Show Me the Way to Go Home

I watch my sister Roberta expand and contract. She has the uncanny ability to breathe in and out simultaneously. She contracts into the limits of her physical space, very small. She contracts into the narrow confines of the day spent in her hospital bed marked by various offerings from Trader Joe’s, tamales, latkes.

Her room is just under two hundred square feet. It includes a dining area, a kitchen, and a bathroom, none of which she uses. Morning and evening she lies propped up in bed searching the backyard for bird life and the walls of the room for familiar objects and photographs. There’s my personal favorite, the one on card stock taken circa 1890 in a studio in Iasi, Romania. It’s Grandma Anna as a young girl done up in a black satin dress with a bustle and a dramatic floral concoction on top of her head. Consider the bustle. I lived with this woman until she died in 1958. In my memory, she wore house dresses and black lace-up shoes. There’s another one of Anna’s parents, the Lobelsons, taken in New York after the long ocean voyage from Hamburg via Liverpool, before it was John Lennon’s town. The shelves high on the wall next to Roberta’s bed are heavy with cloisonné and Chinese export porcelain. We do not come from a minimalist family. My sister’s awareness expands into the space and beyond. The room never feels small or claustrophobic and it never feels institutional. It always feels like a reverie, a museum of my sister’s life. She eats and she smiles. She smiles and draws her hand out from under the covers to reach for mine. Roberta and Jimmy Carter down in Plains are modeling old age for me. She’s demonstrating that a time will come when I will not have appointments or obligations. No dentist. No haircut. No seething frustration at internet inconstancy. Just a Glen Gould recording in the background and a handmade quilt on the bed, expanding and contracting at the same time.

Photo from 2020 on the eve of the pandemic

I tell her about her mentorship. It must be extraordinary to have someone tell you about a job you didn’t know you had. When I tell her about the expanding and contracting, she thanks me and I know she knows exactly what I mean. Roberta does not bullshit. If she says thank you, she means it. I tell her that Reb Zalman, who died in 2014, went about his aging and dying with enormous consciousness, with the idea that he was showing the rest of us how to do it. Reb Zalman was a major figure in the Jewish Renewal movement that brought mysticism, kabbalah, and hasidut into the modern Jewish world. My sister and I crossed paths with him separately and at completely different times, but there is a sense that we share him. I said, “Do you remember Zalman?” And she said, “Yes. He had a lot of white hair.” It was a heavenly moment. The list of people she remembers is very short. If I ask her something unworthy of her time, for example “Do you like Frank Sinatra?” She says, “I have no opinion.” She practices what Buddhists call non-attachment to views.

This way of being is a great blessing for the family. For my niece, Roberta’s primary caregiver, there’s more than enough to do with the feeding and pill-taking and cleaning up. But for the rest of us, not having to tap dance and do card tricks at the bed side, we can attend to our love for my sister and our own anticipation of loss. We who are still very much in the world have time and space to worry about climate and Ron DeSantis and gun violence, while at the same time trying to comfort ourselves, knowing that a day will come when we’ll have to face this darkness without her. By taking her time, Roberta is allowing us to accompany her, as if we’re all quietly tiptoeing up to the gate together, leaving behind bits and pieces of unnecessary baggage as we go. Here a bulky backpack of jealousy. There a bottle of vitriol. Here a sprinkle of self-doubt. There a dash of fear. Forget about it. You won’t need to carry any of that around.

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Beginning this Sunday, February 26th, paid subscribers will have access to a new monthly feature, Many Voices. Signe Schaefer, the founding director of the Center for Biography and Social Art, will be the first contributor to Many Voices. Please consider upgrading to paid.

I’m also pleased to invite you to a service at the Unitarian Universalist church in Housatonic, Massachusetts where I will be offering a sermon via zoom on March 12th. If you are in the Berkshires, please join me for the hour-long service beginning at 10:30 am. The sermon is entitled “Remembering What We’ve Always Known.” You can also email me for the zoom link.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.