Life Will Be the Death of Me: . . . and You Too!(16)

I wanted everyone to go inside. Not on the lawn. Not like this in front of all the neighbors.

    I bypassed all the hugging and went inside to look for Chet. If his car was in the driveway, it meant that he was home. I bet nobody even looked in his room. I walked into his room and could smell him. I looked in his closet and I smelled his flannel shirts. Then I called out his name, but it was like one of those dreams where no sound comes out. This can’t be happening. This can’t happen. Our family can’t take a hit like this.

I remember thinking there was no way my parents had budgeted for a funeral. The domino effect of Chet going off and letting himself die was going to be brutal.

How could he have let this happen?

Then there were the optics. Now everyone would know for sure our family was broken, because now our family really was broken. We were already skating on thin ice because my parents were known to be less than traditional and a little bit too lackadaisical. No other adults or parents seemed to take an interest in getting to know either of my parents, nor did any clear-thinking adult allow their children to spend time at our house, with such a lack of supervision. Now we had a dead brother because my parents let their son go hiking in the Grand Tetons and he had never hiked a mountain like that before. They were unfit, and now there was proof.

There were people in and out of our house all week. We sat shivah, which, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Jewish customs, is a week of mourning for the loss of a loved one—with a lot of deli meat.

People came over with deli platters and all sorts of food—smoked fish, cakes, pies, cookies—everything seemed so unappealing. There was a never-ending supply of corned beef and hot pastrami. Your thoughts become so miscellaneous. I remember looking at all these people I didn’t know who were in our house and trying to figure out the difference between corned beef and pastrami. They both seemed awful.

    I remember watching my father collapse on our sofa in front of our bay window, right in front of our next-door neighbors. My father was strong. He was a physically big man. I remember him heaving and sobbing and his shoulders crumpling, and I was desperate for him to stop. What is he doing? I couldn’t understand how he was letting people see him in that condition. I wanted my father to comfort me, but everyone was comforting him. He was emasculating himself. If he was losing it, then whatever we had left as a family was slipping away. We were unmoored.

Even though Chet was the leader of the kids, my dad was the leader of the family. He wore the pants, and you did what he said and he set the tone—and he was foundering. I looked at my dad’s best friend, Jay Gaidemak, and I remember thinking that I wanted him to be my father—maybe because he wasn’t crying. Maybe I was attracted to that. I don’t remember. We are now five, not six. We were over.

I remember our relatives looking with pity at my father. I hated that. They already thought we were misfits or vagabonds, and now this?

I liked attention, but I didn’t like this kind of attention. I didn’t want pity. It was weak. My father was being weak. I remember that the word “professional” kept popping into my brain—my father was being unprofessional. How on earth was I going to be able to restore any dignity to this family I was born into? Now we were outcasts and we were victims. I could deal with being outcasts because I had Chet. He was never an outcast. Everyone loved Chet. My dad was an outcast, and now he was acting like a victim. He was making victims out of all of us. I stared at him hard with my eyes. Stop this. You’re making a spectacle of us.



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The subject of buying a family plot came up. My dad wanted to buy other plots next to my brother so that he and my mother could be buried next to him. I remember my parents talking to our rabbi about having an open casket even though my brother’s body had been badly damaged and…something about his chest and forehead being caved in, and Jews didn’t typically have open-casket funerals, but my mother was demanding it.

“He’s my son, and I want to say goodbye to him,” she told the rabbi. I remember these words exactly because I had never seen my mom demand anything from anyone. My father looked at my mother when she said that, and I remember thinking he had never seen her demand anything either. For the first time in my life, in that moment, my mother was more in control than my father.

The rabbi was telling my father that in order to be buried in a Jewish cemetery, my mother would have to convert to Judaism. Wait, what? I thought my mom was Jewish—mostly because no one ever told me she wasn’t. During all of my brothers’ and sisters’ bar and bat mitzvahs, my mother would go up on the bimah and speak Hebrew just like all the other Jewish mothers did during everyone else’s bar and bat mitzvahs. She even went with my father and me to temple some Friday nights.

    Apparently, my mother was Mormon, and when she came over from Germany to marry my father, she agreed to raise their children Jewish. I had never heard the word “Mormon” before. I always thought that when my dad called my mom a “shiksa,” he was talking about her being German. I didn’t know that “shiksa” meant a non-Jew. Didn’t your mother have to be Jewish in order for you to be Jewish? Was I not Jewish either? More great news.



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There was a funeral, and all I remember were my brothers Glen and Roy taking turns holding me in their laps as we all sat and cried throughout the service. I remember thinking, Why say such a thing if you didn’t mean it? Why not be extra careful when you’re on a fucking mountain peak if you promised your littlest sister that you would spend the rest of the summer tipping her over in a sailboat? Why would you break that promise to her? I was livid.