A Eulogy For My Grief

My first audio reading of a post, which will be an ongoing feature.

At my grandfather’s funeral in 1992, I saw my mother’s face dissolve for an instant into grief. My memory is of no sound, no tears. Only an image of her face transformed for a moment into a tragic mask like the ones worn by ancient Greek actors.

My mother and I were looking at one another when it happened. Perhaps the sight of me made her release the grief she had been containing. She would have been sad for me, and my own sadness could have been the proverbial straw. Or maybe now that she was without parents, she felt more keenly responsible for me, and that overwhelmed her. Or maybe she cut short her expression so I wouldn’t see her grief and become sadder myself. Because grief can be infectious.

As quickly as the mask came, it left. I wonder if the nearly subliminal nature of my mother’s tragic mask gave it the power to lodge in my memory for decades, and to come back to me with great power this very week, this very last week of the year.

My mother died a few years ago, right at the beginning of Covid. It’s taken a while, but what I’ve come to understand is that the death of my mother was a second death of my grandfather. While she was alive, he was in some ways still alive to me.

Small matters of their joint presence

As a little girl, my mother lived in Wichita where my grandfather was an oil wildcatter. So they shared a Kansas twang for certain words like saying “warsh” for wash.

When we’d travel to Palm Beach at the end of the year to see my grandfather, he had a consistent litany of initial questions for us about our journey and our arrival at the hotel: Was the hotel crowded? How were our rooms?

But he reserved his greatest curiosity for the degree to which our flight was crowded. Remembering his curiosity, I now wonder whether he was looking for a data point on the health of the economy or of the airline industry. Indeed, it would have been marvelous to have seen him receive the answer of “very crowded,” and then pick up the phone to his broker and command the purchase of a quantity of Delta Airlines shares.

After my grandfather died, we continued to make that same year-end trip to that same hotel, and on arrival I’d call my mother who had remained in New York–––she despised travel. She’d usually ask me the very same questions. And if she didn’t, I’d supply the information anyway.

I didn’t realize it then, but these small things, like “warsh” and the litany of questions, were important to me. They added up to a sense that when I was with my mother, I was with my grandfather as well.

Matters of money and manners

My grandfather had a complex relationship with money. He had made a lot of it, first through oil and then through investing in the stock market. He was fearful that his children and grandchildren would squander his fortune after he was gone, and he didn’t hide his fear. He would watch over all of our accounts, and if we spent too freely or invested unwisely, he’d lecture us.

My mother told me that she had a guilty sense of relief when my grandfather died, relief that she could now spend her money as she pleased. For the most part, she did, but every now and then, some financial event would trigger in her an unhinged expression of my grandfather’s (Jewish) Puritan ethic.

Long after my grandfather was gone, the private bank where our family was a client made a relatively small error on one of our accounts. My mother expressed her rage so forcefully that we were asked to take our business elsewhere. That rage was my grandfather living inside of her, telling her that carelessness with money could someday make her destitute.

My grandfather had a sense of wonder and pride at the fortune he had made and the respect it brought him. He was especially proud that he was welcomed into both the old WASP and newer Jewish communities in Palm Beach.

I remember being with my grandfather and his friend Paul Ilyinsky, then mayor of Palm Beach. More importantly to my grandfather, Paul was a real Romanov–– great-grandson to Tsar Alexander II and the son of Grand Duke Dmitri who was supposedly one of the aristocrats who murdered Rasputin.

“Spinning in his grave” was Mayor Ilynsky’s jovial answer to my grandfather’s jovial question of what his father Grand Duke Dmitri would do if he knew his son Paul was socializing with his good friend, Nate Appleman, a Jew.

My mother had that same sense of wonder and respect for old money. She was addicted to the British royal family and was more excited than I was when I spent a weekend at one of the Kennedy homes in the Hamptons, awaiting my report on how the “real rich” live.

My grandfather and grandmother both came from “good” families and had impeccable and gracious manners. This too, my mother inherited, provided she could keep her temper in check. She once sent her driver to hand deliver a note to my wife and me asking us why one of our children had neglected to send a thank you note. The note scolding us about the missing note has become a family legend.

The timing of my memory of my mother’s tragic face

It makes sense that it is now, the last week of this year, that the image of my mother’s brief but tragic expression of grief comes to my mind. This is the week we’d always be in Palm Beach, which for me is my grandfather’s spiritual home. When we’re there, I think about the ghosts of former versions of my parents, my brothers, my wife, my children, and myself.  But most of all I think of my grandfather.

I think of an evening at dusk when I was twenty years old walking along the sea wall to visit my grandfather. I was wearing what I considered to be a glamorous white blazer. I remember being happy and leaning with great expectation into my visit with him, and into my future.

But this year we didn’t go to Palm Beach, breaking a nearly fifty-year streak. That feels to me like the final severing of a connection, which may be a decent definition of this stage of my grief.

Writing this post has been a eulogy for who and what is gone from my life. Also, an acceptance of the responsibility to my own family to choose which traditions and traits to carry on from my grandfather and mother. It’s on me now.

When my grandfather died, I believe my mother felt a fearsome burden of that responsibility, especially since my grandfather had loomed so large in her life. I believe there was a real sense of terror in her tragic expression at the funeral.

It took my mother a long time, perhaps a decade, until she could comfortably inhabit the role of matriarch and all that came with it. But when she became comfortable with her role, she did it so very well.

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I’m a grandfather now too. And when I see my grandson Max I feel many things. Delight above all. A sense of wonder as he acquires new skills like the dexterity to remove my glasses and my hat, which makes us both laugh.

I was with Max this week. His presence, particularly during this year end, brought forth, along with the delight, my generational memories and my generational grief. And along with that sadness, a touch of my own terror of being in a patriarchal role.

I end with a picture of Max, a powerful counterweight to grief and a sense of abiding hope in the future.