September, 2023

R u going to funeral

           A text from my daughter. I was drinking wine and watching NBA highlights when I felt the vibration in my too tight jeans. The buzz was lengthier, more insistent than an email alert – clearly a text. Probably the pharmacy, I thought, or a social security senior scam. Not urgent enough to take the trouble of removing my phone from my pocket, at least not until the second annoying reminder. I reached for the phone, winced from the pain in my wrist – a tennis injury – and saw it was from Hannah.

I took a moment to admire the prose. It was a masterpiece of literary economy. Sixteen letters, no punctuation, no italics, no bold lettering. Yet she evoked stabbing memories of the most significant moments in my life, including the horror-filled nights and days after Hannah discovered the hanging body of her own mother, my wife. Suicide. Heartbreak. Depression. Illness. Mystery. Sex, virginal and otherwise. Romance. Racism. Genocide. God. Evil. Good. Hannah’s non-sentence somehow touched on all the obsessions that defined my life and career. It summoned forgotten odors: Jerusalem pine, garbage on the streets, Israeli shampoo, Time Cigarettes. And distant, nearly forgotten sensations: falling asleep to the sound of breaking waves, cold nights with no heat, the erotic jolt from watching young female soldiers. I’d won a Pulitzer Prize, written eight books, dozens of long think pieces, hundreds of op-eds, a play, even a handful of poems, and I never achieved anything as brief, powerful, painful, and to the point as Hannah’s brief text.

I stretched, wincing again, for the remote and muted the TV. I studied my phone. Was I going to the funeral? Well maybe, if only to make sure the old lady was really dead. Like Hannah, like thousands of others, I’d gotten the word the night before. Zehava was enough of a legend and her family had enough clout to override the Jewish Israeli tradition of burying the body as soon as possible. Zehava’s corpse would have to wait three long days until all the dignitaries could arrive from the four corners of the earth.

All the dignitaries – and me and Hannah? I texted back the first excuse I could think of. “Too expensive?” I wrote. The question mark left the door open. It was an opening bid. In a game I knew I would lose. That, come to think of it, I probably wanted to lose.

“I’ll pay,” she wrote back, almost instantaneously, even before the three dots danced across the text balloon.

“new covid outbreak” I wrote, thinking I could also dispense with punctuation and capitalization and still get my point across. The pandemic was officially over, but there were rumors of a new wave. Surely that was a valid excuse for me, an asthmatic man in his sixties (alright, just sixty-one).

This time she took three seconds to respond. The dots danced. “business class,” she wrote back. And then, in a fresh balloon, “Don’t worry about the money.”

Was that a bribe or a counterargument? Was business class somehow virus resistant? Or was she remembering how much I bitched about the plane ride the last time we flew to Israel seventeen years before, when she’d just turned 15. “Probably too late to make reservations,” I wrote.

Again, no dancing circles. An immediate response. “Already done. Paid for. Tomorrow.”

I laughed out loud. My rich daughter. Married to a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. My son-in-law holding wealth I wouldn’t be able to count. Leader of a company I couldn’t describe, no matter how many times he’d explained it to me. So much had changed since the last time. But not everything. She’s still telling me what to do. Anyway, I’d already decided to make the trip, coach or business class, with or without Hannah. Michal wanted me to go. She had something to tell me. That was motivation enough.