Staying on the Train

“Look who died today,” my father would often comment while reading the newspaper after work. He’d sit in his big ‘easy chair,’ holding the paper in front of him so that only his hands and crossed legs were visible. His voice, muffled by the paper, went on to describe the person, remarking on how young or old the newly deceased was. Later, at dinner, if my siblings or I did something he didn’t approve of, he’d say drily, “You’ll be sorry when I’m six feet under,” or “You’re killing your mother.”

Always restless, when I wasn’t jumping up from the table to dance around, I would wander into the adjoining living room where the television set was invariably on. In those days, news of the Viet Nam war filled the airwaves, and I’d watch men in camouflage clothes creeping through the jungle, accompanied by sounds of machine gun fire or explosions.

Those images of war, the cacophony of voices, and my father’s comments led me to ponder the solidity and interdependence of things. If my parents died, would I still be alive? How real was our house? Or any of us for that matter? When would death arrive here?

Sometimes on Sunday afternoons we used to drive from the new development where we lived in our modern, ranch-style house, to the opposite side of town where my grandmother lived in the humble, old wooden house where my father grew up.

She looked very old—old and rather frail like her house, with sunken cheeks and thin, gray hair pulled back into a low bun. I think some of her teeth were missing. I know there was always dish of hard candies on the coffee table, and I used to do a little dance for her that she liked.

She sat in a chair—I think it was a rocking chair—with her hands on her stomach, complaining about a pain, saying she was dying. She had come to this country from a village in Russia, where, I later learned, the Jews were attacked and she’d seen her sister being raped. I have no memory of her death, but perhaps it was her disappearance that impelled me to ask my mother:

“What happens when you die?” I must have been five or six years old, and I was standing near her legs as she worked on a sewing project at the dining room table.

“Go away. Don’t bother me,” she curtly replied, waving her hand to motion me to leave.

I said no more. Death must be a forbidden subject, I thought, at least for me. Although it seemed fine for others to talk about it. My mother had her own death stories that she repeated. One was about her mother’s death: she had been laughing and talking one minute, and then the next just sat down and died. And there was another about her father’s heart attack: how she’d stayed by his bed caring for him and how after he died, she cried so much, she never wanted to cry again. I only saw my mother cry when she watched old movies, and once when she had a cancer scare and had to go to the hospital for a biopsy. She used to laugh too, laugh until she cried, at some of those old movies. That’s when everyone in the family laughed together, watching such films as “I’m A Yankee Doodle Dandy” with Jimmy Cagney. When my mother’s parents came to the States from Russia, her father had opened a movie house and her happy memories mostly had to do with watching movies.

My mother suffered from tachycardia. During an attack, her heart beat very rapidly and she’d retreat to her room and lie on her bed with her hand hanging down over the edge to keep it lower than her chest. Sometimes I’d stand in the doorway and see her body rocking, her two fingers measuring the pulse in her neck. Of course she was afraid of death, like everyone else. She must have felt her heart could give out at any moment.

I started to wonder about, and want to contact, a power greater than me, greater than death—some source of refuge or safety.