Not that we get any choice in the matter, but I'm hoping two is my total quota of funerals for February

Yes, it's our Greater New York Area Jewish Cemetery Photo of the Week. This is Beth David, just across the Queens-Nassau county line on Long Island.

by Ken

Ten days after my friend Terry's funeral, the other funeral I was waiting for went off pretty smoothly. Again we got lucky with the weather, in this exceedingly unkind winter we've been having in the Northeast. Yesterday would have been an even better day for it, but that was Saturday, and of course we wouldn't have been able to do it on Saturday. It was cooler and breezier Friday, but that worked out fine.

Oh, there'd been a lot of phoning and faxing since the news of the end came Tuesday morning, but it's not as if we weren't expecting it. She'd been in hospice care for two years. Her doctor proved himself a wise man. At the time he knew there was nothing he could do to bring her back even to the state she'd been in before the latest setback, he wouldn't even guess about the time frame. "I've seen too many things," he said, and for once I can tell you that that's not a paraphrase; those were his exact words. I don't remember a lot of things verbatim these days, but for some reason that I remember.

* * * * *

In this regard, the contrast with my friend's passing is stark. Go prove it, but it's my stubborn lay opinion that there were several levels of medical malpractice at play, not to mention the effects of having crap insurance, which in turn was surely a contributing factor to the lack of zeal on the part of the growing roster of doctors who kept being added to her payroll. I'm not saying she didn't have serious health issues, but the ones she presented for treatment never were diagnosed by any of those doctors. They got to choose what they treated her for, and they preferred to stay within their respective comfort zones. Finally, nobody was able to treat the series of complications that developed, even though they were all supposed to be treatable. It seems quite likely that the fancy-shmancy cancer mill she was sent to for cancer she didn't have (the chemo was precautionary after cancer cells were found in tissue that had been removed; she was scared to death of it, but the doctors successfully bullied her into it) in fact gave her the infection that caused her spiraling deterioration.

If she had survived, she would have faced almost immediate bankruptcy. As it is, the medical creditors will probably be reduced to carving up the few assets she still had.

* * * * *

It isn't just the expectedness of the event that made my mother's passing so unstressful, relatively speaking. I think it was under the influence of arranging my stepfather's funeral in the early '90s that she made the decision to spare me as much of that as humanly possible by arranging (and of course paying for, no small strain on her tight budget) her "pre-needs" arrangements. Naturally I had known about this for years -- that was kind of the point, after all -- but I didn't actually see the contract until a few years ago, when I was stunned at how specific and seemingly comprehensive it was, covering what appeared to be every step of the chain of expenses from preparing her in Florida to transporting her to the cemetery on Long Island and on through the funeral. In the end, the only uncovered expenses that had to be paid were a $115 Florida tax (did I hear right that it was a tax on shipping bodies?), which I'm guessing didn't exist 15 years ago, and a $10 cemetery gratuity.

* * * * *

The last time I saw my mother was in June, when I made a quick trip to Florida for her 90th birthday. It took me a month of trying to be able to write a bit about it (here and here). Probably it was my poor communication that led a commenter to assume, presumably from my writing about the remarkable assisted-living facility she was living in (and where she eventually died), that we "must be rich."

It didn't occur to me to mention how much she had denied herself to pay for the long-term care insurance policy that made it possible for her to have the care she needed when her time of need came, as she understood it very well could, or to mention the mountain of debt I've piled up to make sure that beyond that she had what she needed.

It's true that somehow or other she found the money to pay for that LTC policy, just as she found the money to pay for the "pre-needs" contract that both spared me the anguish and expense of making the necessary arrangements and ensured that the arrangements would be made and carried out properly. I'm sure there are a lot of people who wouldn't have been able to scrape that money together, but then, I'm also sure that there are a lot more people who -- like me -- wouldn't be capable of the degree of self-denial it takes to try. That doesn't seem much in fashion among generations younger than hers.

