peripheral vision tends to compress vision and to allow completion of details by already stored inner images

Closure (visual arts): the process by which the mind fills in
missing details of a framed object, as in the panels of a comic, or a cinema/television screen

Closure (law): an act of closing a public trial

Poetic closure

Transitive closure

A packaging “closure” is a bottle cap or screw cap

Deep within my body, the past is still alive. Everything that has ever happened keeps happening. I might be meditating, and then, suddenly, instead of sitting cross-legged on my bedroom floor in Connecticut, I am standing in a New Jersey hospital room, hearing the news that my father has died. While lying still in pigeon pose, my forehead pressed to the floor, suddenly I am in my car, driving up our driveway to see Michael standing on our front porch, phone in hand. His eyes meet mine as I grow closer, and I know that my mother is gone.

It’s a seductive idea, closure—but I think it’s a myth. The poet Anne Sexton was once asked why she wrote almost exclusively about dark and difficult subjects:
Pain engraves a deeper memory
was her response. The quieter and more internal I become, the more these stories unspool. Prayer, meditation, yoga seem to unleash the past, rather than to bury it. What good does all this searching do, when so much of what I find is hard to take? Why would anyone sign up for this? Especially when there are so many ways around it?

Sometimes I want to run away: have a few drinks, take a sleeping pill, buy those overpriced stiletto heels. Anything to sedate myself—to mute the endless loop of stories. And sometimes I give in, and do exactly that. The clarity is too painful, and I want to forget. The problem is, it doesn’t work. Not in the long run. There is no permanent forgetting. Though the world of things is persuasive and distracting, the stories always come back, circled in neon. They are all the more alive for having been hidden.

In the years following my father’s death, any time I had an important decision to make I asked myself: What would he have wanted me to do? The question became my ritual, my belief system. I was twenty-three years old, and aware that my father had died disappointed in me. Was I going to be okay? Was I going to pull myself out of my downward spiral? Would I find my way in the world? He had no idea, nor did I. In my early twenties, I had constructed a new identity for myself. I had shed the obedient, good, observant girl I had once been, as if stepping out of my skin and into another. I stopped reading, writing, playing the piano, spending time outdoors, going to shul—all the things that had kept my feet on the ground. I became rail thin, hard-edged, interested only in the surfaces of things. If I sensed a whiff of danger, all the better. I figured that I would skate and skid along that dangerous surface for as long as I could, until I crashed. Until something stopped me—if something ever did.

Well, it was indeed a crash that stopped me. Only it wasn’t the crash I had imagined. It wasn’t
my
crash. My parents’ accident destroyed their lives, and in a devastating bit of symmetry, saved mine.
What would my father want me to do?
Over and over, the question became a beacon in my personal darkness, lighting the way. It seemed I couldn’t go wrong, as long as I listened to my dead father. He would have wanted me to leave my older, married sociopath of a boyfriend. So I finally did. He would have wanted me to go back to college. So I did that too. He would have wanted me to take care of my mother—and I tried. Oh, how I tried. There was no getting around the Fifth Commandment,
Honor your father and mother
. Not sometimes. Not depending on their behavior. Not when you happen to feel like it. Honor your father and mother no matter what.

Now—five years after my mother’s death—she haunts me. She stands over my shoulder as I write. She is the old lady I see on Broadway, walking with a cane, clutching a Fairway shopping bag. At three o’clock in the morning, if I am startled out of sleep, it is my mother who waits in the darkness. She lives in my hips, and is lodged beneath my solar plexus.
Pain engraves a deeper memory.
The deeper I probe, the more I find parts of her inside me, buried artifacts. Closure is impossible.

Honor your father and mother.

I was unable to honor my mother. I fought her, avoided her, pushed her away.
But I gave you life!
she sometimes screamed in frustration.
You wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for me!
She is my own
samskara
—she lingers within me. She will die only when I take my last breath.

Samskara
—latent impression; predisposition; consecration; imprint; innate tendency; innate potence; mold; inborn nature; residual impression; purificatory rite; rite of passage.

