Left here in the cold

April 25, 2024

Not to get all maudlin on you, but since March 11, which was seven weeks ago, I lost 10 people who were part of my life. Expressed without euphemism, they died. 

 But “I lost” is, in fact,  the subject of this essay.  Yeah, you’re thinking, it’s all about her. Typical.

But I suspect there’s no afterlife and that includes person-to-person Zooming.  So it’s impossible for me to know what they were thinking as they neared the ends of their lives.  These weren’t young people; all were over 70.   Were they afraid, as I am, or had they packed their emotional bags (don’t forget the dental floss)  in preparation for their next adventures?  Were they embarrassed to have procrastinated about clearing the leaves out of the gutter,  or did they reach their expiration dates muttering that they would have polished off that slab of chocolate cake if they’d known that they wouldn’t be having breakfast the next morning?

 It’s a mystery, and all I can write about with any authority is how this feels to me, a woman approaching a birthday that in another year will be a round 80.

The first of the 10 people to die – and don’t worry, I’m not going to go into the particulars of all – was my uncle, who was only 11 when I was born, and grew up under the same roof.  My grandparents lived upstairs from us in a two-family house.  My uncle became  a successful businessman; I became a would-be flower child.  But we’d both grown up pushing aside the same venetian blinds to stare out the window into the same leafy sycamore.  We shared  wicked one-liners and unkind nicknames for family members we found foolish; we shared the sense memory of the smell of moldering books in the library of my grandfather’s synagogue.  My uncle  was in high school when I was in kindergarten.  He’d watched me hatch and learn to fly.

The second was my best, and pretty much only remaining college friend, with whom I’d hitchhiked around Europe for three months at the end of our junior years.   We’d both worked while attending school, saving our salaries for an adventure abroad  that would prove – as much to ourselves as to anyone else – that it was possible to escape Brooklyn. Her father bought her a corsage to wear on the plane when we took off from New York to Amsterdam.  When we returned, mine asked me if I was still the same old Leah, probably referring to my virginity. 

 She was small, delicate, funny and flirty and pretty; in our traveling partnership,  I was the galoot.    We carried suitcases, not backpacks, and we wore dresses, not jeans.  This was so we would be perceived as ladies.   Whenever we spent time together In the 60 or so years that followed,  it would take me 5 minutes to be reminded of all the reasons I loved her.  A big one was her ability to laugh.

None of the other eight were as close, but they were all more than acquaintances.   We had shared meals, we’d had at least one conversation that left a mark.   Some of them earned obituaries that have been, or will be, published in newspapers, here and in New York. Of course, I am not alone in mourning their deaths, in marveling about their accomplishments and missing the sounds of their voices.  But the scrapbook in my head, the corners of its pages bent with use,  is filled with images of my own conscious and subconscious choosing. 

The formal printed accounts leave out the small parts that become inadvertently and individually indelible. You spend time with another person, and rarely know, at the end of an encounter, what snippet of talk, what snapshot of place will remain in your head, ready to be called up at the mention of the person’s name.

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The last time I saw him,  his head cocked and a smile on his face, one of the friends who died played a few notes on his accordion; a distinguished minister, a fervent huge fan of borscht belt comedians, liked to tell jokes. . A novelist wrote two successful books and worked on a third for years, eventually deeming it so poor that she tore it up; a fierce journalist, talking about her childhood, unforgettably mentioned to me that her glamorous mother insisted on maintaining her bleached blonde hair, even after becoming blind at an early age.   An important filmmaker who’d won numerous prizes for documentaries about major issues dissed the dresses while dipping into the guacamole at an annual Oscar party in a basement apartment; another filmmaker used the death of a real friend as a framework for her fiction. A woman I picture with a hand on her out-thrust hip was one of the few people I knew who could get away with saying “gals”; and a celebrated artist was studying hula and Yiddish at the same time. 

The people were soft and tough, vibrantly-colored yarns intricately woven into  the cozy blanket that I and every other person with whom they shared experiences has wrapped around our shoulders.  The removal of each strand,  one by one, and then suddenly too many all at once, has left my blanket threadbare, each hole  a reminder of what/who once was there.  There is still enough yarn left that my blanket won’t fall apart, but I find myself a little colder than I used to be, and worried about the nights that lie ahead. 

 I am sad, but more than that, I am diminished. 

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