Dear Companions,
My grandmother Fira passed away on February 12th, and, while the doctors say it was this, and that, I feel, in my heart, it was Covid that signed the final bill. I witnessed firsthand the dystopia that is the ICU these days, for the elderly especially, and the importance of an advocate, in this case, my mother, who resorted to legalese to pry her mother from the hospital in Massachusetts. On the penultimate night of my grandmother’s life, she was on a helicopter—a tour de force, headed to New York. The nurse onboard said our Fira was not afraid. The next time I saw Fira, she tried to communicate with me but I could not quite make it out. I think that I comforted her. I will never forget the feeling of rubbing her plump, soft hands.
I’m still in the room with Fira, a few days earlier. She is fully cogent. To my knowledge, she has never had an ambiguous day. As soon I open the door, she says in a heavy Russian accent, VWHY are you not blonde?! Beneath all the PPE I am required to wear, Fira hones in on my Achilles. Her voice isn’t booming, like usual, but it is still conveys something adamant. I am disarmed. I fumble for an answer, but I know the truth won’t satisfy. The answer, that I’m sick, the answer that I don’t care about my hair—that won’t fly.
My blondness was a long standing debate between us. One that intensified when I dyed it dark for my wedding. One that became contentious as it turned a careless brown during the pandemic, sullied further in the sick period. My once long blonde hair represented a pact between us, we were on the same team. Yes we were Ashkenazi Jews, but we were blondinkas, always. What that meant is a kind of joie de vivre—balls to the walls.
At one point in the hospital Fira asks me to brush her hair. With all the harried Covid regulations, I forget to do it. We don’t even get chairs as nurses do not want to encourage us to stay. My grandmother is not able to see our mouthes, just our sorrowful eyes. Their protocol requires visitors to wear a mask, goggles, a full set of PPE during the 20 days after a patient is admitted with a positive Covid test, even though they are also telling us she likely will not make it that long. None of it makes any sense.
Fira always delivered on the presentation. That may sound superficial, but it was far from it. Her commitment to engage with the beauty of life outlasted three marriages. Her beauty lay in her sense of style—theatrics, boisterousness, conceit. Dresses and cardigans exposing a large bosom, long pearly Boosikie draped around the neck, clip on earrings and cocktail rings on many fingers, which sparkled as she twirled her hands, dancing always, even from her chair, the Rabbi said, in the weeks before her passing.
She always forced me to dance too. Vwhy you not dancing, come! At my wedding, during the hora, lifted into the air, stockings and all, she furiously waved a napkin, had the entire banquet hall memorized. The next night, at the after party, around midnight, she locked eyes with me and said: Your grandmother is Ninety Vwon, Rebecca, Ninety Vwon!
When you went to Fira’s you had to prepare an appetite days in advance. Multi-hour long lunches rolled into multi-hour long dinners followed by tea and cognac. Drudging up the stairs after the drive from New York, Fira bellowed into the hallway, Vwhat took you so longgg. Sit down, eat! Everyone who came knew not to eat anywhere else on the day of visiting. Whenever I entered her place, I first suffocated in her large bosom—long, strong hugs, with boosikie pressed on my cheeks. Then, it was time to eat.
This week I have to go back with family to clear her apartment without any of her festivity. I will smell her shawl on her chair, an array of perfume in her bathroom, and run my hands along her satin pillows. All of these memories, in that small apartment, which never felt small. How could it be small if it held all of us? Decorated head to toe with art, memorabilia, pictures of us and herself at beauty contests. She was a collector of our lives, and a maker of her own.
Despite coming to the country after the age of 55, Fira started anew in the US. She went to work almost immediately. Once she got past retirement age, she continued to work, clocking more than 5000 hours of community service. She was celebrated in the local newspaper for this. Her commitment to service, and productivity, visible on her thickened heels, poked out of the slides of her peep toes. Many people drove hours to her funeral, and as my mom notes, it’s not just old people.
