Last Words

...Carve this for me," she said...

...although he appeared willing to work for the assistance and approbation of a handful of academicians and interested observers, a part of him craved more universal enthusiasm for his work...

...We go to New England, or the colonial states, where a little poison ivy and a few bramble scratches are small price to pay for precious fragments of the Queen's English...

...If I did not know who had fallen afoul of community norms and mores, or who had been propelled to the top of its heap, the gravestones certainly wouldn't tell me...

...The defiantly affirmative pronouncements, the profusions of gratitude to the community, the ambiguities, the attempts at self-consolation, the expressions of doubt and uncertainty were exquisitely and creatively revealed...

...She has published many articles in Medical Dimensions...

...My mother's second phrase seemed a form of "wish-fulfillment," a way of warding off her fear that my father's work might indeed have been in vain, the work in which he was engaged for the last years of his life...

...Beloved Father...

...Resting is easy there, each plot being a pleasant distance from its neighbor...

...We collect these epitaphs and share them...

...It was no surprise that the inscription on the tombstone would be in Hebrew, which was the language of highest emotional import to my parents...

...Far from family, friends and past, he did indeed find refuge in a strange place, and made it into a home for his wife and family...

...In this regard, the Jews are perhaps no different from their Gentile neighbors, who also inter Beloved Fathers, Cherished Mothers and Adored Sons in row upon row, undistinguished by any recorded remains of Given six precious words to be carved in stone, she made a personal, self-oriented choice which served a theraputic rather than a commemorative function...

...Less may be said about the loss of Jewish funerary art and architecture, since little has been lost, as little was ever present...

...Is this a universal chord that rightfully must touch me, or am I too secularized, even Hellenized, to see the incompatibilities...

...Glaring angrily out across the field it announces, "ONE OF THE SIX MILLION LIES HERE...

...Who was to define in vain...

...Cannibalizing several poems, she found two phrases that yielded meaning to her...

...We find Protestant churchyards and family plots which, when methodically studied, reveal strikingly shifting patterns of feelings about death and bereavement, ranging through awesome dread of judgment, exaggerated faith, attempts at resignation and acceptance, and occasional glimpses of apostasy and rebellion...

...My father, a methodical man, left written instructions regarding the terms of his burial...

...One is an outsized granite block which towers above the remaining monuments across the road from my father...

...After all, one sees leather workers resurrected anew in Vermont, so why not stone engravers...

...Now S. looks out on my father, just far enough away to make talking next to impossible...

...We thought it best to make no attempt to talk her out of it...

...Blessed Be the Name of the Lord...

...My sister and I sensed that she was hell bent on scribbling in the margins of my father's last page...

...I will take a moment to try to explore why my mother chose these particular words, and their contextual significance...

...And he did not labor in vain...

...I commit my spirit to the God who gave it, relying on His mercy and redeeming love, and believing with a fine and perfect faith in the religion of my fathers, Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord...

...I sensed an ominous note creeping in on the shadow of a seemingly forthright and unambiguous statement...

...Besides, she had a better idea...

...And it would not be original, as my mother had little faith in her power of elegiac composition...

...If possible, he added, he would like the same blue-speckled stone which marked his father's grave in one of New York's teeming tenement cemeteries in Queens...

...T-in-her-wheelchair, with about as much thought as I gave them in life...

...The epitaph has certainly not been utilized as a creative expression, a literary genre, a source of meaningful communication to the world or a means of consolation to the bereaved...

...He was my father's printer...

...In due course, she appeared at the stone cutter's shop with a small scrap of paper in her hand...

...And who would remain to carry on and finish what he no longer could, when he finally closed his desk six weeks before he died...

...one does not lean on a formidable woman in the hour of her grief...

...not to weep after me, on the contrary to think of me with joy...

...The epitaph, as a small indicator of comparative religion, is greatly overlooked...

...Soon there will be a tombstone for Rabbi K, so deaf that we do not have to whisper as we approach his fresh mound...

...They are tactiturn, functional, cost-conscious, space-saving...

...Called to a last community meeting, they recline near each other, as they did so often in the auditoriums of the synagogues, or the lobby of the "Y...

...Dr...

...Consider the classic churchyard quatrain, which has appeared in many forms in this country and Europe in the 650 years since the Black Death: Stranger, reflect as you pass by As you are now, so once was I As I am now, so you will be Prepare for death, then follow me . . . It is hard to believe that dead Jews shake their skeletal fingers in the faces of the living, still-respiring innocents who are merely on their way to the office, the bowling alley, or the latest Bat-mitzvah...

...A similar fate has befallen the last testament, which used to be a final opportunity for the deceased to express himself, and his survivors and heirs to make their peace with this expression...

...Once again, an excellent opportunity for catharsis and communication is being destroyed...

...To his objective accomplishments as the director of the Jewish Community Center...

...Augustine, Florida: "Returning from his studies prosecuted in a distant land he reached his cherished, long wished for home, only to cast around it a bright but most brief joyousness, and to die...

...and when circumstances permit, to pay my debts, should I have any...

...Furthermore, all occupants of this city of the dead are known to each other, and to their survivors...

