My mother, Elaine (Kahn) Waxman lived from Sept. 24, 1929 to Oct. 26, 1984 (30 Tishrei, 5745)
Preface: There was no good reason I could think of for Mom to leave the world when she did. It was not her plan, that’s for sure. No one in the world wanted her to go. Everyone she knew was shocked and devastated by the sudden loss. I was more than devastated. So were my brothers. So was my dad. I was not ready for her to leave. There were so many things I wanted to do for her that I didn’t get to do. There were so many things I needed to say to her.
I think even G-d felt remorse, like when a person makes a mistake but it’s too late to undo it. I was in Israel at the time, in Ofaqim. When I got the news, there were a dozen or so hoops I had to jump through, and red tape to get through to leave the country. What would normally take at least 3 or 4 days, I was able to get them done in several hours, all in the most distraught state I had ever been in, and fly out of Tel Aviv the next morning.
The last time I talked to my mother was the day she died. It was a Friday. She was in Kansas, having cut short her visit with her family on the east coast to be close to my dad, who had just undergone heart surgery. She and I were making plans for me to come to Kansas to be with my father. I had no phone in my apartment, so I had to make a long distance call from the post office. We kept the call brief. The last thing I said to her was, “Shabbat Shalom.” The last thing she said to me was, “Shabbat Shalom to you, too.”
My father could not go to the funeral because he was in the hospital. I did not make it to the funeral because I was flying in from Israel. What a spectacle that must have been. A lot of relatives came to Kansas from the east coast. Add that to all the relatives and friends living in the Kansas City area. I was told the long vehicle procession had its moments of chaos.
I can only imagine that the eulogies recounted my mother’s involvement in the synagogue, the stamina it must have taken to raise five boys, her laughter, her baking and cooking skills, her way with babies dancing on her lap, her laughter again, and her ability to talk with anyone in the room and make them feel like they were best friends, even if it was the first time they met.
The Torah reading for that Shabbat was Parashat Noach, the account of Noah and the flood. This was the most devastating event in world history, for G-d decided to destroy the world and all the people in it. I’ll tell you, I felt like the world I knew and the world I was still preparing to live in, collapsed when my mother passed away. I would never see things the same again. Nothing was the same again. However, at the end of Parashat Noach, Noah and his family are off the boat, making plans to rebuild the world. That’s what we’re supposed to do when tragedy takes away the worlds we have created for ourselves. We have to rebuild.
Adventures In The Aftermath Of A Tragedy
Pain is the author of uncommon events that probably would not have happened without it.
Days after Mom’s funeral, the house was still filled with out-of-town relatives when Dad came home from the hospital. They all soon left, but I stayed behind to watch Dad and keep him company. What is weird is I don’t remember Matt being around at this time. He was still in high school, and I am sure he was living at home. But my only memories of this period were of Dad and me. At first I stayed around the house. Eventually, I got a job through a temporary service.
I worked at a factory in Olathe. Quite a few of the other factory workers were refugees from Cambodia. I got to know one girl who was able to speak English a little better than most of the others. She had aspirations of going to college. I helped her write a letter that she would use when she applied for admission. One day she told me she had never heard of Jews or the Jewish religion, so she asked her father, at home. He said that all he knew was that Jews were very intelligent people. This was my introduction to the Hmong people, many years before I would set foot in Thailand and Southeast Asia.
Come to think of it, that whole anecdote about the temporary factory job did not occur until a year or so later, when I came to visit Dad and his second wife. But I’m going to leave it in here because I don’t plan on saying anything else about that later visit.
Actually, after my mother’s funeral and after all the out-of-towners left, I went back to the bagel bakery, where I had worked before going to Israel. Interestingly, one of the same guys that had worked there four years earlier was back there again. He had read in the newspaper about my mother’s passing. He did not normally read the obituaries, but for some reason this one caught his eye.
Of course the owners of the bakery had known my mother. The owner’s wife teared up the day I left – months later – to go back to Israel.
How Dad Coped
On a cold winter day, Dad brought me to his farm in Osawatomie. There was nothing there but a fence at the entrance, and a small shed of some sort where he kept tools. He worked on something, and I helped him. To this day, I have no idea what we worked on. At about noon, Dad and I sat on the grass and ate sandwiches. Dad tried to speak semi-philosophically. He looked out over his land and he turned to me and said, “I don’t know what you think, but I love it here.”
It was cold. I was freezing. I saw nothing but brown grass and leafless trees. What was there to love?
Years later, the farm was the only place I wanted to be at.
Now I own a home in Puerto Rico. I have worked on it where it has needed work, and I have seen the potential to grow things in back of my property. I think I have come to appreciate my father’s love of a place, especially when it belongs to you. It is a shame that neither my mother nor my father lived to see my house in Puerto Rico. They would have loved it here.
