During the many years that my mother fought the cancer that eventually killed her, she liked nothing better than planning her funeral. She knew exactly what she wanted and, moreover, exactly what she wished to be buried in: a bright red sweatshirt smattered with stars along with matching sweatpants. She called this ensemble her “star-spangled suit.”
I’m pretty sure we didn’t obey her wishes regarding her burial attire, but then again, we may have. She also insisted that, after the crowds went home, her 11 grandchildren gather in the front yard to release helium balloons, with instructions that the balloons carry each child’s wishes — love letters from the children to their beloved grandmother that would float to the sky and from there reach her in heaven. It was February when my mother died, and in suburban Virginia, where she and my father had lived in the same big house in which they’d raised their children, the trees were black and bare. Most of the balloons got caught in the branches, their sweetly colored ribbons dripping with rain.
Her funeral was packed. So packed that mourners had to find parking wherever they could. So packed that those of us with front-row seats felt like some kind of rock ’n’ roll nobility. We, the grieving family, were celebrities, touched as we were not only by grief but by having been on such intimate terms with my mother.
My poor mother. Her life was difficult.
On the outside, she was all glamour and smiles, the very picture of fulfillment. She was athletic, beloved, pretty, down-to-earth, can-do, Vassar-educated, a bundle of energy managing a large home, four kids, several dogs, various Guinea pigs, parakeets and rabbits, and our handsome, driven father, until death did them part. Dinner parties, birthday parties, cocktail parties, lawn parties, pool parties — skiing, tennis, Bermuda, Europe, Israel, the State Department, have you met our great friend the publisher of The Washington Star, Senator So-and-So, the Honorable and Mrs. Honorable, Ambassador and Mrs. Whosit, and so on and so forth.
My parents thrived in the swirl of Inside-the-Beltway, who-do-you-shmooze-with political culture. Culture? While those who danced the D.C. dance were no doubt cultured people, the social strata my parents moved in wasn’t so much a culture as a game. A game that both my parents, being gifted and competitive athletes, excelled at. My father was ambitious and brilliant. My mother was warm and lovely. They were a hit.
If people were drawn to my father’s aura of intelligence and command, they loved my mother. It was as if she’d been endowed with an invisible magnet that pulled people toward her. What she possessed was both more and less than charisma, something to do with how wholehearted she was, how ready to give and receive affection, to be your best pal, and more than that, to uphold your own best vision of yourself. Her personality was huge, all but spilling out of her skin. In photos, and no matter how many other people she was posing with, it’s as if she’s the only one in the shot. All that bright, bouncy self-confidence, that sense that she was born to be admired. But as her daughter, I knew better than most how deeply she longed to be longed-for.
My mother had a wide circle of devoted girlfriends, most of whom had been raised among the East Coast elite to believe that feelings were something both private and slightly embarrassing and that church was for your wedding day only. All through my school years I’d come home to find my mother holed up in the den with one distraught girlfriend or another. Through the door, I could hear them crying. Through the door I could hear her voice, measured and empathetic and kind. In Washington, D.C., when I was growing up, no one was in therapy. No one talked about therapy. No one believed in therapy. Except, of course, my mother (and perhaps a handful of other Jews), who sought help when she hit what she called a midlife crisis, in her case coinciding with one after the next of her four children leaving the nest for college.
After she died, a friend of mine wrote me a beautiful letter comparing my mother to the sun, anchoring the rest of us, her planets, in our orbits around her. It’s true she cast a wide, bright light. It’s true she dazzled. She dazzled so much, in fact, that until I was about 30, I literally believed that without her, I was, and could do, nothing.
My father, 74 at the time of my mother’s death, was devastated. He was also resilient. So resilient that as of this writing he has survived her for 20 years, enough time to remarry, start a new career, travel widely and often, write (and publish) a memoir of his years serving as the United States Ambassador to Romania (or “Liverwurst,” as my husband likes to call it), buy a home in Tel Aviv, and move to a four-story house in Georgetown within walking distance of his synagogue. Why should he live in an apartment when he still walks just fine thank you very much, because no, he does not need a cane, get off my back, stop fussing, you remind me of your great-grandmother Etta.
My father and I, we see and understand the world differently. This leads to the occasional communication gap, which started about the time that I mastered speech. Now of grandmother age, I take pride that, when it comes to words, I know what I’m doing. No dice. Not when it comes to my father.
An example:
Me: “Oh no, it’s raining! I was hoping to go on a bike ride.”
Dad: “Your grandfather didn’t mind rain. I was lucky because my parents rarely complained. None of us did.”
Yesterday, my friend Dale called me. I know Dale and her husband from our synagogue in New Jersey. On this occasion, Dale called me because, first, she wanted me to hear it from her rather than from an email that an elderly member of our synagogue, Toby, had died. Toby was something of a personage in our community, demanding, difficult, prideful, and — with the years — increasingly dependent on the synagogue community for help. Dozens of us had schlepped her to and from medical appointments, visited her in the hospital, listened to her stories, helped her with groceries and, as dementia beset her, engineered her move into assisted living.
Dale had a second reason for calling. She’d heard through her own grapevine of mainly journalists that an anti-dictator, pro-democracy organization that she and her husband support had recently been given a whopping gift from none other than my father, and did I know about that? No, I didn’t know, but I wasn’t surprised. “Yeah, he does stuff like that,” I said, which Dale already knew because, the two of us being pals, I’d already told her.
Here’s how it goes when someone who inhabits or is adjacent to my father’s world learns that I am his daughter.
“Ambassador Moses is your father?”
“Ambassador Moses is your father?”
“Ambassador Moses is your father?”
