Yizkor

*Yizkor means to remember in Hebrew. It is the name of a Jewish memorial service recited four times a year for deceased close relatives.

“Bring her up here to the front.” One of the Hebrew Home staff, a young social worker, is waving across the small chapel to get Naomi’s attention.

    Naomi, a Jamaican aide with fat, eel-like braids that dangle to her shoulders, smiles as she pushes Edith’s wheelchair through the open double doors into the wood-paneled room in the basement of the Home for the Aged.

    Edith braces herself as the chair barrels forward. She feels the change from the lumpy linoleum in the hallway to the carpet of the chapel, and stiffens as the chair stops with a jerk in the front row.

    “There you are, my dear.” The Jamaican aide, whom Edith can barely hear because she is speaking in Edith’s bad left ear, puts the brake bar on the wheel. “I will come back to get you later.” She pats the old woman’s right hand and turns to go.

    “Why did you bring me here?” Edith calls after her, loud enough to hear her own voice.

    “It’s your holiday, Edith. Don’t you want to pray?” Naomi says, her voice lilting.

    “Did you ask me if I wanted to pray?” Edith says, but the aide is gone. They wouldn’t take her back to her room anyway, she knows. They take her wherever they want.

    It is a Friday morning in May. The rabbi, a volunteer himself teetering on old age, is leading the service for the second day of the holiday of Shavuot. He chants in Hebrew as the sparse congregation sits silent in the wheelchairs that serve as pews.

    Edith turns to see the woman across the aisle is gazing at her with teary eyes. They say that all babies are born with blue eyes that darken with age, she thinks. Then why do old people’s eyes all melt into milky blue?

    Edith doesn’t know the skeletal man sitting next to her. He is slumped in his wheelchair, his eyes closed, but she knows that doesn’t mean he is sleeping. Beyond him, a bank of windows is flush with the gravel walkway outside. Potted ferns and spider plants dangle from the sill.

    Plants. They put plants in the basement and windows that let in too much sun and hurt your eyes, Edith thinks. It looks like summer outside, but she can’t tell. In here, the air is freezing cold all the time, except in winter, when you could faint from the heat.

    At least it smells better here in the basement chapel than on the floor upstairs, with its stale odor of unwashed sheets, or in the dining room, where the smell of grease takes away her appetite. Here, there is the smell of carpets and books.

    The rabbi is a tall, skinny man with a pale face and a thin goatee. He smiles too much. The rabbis of her day didn’t smile. They were scholars and geniuses, like her father. He is wearing a white robe, like a priest. In her time, rabbis didn’t wear robes, except on the High Holidays.

    “Please join me on page eighty. First, we will say the morning prayers, then we will come to the Yizkor service,” the rabbi is saying. There is a rustle of pages turning, but most of the listeners are content to be able to keep a grasp on their prayer books.

    Aha, now she knows why she’s here. Today is Yizkor. Get on with it, Edith thinks, or maybe she says it out loud. She can’t tell because of the noise the rabbi is making with his singing. His voice is high-pitched, and he sounds like a cat. A few voices join his; they are coming from the social workers and visiting relatives, who sit in the back.

    The singing reminds her of old prayers; they are the same tunes and the same words. Somewhere in her mind stir memories of sitting in a tiny synagogue, smaller even than this one, with her father.

    A shadow dims the room as a cloud passes over the sun. A pebble rattles against the window from the footpath outside. Edith feels herself pressed back gently into her chair. She senses a shiver against her temples, like a comb being passed through her thin silver hair. She can still hear the rabbi, but much closer, much louder, there is a whisper in her ear.

    “You remembered to say Yizkor. You remembered,” says a man’s voice.

    The voice is so clear that she turns to her right then to her left, but there is no one there, no one but the skeletal man, his mouth drooping open as he snores.

    “We remember you, Edith. We remember you,” the voice says.

    The words are coming from outside and inside her head at the same time. She isn’t scared. She is listening too intently to be amazed or frightened.

    Who are you? she wonders.

    “Don’t you know?” says the voice.

    Edith nods her head like a little girl. I knew you wouldn’t forget me, she thinks. Relief washes over her as she shuts out the rabbi and the pulpit and the old people in their chairs. Against the darkness of her closed lids, purple clouds pulsate and there are starbursts of light.

    “We’re always here. We’re waiting,” the voice says. A face appears in her mind’s eye, and she wants to cry, because it is her father’s face. Now there is a beard; there is a genius.

    Look, Tatele, she says to him, I’m in shul. You wouldn’t recognize me. I do just what they tell me to do.

    “Ahh,” says the voice. Her father’s mouth opens, and she wants to hear him speak, but his face blurs and in its place she sees her mother. How young they both are. The room smells heavily of perfume.

    Where is Herman? Edith asks. More starbursts and she sees her husband’s face, though not clearly. She had forgotten how much she misses him.

    Don’t look at me, she tells the face. I am too old. I am older than anyone ever was. She feels the comb through her hair again and a breeze on her cheeks.

    Look what they’ve done to me. She is talking about her children and the doctors and time. You were lucky to die young. Are you here to take me? Edith has found the courage to ask. Because this would be the time, here in shul, at Yizkor. She hears waves, and the perfume is overpowering. I’m ready, you know.

    “It’s not your fault. You did nothing wrong,” says the man’s voice. But she’s having trouble hearing him through the pounding and the singing.  

    Suddenly, a pain tears through her body. The singing stops.

    Edith forces her heavy lids open, and it’s the hardest thing she’s ever done. Naomi is on her knees beside her, smiling and patting her hand.

    “Edith, are you all right? You were sleeping and you fell. And you dropped your prayer book.”

    Edith is crumpled at the foot of her wheelchair. The pain is in her leg. But it is nothing compared to the stake of disappointment that has rammed her heart.

    As the Jamaican aide lifts her into her wheelchair, Edith looks up and sees the rabbi staring down at her from the pulpit. His eyes are no longer pale and benign, and he isn’t smiling. For an instant, Edith imagines that he knows. He is a rabbi, after all, and rabbis should know such things.

    Naomi tucks Edith into her chair and spins it around. The pulpit has disappeared as they roll down the aisle to the back of the chapel. Edith is filled with a strange new certainty and calm. She has said Yizkor, and she knows what is coming.

    “Why don’t we get something to eat?” Naomi says as they stop at a small table by the door where the social workers have put out square inches of pound cake on paper plates and tiny cups of holiday wine.

    Edith doesn’t talk and doesn’t nod her head, but takes the cake and wine.