Yahrzeit

This is such a strange week now, Memorial Day weekend and the week that follows. It was always closed linked to my father, whose birthday was May 30, and who was told as a little boy by his own father that the parade every year was for him. (Aw.) He would tell us that he remembered seeing the Civil War veterans marching, all with white beards. (This would have been in the early 1920s.) Memorial Day was Jack's birthday.

Then it wasn't always, of course, when it became a Monday holiday. Six years ago, my mother died on Memorial Day Sunday, so to speak, the day before Memorial Day, which was today's date, May 26. Technically, then, this is not her yahrzeit because it's not the same day on the Hebrew calender, but I think she'd understand.

We couldn't have the funeral the next day, as is the custom, because it was Memorial Day and the gravediggers don't work holidays. And we needed a day for my cousin to fly in from Colorado, so we scheduled it for Wednesday, the 29th. Less than an hour after we got home from the funeral, my cousin got a call from her son that his wife was in early labor with their twins, so she flew right out to San Francisco to be with them.

The twins -- a boy and a girl -- were born just after midnight, on Jack's 83rd birthday, less than a week after my mother died. As if that wasn't excitement enough, that night was K's senior prom, which she only agreed to go to because it was really the last thing Shirl took interest in that last week of her life, and she had been very interested in all the details of the dress, the date, the shore trip for the next day. So there was a prom. A death, a double birth, a birthday that would turn out to be father's last, and a prom.

That's a lot to remember for one week.


WATCHING FRASIER :: ENTRY #1763