Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer(101)
“And let’s ditch the monogrammed yarmulkes, too.”
“Why?” Julia asked, hurt as only someone who had spent six hours choosing a font, palette, and material for monogrammed yarmulkes could be.
“They’re decorative,” Sam said.
“OK,” Jacob said, “maybe they’d be a bit gauche, considering.”
“Gauche they are not,” Julia said.
“The problem—” Tamir began, again.
“And it probably goes without saying,” Sam said, as he always did when he was about to say something that did not go without saying, “that we’re not going to have party favors.”
“I’m sorry, I have to draw a line,” Julia said.
“I actually think he’s right,” Jacob said.
“You do?” Julia said. “Actually?”
“I do,” Jacob said, not liking that mimicked actually, actually. “Party favors imply a party.”
“The problem—”
“Of course they don’t.”
“Party favor, Julia.”
“They imply a social convention, the lack of whose fulfillment would imply extreme rudeness. Jacob.”
“Social convention at the conclusion of a party.”
“So we punish his friends for plate tectonics and the death of Sam’s great-grandfather?”
“Punishing thirteen-year-old children is encumbering them with garbage bags full of tourist tchotchkes from places Sam’s distant and uncared-about relatives live and calling it a favor.”
“You imply an *,” Julia said.
“Whoa,” Barak said.
Where had he come from?
“Excuse me?” Jacob said, exactly as Julia would have.
“I’m not chanting Torah,” Julia said. “We know what these words mean.”
“What’s gotten into you?”
“It was always there.”
The television filled with tiny flashes, like fireflies trapped in a jar.
“The problem,” Tamir said, standing up, “is that you don’t have nearly enough problems.”
“Can I state the obvious?” Sam asked.
“No,” his parents said simultaneously—a rare unity.
There was a woman on TV, of unknown ethnicity or nationality, pulling at her hair as she wailed, pulling with enough force to yank her head left and right. There was no ticker across the bottom of the screen. There was no commentary. There was no cause offered for her suffering. There was only the suffering. Only the woman, her hair gathered in the fists she beat against her chest.
ABSORB OR ABSOLVE
When Isaac should have been well into his decomposition in the ground, he was still maintaining freshness in a human crisper in Bethesda. Only for Isaac could the end of misery be the extension of misery. His final wish—made known both in his will and in far too many conversations with Irv, Jacob, and whoever else might be entrusted with the task—was to be buried in Israel.
“But why?” Jacob had asked.
“Because that’s where Jews go.”
“On Christmas break. Not for eternity.”
And when Sam, who was along for the visit, pointed out that he would get far fewer visitors over there, Isaac pointed out that “the dead are dead” and visits are the last things on their brain-dead minds.
“You don’t want to be buried with Grandma and the rest of the family?” Jacob asked.
“We’ll all meet when the moment is right.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Jacob didn’t ask, because there are times when meaning itself means very little. A dying wish is such a time. Isaac had arranged the plot two decades before—it was expensive even then, but he didn’t mind being grave-poor—so all that was required in order to fulfill his last and most lasting wish was to get his body on a plane and work out the logistics on the other side.
But when the time came to drop Isaac’s body in the mailbox, the logistics were impossible: all flights were grounded, and when the airspace reopened, the only bodies the country allowed in were of those prepared to die.
Once the ritually mandated window for a burial-in-one-day had passed, there was no great rush to figure out a solution. But that’s not to say that the family was indifferent to Jewish ritual. Someone had to be with the body at all times between death and burial. The synagogue had a crew for this, but as the days passed, enthusiasm for babysitting the cadaver waned, and more and more responsibility fell to the Blochs. And that responsibility had to be negotiated with the responsibility of hospitably hosting the Israelis: Irv could take them to Georgetown while Jacob sat with Isaac’s body, and then in the afternoon Jacob could take them to the Air and Space Museum to see To Fly! on the perspective-swallowing IMAX while Deborah had the exact opposite experience with Isaac’s body. The patriarch with whom they begrudgingly skyped for seven minutes once a week was now someone they visited daily. By some uniquely Jewish magic, the transition from living to dead transformed the perpetually ignored into the never to be forgotten.
Jacob accepted the brunt of the responsibility, because he considered himself the most able to do so, and because he most strongly wanted to escape other responsibilities. He sat shmira—an expression he’d never heard before he became a choreographer of shmira sitters—at least once a day, usually for several hours at a time. For the first three days, the body was kept on a table, under a sheet, at the Jewish burial home. Then it was moved to a secondary space in the back, and finally, at the end of the week, to Bethesda, where unburied bodies go to die. Jacob never got any closer than ten feet, and dialed the podcasts to hearing-impairing volumes, and tried not to inhale through his nose. He brought books, went through e-mail (he had to stand on the other side of the door to get cell reception), even got some writing done: HOW TO PLAY DISTRACTION; HOW TO PLAY GHOSTS; HOW TO PLAY INCOMMUNICABLE, FELT MEMORIES.