My Aunt

We interred my aunt’s ashes this morning. It was a winter day in southern Florida—cool and grey and threatening rain for most of the morning. The mausoleum was filled with Baums and Shapiros and Leibowitzes and Friedlanders, with Stars of David carved into marble above each name. Most of the people there were of my Aunt’s generation, born in the early 1930s. Some were a bit older; some were a bit younger. There was one couple—siblings or spouses, I couldn’t tell—who had died recently at 27 and 33. But they were the exception. Most of the people who had come to their final rest here had lived long lives. I had not really thought about the relentless in-gathering of my parents' generation when three uncles had died over the past few years. For two of them, I had not been present at the funeral, and for the third, it had been an actual graveside service—a lone hole in the ground, a singular story: his thing alone. In the mausoleum, though, we were not alone. My aunt was with her people—her husband, interred in the alcove next to hers, and her more distant kinfolk in rows and columns all around her. You could see the blank spaces getting filled in.

My cousins and I were quiet and serious. We read the Kaddish. We told or listened to stories. We tried not to think or talk about COVID. We tried not to think or talk about our missing cousin—the youngest of my aunt’s three boys, who had died of cancer just a handful of weeks earlier.

And then, because the dignity of death is a lie, a handyman stepped forward, climbed a stepstool, and sealed my aunt’s remains inside a cinder-block alcove with a putty gun that whirred pragmatically in the silence.

My closest cousin got teary talking about growing up down the block from our aunt, receiving nothing but love and warmth and support from her. I did not have any ready memories or stories. I did not grow up down the block. I did not hang out with them.  And those cousins—her sons—were all much older than I. Enough older that it mattered when I was a kid.  

My closest cousin’s mother was there—the only representative from that generation and the last of the women, my mother having died some 22 years ago. I could see her shaking as her son told his stories, reaching for one tissue after another. The sole survivor in the room with us.

The actual sole survivor, though, was my father, the baby of the family. Not the actual youngest, but the youngest to have survived to adulthood. He was three thousand miles away. He had asked his doctor if it was safe for him to make the trip, and his doctor had laughed at him. You? he said. You, with the weak lungs from years of smoking? You, with COVID rampaging all over the country? You? Go to FLORIDA?

We regrouped back at my closest cousin’s lovely house on the Intercoastal Waterway. We watched the rain finally come pouring down, and we ate cold cuts, and we looked at pictures. Later, we held a Zoom call to include the other cousins, who had not been able to make the trip, and to give my father a chance to read a eulogy for his sister.

In my father’s family, the first child was called by his actual name, but the son who followed was forever Buddy, and the daughter who came next was Sister, or Cissie. Anyone who came after, like my father, got names. I have no idea why it worked like that, but I was a teenager before I realized that Buddy and Cissie were not what their birth certificates said.

My Aunt Cissie was painfully thin, and she ate like a bird and smoked like a chimney and loved her vodka. She had blonde or red hair right up until the last time I saw her, this past Thanksgiving, when grey hair and frailty had transformed her so uncannily into the image of her mother that my father (who had been allowed to make that trip) was unnerved.

My aunt hosted enormous  holiday dinners at her house, which were always loud and raucous, and at which I often felt small and young and lost. She made Jell-O molds which I hated, with suspicious-looking pieces of fruit suspended inside. She made brisket which I loved, using a recipe that everyone in the family ended up adopting, and which my wife and I make to this day. It is Cissie’s Brisket, and it always will be.

My aunt and my mother talked almost every night when I was growing up. When dinner was over and the rest of us tramped upstairs to watch television, my mother would get on the kitchen phone—the wall-mounted phone with the extra-long cord, and she’d putter around, cleaning up and putting things away and then just sitting with a cigarette, talking about her day and my aunt’s day and…whatever else they talked about every night.

A part of me hopes they are talking together again in their heavenly kitchens.

I don’t really believe in that, but I wish I did.

The hosting of big, holiday dinners has long since shifted to my generation, though none of us live near each other and the getting-together is sporadic. But when it happens, it is joyful and gratifying in ways that I rarely felt was when I was small and the cousins were large and I had trouble finding my place. Now we are the big people, and the family-ness of us when we get together is powerful. When one of us laughs, we hear our own laughter—and our fathers’ laughter—in each other’s voices. It is something my own sons have talked about when my side of the family gets together. It makes them very happy. It is a thing my wife identified years ago as, “loud love.” 

It is loud and it is love, and it feeds my soul in places where I’ve forgotten I was hungry. It is better than a Jell-O mold, and even better than my aunt’s brisket. It is, I realize, precisely the thing my cousin talked about this morning, bequeathed to us by our parents and blooming in our own generation. It is a better inheritance than any other I could imagine.