“For man is a tree of the field” (Devarim 20:19).
Early in the summer of 2004 a fierce thunderstorm deposited a giant tree limb on top of my car. Thankfully no one was hurt since it happened on a Friday night, but my car was crushed and the tree was later determined to be old and sick and needed to be cut down. The township offered us the option of planting a new one in its stead, but we declined. Having a tree on our property had only created aggravation in the form of carpenter ants and kamikaze squirrels who leaped fearlessly from the tree onto our roof. No thanks, we were done with nature.
At the same time that my tree was being poked and prodded and diagnosed as terminal, my grandfather’s body was slowly being ravaged by end-stage esophageal cancer. He had been diagnosed one, maybe two years before this, and the doctors decided that due to varying factors he would not be treated with chemotherapy, only with radiation. His life would be prolonged, but not saved; and sometime that August, we were told to say good-bye.
My paternal grandparents died when I was very young. We referred to them as Bubby Henya and Zaidy Simcha, and the appellations of Bubby and Zaidy without further qualification were what we called my mother’s parents who were an integral part of our lives. All four of my grandparents were born in Poland, but my paternal grandparents came to America after WWI. Bubby and Zaidy would not be so lucky, and sometime during WWII they escaped the Germans only to be detained by the Russians who threw them into the Siberian Gulag where they spent the duration of the war until liberation.
In February of 1998, our family celebrated my grandparents’ 60th wedding anniversary with a small party in my parents’ house in Flatbush. By then, my parents were Bubby and Zaidy and my grandparents had been upgraded to Bubby Bubby and Zaidy Zaidy. During the party, amidst the chaos of five great grandchildren under the age of three, my grandfather began to talk about his life during the war. If this would have happened now, we would have whipped out our cell phones and videotaped him, preserving his story forever. But back then technology was still in its nascency, and so we would have to rely on memory alone. Much to my deep disappointment, I heard everything he said, but I can’t remember anything he said. I remember that he cried, but also that he laughed. He wore his emotions like a second skin, and despite his difficult life his default setting was happiness.
I went to visit him in the hospital a few weeks before he died. He had stopped communicating in English, reverting back to his native Yiddish, and when he saw me he murmured, “Oygen dokter” (eye doctor). How odd, I remembered thinking, that this is what came to his mind when he saw me. I was named after his mother, Genendal, but my grandparents called me Chanala because my parents added Chana to the Genendal so I wouldn’t be teased at school. I was happy that he recognized me, and amused that even on his deathbed he couldn’t stop shepping nachas from his grandchildren’s accomplishments. But oh, how I wished he would have called me Chanala just one last time.
My grandfather was 94 when he died on the 15th of Elul, 5764, and we buried him in Wellwood cemetery on the far end of Long Island. At the gravesite my grandmother was stoic, tearless, and as the shovels moved the dirt to prepare for the coffin, my grandmother asked my husband in her accented English, “Vich side is for me?” This practical question would come back to haunt us shortly, but we didn’t know it then.
After the three-hour drive home from the cemetery we were drained; still ahead of us was picking up our young daughters from a friend who had taken them for the day, and trying to explain to them that their Zaidy Zaidy was no longer with us. The next morning, my husband called me to look outside the front window. I didn’t know what he wanted me to see, until I realized that the sun was shining straight into my eyes, no longer occluded by leafy tree branches. The huge tree was gone, its limbs sawed off and hauled away on the very same day that we buried my grandfather.
There are no words for this confluence of events, even twenty years later.
Rosh Hashanah was coming up, and my strong minded, newly widowed Bubby, who never wanted to be a burden, insisted on davening in her own shul and sleeping in her own bed. Somehow, and I don’t know how, my parents convinced her to spend yontif with them, which in hindsight, was a beautiful gift. Two weeks later my 90-year-old grandmother had a massive stroke and passed away on the first day of Chol Hamoed Sukkos, a month after my grandfather’s petirah.
My grandmother had a tough life. My grandfather came from a more affluent home; he was a beloved only child which may have nurtured his optimistic nature. My grandmother lost her mother when she was three, and after her father remarried she was sent to live with her grandparents. While my grandfather went to cheder, my grandmother went to gymnasium; I have no idea how they met or decided to get married; yet another lost story. When they died a month apart everyone said that my grandmother had died of a broken heart. We laughed at that notion because my grandparents were not a lovey-dovey couple, much of their interactions involved my grandfather doing something my grandmother didn’t approve of and my grandmother scolding him with two words; “Luzer, gemacht,” which roughly translates into “Luzer, stop what you’re doing this very second!”
During Bubby Bubby’s funeral my children were in one of the mega malls in North Jersey with a good friend of mine and her family, and I kept worrying that my youngest daughter would be torturing my friend with her rambunctious behavior. I inherited this dominant worry gene from my grandmother; anytime the news reported any kind of dangerous situation in New Jersey or any of the other Highland Parks in the world she would call me, frantic, “Is dis near you, are you okay?” Even twenty years later, anytime something bad happens in New Jersey, I imagine that somewhere, my grandmother is still worried about me.
My grandparents originally had burial plots in Israel, but they decided that it would be too hard for the family to visit their graves if they were so far away, so they bought plots on Long Island. Long Island may be closer than Israel, but the trip there from New Jersey is arduous in its own way, and somehow twenty years passed without our visiting their kevarim. When a memorial service for my husband’s uncle was scheduled to take place a few miles from Wellwood Cemetery this past May, we took the opportunity to visit my grandparents.
Is it weird that I remember what I wore to my grandmother’s funeral? I wore a pinstripe suit with a pressed white shirt and a pair of heeled black boots, a level of formality that is almost nonexistent twenty years later. Twenty years is a long time. I have swapped my heels for sneakers, stopped wearing suits, and I don’t even remember what my house looked like when the tree was there. I have lost my father, raised two daughters, and become a Bubby. I cried at my grandparents’ graves, but truthfully it’s hard to imagine them inhabiting this world. They would be saddened and confused by so many things; texting instead of phone calls, the inability to function without technology, and I can’t even fathom their reactions to current events.
Even after a tree is cut down, its roots remain underground and can survive for years. Eventually, the roots decay, providing nutrients to the soil and enriching the ecosystem, allowing dormant seeds to grow and flourish in the previously barren soil. This creates a whole new generation of plants, who never would have existed without the original tree. Although the loss of a tree is sad, its ability to foster new growth and continuously nourish everything it ever touched ensures that its limited sojourn on earth will never be forgotten.
L’ilui nishmas Lazer and Mindel Rosen.