1. It is a predisposition from past impressions. It is one of the five aggregates according to Buddhism. They are impressions left in the mind after any experience.

2. It is one of the twelve links in the causal chain of existence, according to Buddhism.

3. It is a rite performed with the help of sacred syllables (mantra) to restore a thing to its original pure state.

4. It is a purificatory rite in connection with an individual’s life in Brahmanic Indian society. It includes the sacred thread ceremony, marriage rites, funeral rites, etc.

5. It is one of three kinds: velocity (
vega
), by virtue of which an object possesses motion; feeling (
bhavana
), by virtue of which there is memory or recognition; and oscillation (
sthitisthapa-katva
), by means of which a substance returns from a distance to its original position.

If
God doesn’t give us more than we can handle
is my least favorite bromide, my second least favorite is this:
Everything happens for a reason.
On the cover of
People
, the sole survivor of a plane crash expresses his gratitude to God. He doesn’t understand why he alone was saved. “I put myself in God’s hands,” he says. “I have faith that everything happens for a reason.” We look for reasons in retrospect. We tell ourselves stories. Every near miss has a narrative. Since the time of the cave dwellers we have attempted to take the random events of our existence and fashion them into something that makes sense.

Shortly after we moved to Connecticut, I got a call one morning from the concierge at the inn down the road. A guest at the inn had seen my books in the gift shop, and asked if I lived nearby. He wondered if I might be able to meet with him. I admit, I was curious. It’s not every day that I get a call like that, out of the blue. What did this guy want? Was he a fan? A stalker? If so, he was a well-heeled stalker. The inn is no quiet country B&B. A late de Kooning hangs in the state-of-the-art spa, its yellow and blue swirls the only color in a room filled with white sofas and chaises draped with white cashmere blankets. The effect is of a heavenly sanitarium,
Magic Mountain
complete with haute-lite cuisine and a lavender-scented steam bath.

The man and his wife greeted me in the lobby.

“I’ll leave you two,” said the wife. She was a lovely woman, perhaps fifteen years older than me. She was wrapped in a bathrobe, her hair slick with massage oil. “He has a lot to talk to you about.”

I followed the man into the great room. He was quite tall, distinguished even in his weekend casual clothes, gray-haired and wearing wire-rimmed glasses. As we poured ourselves some ginger tea and settled on the sofa beneath the de Kooning, I wondered. Did he know me, somehow? A friend of my family? He had a way
about him—a certain kindness in his face—that reminded me of my father. I guessed he was in his mid-sixties.

“I loved
Slow Motion
,” he said. “It meant a lot to me.”

Slow Motion
is very much a young woman’s story—a memoir of the mess I made of my coming-of-age. Why would it speak to him?

A spa attendant whisked away the saucer on which we had placed our used tea bags. There was an absolute absence of clutter. Even the garbage cans were empty. I had recently taught a memoir workshop at the spa, to several women who had come to this most privileged place with some very heavy baggage: one whose Silicon Valley billionaire husband had left her; another whose only daughter had committed suicide.

The man reached for his cup of tea, then set it down without taking a sip. “I was the last person who got on the last elevator to leave Windows on the World before the plane hit,” he said. “Someone held the door open for me. I don’t know who it was. Later, I remembered things. I remembered the sight of an arm reaching out”—here his voice cracked—“and holding the door open.”

He went on to tell the details: he’d been having breakfast with a woman from an arts organization who had asked a favor he was unable to grant. As they left the restaurant, he stopped at a few tables to greet acquaintances. Once in the elevator, he rode all the way down to the lobby with his breakfast companion instead of getting off on the seventy-eighth floor to go to his office—his life saved not once but twice, based on timing and split-second choices.

He shrugged. It looked almost involuntary, like a spasm. “Trying to be a nice guy, I guess.”

He looked at me, this man with the kind face who reminded me of my father. His eyes, behind his glasses, were filled with the bottomless pain of his own good fortune. All around us, men and women padded by in thick white robes and plastic flip-flops.

“I keep thinking there has to be a reason,” said the man. “Something I’m supposed to do now. Only I don’t know what it is.”

