Grief

Im four years old and my pet goldfish are both belly-up, their copper
bodies bloated and still, like clockwork toys without their motors. On
the same shelf sits the watercolor magnum opus, abandoned in favor
of a village of plastic zebras. A diary with a crooked lock. Broken music
box. My great-grandmothers silver Siddur inlaid with turquoise stones.
The pages flake like onionskin. Stack of half-finished bedtime books.
Small colonies of postcards I cant read yet and scraps of paper, gently
stirred by Lake breeze from open window. Cup of lavender on the sill
wards against the evil eye and invites sweet dreams. An affinity for the
world in miniature reveals a curious, but orderly mind.
Mommy, Ned and Ned are dead.
Frantic half-baked explanation. Resentment spreads and burns
like mustard gas. I knew it was a bad idea when you brought them
home. An experiment in responsibility, one of those teachable
moments gone horribly, embarrassingly awry. An argument to
determine who is liable for this small, everyday heartbreak leads to no
satisfying conclusion. Grief, not for two dead carnival fish, but for what
I, at age four, would now necessarily understand about life. That
everything and anyone I would ever love will one day die. That this is
the cost of loving things. And people. I feel a hand on my shoulder. I
can no longer see the antique rose wallpaper of the small bathroom.
No I insist. I want to watch. Heavy, horrified silence.

I even empty the tank into the porcelain bowl, looking down with cold
child-wonder. I remember very little about their funeral. I know their
eyes were open.

Cyclical river borne down to where the sun dont shine, so to speak.
Spiral pressure builds and plunges below where brindled copper
branches that, city underneath city, bringing infrastructure. Topsoil was
overturned years agothe sacred sites of the Ho-Chunk and Miamia,
Shawnee and Illini go disturbed and unquiet. They dug trenches to
discard the bones of smelt, rainbow trout and Chinook salmon and
other human waste. Their arrowheads and pottery line the silt banks of
the Chicago River. They understood the Earth. When land was
savaged, water stood, battering coasts carved by glaciers and
northern storms. Ecosystems, burial ground of consumer guilt and filth,
blooms and brews fertile, fecund northern goddess, silent Lady with
her pregnant, purple clouds drawn back. Even for an atheist, this
scene seems proof enough of God.

Sacre-bleu! Cette ciboire, quoi ny pas

My grandmother by marriage on my mothers side grinds coffee beans
in the polished wooden and cast iron cog beneath the doublereinforced New England storm window. My mothers father is swearing

in Qubcois at the riding mower. He is slender and ambiguously

Anglo-European, excepting skin like leather, a broad nose and telltale
surname. Tremblay.
From my perch on the kitchen counter, refinished by hand in the
early seventies when they were newly married, I catch the string of
arcane, provincial French. Cuss words float like lake breeze through the
open window.
Don, my grandmother scolds. Her thick Cambridge accent make
the vowels come out round. Dawn, like the soap. She has skin like rice
paper, folded over French and Irish bones, Northeastern patience and a
willful disinterest in progress. They say her people came from the same
reservation in Trois Rivieres, but obviously there is no documentation
to support this. Only stories of Canadian frontier women living in handbuilt log cabins, smoking corn pipes. Her censure is merited. I am still
young enough to remember I understand French.
This is the housebalanced on the hill overlooking Moon Lake
and Arlington cemetery, where my aunts aunts and all their New
England progeny are buriedmy maternal grandparents swear they
will die in. They have said as much into the wall-mounted corded
phone that sits next to the glass-front cabinet full of thick books on the
art of embalmment, arboreal guides to flora of the Northeast, a printed
tour of the stained glass windows of Bostons churches. The jar of
bacon grease and the pack of Marboros are not reassuring. Maize,

steak and potato people. Season break on this house like water on
rocks. Salt air makes the paint peel. Purple nightshade grows up the
lamppost and devils apple along the fence. We have no reason to
doubt that they are right.

