Yizkor
Stein, Toby
YIZKOR TOBY STEIN Wishing to remain untouched by death, people leave. (Haven't they, I wonder, ever lost a friend to death? Or known— I would count it— the death of a life-giving...
...This life-carrier has given birth only to words...
...In one homing moment, the room fills up again, crowded as for Kol Nidrei...
...To stir my guarded heart...
...But not this day when they enfold me with their pride in my printed (and imprinted) progeny, in my age-proof search for the pregnant word...
...I sometimes think that choice a sin against the two who gave me life...
...Their life beating in me, confident of continuity...
...Life without them— to look back on to look to to look forward to— merely unthinkable...
...They stayed long enough to teach me love...
...It took me years to know it wasn't just to prove me wrong...
...He who hasn't hugged me to laughter since I was nine...
...She who hasn't teased me since, twice nine, I thought myself quite grown up: capable, at any moment, of being on my own...
...They teach me still...
...Our dead have filled in the empty spaces...
...She wanted, I think, too much...
...They died much too young...
...My mother was smart in her two suits, and in three languages...
...Or known— I would count it— the death of a life-giving friendship...
...I feel their warmth, my dearest dust {that warmth, I'd know it anywhere), and tremble to apprehend that they, sixty-five years dead between them, have warmth enough to spare...
...Them: alive...
...She claimed it was everything...
...I feel more...
...I was—much—too young...
...The Yizkor prayers liquify before my eyes...
...Bested by reality again and again, to the end he remained besotted with optimism...
...it is part joy: if I cannot remember them without remembering their deaths, no more can I recall their deaths without remembering them...
...A week later she died...
...It was on a sticky night in mid-July, standing on the Seventh Avenue station of the Independent line that I, brash as an incoming train, told her how grown-up I was...
...There were times howling would have been more appropriate, but he didn't have that knack...
...Mindless blood...
...For—dear—life, I listen...
...and his hands, too, made things astonishing as noonday leaves...
...But behind her splendid front, she struggled vainly with equations she couldn't master...
...Shriven of last year's sins— bared, spared— willing, wanting, bursting to start fresh, I dare to hear them as they whisper of endurance, a giving heart, and hope and hope and hope...
...Against all my dead Jews...
...My father had a smile like God's...
...I feel their deaths— their dying— repeating in this broken moment, the forever-present leaving, the grief-taking fresh as unstemmed blood...
...But my sadness isn't whole...
...Life without them was at first, is now and then, next to unbearable...
...At the end, truth to tell, she had little more than me...
...She got, I know, little enough...
...I feel more...
...Yet there was, between us, overlap enough...
...The sanctuary is startlingly empty...
...In the stillness after Kaddish, I risk it: I listen...
...We who are left begin...
...I don't know which was more elegant, her mind or her carriage...
...The habit of smiling was strong in him...
...Mine stand to either side of me, close as breath...
Vol. 8 • January 1983 • No. 2
