![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Back from Montreal
Jun. 18th, 2005 05:35 pmOh, man.
As a testament to howaddicted I am to teh interwebs how much I love you all, I'm writing this before I've finished packing and checking my e-mail. (Down to 48 new messages out of 185...a certain group I'm in had some rather intense debates over the past few days that killed my inbox dead.) I'm alive, albeit frazzled and dead exhausted.
The funeral was good, as far as funerals go. We scored on the rabbi. There was a big deal with my grandmother hating the rabbi at her synagogue to the point of bribing him when my Zaidie died so that she could get a different rabbi to do the service. We had to do the same thing this time, too. Anyway, the one we got was really great -- despite being so Orthodox that he wouldn't shake my hand (I am queen of the Bad Jew faux pas), he spoke very little about religion and very much about the sort of complicated person my grandmother was and what her life meant to all of us. Funny thing is that he never met my grandmother -- he reconstructed some of her life from what my mother and uncle said about her, and sort of expanded from there. He talked a lot about the artistic things she was doing in the last few years of her life, and what a creative person she was. I wish I'd gotten to know that side of her better, because it was probably the only thing that she and I ever had in common. She repressed a great deal -- like everyone else in my family -- but I think she did find some joy in knitting and pottery.
Funerals are cathartic, anyway. I get the whole shovelling dirt onto the grave thing, really. (For those of you who've never done it, that's harder than it looks.) It was closure. I'm not okay now, but I'm more okay than I was when I left.
The shiva...oy. They could only do it for two days, which caused a minor stir with my grandmother's (relatively secular) friend. But seriously, even having it for two days was pushing it. We had to rent a hotel room, since hardly anyone in the family lives in Montreal anymore, and by the second day, only three people managed to make it.
( a meandering series of anecdotes about my family, etc. )
As a testament to how
The funeral was good, as far as funerals go. We scored on the rabbi. There was a big deal with my grandmother hating the rabbi at her synagogue to the point of bribing him when my Zaidie died so that she could get a different rabbi to do the service. We had to do the same thing this time, too. Anyway, the one we got was really great -- despite being so Orthodox that he wouldn't shake my hand (I am queen of the Bad Jew faux pas), he spoke very little about religion and very much about the sort of complicated person my grandmother was and what her life meant to all of us. Funny thing is that he never met my grandmother -- he reconstructed some of her life from what my mother and uncle said about her, and sort of expanded from there. He talked a lot about the artistic things she was doing in the last few years of her life, and what a creative person she was. I wish I'd gotten to know that side of her better, because it was probably the only thing that she and I ever had in common. She repressed a great deal -- like everyone else in my family -- but I think she did find some joy in knitting and pottery.
Funerals are cathartic, anyway. I get the whole shovelling dirt onto the grave thing, really. (For those of you who've never done it, that's harder than it looks.) It was closure. I'm not okay now, but I'm more okay than I was when I left.
The shiva...oy. They could only do it for two days, which caused a minor stir with my grandmother's (relatively secular) friend. But seriously, even having it for two days was pushing it. We had to rent a hotel room, since hardly anyone in the family lives in Montreal anymore, and by the second day, only three people managed to make it.
( a meandering series of anecdotes about my family, etc. )
