Memory

A very dear friend's mom died this week and tomorrow I'll be going to the funeral. Which is going to be at the chapel where we held services for my mom. Then his mother will be buried in the same cemetery where my mother is. Because we are Jewish, and this is how we do funerals. That's what I tell myself, that this is just circumstance. But nevertheless I have spent the day crying intermittently.

The connection I feel to the Jewish community is a strange one. It is not constantly positive. But it is constant. Sometimes it kind of feels inescapable.

Culture is often presented as something we can choose. I can choose to like the music I do, I can (sometimes) choose the company I keep.

But to be insufferably cliched: In matters of life and death, I realize I haven't got the privilege of choice with respect to my Judaism.

It wasn't a choice. For as long as I can remember I have been a Jew. I imagine myself sliding into the world, covered in afterbirth, with two proof positives: That I belonged to my mother, and that I, because of her, was Jewish. If I chose at all, it was in the way that my lungs 'chose' air over the alternative.

I looked up the funeral services for my friends mother on the website of Benjamin's Park Memorial Chapel. Noting that in the 6 years since my mom died they had replaced the highly irritating animated gif of a Star of David with a much better design.

I did a search on their new search engine out of a sense of professional experimentation more than anything else and then was surprised to discover that there she was, my mother, the date of death, her funeral, and her location in the cemetery where, quite literally, almost all the Jews presently alive in Toronto will buried.

Then I thought to myself, "Oh good, I'll stop by on my way home." And then in the next instant I felt so fucking sad for myself, and for my friend who the newest member of this stupid club I made up in my head, of people who have developed a strong relationship to a headstone in lieu of a parent.

What makes a culture inescapable is proximity, and memory. So yeah, I guess if I had stayed in Montreal forever I would have eventually been able to say I had stopped practicing, stopped being as culturally Jewish as I was.

But, I decided to come home, and that has included returning to not only a specific culture, but the specific events, and people, and lacks of people, and losses expressed ritualistically, in a religion that even if I ceased to believe would still inhabit my life and my memories.

I am like my friend today, his pain is not only similar to mine, it feels like it must be mine. Because the day he will have tomorrow, at least in it's outer trappings, in the what we do, where we go, what we eat and who is invited, will be so similar to the day I had 6 years ago.

Fuck, he knows, because he was there for me. And I still remember when we ended up at the bar not one block from my mom's old apartment because all I could that night was just keep being with my friends. I don't remember a lot from that week, but I remember being at that bar, and I remember his presence, at the service, at the cemetery, at the Shiva, and finally after hours and hours had passed, at the bar.

But that's the thing about Judaism, that is the whole point of these rituals, and connections, inescapable places; cemeteries, synagogues. They create empathy, make it easier to step into the shoes of someone you love, and hopefully by sharing in their experience, share some of the burden of loss.

I guess that what a culture is, an architecture for empathy.

I just hope tomorrow I can be there for him, like he was for me, and that I am strong enough.