My dad died 29 years ago today. PLEASE no condolences, sorry for your loss, may his memory be a blessing. Our relationship wasn't like that. I only just realized that today was January 6. January 6, 1996 was the eve of the real snowmageddon in Baltimore. My dad, Rudy Weis, died that morning, three months after being diagnosed with a glioblastoma multiforma (the minute Dr. Agha Khan said those words I knew I'd never forget them, his fine brain surgeon fingers spreading like a spider’s web indicating how the tumor would grow). The body was taken to Sol Levinson's when they were in the city, on Park Heights Avenue or Pimlico. And there he stayed for over a week because we got 22.5 inches of snow in three days. Rudy wanted to be cremated ("Don't spend more than $300 on cremation," he instructed me), but we hadn't planned on embalming him.
So two whammies (Jews don't embalm or cremate, usually). The 70-year-old body had to be embalmed, according to Sol Levinson's folks, as he was beginning to decay, decompose, something like that. As soon as they were able to, he was shipped off to Ruck Funeral Parlor in Towson where they do all that -- embalming and cremating. Off he went. And then the ashes were transported back to Sol's in a plastic black box, slightly bigger than a VHS case from Blockbuster. All six feet and 180 pounds of him. I lived in Israel at the time but had come home to try and care for him as he was dying. I carted those ashes back to Israel with me thinking I'd let them fly in the Holy Land. My dear friend Yoni Gordis advised against it. Something about the ashes defiling a Cohanim (if you don't know who they are, let's save it for another time).
The oversized plastic box stayed on a shelf in my flat on Jabotinsky Street, and then came home with me a few years later and lived in the back of the closet in the second bedroom in my sweet little ranch house in Mt. Washington on Oakshire Road, that I purchased with my inheritance. Eventually, my sister and I decided to scatter the ashes on his parents' graves at Chevra Ahavas Chesed Cemetery in Randallstown around 2002. The ashes flew into our eyes and mouths on that windy, sunny afternoon. His parents, Alfred and Mathilde (Lion) Weis, slipped out of Germany by the skin of their teeth in 1937 with my 12-year-old dad in tow.
I'm thinking of these things today. My dad would be 99 years old.
https://www.wmar2news.com/.../recapping-the-blizzard-of-1996
thank you......sending love
Cremation, embalming, ashes and the process of picking out containers to hold them. My dad too was reduced to scattered ashes in the end.
This beautiful writing all because you saw a set of numbers (the date). Our brains, our memory—fascinating isn’t it?
I have two dates in January that trigger emotions and memories, not really the good kind. It’s complicated. Ironically, I journaled right before the new year that I’d try to retrain my brain to see the numbers in a different light this year. I don’t know, like go hiking or skydiving. Attend a self care class—do something to change this particular set of numbers (1/14 and 1/21) when I see them.
Maybe I wont, maybe I’ll write a memory too.
Living, humaning — what a ‘ting…what a ‘ting…