* * * * *

The funeral home people were great. At the Florida end, fortunately I maintained contact these last several years, eventually keeping them updated on her living situation, so that when the time came, they sprang into action and, eventually handing off to their local affiliate, handled everything. For once in the long ordeal of my mother's illness and decline, I was able to take advantage of the fact that the people you deal with in matters like this deal with it all the time, while you, if you're lucky, hardly ever do. Finally I had the people who know all about it on my side. And my mother, rest her soul, had the peace of mind of knowing that she would have the exact arrangements she wanted, and that I would have to do as little as possible beyond showing up.

I imagine there are any number of reputable companies servicing people of various faiths who perform these same services equally well. I only know my folks, though: Riverside Gordon Memorial Chapels in Florida (our branch was the one in Aventura, and I feel now as if I know pretty much everybody there), and Boulevard-Riverside Chapels of Hewlett, on Long Island (and also Brooklyn). If you consider that all the money was paid in 15 years ago, you might wonder if there might be some going-through-the-motions quality to their work. Uh-uh! Everything was done with maximum efficiency, courtesy, and respect.

* * * * *

By the time I reached home Friday I had a message on my answering machine from Boulevard-Riverside, checking to see whether everything had been okay. The caller said he would try again, but I didn't wait. I returned the call right away, happy to assure them that everything had been great.

* * * * *

The funeral home also arranged the rabbi. By the time I got home Tuesday night, I had a message from him, informing me that he would be officiating at the service Friday. He did, and he was great. He didn't know my mother, and I didn't want him pretending he did. He did for her what I never could have: made sure that she had a traditionally correct sendoff. Thank you, Rabbi Rosenbaum.

I knew I was going to be asked to identify the body. I thought I could handle it. My friend Richard argued vociferously against that. He says he thought he could handle it at his mother's funeral too. In Jewish tradition we don't do anything unnatural to the deceased, like embalming, let alone all that Six Feet Under-type post mortem prettifying. When the time came, I was offered a choice, and chose not to find out whether I was up to it. It just meant signing in one extra place. A good tradeoff, I think.

At the gravesite, where I hadn't been for many years, I was startled to see how filled in the surrounding area is. There used to be so much open space! I guess in that time (it could be as much as 15 years), a lot of the people who had invested in that "real estate" have, er, moved in. There didn't appear to be a spare inch in any direction from my folks' plot. The double stone arranged to my mother's specifications all those years back looked really good. (Way back when, at the time of the unveiling, it had had to be redone at the last minute when it was discovered that the goniff I'd found to do the stone had had the wrong half of the stone engraved. By next year at this time I have to find out if the goniff is still alive, or some other company has taken over his contracts, since my understanding was that the engraving of the other side was included in the supposedly "complete" price.)

Now that it's so crowded around there, and with the ground being a mixture of packed frozen snow and mud, I didn't venture the several rows farther back to where my older stepsister is buried. She died appallingly young of a form of Hodgkin's that within a few years, I understood, was considered readily treatable. My younger stepsister died a few years ago. Their mother died fairly young of cancer, and I know all their too-short lives they felt a sort of premonition hanging over them.

* * * * *

Afterward, and after I'd made a couple of phone calls to let those people know that it was done, and done well, Richard's magic phone not only informed us that there was a Ben's Deli, which he had reason to believe was an outstanding kosher deli (he was right), a mere six miles away in Queens, but actually led us there, or at any rate to the outskirts of a mall, in which we eventually found it. I had the juiciest corned beef I've had in decades and a kasha knish and two (2) Cel-Rays (talk about going hog-wild). Richard had tongue (he loves tongue; so did my mother) and stuffed derma.

My mother would have approved. She would only have regretted not being able to join us. In her slightly idiosyncratic view of the faith, it sort of revolves around having the correct foods prepared correctly for the correct occasion. I used to find this kind of funny. Now, as I think about it, it strikes me as pretty sensible -- a lot more than the customary approach.

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