My phone rang twice on the morning of September 11, 2001. The first time it was my husband, Absalom. He had just seen a plane hit the World Trade Center. He knew it was no accident. I turned on the television, and just as the impossible happened – as an embodiment of strength, passion, vitality and life began to sway precariously from its very foundation – the phone rang again. It was my uncle. My grandmother Celia Feldschuh had suffered a massive
stroke. The Trade Center crumbled. I tried not to. I did not know where to turn first; my whole world was on fire. A day that began with infinite possibilities had turned deadly, hopes and dreams smoldering in the autumn sun.
My grandmother did not actually die that day, but slowly, nearly two months later. We spent the first few days after September 11 in Montefiore Medical Center, watching her cling to life. I had never seen a stroke patient before, and had been blissfully ignorant to the unique brand of evil with which a stroke tortures its victims. It was the first time that I had ever seen my grandmother silent, her Viennese accent inaudible as her lips formed soundless, nonsensical words. Her always busy hands, which had created countless works of English fiction and Yiddish plays, lay lifeless. Her legs, which I had watched just three months before glide through my parents’ pool as she swam her daily one-hundred laps, were swollen and unresponsive to touch.
I held on to the familiarity of her eyes, their wisdom untouched by the ravages of the illness. They seemed to know her fate before we were willing to accept it. They pleaded with me to let her go, to stop our daily routine of the little tactile tests we used to see if she was improving.
“Ma, Ma, can you feel this? Can you hear this? She moved – I think I saw her pinky move.” Finally, when I held up a Fisher Price alphabet board with the hopes of having her create even one word, she looked at me and I knew it was over. Her eyes told me that these infantile routines were still beneath her – this woman who was a published author, literate in several languages and just about any subject, whose wit had sharpened even in the months that hindsight would cause us to call her “decline.”
My home in New York City in the weeks following September 11 gave me no respite from the death that I was watching unfold every day in my own life. The pained faces on the streets and subways magnified my own despair, as I watched strangers cope with losses too horrible to even imagine in my own state of misery. My reddened eyes and glazed expression blended all too well with the New York masses, but left me with a guilt that would pervade my own mourning process.
When speaking of my grandmother’s illness and eventual death, I used validations I deemed necessary given the state of national trauma. “She was ninety-one years old”; “She lived a very full life”; etc. I used these sound bites to assuage my own fears that others would deem my pain unworthy, but I could not avoid the reality that watching my grandmother die was as painful as anything I had ever known.
The coincidence of the timing of my grandmother’s stroke with the terrorist attacks forced us to immediately experience the harsh impact of life without her. She had always been my own barometer of purity and goodness – her everyday actions steeped with virtue and meaning. Her unique righteousness would have been one of the few salvations that helped us heal; her way with words perhaps would have made sense of a world that was now unrecognizable. Instead, she lay paralyzed, scenes from the World Trade Center filling the hospital television, as my uncle yelled “We’re gonna beat this, Ma,” referring to both the terrorists and her illness. Yet somehow we all knew we were powerless.
When my grandmother died, there was none of the relief I had heard others refer to after a loved one crippled by illness passed on. I watched the families of 9/11 victims on television, trying to gain from their strength through some sort of osmosis. But I was able to identify only with their shock and regret. It took me some time to realize I was mourning more than my grandmother alone. My family had lost an entire era. She had been the last of the Eastern
Europeans from my mother’s side, a generation who fled the Nazis just in time to save their lives.
Grandma had savored when we all had rushed, had sang without music and refused to allow the daily nuisances of life detract from the immense luxury of living it. The warm, spiritual, delicious, schmaltz-filled way in which she lived left a vacancy in her death that I knew would never be filled, even by my very best rendition of her kugel recipe.
September 11 ended one world and began another. People spoke of living in perpetual danger, of being on guard, of needing protection. It was so easy to want to hide. But I kept thinking of grandma, and how she had always known that the miracle of living could never be taken for granted. She took time to smell the roses even among the thorns, and believed that humanity is the best revenge for indecency, and that a little chicken soup and a Yiddish ditty can create a safe haven.
These days, I never leave the house without saying “I love you.” I hope she can hear me.
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