One of my most vivid memories of the week my father died is all the food that came pouring into our two bedroom apartment within a day of when the news had reached our extended family. My mother had dozens of cousins when I was little. And it was all those cousins along with my mother's two remaining brothers who flooded our lives that week. When my father died, my mom was already down to having only 2 of her 4 siblings. Her only sister died exactly one year before my dad died. The first week of March would become “the week” in our family. As I grew I realized every family has a “week” or a “month” that stands out in the calendar because all their tragedies seem to miraculously fall in the same short space of time during a calendar year.
My dad and my aunt were both born in the first week of March in 1911 and they both died in the first week of March, my Aunt in1969 and my dad in 1970. My mom’s oldest brother died when I was just a first grader, but I cannot recall what month. My dad died when I was a little more than half way through the 4th Grade. All time is connected to Grades when you are growing up. It is the only reliable way to measure time and who you are in the world when you are a child. Your grade is a significant part of your identity. So in 1970 when I had just past the half way mark through 4th Gradde I got to take an entire week off from school to be with my family as we observed a period of mourning known as sitting Shiva. I do not remember a lot of sitting. What I remember is a lot of eating.
The week of the Shiva, is really a mandatory 7 days of feasting and welcoming people into your home at all hours of the day and night. It is the Jewish Way to help postpone the grief for the family until they gain enough strength to deal with the enormity of losing a loved one. The Shiva was one long week of chaos. The doorbell was always ringing with noisy and nosy neighbors waiting to come in and eat while expressing their shock and disbelief to my mother. Relatives arrived from near and far finding ways to fill up our days with family stories, and the phone never stopped ringing. The traffic was coming in from both ends of our apartment, the back door in the kitchen and the front door in the living room. Since we had an open floor plan it was easy to stand in the dining room and either look to the left to see who was coming in the back way or straight ahead at the big picture window in the living room where the half drawn shade only allowed me to view people from the knees down as they made their way toward our front door.
The food arrived in all shapes and sizes, some brought in by the actual giver and some by way of professional delivery. There were enough boxes of Fannie May Chocolates to feed a starving nation. The deli trays were always covered in tinted cellophane with a bow on top. Who would not want a wrapped gift of corned beef, tongue, turkey, and roast beef surrounding a giant container of chopped liver? Fruit baskets were more like fruit bushels, crates overflowing with apples, oranges, bananas and grapes. Coffee Cakes seemed to be multiplying over night while we slept. I remember thinking people were sneaking in while we dozed and leaving more and more food.
I cannot recall which day it was on during that long week but when it arrived I remember everyone gasping at it. It was huge. I tried imagining it hanging from the ceiling with the other salami’s I was use to seeing at the Kosher butcher, but I think it would have gotten in the way of the workers as they prance behind the meat counter trying to keep up with patrons pointing out which cut of meat they wanted. The salami was so long it extended far over our small round kitchen table. Like all the other salamis I had seen in my life it was tightly wrapped inside plastic with the words “Best” on it. It had a small looped rope at the top and a silver clasp to keep the plastic tightly sealed.
“I bet that salami is taller than you!” someone said as they came in through the back door and saw me standing by the counter that jutted out from the wall and separated our kitchen from our dining room. It was the spot I had chosen to make sure I could see people coming in from either door. I don’t remember who said it, I just remember being compared to the salami. Back then I was still short and skinny. But it would not take long for the people to disappear and what was left of my family to grow exponentially from grief fueled by fattening foods like fried chicken, French fries, smoked fish, brisket, sour cream mixed with bananas, and of course, salami.
