Remembering

Today marks one year since my father's death. One of his common expressions, especially in the last couple of years of his life, was "I just can't wrap my mind around it" (being 89, being in the nursing home, whatever it was). And that is how I feel--I just can't wrap my mind around the fact that he is gone.

I am holding onto a lot of feelings about it--and many of them do not have to do with acceptance. I would like to have some acceptance about all of it: that he is gone, that it was not great for him at the end, that I/we tried to make it better but there was not much we could do.

I wanted to observe the anniversary in some way, maybe go to services, but I am away on a business trip. I thought about trying to find a synagogue in this unknown city, but in the end it seemed too daunting and I was too tired after a day of going to sessions and talking to people.

At the hotel bar a couple of hours ago, where I went just to have something to eat, really, before a reception that I was planning to go to, I got into a conversation with a very polite German man sitting next to me, who was also at the conference as a publisher. We chatted for a bit, and then he asked me, "So, do you have a family?" (He had already mentioned his wife and children.)

"Well," I said, pausing, "not one of my own." He nodded. "I have an older sister. And," I said, swallowing a bit, "my father, my father died just a year ago. Today is the anniversary." The German guy just took it in--he looked a bit uncomfortable that I was telling him this, but not too, maybe more concerned or uncertain, not sure how to react. So then I just said, "He was 89. I had him till he was 89," and then I went on to telling him about the rest of my family, my sister, my niece and nephew, my darling greatnephew, and my brother.  And I thought, at least I told someone about this, about what today is.

The German guy finished his drink, I finished my meal, and then we both said we would see each other  at the reception. At the reception, I got a glass of white wine and circled the room a few times, but the one other person that I knew at the conference and that I thought I might see was not there. Then the German guy found me and we talked a bit more. Then he had to go to a meeting, and we shook hands again, and he said again how nice it was to talk to me, and that he'd see me tomorrow. I said that I would find him and say good-bye, since I am leaving tomorrow.

So that was a sort of nice, comforting interaction--and another nice thing that happened is that when I checked my cell phone at some point tonight there was a message from one of my friends in Brooklyn, one of the volleyball crowd whom I've never even had a phone call before from. But she said she was thinking about me, and my move, and hoping I was doing okay. So that made me feel looked after.

Everything is so different these days--I am at a conference but not working for the publisher I used to work for. And not going back to the city I used to live in. I found myself absently thinking earlier about the little bars of soap I was going to take home from the hotel, but I was picturing myself putting them away in my old apartment in Brooklyn. Strange. But it's all okay, I think.

In Transit

This past weekend I went "home," that is, back to NewYork City, for the first time since moving to Western New York State six or seven weeks ago. I stayed with my sister, which was fun, and I saw my nephew and my brother, and all of that was very comforting. And, my sister and I got to see Barbara Streisand perform in a concert that was heralded as "Back to Brooklyn"--kind of in tune with how I was feeing. It was a phenomenal concert--Streisand was feisty and strong and sounded glorious. And it was fitting that I was there with my sister, since my attachment to Streisand's music comes from hearing my sister listen to it when I was very young. 

It was a little hard to leave, but I had a couple of quintessential New York encounters to carry back with me. The best was perhaps as I was waiting on line to get through security at the airport (where I live now, this takes about 2 and a half minutes--at JFK, a long, drawn-out process, which followed the long, drawn-out ride to the airport in a taxi, with some extra suspense about whether I was going to make it to the airport on time, this time not because I left late but because of a Fire Department ceremony that was blocking traffic on the street my cab driver chose to take to get on the Belt Parkway. Which meant that we had to circle back through traffic in the direction we came to take the entrance that was the closest to my sister's place, which we should have taken in the first place--a half hour lost).

Anyway, I made it to the airport, waited on the long line to get through security, feeling frazzled and wondering somewhat grimly if I was really going to make the plane. Finally, I got up to the agent who was checking people's IDs and boarding passes. He had the usual bored and jaded look as he scribbled those unintelligible marks on my boarding pass, but then he slipped me the casual question, the way the customs agents sometimes do. "Where are you traveling to?" "Upstate City," I answered quickly. But then I wondered, had I answered quickly enough? So I embellished, just to drive home the point that I really did know what my ticket said on it and was actually going there. "My new home," I said. I must have said it with just a touch of resignation, or irony, or can-you-believe-it tone. At any rate, it got the unanswerable, Yiddish-inflected New York response from the agent: "Better you than me." 

That made me very happy somehow.