...The effect is lost, however, through overkill, for the zealous husband, not trusting himself to have made his point, also inscribed on the reverse, "VICTIM OF THE NAZI BEASTS" (!) By and large, however, the Jews of Wilmington do not wear their hearts on their tombstones...

...Above all, the tombstones are discreet...

...In 1915 my paternal grandfather had travelled to Palestine, where he privately printed a collection of his Hebrew poetry and songs...

...I found it particularly sad that my mother chose her epitaph for my father knowing that there were not ten Jews in Wilmington who could read it without consulting the dictionary, and that her proclamation to the world, carved in stone, was essentially a hieroglyph, an elite communication to the chosen few, a secret code which she could share only with those capable of deciphering it by means of some arcane scholarship...

...The neglect and loss of funerary arts diminishes us in life and may morbidly affect the way we relinquish our dead and grieve their passing...

...This had been accomplished against great odds, for the community had given him little money and no staff to assist him...

...With the decline of funerary art, architecture, and literature has come the decline of the corpus of the cemetery itself...

...Inevitably, if we are Jewish, we wonder why we have to go to Gentile cemeteries to feel some sense of the natural order of things...

...Near my father lies S, who sold my father his plot, years ago, when they cost next to nothing...

...Amen...

...Any woman active in the Sisterhood is considered a "woman of valor" and valued "above rubies...

...Sepulchral anthropomorphism of rotten protein seems foreign to our tradition...

...Certainly survivors display a constant but probably unrecognized and generally unrequited thirst for the consolation of order and beauty at times of mortal confrontation...

...Since, unlike epitaphs, these documents are intimate and personal, and rarely published abroad unless the author is a person of note, we can only conjecture to what extent the shrivelling process has progressed, here, too...

...Foreign to this tradition is the gorgeous mourning sculpture of the Greeks, the re-created nether-cities of the Etruscans, the Forts Knox of the Egyptians, the battle-scared mounds of the ancient Semites, the marble tombs of the Renaissance, and the ivoried grace of the Shah Jahans...

...The young rabbi-historian who had followed his work most closely, and seemed the most logical candidate to complete the history, had elected to make Aliya...

...When I visit my father's grave, I stop to see L's father, wondering if his eyes are still crossed in death...

...It did not seem right to her that a man should go to his grave with a starkly empty tombstone, a tabula rasa that implied a life lived without effect or substance...

...Given six precious words to be carved in stone, words which would confront her for the rest of her life, she made a personal, self-oriented choice which served a therapeutic rather than a commemorative function...

...Additionally, he was sick and racing the clock to complete the work...

...carry with honor my hard-earned Jewish-name, and May God in heaven come to your help...

...A native New Yorker, he could not have guessed that the warmth and friendliness of a closely knit Jewish community would satisfy so many of his needs, or that the respect it gave him would encourage him to do his best work...

...A late blooming plant, he had spent many years in school, changed professions, built his way slowly along new career directions, and accepted a position in this small city, unaware that he would settle, complete his career, retire and die there...

...I believe that my mother's decision to provide an epitaph, the way in which she approached her task, and the shape which it ultimately took have a great deal to teach us about an important component of the mourning process...

...When I was very young and my father would take "The Recorder" to be put to bed, I would go with him, and squirm while the two men schmoozed...

...Where has the English epitaph gone...

...I do not know if this activity was pursued "k'seder" (in order), or given over to chance, as rural Baptists will open the Holy Bible at random, and seek the answer to existential dilemmas on the wing of chance or the whim of a binding...

...Surrounded by the violence of poverty, inaccessible to pedal or motor transport, closed during the hours most conducive to reflection, and subject to the vandalism it shares with abandoned buildings, the cemetery is stripped of its capacity to offer a haven for serious grief work, communion with tran-scendant ideas, or confrontations with personal mortality...

...He found refuge here...

...When the time came to honor the initial portion of his request, my mother balked...

...The loss of the epitaph is surely more than an economic phenomenon, although some believe that it is the sheer cost of inscriptions that has sounded the death knell for yet another of the hand crafts that used to flourish in this country...

...While'few of us exhibit Pharaonic needs for funerary creations that ferry us to the other side and sustain us eternally while there, most of us do have some feelings about the style, appearance and "motif of our final resting place...

...My father had built on the work of his predecessor, then turned over the reins to a younger man at a relatively early age...

...We may seek the answer to my mother's fragmented choices not in my father's life, or in what his survivors might think he would have wished (since we have every reason to believe that he wanted us to ignore his last request), but in my mother's feelings about him, and her way of dealing with an almost insurmountable loss...

...And yet the cemetery is strangely bland...

...he had come for a tearful farewell only a week before my father's burial instructions became operative...

...There are few, if any, real epitaphs...

...But if the classical, Biblically based epitaph is gone, could we not utilize our own English, a beautiful language in its own right, and now fallen upon as hard times as Hebrew, Latin and Greek...

...Our cool disregard for beauty works to the great disadvantage of those among us who respond to the visual arts, and obtain consolation from the creation and appreciation...

...The Jewish Community Cemetery in Wilmington is presently a semi-rural oasis abutting a well-trafficked road...

