Pack Up the Moon

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.”
– W. H. Auden, “Funeral Blues”

When I was eight or nine years old, my favorite part of the week was Thursday evenings around 6:15. That was when Hebrew school let out, and my friend Sam and I would play a kind of game on our walk home. Part race and part hide-and-seek, we would run ahead of our mothers at the start of each block and pick a place to hide just around the corner, and wait until either they had passed or had “given up” on finding us, and then we would run out and surprise them from behind before racing ahead to the next street corner. We usually saved the “best” hiding places for the corner of Sherman Avenue and Greenleaf Street: then we might brave some minor trespassing and hide in the bushes in front of a house instead of a behind a tree, and cause our mothers some genuine if mild concern (this was itself, naturally, a great triumph). Once found, we parted ways to our separate homes.

The game was highly ritualized: it didn’t work, for example, if our fathers had come to get us, or on occasion my grandparents. I think we always felt that they didn’t quite understand the game the way our mothers did: they’d search too hard, or not at all, they’d take a different route, or perhaps one might come in a car, forcing the other to walk home alone. There were certain spots we favored every time, others that changed, but we always hid the longest at that last corner, because we didn’t want the game to end. We raced in all weathers—and it was always a race, for we were well-matched in speed—and whether it was still light out or not. And however hard we competed to reach the end of the block first, we (nearly) always cooperated in securing our hiding spots. After all, if one of us was found out, the other had to reveal themselves or risk losing the race to the next block. Only on the last block could one of us afford to remain hidden while the other was found out, and indeed, it would have been treasonous to reveal the other’s hiding spot at that last moment.

All this to say that I have always been a person who thrives in the structure of a ritual, from childhood games to my current morning routine. It’s why I’ve felt such keen stress this year as Passover approaches and I prepare to take on one of the most ritualized of all the Jewish holidays totally alone. It’s why, conversely, I am holding up reasonably well in the new, quarantined world we are all living in.

And it’s perhaps why, last Wednesday, when I learned that Sam had died, I felt that I had been robbed of my grief.

It’s difficult to say what Sam was to me, exactly. I had known him all my conscious life, from age two when we met in preschool until last Tuesday, when he died in the kind of accident I had foolishly assumed would cease to occur during this strange time. He was my partner in crime, perhaps: certainly I got into more trouble with him than I did anyone else, from a mud bath in his front yard to a large wad of silly putty in my hair, from biking past the boundaries my parents set (sorry, guys) to go visit him in middle school to letting him copy off my Hebrew tests in high school. A brother or a best friend, too, the sort who you could go days or weeks or years without seeing and pick up exactly where you had left off, with no doubt at all of an enduring, mutual affection. Whatever the best definition might be, whatever exactly our relationship was, Sam was family.

When family and friends die, there is a long list of rituals proscribed by Jewish law. There is a certain way to prepare the body for burial. There are certain practices one follows at the funeral. There are times to visit the bereaved, instructions for how those people are supposed to act and be treated in the coming days, months, and years. There are prayers to say.

But such things are impossible in the world we live in now. Personal protective equipment is too precious to give to those tending a dead body. Funerals must adhere to size restrictions and be closed to the public. Shiva, too, must be private. And I could not have gotten back to Evanston right now in the first place. I cannot say the Mourner’s Kaddish, nor respond to its recitation, because that requires nine other Jewish adults, congregated in a single place. I cannot reach for my family, for my friends, for Sam’s parents, to hold them or to weep with them. Each of us must mourn apart.

Without these rituals, I was unmoored. When I told friends and colleagues what had happened, they expressed all the notes of consolation and grief that one would expect, but I could not process them. Intellectually I felt the loss, and it sobered me in the following days, but my emotions did not know how to square such devastating personal news with the unfolding disaster around me, and the unchanging walls of my room, the familiar but unreal routine of my current now.

It has been a difficult week indeed for New York, and it stands to get more difficult before this is over. I am afraid for those who I love here and elsewhere, and for those who I have never met but are trapped in the city with me. A hospital is being set up in Central Park. The streets are deserted. The city is quiet. And yet, as with all things, we have adapted: I go out on my fire escape for fresh air, rain or shine, I walk in the streets to avoid close contact with others, I call my family and remind them that I love them. Though we lack the participation rates of Spain, at 7pm each night we, too, venture to our fire escapes and open windows to applaud the essential workers risking their lives during this crisis. New York has survived terrible things before, we are constantly reminded. We will get through this too.

But not all of us will get through this, though the Empire State Building will remain standing. And when those losses occur, we will face them bereft of our normal coping mechanisms. Death is a reality we do not like to face head-on in America, but we are familiar enough with its shadow that when someone we know loses a friend or a family member, we follow procedure: time set aside for tears and physical comfort, donations made in the deceased’s honor, and the memorialization that starts the second after death and continues, sometimes, for the rest of our lives. But these losses will be different. They will be endured without funerals, without friends or family to hug, without a grave to visit. In such moments, our grief may feel suspended in amber: unreal, or perhaps, somehow incorrect. This will not be true, of course, but it will be hard.

I watched a recording of Sam’s funeral over Zoom yesterday, sharing a screen with my father back in Evanston. I had thought to wear all black for the occasion, but instead I wore an old Gap sweatshirt he’d given me as a birthday present in fifth grade: his babysitter had wanted to buy me a pink one, but he knew me better, and insisted on a gray-green shirt that I wore on our runs home the rest of the year (it was a great color for hiding in the shadows). His mother spoke, our rabbi spoke, the cantor sang the psalms and the prayers of mourning. I watched them pile dirt on his grave, the first scoop done with the back of the shovel, to show their reluctance to bury him and let him go. I watched all the rituals I had been taught unfold from afar, two days late, and ached to know that I could not do these last things for Sam, and for his family. Someday, God willing, when this plague has ended, I will go and visit his grave. But until then, what?

Watching the funeral, at least, undid the emotional dam I had been feeling: I wept silently through most of it, and when I had hung up with my father, I set my head down on my desk and surrendered at last to my grief. The ghosts of our rituals will help us a great deal in the coming days. But we will need new ones too: new ways to step outside of the bizarre normal that we have entered, and to pause to mourn and remember what and who we have lost. We are all grieving the loss of our past, present, and future. We have all lost our normal way of life—we are, in fact, still losing it, as more and more restrictions go up to keep us safe—and we have lost things that we were looking forward to and planning on. But we must make space, too, for this individual loss, and our individual grief.

We heard last week that perhaps lives ought to be sacrificed in this pandemic for a greater good, that we might return to the normal we had had before all of this. I do not think I need to say how I feel about this. I will say, though, that I wish that any person who thinks that might have known Sam, who had the biggest heart of anyone I’ve ever met. He felt deep pain when he saw anyone suffering, and he celebrated the accomplishments of others unreservedly and unselfishly. If he loved something, his first instinct was to share it so that you could love it too.

I do not know what mourning Sam will look like in the days ahead. I do not know what life in New York will look like, either. But when I sit out on my fire escape and watch the world keep ticking by, I will stop the clock for just a moment, and ponder what I have lost, what we all have lost, and do what I can to ensure that this virus does not rob us of our grief, too.

Dedicated to the memory of Sam Wiener, who was, sometimes despite his best efforts, a very good man.

—

Title also taken from “Funeral Blues.”

Thanks to everyone who has reached out about the situation in New York: so far, we’re okay, and we’re doing everything we can to keep it that way. Stay safe and healthy wherever you are.