I was certain that there was no reason. No reason at all. There was only this: luck, timing, consequences. Infinitesimal moments that added up and became personal tragedies, personal miracles. God wasn’t up in the sky pulling the strings. There was only one thing to say—one thing I understood from my own life, my own personal tragedy. Finally, I understood why this man had responded to
Slow Motion
. My parents’ accident wasn’t an event that changed the world, but it had changed me. I had risen out of the ashes of that sadness and loss, and did the only thing worth doing. I had tried to become a better person.

“You
make
it mean something. That’s all you can do.”

I’ve been having trouble maintaining a sense of solitude. Oh, sure, I have the hours during the day when Jacob is at school, Michael is at his office, the dogs are asleep on the kitchen floor. But solitude—the kind of silence inside of which one can
transact some private business with the fewest obstacles
, in Thoreau’s words—does not simply have to do with being alone.

I can be frenetically alone. I can be anxiously alone. I can be
alone with ten thousand thoughts racing through my head. These kinds of states aren’t productive; they don’t count. The kind of solitude I long for is what I was able to achieve during those days at Kripalu, when my mind felt ironed clean. All it took was yoga and meditation around the clock! But I don’t live at Kripalu—and if I did, I imagine that the magic I felt there would slowly evaporate. The thing is this: I know I can find it right here at home, though certainly it’s more of a struggle and requires greater discipline. I have found it on my yoga mat. I have found it during meditation. I have found it when, first thing in the morning, instead of checking my e-mail (
Free shipping from Land’s End! Twenty-four-hour J. Crew sale!
) I open Virginia Woolf’s
A Writer’s Diary
to a random page. This morning’s entry: “Arrange the pieces as they come.” Is there any other way to live than arranging the pieces as they come?

So if I know all this, why such resistance? The door is always open. Why not go through? Why does it seem that I require friction, a certain amount of agony, before I batter the door down like a blind and crazy ram? Yesterday I wrote to Steve Cope that I am alternately as good as I’ve ever been, and full of despair. His response: “The tension arc between despair and wonderful is very good for the writing, don’t you think?”

On the morning my father died, his younger brother—my uncle Harvey—arrived by taxi from New York. He found me in the hospital corridor outside my mother’s room, making calls.

“Who’s with Paul?” Harvey asked. He was breathless, his grief wild and angry, leaving no room for my own. I had never been close to Harvey, but still, I wanted to collapse into him. I wanted him to recognize that I was still practically a kid.
I don’t know how to do this,
I felt like saying.

“I asked the doctors to leave him in his room,” I said. “Until we—”

“No one’s watching him?” Harvey wheeled around and raced back down the corridor to the elevator bank. My father’s room was in another unit, two floors up. I hadn’t been aware of the sacred tradition of
shmira
, in which the body is not left alone—not even for a single second—between the moment of death and the moment of burial. Later that afternoon, my uncle would inform me—in an accusatory tone, as if I should have known better—that my father had been intubated, that a tracheotomy had been performed in a last-ditch effort to save him, and that the various tubes and equipment had been left in his body in a way not consistent with Jewish law.

You fucked up
, was the subtext.
And you can’t fix it now.

My mother was fighting for her life. Given the scope of her own injuries, she wasn’t expected to survive the shock of this—the loss of her husband. Sedated, on painkillers, she drifted in and out of consciousness as the Shapiro family descended—an Orthodox SWAT team. There were precise, choreographed steps to take: the appropriate funeral home to be contacted; the paid death notice announcing the location of shivah; the summoning of the
chevre kadisha
, a holy society consisting of Jews who cleanse and purify the body, and recite the required psalms and prayers asking God to forgive all sins and grant eternal peace to the deceased.