The official Handbook of Childhood Death and Bereavement suggests,

as do most pre-90s psychological treatises on death and dying as seen
through the eyes of the young, that American children are
exceptionally ill equipped to deal with finalities.1 That is to say, death.
The famed Swiss clinical psychologist, Jean Piaget, over round
owl-glasses and a discerning, white mustache, perceived that there
were, are, several discreet milestones a child achieves on the path to
understanding this concept. Their names are clinical and reveal
nothing about their intentions. They are better understood as
conceptual categories; permanence, finality, causality, inevitability,
and age.
These post-Freudian clinical psychologists of the mid-to-late 20th
century still heavily subscribed to notions of separation of the
hemispheres. That there existed, and had always existed, a first, a
second, and a third world whose orbitals of knowledge could not
possibly intersect with one another. That in a time when babies died of
1 Corr, Charles A., and Donna M. Corr. Handbook of Childhood Death and
Bereavement, 46. (New York, NY: Springer Pub.), 1996. Print.

hunger and war in Africa and the Middle East and the leader of the free
world couldnt seem to keep his dick out of the news clippings, there
were still distinct and disparate ways of thinking about humanity. In
short, they believed in the legitimacy of cross-cultural comparison as a
way to expose difference.2
In 1989, Schonfeld and Smilansky determined that Israeli
children had a better understanding of the irreversibility and finality of
death than did American children.3 The key to manifesting this
sophisticated understanding, they said, was through exposure.

His daughter Andrea found him in the morning in his La Z Boy with
the geometric pattern of mustard and olive and tomato with his eyes
open. There was no more talk of getting a dog. The classical acoustic
guitar, received in lieu of an accountants fee, was given to my sister.
He was the younger of the first American-born generation. Their
parents, my great-grandparents, had walked across war-torn Eastern
Europe so that their children would never wake in the middle of the
night to the sound of breaking glass. They were among hundreds of
thousands to leave, for the first time since Isabel and Ferdinand, their

2 Mahon, MM, EZ Goldberg, and SK Washington. Concept of Death In A

Sample of Israeli Kibbutz Children. Death Studies, 23.1 (1999): 43-59, 17p.
3 Corr, 46.

rural German, Polish and Russian shtetls. Extended families led each
other in exodus, following one after the other like frightened ducklings
as shops and homes were vandalized, men beaten in the streets and
the only empires keeping us tenuously alive collapsed completely.
Not to say that once in America we were not confined to a new
kind of ghetto, the kind without patrolled borders and unspoken rather
than enforced standards of public dress. The old women, unsmiling in
their somber headscarves and discounted furs attended Synagogue
down the street from the old men in flat, brimmed pilgrim hats and
braided beards. Except for the children, who had been forced to learn it
in school, nobody knew English. This is what we were reminded of then
our roots. Lines of loss as ancient and as salient as the Dead Sea.
We cook our grief. More specifically, Jewish women translate grief
into the laborlove of cooking. The family consumes grief in the form of
braided challah spread with honey and chrain, a red horseradish and
beet relish. The first sit-down course, matzo ball soup, will simmer for
two days prior, allowing the fat to rise. We make it for our children
when they come home stuffed with fever and phlegm. We make if for
ourselves when we need to remember what it feels like to be that
child.
At the center of the table sits the prize brisket, the responsibility
of the oldest woman, or the grandmother to the greatest number of
attendees. Flanked by platters of kishke, or fried chicken skins dipped

in matzo meal and spices and boiled like a sausage, pickled herring, a
heaping sweet-noodle kugul, couscous with vegetables and long grain
Persian rice. Vodka cocktails served with more pickled fish, pickled
onion, picked eggs, pickled pickles. For desert, sweet kosher wine and
poppy seed pastries stuffed with cream cheese, wafer thin cinnamon
cookies (white sugar was too dear) and mandelbrod dotted with black
and golden raisins.
When the Rabbi arrives we arrange ourselves in the living room
and share memories of the deceased. A pot of strong tea and another
tray of sweets is passed around, to ensure the sweetness of our
tongues.