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January 14, 2005/Tevet 4 5765, Vol. 57, No. 20
A story that never ends
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
My holiday letter is not in the mail.
The annual missive, replete with family news, did not get written this year.
Instead, I am penning dozens of thank you notes for the tributes, cards and letters I've received since my dad passed away in early December.
I began writing the annual cheery update nearly a decade ago, sending it to a far-flung collection of family and friends, as messages on greeting cards became increasingly difficult to scribble - and read.
Sometimes the letter went out year-end; other times, it was delayed in the late December rush and posted the first week or two of the New Year. It was a good way to keep in touch, and it was a useful exercise, obliging me to sort through the experiences of the past 12 months, reflect on them and then weld them into a short, breezy letter.
That would have been no easy feat this year as I reeled from my father's death. He had been sick for several months and in declining health, but death, with its shattering finality, hits hard. It seemed impossible to collect my thoughts, to put them into words, and unseemly to consider sending them off in a holiday greeting.
And yet, the occurrences of the past month have reminded me yet again of the incalculable value of preserving those often seemingly inconsequential events as family lore. Telling and retelling our stories, often expanded and redacted at the whim of each storyteller, we share our storehouse of experiences, limning them for needed perspective and, at times like these, a modicum of comfort.
And so, during shivah, we spent afternoons reminiscing, trading stories while we sifted through boxes of old photos. We laughed as my aunt told of my dad coming to court my mom, dapper in a straw boater. We chuckled at photos taken in the Catskills in the late '40s, our parents smiling broadly for the camera, my dad even then of bald pate. My sister remembered accompanying my father to Sunday morning softball games. And she recalled weekly visits to my grandparents, greeted by Grandma planted in front of her Bronx tenement saving a parking space for her son and his family.
In the evenings, friends and neighbors regaled us with even more stories, some funny, some sad. Business associates told of my dad's last months, holding business meetings around the kitchen table as if he was holding court, conferring and reviewing figures from his hospital bed.
And, later, the notes arrived with more remembrances: my dad boarding as a bachelor with a Jewish family during the war, or serving as president of a fledgling New Jersey congregation.
The stories connected us to each other, opened us up to the solace that those who came, called, wrote, offered so selflessly. They eased our grief, as we recalled a life well lived.
"Every life is a story," writes Leonard Fein in "Against the Dying of the Light." "Every life well lived is a story that never ends."
And so it is.
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