One Sunday, I was riding around with my father, doing errands, when he mentioned he had free tickets to the movies at Crown Center (I believe) and we should go. At this time, I was trying to be observant of Jewish tradition, and not indulge in entertainment for a year after the death of a parent. I also wanted to be supportive of my father. I also had not been to the movies for a long time. So my inner dialogue was very short before I answered, “Yeah, why not?”
We went to the movie theater, where we had to make a choice of which movie we wanted to see. I was looking at the movie posters, trying to decide which movie I thought Dad would like when Dad said, “Come on, let’s go.” He had already picked a movie and he seemed to think I already knew which movie we were going to. Imagine my surprise when I found us in line for the next showing of “Ghostbusters.”
Dad must have seen my hesitancy. He asked, “Don’t you want to see this film?”
I said something like, “Are you sure you want to see it? I think the music is going to be pretty loud.”
Dad said something like, “Come on, let’s go. The guys at work talked about this movie.”
You know what? That movie was just the right medicine for the moment. Dad had the best time of all. He laughed all the way through the picture, and he couldn’t stop talking about it as we drove home. Sometimes, we just need a break from the gloom that envelopes us, you know what I mean?
Flashback:
Mom was actually an adventurous person. She took to camping and boating and fishing and hiking and site-seeing like the best of them. But she and I never shared what I would call a real adventure. The truth be told, I didn’t want to do things with my mother, growing up. The feeling kind of stuck even as I entered adulthood. But then, after years away from the nest, I was in the midst of changing my entire attitude when suddenly she was gone.
What I wanted to say, in this flashback, was that I went to the movies with my mother once or twice. I think we saw “Fiddler on the Roof” together when I was home from college once. But it was years later, in the summer after I finished the regular army, that I want to tell you about.
A Matter Of Moods And Something Else
For reasons I couldn’t put my finger on, I was not in a good mood when I went to Kansas the summer after my army duty in Israel. It was to be a short visit, as I recall, for I had managed to get a teaching job that would begin soon.
I don’t know if it was the effects of the army and the war (the first Lebanon War), or the adjustment to life after the army with the struggles to get a job, and so forth. All I know now is that I was confused. The sad thing is, I was so wrapped up in my own issues that I failed to notice that my family was having its own issues. My brothers – especially Mickey and Matt – each had their own challenges. My mother and father were barely talking to each other.
In hindsight, I run scenarios in which I cut loose from my own problems and somehow help my family restore harmony, without becoming too much like the Waltons.
One day, it was just Mom and me at home. She asked me if I wanted to go to a movie. I didn’t want to. We went to some stores together, and did some shopping. I should mention here, that whenever I came to Kansas from Israel, I had a sense of culture shock. I enjoyed going to stores because there were so many amazing things to see that I had not seen before. And every place had air conditioning.
This time however, something nagged at me when we went inside a department store. As soon as I was inside I had a screaming urge to leave. A whole flurry of frustrations was eating at me and I couldn’t figure any of it out. Have you ever had a half-second conversation with yourself in which you come to a logical conclusion that solves a problem? Within half a second, this was how my conversation went:
“This store is stuffy.
I don’t need anything in this store.
Neither does Mom.
The only reason we are here is that she wants to spend time with me.“
Before we walked very far into that department store, I turned to my mother and said, “Mom, I changed my mind. Do you still want to see a movie?”
She didn’t say anything. With a blank look on her face like she was fighting back an emotion, she grabbed her purse, headed for the exit, got in the car, and she drove to a movie theater. When we got to the movie theater, she was relaxed and able to talk. We talked like friends who don’t have much to talk about. Neither of us knew anything about the movies that were playing. We chose one that looked like a comedy.
It was a light comedy called “Mr. Mom,” with an actor neither of us had heard of, named Michael Keaton. It is incumbent upon me to mention the name of the actor because that is what Mom talked about after the movie. That was Mom. The content of the movie was fine. But Mom paid more attention to the appearances of the performers. Mom watched “MASH” on television because she liked Alan Alda, who happened to be Jewish. As for Michael Keaton? He was okay. His mouth was crooked, though.
I didn’t have much to say about the movie, or anything else. I recall feeling pleased for awhile. I was pleased that Mom enjoyed the movie. I was pleased that I was able to make my mom happy, for a change.
Less than a week later, Mom and Grandma took me to the airport to fly back to Israel. At the airport Mom hugged me real hard and she wept as she told me to be careful and take good care of myself. It was curious. Mom had never done that before, all the times she had seen me off at the airport. That’s why I remember that moment so well. . . not the words that were spoken, but the weeping and the hug and the look on Mom’s face, like she knew something she wasn’t telling me.
It was the last time I saw her.
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