Well into my 60s, I still hear this. Well into his 90s, my father still has a wide circle. Smaller than it was when he was a youngster in his 80s, but still impressively robust. Along with a “me wall” (actually four walls) of photos of himself with various dignitaries, homes on two continents and an enviable head of silver-white hair, he has friends who literally pay to fly on private airplanes in order to attend his birthday in Maine, where he spends his summers. A few years ago, when I went to Washington to visit him, I opened the front door to find him glued to his cell phone. I went for a walk. When I returned, he was still on the phone. Later he told me that he’d had urgent matters to discuss with Nancy Pelosi.
Which brings me to his funeral. Unlike our mother, who entertained herself for years by informing us of how she wanted her send-off party (as she called it) to go, our father hasn’t been quite so vocal on such matters. To be specific, he hasn’t said a word about it, other than that he expects things to be done within traditional Jewish practice. My siblings and I assume that, as with all things regarding our father, we’ll figure it out when the time comes. If it comes. For years I’ve been betting on my father’s being the world’s first immortal. Either that or outliving at least one of his children. Or simply dying when the entire human race goes under due to our insufferable arrogance and greed, the land being covered by water, the air stinging with toxic fumes, the heavens raining fire and ice.
Nevertheless, I’ve long known that when the day of my father’s death comes, I will be plunged into terrible, crushing grief. Also, that his funeral is going to be packed, starting with family and branching out and out and still further out to include his wide circle of friends and his wider circle of admirers as well as business associates, folks from dozens of Jewish and other philanthropies, members of Congress and occupants of various upper reaches of the federal government, a sprinkling of former Israeli ambassadors to the U.S., and at least one retired general of the Israel Defense Forces.
Some perspective, please. During my childhood and into my teens, just about everyone I knew had a father making his mark in the larger sphere. My classmates’ fathers were federal judges, U.S. senators, presidential candidates, inventors of the atomic bomb and famous spooks. They were also not-famous spooks, real estate developers, Justice Department lawyers, dentists, doctors, editors and accountants. My friend Lise’s dad was among the not-famous spooks, my classmate Lucy’s father was one of the most famous ever, and as fate would have it, the high school I attended literally backed up on CIA grounds, such that when the cool kids wanted to get high, they’d sneak through the fence at the back of the football fields to smoke on CIA property. Pretty much every kid knew who every other kid’s father was. As far as my own father went, he wasn’t a senator or even a Supreme Court justice but in fact made his way as a regular old (if high-powered) lawyer. But he was something even bigger, and much, much better: He was astonishing.
Just as there are rock ’em, sock ’em bar and bat mitzvahs and those that make you want to weep with embarrassment, there are first-rate, second-rate, third-rate and God-that-was-depressing funerals. I went to a funeral recently where the dearly departed’s son went on for an hour about his mother’s stubborn refusal to cut his ex-wife out of the family while said ex-wife was sitting in the second pew bawling her eyes out. That was embarrassing. I’ve been to others that were so dry that not only were there nothing but dry eyeballs in the house, but also people fell asleep over their psalters.
As for Toby, the cranky old woman in our synagogue? Her funeral was moving. People spoke beautifully. Secrets were revealed. Who knew that years earlier Toby had gotten a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease and, determined not to let it define her, simply carried on? Nearly every seat in the sanctuary was taken. No doubt she would have been pleased. But not nearly so pleased as my mother would have been had she seen the standing-room-only crowd that came out for her own funeral, everyone dissolved in tears.
To this day, when I run into anyone who knew my mother — be it my high school buddies, their parents, or my mother’s diminishing circle of elderly friends — I can count on hearing a variety of effusions, all of which boil down to: “Oh my God. Your mother.”
Suffice it to say that though I have a large family — not only my children and their spouses, but my siblings, many first cousins and in-laws — my own circle of friends is small. As for admirers, fans, I have none. OK, maybe there are some out there. How would I know? I write, the work goes out into the world, and then, far more often than not, I hear — nothing. No one I know of is particularly impressed by me. Not one of my three children has ever had anyone say to them: “Jennifer Moses is your mother?” Or: “Jennifer Moses? For real? Wow.” I hope not to die for a good while yet, but when I do, I hope that my funeral, if not packed to the rafters like a Springsteen concert, might nonetheless be reasonably well attended. Forty people? Fifty?
Since you asked, my husband and I only recently bought side-by-side burial plots at the third of our synagogue’s cemeteries, this one arrived at via New Jersey’s horrific Route 17 and so massive that I would bet money on its being bigger than some Eastern European countries. And then, once you get to the Jewish section of the cemetery and from there make your way to the specific neighborhood that our synagogue has claimed, you’re so depressed — do I really want to spend all eternity next to 8,000 strangers? — that you seriously think about cremation. (Cremation is not permitted in Judaism.)
That said, I’ll tell you how I’d like things to go. First, I want whoever talks about me to talk about how funny I was, and by the way, she had really great hair. After that, my biggest request is that the rabbi who conducts my service has to have actually known me, personally, in order to prevent a lot of anodyne blah-blah-blah. After that, I can’t picture it.
The Everlasting is her heritage, and she shall rest peacefully at her lying place, and let us say: Amen.
Not that I’m competing with my hugely popular mother and father. Except maybe I am. Because that’s how I am: competitive. It’s a terrible curse, really, to be so desperate for affirmation, love and that most golden and shimmery illusion of all — success! — but there you go. I imbibed it with mother’s milk, all that what-you’re-supposed-to-be and who-do-you-know, so when I start thinking of my funeral, I can’t help but feel a little sad for myself, my poor dead body in its pine box, and only a petite crowd, a non-crowd, of mourners there to see me off. Then again, I’ve never been popular. So maybe I’ll just have to accept that those who attend my funeral will be there because they loved me and, even after my death, will carry me in their hearts.
Jennifer Anne Moses is the author of eight books and a frequent contributor to this magazine.