...Poring over this volume, she searched for a phrase that might sum up my father's life, or cast some insight into the way he had conducted it...

...The gravestones all have names and dates, the most minimal identification, in English and Hebrew, as if after two millenia the Jews of Wilmington still don't trust the Gentiles to maintain an accurate calendar...

...Those of us who look to the literature of the cemetery for the charm and the grace of a by-gone day know exactly where to go...

...And he did not labor in vain...

...There surely must be another meaning here, but what would it be...

...He also expressed his devotion to his Jewish people, and his prayers for the continued well-being...

...Paying a visit to a parent means visiting the graves of the parents of friends, and being flooded with memories of childhood and growing up...

...The Jews of Wilmington retain their devotion to the Davidian shield in its neat little circle, the Shofar, and the Menorah, with as many arms as Shiva...

...My father had come to Wilmington at the age of 44, after many years of restless and unsettled living...

...Children...

...And they are carefully categorized in terms of family role and straightness of character...

...When my father died, two years ago tomorrow, he left in his desk a single page which attempted to tell his family how much he loved them, and how, through the course of his 76 years, he had struggled to live by an ethical code which he held dear...

...lr is no longer even a good place to polish off a solitary brown bag lunch...

...Naomi Bluestone is Coordinator of Community Health...

...It is probably one more manifestation of the ignorance into which most have fallen, for they could all open the liturgy at random and find appropriate encomiums, were they more familiar with their own heritage...

...S., and Mrs...

...and the main thing—to live together in peace, to bear no hatred one for another, to help one another in bad times, to remember one another upon occasion in the family, to have pity on the poor man...

...Never do I read a fairly traditional Christian memento mori but I wonder, "Could a Jew have written this...

...Residency Program in Social Medicine, Montefiore Hospital, in the Bronx...

...I visit M's father, and send her a note in California to tell her that I have done so...

...Calling upon a friend or relative does not resemble being lost in a huge apartment complex, in which one trudges down corridor after corridor, looking for apartment 4-B . . . only to discover that one is in the wrong building and the occupant of this apartment 4-B is an Hispanic woman with four children peeking through the door...

...People who bury their dead in white shrouds and plain pine boxes, with what strikes those of another culture as unseemly haste, may not reasonably be expected to embellish the scene of the interment...

...To the community programs he developed, the Day Camp for the children, the Hebrew Speaking Circle (the oldest continuous group of its kind sponsored by a Jewish community center in the country...

...Teach thou, those, Oh God, by whom this perishing memorial of their child is erected, to feel and say, with unfeigned sincerity and resignation, that the Lord gives and the Lord hath taken away...

...She began a prefetory series of rumblings vaguely rationalizing her discontent along lines of certain folk wisdoms, among them, "Life belongs to the living...

...We might also profit from a closer look at the cemetery itself...

...He requested a simple grave marker, bearing only his name and dates of birth and death...

...Cherished Mother...

...There are few exceptions to the bland rule...

...But on the other hand, who could fail to shed an empathic tear for the contemporary mourners at the graveside of a young Huguenot boy, felled one and a half centuries ago at the age of 17 in St...

...I believe this is something for us to think about...

...It is quite unlike the smashed and tangled cemeteries of the large cities, where people lie the way they lived, on top of each other...

...This is a great loss, not only for Gentiles, but for Jews who have prided themselves for centuries upon being the people of the book, the nation of words, the source of profound wisdoms and consolation for the oppressed...

...My father had been writing a history of the Jewish community in Delaware, a labor of love to fill the hours of his retirement and to give creative expression to his meticulous historical instincts...

...The more we pondered, the more elusive appeared the latter portion of the inscription...

...Nevertheless, art students in pursuit of grave rubbings know better than to approach a cemetery of eschewers of the graven image...

...Matza po miklat," he carved, ("He found refuge here"), "v'lo amal larik" ("And he did not labor in vain...

...In extreme cases, it has become another humble victim of inner city deterioration...

...To what was she referring...

...Saddest of all, he had worked knowing that his audience was limited, and by and large uncaring...

...I pass quickly by old Mrs...

...Adored Son...

...their personhood...

...The reason probably deals more with the general atrophy of sensibility which has attended our mechanized society, and our paretic ability to communicate with ourselves, our dead, and each other...

...Both the dead and those left behind should have the opportunity to make a statement, one final statement, one last attempt at summation and closure, whatever form that might take...

...as many of us do when we serve a community that has no beginning and no end...

...Is this reflective of the Jewish attitudes towards death...

...It seemed unlikely...

...It came as no surprise, but a comfort, nevertheless...

...Absent here are grinning death heads, infant cherubs, weeping vegetation, and funerary urns...

...Many of these documents became justly famous, such as these closing words from the last will and testament of the Yiddish writer, Sholom Aleichem: "My last wish to my successors and my prayers to my children: To protect mama, to beautify her old age, to make her bitter life sweet, to heal her broken heart...

...Or consider these, the final words of a nineteenth century servant of her people: "I, Rebecca Gratz, of Philadelphia, being in sound health of body and mind, advanced in the vale of years, declare this to be my last will and testament...