by Anna Stolley Persky (Fairfax, VA)
Today we are burying my friend, my Jewish light, and it is gray and cold and muddy, and we are in the middle of a graveyard, and we are in the middle of a war, and people all over the world are telling us that they hate us, and I believe them.
It is December 2023. We are in the Philadelphia suburbs, where my friend and I grew up together, and where she is now being lowered into a hole in the earth. I am with her brothers and sister and father and friends, along with her three children. Her husband, their father, died of cancer more than ten years ago.
My friend’s children, the youngest still in high school, are orphans.
There is a war going on more than 5,700 miles from us here, under a tent that barely shields us from the wind and rain.
Some of my friends who aren’t Jewish are marching, even yelling that Zionists have blood on their hands.
I look down at my hands. They are cold and tinged pink. I put them in the pockets of my jacket.
We are saying the Mourner’s Kaddish in Hebrew, but in my head, I am hearing Avinu Malkeinu, “Our Father, Our King,” a prayer that asks God for mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. My friend was a cantor. She led prayers in her lovely, lilting voice at synagogues in Florida before moving back to Philadelphia. She taught me what it means to be Jewish, and now she is dead, and I am standing among the lost and left behind, and I know better to ask why, and yet, still I ask. She was 54, the same age as me.
My friend taught me that to be Jewish means to ask the questions that can’t be answered or, rather, can be answered in vastly different ways. She taught me that to be Jewish is to live in the land of limbo, the endless thirst in a desert.
I don’t want her body trapped inside a coffin. I want to open it up and let her fly, but my friend isn’t in there; she is already away, in the somewhere else. Is she with her husband? Is she part of the wind? We debated death, my friend and I, and then we agreed that it probably meant returning to the universe in a squishy way we couldn’t fully explain. Then we laughed and tried again.
Here’s something I would like to ask my friend: Should we ask God for mercy? Why should we pray for redemption? What did she do but live in a way that was more good than bad, where she helped people find comfort in Jewish traditions? What have I done, what have any of us done but try to survive?
Do we need to ask God for forgiveness if we are fighting a war? Each life has value, so is there such a thing as a just war? What if you are attacked first? Does anything justify slaughter and rape? Does anything justify killing children?
These are the questions she would have debated with me – Jew against Jew, not against, not really, just trying to look at a problem from all the different angles. She appreciated nuance, something I fear is disappearing.
It’s time for each of us to take turns with the shovel.
We cover her coffin with bits of the earth, dirt, stones, each of us, three times. The first time we use the back of the shovel to demonstrate our reluctance to say goodbye. Then the other two times, we turn the shovel back over to symbolize our acceptance that she has gone from us.
One: Do you remember that when we first met? We were seven. You wrote poetry and ate Tastykakes in the library even though the rules said no eating in the library. You smirked while you opened the plastic wrapper. I want you to come back and debate with me why those rules, but not all rules, could be broken.
Two: Are we going to be all right? I mean, all of us, the Jews, and me without you? Your son called me on your phone to tell me that you had died, and I already knew because your sister texted me first, but when your son called on your phone, I thought it was you anyway. This shovel thing isn’t working. I see your children. They are looking down, stunned.
Three: When we were in high school, you would let me lie next to you, and you would play for me “Fire and Rain,” and we ignored the Jesus in the song, but I am still on “I always thought I would see you again” repeat.
My friend was still living when the war started, although she was sick and knew she was dying. She was still living when she told me to turn off the television, that she couldn’t watch anymore because she was so angry, and she was worried that her anger would twist into a blood lust. She was so honest, sometimes, and unafraid of putting to words what the rest of us hold inside and allow to fester. She was also not honest sometimes, which is to say, human and mortal.
Then she said, turn the television back on, and we talked about all the different emotions we were feeling and how they could exist at the same time, and all of them could be true to us.
I look at my friend’s children again. They are Israeli American. Their father’s family had to flee Iraq, their home, to Israel or they would have been killed. My friend’s ancestors escaped pogroms. It is a miracle these children are alive, these three beautiful beings.
It is raining harder.
I want to sit with my friend in the land of limbo. I want to sit with my friend who reveled in the gray.
It is perfect for her, this weather.
Anna Stolley Persky is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at George Mason University. Her essays have been published in Pithead Chapel, Two Hawks Quarterly, and The Washington Post. Her fiction has been published in Mystery Tribune, The Satirist, and Five on the Fifth.
The Jewish Writing Project 