Eulogy to My Grandmother

This past Hannukah, my mother gifted me a copy of “The Jewish Home Cookbook” that my grandmother – Bubbe – had given to her 30 years ago. She left a note on the inside cover dated October 21st, 1995 that reads as follows:

“Carol:

Being surrounded by my family at the dining room table were my very favorite times, enjoying one another’s company. Hope you enjoy the same wonderful feeling.

Love,

Mom”

This note encapsulates my earliest memories of Bubbe. My best memories as a child were being at her Passover table with our entire family. Seeing my uncles, aunts, and cousins (as well as honorary family members Stuart and Caroline) and having them all in one place was always a special treat. As you get older, you come to find out that people go off on their separate ways, and these gatherings you had when you were younger were ones that you took for granted.

When someone close to us passes away, I think there is always something in us that looks at it through a selfish lens. What I mean by that is that we often think initially about how it affects us personally. In my case, losing Bubbe is really losing the last vestiges of my childhood. Even though I am 37 years old, I feel that her loss truly puts the seal on the end of my childhood.

We were very close and things stayed that way through the years. I was the youngest grandchild for a very long time and with that came a special sort of relationship. She knew that I was fond of her Matzo Ball soup and Beef brisket and so she would make me my own batches of each that we would keep at home. I also loved pickles as a kid so she would make sure the table had plenty of pickles. Similarly, she had a penchant for frogs and had a menagerie of frog-related items: doormats, sculptures, widgets and so on, and so I would often be getting her frog paraphernalia as gifts, which she dearly enjoyed.

Like a typical Jewish grandmother, she loved to brag about her grandchildren. Whenever I went to visit her during the winter in Florida, she would drag me around to other tables in the elderly community she lived in to introduce me to everyone and to make sure they knew I was her grandson. I think there was a brief period of time when I could have won a mayoral election in Boca Raton based on how many hands I had shook. This continued to her dying day. As I got older, I came to see this was not bred out of arrogance but that she really was just so proud of her family. She really enjoyed bragging about my overachieving older brother who always seemed to be doing something noteworthy, and she would then conclude her salvos by stating “Jeffrey is no slouch either” before saying whatever it is she wanted to say about me. So in my teenage years, I bought her a mousepad for a computer that had a picture of me and her together and the transcription “Jeffrey is no slouch.”

COVID was a particularly hard time for her. At this point she had been relocated to the Willows in Worcester and she was essentially in solitude for prolonged periods of time. Every weekend, our family would organize a FaceTime. In some ways, it was for all of us, but realistically the reason we always organized behind it was for Bubbe, so she had something to do. I think she recommended a show on Netflix called “The Crown” about a dozen times, and she enjoyed comparing herself to Anne Frank since she felt that she was a Jewish lady locked in an attic. I had to remind her that I think she had things a lot better than Anne Frank did. 

Having her at our wedding was something very special for us. As she was declining over the last couple of years, our wedding was a focal point of every conversation. I could be in dialogue with her for a 10 minute span where there would be three separate discussions about our wedding and how wonderful it was. While we would joke that her memory had gotten so poor that she did not remember saying the same exact thing she had just said a moment ago, I must say I am grateful that our wedding is a memory that seemed to really be engrained into her mind. And with that being said, she kind of was at everything – piano recitals, my college graduation, and even in her waning years, I know she masked a lot of anguish when being present at our wedding and Julianne’s baby shower, for example. She was always very complimentary of Julianne and how beautiful and smart she was and how she came from such a great family, and she referred to our union as beshert, which is Yiddish for “it’s meant to be.”

There is one very important lesson that she taught me. Almost all of my pride about being Jewish comes from her. Starting from a very early age, she would always say to us this phrase verbatim: “anti-Semitism is alive and well.” We would laugh at her because as much as we knew that there were people out there who did not like Jews, it did not feel like a pervasive issue. Even during our FaceTime calls during COVID, she would slip that sentence into every call. The rest of us joked about having Bingo cards to fill out about her favorite Netflix shows, a reference to Anne Frank, or anti-Semitism being alive and well. Sadly, as we have come to see quite plainly over the last 15 months, she was right when she warned us about anti-Semitism.

When our daughter Josie was born, our lives changed forever. I distinctly remember bringing Josie to see Bubbe for the first time at my parents’ house in Dover. Bubbe cried when she saw Josie for the first time and remarked about how beautiful she was. She also was present at a lunch for Mother’s Day earlier that year in Mayl when we announced we were having a baby. She cried then as well and I remember her saying multiple times to my mother that she was now a Bubbe like her. For Bubbe to see my mother finally become a Bubbe herself was I think the best gift I could possibly give her, perhaps even better than the mousepad about me not being a slouch.

On the note of my mother, there is no one for whom this loss is harder than for her. My grandmother was her best friend and they spoke every single day. For the last decade since my grandfather passed away, my mom took on the brunt of Bubbe’s care. She would speak to her several times a day and drive out to Worcester several times a week to help her. In the last couple years, this intensified to become a nearly full-time job. Mom, your efforts do not go unnoticed and if I can take half as good of care as you as you did for your mother, I will feel that I performed a mitzvah.

Coming back to our daughter Josie – she is happy, excited, outspoken, funny, caring, kind, and the center of attention. And yet I realize as I describe her that these traits are interchangeable with my grandmother’s. I like to think that a part of her and her legacy lives on in our daughter. My wife and I are of different faiths and neither of us are particularly religious. Our plan has been to celebrate both holidays and things of that nature, but nothing overly formal with regards to religious education. In the Jewish tradition, you name the living after the dead, and so considering that Josie will never formally get a Hebrew name, I would like to informally pass on Bubbe’s legacy by giving her Hebrew name, Golda Hinda, to Josie. 

A couple months ago, me and Julianne went with Josie to visit my grandmother after her recent fall. Josie was excited to explore a new place and would make excited noises, and hearing the baby actually seemed to stimulate Bubbe in some way. “Is that the baby?” she said. And later she asked, “Can I hold the baby?” Even in her more “awake” moments, she had never asked to hold the baby before. In a way I felt as if she knew the end was near and that holding on to the baby might be some way of holding on to the thing most important to her: her family’s continued legacy. So I placed Josie on her lap and Julianne captured a moment of me, Josie, my mother, and Bubbe all together, with Bubbe smiling down at Josie. I believe this is the last memory I have of her in a somewhat lucid state.

I brought Josie back a couple times again with hopes that the baby might somehow bring her back to us, but it was to no avail. My last several visits to Bubbe were ones where I can only hope that she heard us, even if she could not speak back. In the end, most of us are not so fortunate to have anyone in our lives for such a long time, let alone someone with so much vigor, passion, energy, and loyalty. While it may be the end for her, as we say in the Jewish tradition, “May her memory be a blessing.”