Correction: We couldn’t agree that the original photo was my mom, so I’ve deleted it and replaced it with these.
It is Tuesday. We bury my mother on Thursday. Sit shiva. Mourn together.
Her final years were not easy. Not for her or my dad or for any of us, and I think I’ve made my peace with her being gone. And yet, the idea that I will not see her again, even the version of her that did not remember me or any of us, is difficult to contemplate.
Today is hard. I mourn. We mourn. Because she is gone and because the woman she was left us long ago. I choose to remember the past to keep it a part of the present, to keep something of her alive in the present. To keep the darkness away, to live through the absurdity of the world.
There is a photo I came across when we were looking for pictures to display in commemoration when people came over. It is from my brother’s wedding. Mom and dad are kissing. It is a posed photo, but one that sums them up — and echoes many others taken in the past.
The past and future, according to some Buddhist teachings, does not exist. We live in the present and the only thing we have is the present. This makes sense to me on many levels, but also feels incomplete, both asking us to stay focused on the now, to give our all to the moment we live in, while giving us license to ignore our personal and cultural histories. We cannot live in the past, but we can remember it, and we have to remember it not just because of hoary cliches about being "doomed to repeat," but because the past existed and may exist on some plane, and because this ephemeral past has led us to what we are and where we are now.
I was raised a Jew, and while non-observant, I still carry much of what it means to be a Jew with me -- that respect for the past, for history, that unites us as a people, the importance of family. I consider myself agnostic -- I'm a doubter and skeptic when it comes to god, feeling that there is something there, but not buying into the various incarnations handed to us by the great religious leaders. I am not a Buddhist, but there are elements of Zen Buddhism I find attractive, just as I am attracted to existential philosophy.
All of these intersecting belief systems make me who I am, though none define me. They allow me to live in the present as much as I can without being weighed down by a past I cannot control but that I find necessary to understand who I am.
All of these intersecting belief systems also intersect with the people from my life: Annie, of course, and my brother and sister and their families, my grandparents, and my closest and dearest friends. But also the people who I have worked with, went to school with, people who have influenced the directions I’ve taken, helped me make sense of the world.
This all seems distant. A bit cold. I keep thinking of the opening line of Albert Camus’ The Stranger (one of the early translations): “Mother died today.” The oddly constrained tone. The distance. The coldness. Camus uses her death to explore his sense of the absurd, the idea that life’s meaning is not given us from above or part of a Platonic ideal, but that life lacks sense and that it is up to us to inject meaning, to find it in our relationship with others.
Meaursault, the protagonist in the novel, fails to do this. Cannot do this. And for Camus, it is a tragedy. (Meaursault kills an Algerian on the beach, a man who is purely plot device, which is the novel’s great flaw, a different kind of tragedy.) I use the word “tragedy” in the Aristotelian sense to mean a kind of self-inflicted fall. Meaursault cannot find meaning, because he chooses not to.
My mom died Friday. She was 82. She lived a long, fruitful life. Her presence in the world made it better. Her last years were tough, robbed as she was of past and present, living in an alternate world we could not enter. This frustrated her — you could see her grinding her teeth in anger sometimes — and it frustrated us. It was toughest on my dad: his mate as he would say, and being the only one in Las Vegas put a lot of pressure on him.
Little of this makes sense. This is from where my anger derives. A sane god would not do this to people, would not turn each of us into Job, would not need to test us with this kind of unnecessary hardship. Part of me feels like Meaursault — numb, but angry. Meaursault allows his subsumed anger to spill out in a single, horrible act. He then essentially hides behind a kind of paralysis in the face of life’s absurdity. Where I differ is that my numbness is not a lack of feeling, but a dullness caused by extreme feeling, by my recognition that these relationships are what make us human. Give us meaning.
I choose to acknowledge the absurdity, but to act in defiance of it. I am human because I care, because I persevere despite the darkness. There was a shooting off campus the same day at the school my cousin’s son attends. A shooting last week on the campus of the school my nephew attends. Guns. War. Disease. Homelessness. Hate. The planet is choking on our history, because of our decades, centuries of abuse. This is the absurdity Camus writes about, that he fights against, that we all must fight against.
I choose meaning. I choose the present, life, not selfishly but because acting in the present creates the potential of a future. I choose to move forward as a way remembering. Or preserving. Because I think we have a responsibility to the world, to its people, to our closest family and friends.
Yes, mom died Friday, but that is not what I choose to focus on. She died, but she also lived, was here for 82 years. Left her mark. Lives on in us.
Here are the burial and shiva arrangements.
Graveside service for Sharon Z. Kalet will be at 10 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 20, at Washington Cemetery, 104 Deans Rhode Hall Road, North Brunswick, NJ 08902. Mourners will meet at the cemetery office before proceeding to the gravesite. Shiva will be immediately following on Thursday until 4 p.m. and then again from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday and 1 to 5 p.m. Friday at my house. Email me for address.