Riverside
, I heard through the thick, cottony wall of my own grief.
Shivah at Gram’s
. Wait a minute. Riverside Chapel was in Manhattan. As was my grandmother’s apartment. I looked at my mother, her shattered legs scissored in traction. Her face still lacerated, black and blue. She looked frail in her bed, surrounded by my father’s family—a group of people with whom she had barely been on speaking terms for most of the twenty-eight years of her marriage. She stared at the ceiling as they discussed different rabbis. Names—Shlomo Riskin, Isaac Swift—were floated. Plans seemed to be happening all around my mother, but they did not include her. And then, as if issuing a news bulletin from a faraway land, my mother spoke:

“The service will be here in the hospital,” she said. “I’m going to attend my own husband’s funeral.”

The next morning, my mother was transferred from her bed to a stretcher, then wheeled through the hospital’s main lobby, past the gift shop and into the auditorium for my father’s funeral. Her cardiologist, internist, and trauma specialist were all nearby.
Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die
was my mantra, the ceaseless whisper in my head. Any horror seemed possible—no, more than possible. Likely.

I held my mother’s hand and stood next to her stretcher. The service was about to begin. The auditorium was filled to capacity: Wall Street bankers in business suits, neighbors I remembered from years of backyard barbecues and pool parties, my mother’s tennis buddies. The previous night, my mother had asked her own brother, a college professor, to speak at the funeral. Not Harvey. She had also asked a senior partner at my father’s firm to speak.
Not some famous rabbi. At this modern funeral service orchestrated by my mother from her hospital bed, my father’s family had no role. They clustered together in the front row, their dark coats and prayer books setting them apart.

After the service, a line of black cars idled near the hospital’s main entrance. Of course, my mother couldn’t make the trip—not even by ambulance. I had to leave her behind to go bury my father. I watched my cousin Henry, Shirley’s younger son, climb into the hearse, siddur in hand. He davened the whole time. He wore a fedora and a dark overcoat; a muffler covered the lower part of his face. Henry, a member of the
chevre kadisha,
had stayed with my father the night before. I kept my eyes trained on the hearse as we snaked down the leafy suburban streets near the hospital. I was afraid of losing sight of my father as we sped along the wide New Jersey highways of my childhood, crossed over into lower Manhattan, then made our way through downtown traffic to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Finally we emerged at a massive, old cemetery in Bensonhurst where my grandfather and great-grandparents were buried.

I had never been to the Shapiro family plot. I had, in fact, never been to a funeral of any kind. The only ideas I had about funerals came from the movies—and this wasn’t anything like that.
From dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return
. An Orthodox burial takes these words from Genesis seriously. The body, as prepared and purified by the
chevre kadisha
, is wrapped in a white shroud and placed in a plain pine box. No Astroturf covers the earth around the burial site. Cremation is considered abhorrent. Embalming is expressly forbidden. Viewing, flowers, incense are discouraged. In the starkest possible manner, the dead are returned to the earth.

My legs were unsteady as I followed the pallbearers—my cousins—through the crumbling paths of the Brooklyn cemetery. The el train rattled overhead. Somewhere, a dog was barking. My cousins paused a number of times along the way. I thought they were lost. I didn’t realize that the pausing is customary—a sign of reluctance to depart with the dead. I didn’t know the prayers, or their meaning. What was happening? My father was inside that flimsy box, and his family was burying him at his own father’s feet. In the midst of their sadness and shock, they knew exactly what to do. Here,
I
was out of place. An interloper.

Mordechai sang “El Malei Rachamim.” My cousins lowered their uncle by long straps into the ground. Someone handed me a shovel and pointed.

I lifted a shovelful of dirt and spilled it onto my father’s casket. My half sister did the same. Then Shirley, Harvey, their grown children. The men shuffled. Their voices rose and fell; now a murmur, now a wail. They were schooled in this ritual, and the very fact of it gave them a kind of solace. The washing, the wrapping, the standing guard, the praying. After my father’s coffin was no longer visible, the small crowd formed two parallel columns, as if in a square dance. The immediate family was meant to walk through. As we did, the prescribed condolence was offered:
Hamakom y’nachem etkhem b’tokh sh’ar aveilei Tzion v’Yrushalayim.
May God comfort you among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem. I felt no such comfort, but I did know one thing: this funeral was precisely what my father would have wanted.