The Detroit News and the New York Times ran the same long obituary, complete with pictures of Lydia and Mendel that had been taken right after they arrived in Ann Arbor to teach, pictures Lizzie had never even seen. Her parents looked so young. Lydia had long straight hair and stared at the camera with a serious expression. Mendel had a mustache and beard and was smiling slightly. Lizzie was now older than her parents had been when the pictures were taken, another odd and unbalancing thought.
Everyone helped Lizzie make the arrangements for the funeral service and the reception at her parents’ house afterward. Allan and Elaine of course flew in from Tulsa immediately and were, along with George, Marla, and James, wonderful about dealing with all that death requires the survivors to do: working out details with the funeral home, helping Lizzie select her parents’ caskets, calling various governmental agencies and financial institutions to report the deaths (Allan did this, thank goodness), but it fell to Lizzie to do what she felt were the two hardest tasks.
Lydia had died instantly in the accident, despite obediently wearing a seat belt and having the driver’s-side air bag work as promised. But Mendel, sitting in the passenger seat, was not as fortunate. For some reason his air bag hadn’t inflated. In spite of that, he survived the collision, but with his body badly broken and his fine mind knocked silly. The doctors told Lizzie there was nothing to be done, he’d never be Mendel again, that even if his body healed and he awoke from the coma he was blessedly in, the kindest thing she could do for her father was to let him die.
Mendel and Lydia had left no instructions for her. There was no will, nothing giving her power of attorney, and nothing at all to help her decide what was to be done with them, dead or alive. She had a slight memory of her parents coming home from an elderly long-retired Jewish colleague’s funeral and Lydia scoffing at all the attendant rituals, at the procession to the cemetery, at the shoveling of dirt on the casket after it was lowered into the grave, at the professional friends and professional enemies who came together at his death to professionally mourn him. And then adding, unless Lizzie misremembered, that despite the rigmarole she’d decided that she’d like a rabbi on hand during her funeral. But nothing religious.
“That makes no sense. They’re totally opposite desires,” Lizzie complained to George. “But I do sort of hear her saying that in my mind. Or at least I think I do. What if I made it up? What if we do one thing and it turns out that she really wanted the other? Oh God, George, this is just like them. What do you think we should do?”
“Well, before we decide about the funeral, I think we, or you, have to decide about Mendel first, don’t we? And we should do it fairly quickly, although it won’t matter to Lydia if you stretched Jewish law and waited a few days before she was buried.”
So this was the first hard task: telling the doctors that she wanted to end her father’s life, if you could call the state he was in life. At first it seemed like a no-brainer (like Mendel, himself, at this point and now forever). But it still felt weirdly wrong when, during a meeting with her father’s doctors, she told them to “pull the plug,” as Allan had indelicately put it. Was it really a plug? An electrical connection? What if the God that Mendel and Lydia didn’t believe in stepped into the picture with a convenient power outage so that those words wouldn’t have to be said, and the decision would be taken out of her hands? In the end, the life-support system was turned off, and now neither Mendel nor Lydia could mourn the other, as she felt they would have wanted but dearly wished they had made explicit.
“Did they purchase funeral plots?” Elaine asked.
Lizzie didn’t know.
“Did they want to be buried or cremated?”
Lizzie didn’t know.
“What do you want to do, sweetheart?” George asked.
Lizzie didn’t know. She wanted to run away. She wanted to find Jack. She wanted to be back in Terrell the Terrible’s poetry class and meeting Jack for the first time. She turned to George. “Can you decide, George? Because I don’t know what to do.”
George considered the two options. “I’d say burial, I think.”
“Okay,” Elaine said, “then the next steps are to choose their caskets and find funeral plots.”
“Yes,” Lizzie said. “I suppose that’s what we have to do.”
“I’ll start calling cemeteries,” Allan said.
Even harder than talking to the doctors was calling the rabbi who was going to conduct the funeral service. Because the Bultmanns had never affiliated themselves with any religious institution, the first problem was locating a rabbi. “You would think,” Lizzie said to Marla, “that for people who avowed no interest, zero, nada interest, in religion at all, Mendel and Lydia would have wanted nothing to do with the rituals of funerals either.”
At all. But there, unable to be refuted, was Lizzie’s memory of what Lydia had said. Or had not said.
Elaine called their rabbi in Tulsa for advice. After doing some quick research, he came up with the name of a young woman who had gone to rabbinical college with his own son and was now working on a PhD in Middle Eastern studies in Ann Arbor and assisting at Temple Beth Shalom, a building into which not one of the Bultmanns had ever set foot.
Lizzie liked the sound of Rabbi Gould’s voice, and she suspected that her mother would have approved of a female rabbi even if she didn’t like what the rabbi might have to say. She had a brief fantasy that maybe she and the rabbi could be friends once this was all over. But first she had to convey her parents’ (or at least her mother’s) wishes, and could only think to say without any preamble, “My mother wanted a funeral with a rabbi, but she was a devout atheist, so she wouldn’t want God mentioned at the service.”
There was a long silence on the phone. Lizzie wondered if this was the first time Rabbi Gould been asked to officiate at a funeral and now, most unluckily, had to deal with such a request. Oh God, Lizzie prayed to herself, unaware of the irony, please, please don’t let her refuse. I can’t do this again.
Finally, Rabbi Gould spoke. “There has to be at least one prayer that mentions God. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a Jewish ceremony. It’s a memorial prayer called El Maleheh Rachamim, ‘God Full of Compassion,’” she went on. “It’s the first time the deceased person is labeled as deceased by name. Do you want to know how it came about?”
“Um, not really,” Lizzie started to respond, but the young rabbi was on a roll.
“In Poland in the 1640s there were a series of terrible massacres—the Chmielnicki Massacres—and this prayer was a way for an entire community to be named and therefore remembered. Over time it developed into a more personal prayer that was used as a way to memorialize the dead and ask for God’s protection over them throughout eternity.”
“I guess that’ll be okay,” Lizzie replied, tired of the issue, of the last difficulty her parents had directed her way, however unintentionally. But what kind of parents would neglect to tell their daughter what she should do with them after they die? Lizzie’s kind, obviously.
*?The Outside Linebackers?*