It’s so hard to find your way around a cemetary. They’ll give you a map at the front entrance, and if you’re savvy enough you can find a digitized map on your phone, but the urban planning is sort of a mess. It’s all footpaths and grassy areas and poorly marked streets. I guess since nobody is in a rush once they’re there, it’s never been a logistical issue. I hope that most of you are unfamiliar with this. I hope you spend very little time in your life navigating the winding ways of a vast burial site.
I saw my great-grandparents graves today, Max and Ida Sklar. They never met me, but they were fluent in Yiddish so I would have loved trying to get them to teach me how to say “fuck you” and “farts” in the language of my people. I never met them, but I owe my life to them. They fell in love and had kids and one of their kids was my grandpa and then he fell in love with my grandma and now I have to wear glasses and feel emotions and take out the trash. Two people fell in love in Prussia so many years ago and now I have to spend my life searching for something close. And searching for “turkey club sandwich near me.”
I’ve spent most of my logged cemetery hours in Jewish cemetaries. Which are especially hard to navigate because everyone has some iteration of the same 10 last names. This is top of mind because today was my grandma Renee’s unveiling. If you’re not Jewish, an unveiling is when you gather at a loved one’s grave site about a year after the funeral to “unveil” the headstone. If you’re Jewish, at least in my family, an unveiling is a time to gather at the grave site about a year after the funeral and then drive 18 minutes away to get pizza from King Umberto. There’s nothing explicitly Jewish about pizza but there’s something deeply Semitic about spending the same time at the grave as we did driving to the restaurant.
Today was my grandma’s unveiling and it was easy to find her headstone because it’s right off the main road. She’s in the sought after section of Montefiore. She’s in the Williamsburg in the sky. Jews don’t believe in heaven but I do, I think heaven is where everyone is walking just as fast as you on the sidewalk.
A year has passed since the funeral which means we have had time to deal with and understand and later compartmentalize our grief. We have found, over this year, pictures and scarves and buttons and jackets and letters that reminded us of the richness of grandma’s life. We found a picture of my grandma and grandpa from 1951 when they were so in love. They would have been a kissing couple I would roll my eyes at on the Subway.
In the maze of Montefiore, we set off to look for our other relatives. There are so many dead Jews buried in Queens. They are all named Shapiro and Cohen and they were all very loved, as it reads on their headstones. Some had big headstones and some smaller, some cleaned and some weathered. But there they all were. Packed in on a large lot of land remarkably close to the airport. My mom told me about a poem someone wrote about the “dash.” AKA, everything that happens between the year you’re born and the year you die is just a dash on granite at the end. Not your job, not your Instagram feed, not your body weight, certainly not your SAT score. Not even your Myers Briggs. “Here lies Rachel. She was always concerned with carrying weight in her mid section and she got a really high score on writing but the math score skewed it down. She worked for a tech company in Soho and stole all the organic tampons from the bathroom the day she was fired.”
Everything happens in your life, and then you’re just in the ground with a big rock over you so you can’t come out. And all that matters is that you leave a legacy strong enough so there will be people standing around the rock above you, and putting smaller rocks on it, to signify their love and care. You are your legacy. And your carbon footprint.
When we spread out, pacing around the cemetery looking for great-grandma Ida and great-grandpa Max, we called back and forth to each other. We found a number of Max and Idas who weren’t Sklars, and a bunch of Sklars who weren’t Max and Ida. It was a reminder that everyone has a grandma and grandpa and at some point they all end up (mostly) at the Old Montefiore cemetery in Queens. People need people. Barbra Streisand said that, and she’s right. All the people that fill your life become the inscriptions on your tombstone. Friend, Mother, Daughter, Husband. You need people to fill the gaps. You need people to come with you to the cemetery and find other people. Because in the end, everyone’s just under a rock. And unless you brought a Modern Minyan (a search party of more than 5 adults) you will never find them.
The best thing I ate this week:
Was pizza at King Umberto. The kind of slice that stands up on its own when you hold it. A sprinkle of red pepper flakes. Eaten in a banquet hall on Long Island between a sweet 16 and a surprise 70th birthday party. Washed down with a fountain ginger ale and followed by a one hour car ride back to Brooklyn.