I’m still in her apartment and I’m eight. Fira lets me sleep in her bedroom, and she takes the couch. Sometimes her house-tilting snoring wakes me up, but I also wake her up when I pee. At camp, I unpack her brown paper bag lunch. It’s a bagel stuffed to the brim with tuna fish, egg salad, or white fish salad. I have no idea how I play softball afterward, in the hot northeastern sun that turned grass into concrete. After camp, I go to Fira’s job at the nursing home. I bounce between the cafeteria, and the gift shop. I visit the elderly, sick, and spend time with lonely people. I play bingo every Thursday with more than thirty residents of her living center. Each game costs a quarter, but the prize for winning is a dollar. I’m the only kid there, and it sets me up to be independent in life, maybe even entrepreneurial.
I stay with Fira during many summers, vacations, and weekends. I’m with her for my first birthday while my parents are on vacation. One year Fira calls the cops on me because I was late coming home with my friend Marina. Fira and I go to Friendlies together and have ice cream sundaes with whipped cream, chocolate drizzle, and the prized, endangered fruit that is the maraschino cherry. I go to Fira’s place every year, except this last one.
My grandmother didn’t really understand my illness, and the last time I was on the phone with her, I hung up on her in anger. Fortunately I called her back and made peace. My therapist, the first ever hired, now fired, told me it was important to remove stress from my life by focusing on me. This sealed the deal. I felt obliged to create distance some distance with my grandmother as she often got on my case for not just putting on makeup and going out with friends. I told her many times, I can’t, I’m in pain, and she would say VAT PAIN?! She didn’t get it. Or didn’t want to get it, and that made my head burn. I also hated disappointing her so I stopped calling as much. Even if I could get a refund from that therapist, it wouldn’t change the facts.
Fira talked to me about death in the last few years, how it was calling her, how her time was coming, especially after she had lost her sister, but she bulldozed each day yet—inviting people over for tea, getting heated about politics, hosting a Hanukkah party as recent as December, the latter detail I learned during the Rabbi’s speech at the funeral.
In Russia, Fira left the city to work the fields during WW2 to feed her family. She lost her brother during the war. Not too soon after Fira married, she lost her first child. Her first husband, my mom’s dad, was sent to the Gulags. Fira waited for him for 8 years. They divorced 9 months after my mother was born. Once in America, she completed the paperwork to bring her sister over, and her 91 year old mother, Olga. I don’t know if these events create a person who does not feel pain, or feels it but, simply does not make room for it.
At the hospital, I ask Fira if she ever had headaches. How stupid is that? My mom and sister interrupt me saying, we have other things to worry about now. They are right. I should just tell Fira that I love her and that I’m well. But Fira replies for my sake: Vat headaches?!
It all happened fast. The entire time I was suffocating in my mask. In the last couple weeks, in the final acts of being my grandmother, Fira pushed me to work through symptoms and be present more than I believed was possible. I am grateful to my body that it allowed me to go to the hospital, it allowed me to drive back and forth for 6 hours in a day, it allowed me to support my mother, it allowed me to go to the funeral and be surrounded by family and friends, and now grieve. I know that three months ago, the pressure, the grief, would have been impossible to engage. I have learned, sorrow and stress require health.
But I’m still upset that I could not visit Fira this past year. I was too weak to give her the satisfaction that I will be OK. I feel I am the only one in the family feeling regret.
I used to be much more like Fira. Feisty, indomitable, hard-nosed, loyal, short fused, scary at times, a lover of music, wine and life. In short, blondinka. So at the moment Fira passed, at the moment I heard the news an hour after I had left the hospital, the words which flashed through my mind were: I will do everything in my power to get better for you, Fira.
So that is where I am now—brooding on this solemn promise, trying to screw it back into my genes. This commitment is a hard one, especially in the face of all this medical obscurity. This obligation requires a strength that I only knew in Fira, and now, somehow, has to live on in me. But to love and honor Fira, to keep my promise, I have to find my way back to being…blondinka.
With much love from the healingvrse,
Rebecca
Such a beautiful tribute to Fira... made me cry.
Love you lots
well said