My uncle was dying, and I didn’t know where to go.
I drove my aunt to the hospital one morning in June to help her out, hoping as well to see him in person before his death, but the hospital’s COVID visiting protocols were unyielding. My protest to the nurses’ station that I was one of his rabbis – a claim that even he, an atheist, would have gladly confirmed – went unheeded. I said goodbye to my aunt and trudged out the main lobby door.
My aunt and uncle have been anchors of our family since before I knew I had a family. Now, my uncle was drifting out of his tired, sick body, so loved by so many but so alone. All the platitudes about a piece of him living on within each of us wouldn’t salve the wound that was injuring my family. His impending death would be a second amputation traumatizing us a mere six months after the tragic death of my cousin, my aunt and uncle’s eldest child. I stood outside the hospital door in the oppressive New York City summer, reduced to feeling like a lost, rootless child, cut off from this man I loved, not knowing what to do and where to go next.
At my feet, the streets of Astoria, Queens were a torrential river, their sounds, colors, faces and bodies from throughout the planet bleeding, pulsing a relentless life flow. I did know that I had to move, and the streets were happy to pull me along in their current. As if swimming down 30th Avenue and under the trestle of the elevated train, I came to the intersection with Steinway Street. I began to think about my mother’s childhood stories of growing up in Astoria as I stopped at the noisy corner and called her on the phone.
“Hi”, I shouted over the din of cars, “The hospital wouldn’t let me go up for a visit, so I’ve decided to check out the neighborhood. I’m on Steinway Street right now.”
“I lived on Steinway Street!” she exclaimed.
“Wait a minute,” I responded, you told me the family clothing store was there, not that you lived there.”
“No, no,” she laughed, “I mean that’s where I spent all my time as a girl. Steinway Street was like a second home.”
“OK,” I said, now strangely intrigued to see the actual apartment building in which
she had lived, “Where was your apartment building?”
The passage of seventy years hadn’t dimmed my mother’s recall. “2559, 41st Avenue.”
I walked the few blocks to the address with a peculiar, inchoate longing, as if I was approaching some shrine to my family’s enduring legacy. My arrival was, unsurprisingly, deeply disappointing, yet what should I have expected? The building’s dull black façade held no lasting tribute to their long withered and forgotten presence. Nothing was etched in its bricks that told the story of my mother’s childhood, its traumas and joys, and it’s likely that façade had been redone a dozen times since she had lived there seven decades ago. Earlier I didn’t know where to go. Now I didn’t know why I had come here.
I stood outside the building door in that swelter, trying to imagine what it was like for my mother, at age eight, along with her loved ones, to lose my grandmother to asthma; I closed my eyes, trying to see my great grandmother, a huge presence in my early life, raising my mother and my aunt, who was then three, and who at this very moment was losing her husband to cancer; I wondered what a typical Saturday night looked like in my grandfather’s apartment, as relatives from all over the building and throughout the city came to visit at the close of the Jewish Sabbath, week after week, for many years.
Almost all these people who I imagined, foundations of my past, were long dead. Soon my uncle, who for all my years had been my present, would also die. It would be only a matter of time, hopefully not too soon, when even my memory which resurrected them would also fail, and their images would be erased from my mind. But just moments before, at the hospital, and at that very moment outside 2559 41st Avenue, I was alive, a grateful recipient and faithful trustee of their individual stories and collective spirit. Pieces of them all, from my uncle all the way back to those who came before him, really were pieces living on within me. And equally important, I was a piece of them, an extension of their legacies, who kept them alive just by being alive. I meditated with grief and gratitude on how much I owed to them and how I now continued their story.
My uncle was dying and now I knew where to go. Forward, taking him and all my ancestors with me.
Dan Ornstein is rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom in Albany, NY. He is the author of Cain v. Abel: A Jewish Courtroom Drama. (Jewish Publication Society, 2020)
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