Coming into the End Zone by Doris Grumbach Page B

sound philosophical basis for what I have been, and fail. All I can conjure up is bits and pieces, nothing solid, nothing whole. My lifelong, hard-held views: where are they now in this reexamination? What do I believe? What have I done? The time I have been granted: what has it all come to?
    I look across the table at my friend, who is happily paying the bill for our good dinner, as a final gift for the terrible Twelfth, and wonder, under the confusions of the day and my amazement at having survived this long without being aware that all this time had passed: Who am I? At the end of this hard, dismaying, and only occasionally heartening day, Sybil and I talk of someone we have heard about who, it was reported to us, died, ‘leaving nothing.’ The phrase stopped me. Its ambiguity is interesting. Does it mean money, property, goods, books, ‘belongings,’ as they say? In a different sense, perhaps it is more accurate to say we die leaving everything: what is left of the beauty of the natural world, the familiar faces of those we have loved, the music we have come to know so well that it plays in our ears without the use of technology, the paintings engraved on our eyes, the interior vision of dancers who perform brilliantly in our heads while we sit inert in our chairs at home. All this we ‘leave.’ It is never nothing. It is everything.
    As I fall asleep, I remember that I have not spoken to Richard Lucas in many days. I feel the need to be close to him now, to be part of his suffering and his courage, to see his dying. Am I being honest, or is this feeling accentuated by the impossibility of gratifying it? We are three thousand miles apart.
    This desire is something new for me. When I was a child I would not look at the dead, would not accompany my mother into a hospital to see a sick friend (in those days children could visit their friends without hindrance). ‘I’m afraid,’ I remember saying. ‘Of what?’ she would ask. I could not tell her, I did not know.
    During most of my life I walked away from the sight of an accident, sickness, suffering, as if, by my not witnessing them, they would cease to exist. Forced, by chance, to look upon an old man who had been shot through the head in front of his cigar store at the corner near my apartment house in New York, I am unable to forget the sight, in my dreams, and awake: a piece of the shell of his skull was left on the sidewalk after the ambulance had taken him away. As a young girl, all of death, dying, suffering, and pain coalesced into that glimpse of a section of a dead old man’s head.
    I could not bear to look upon anyone who was less than perfect for a long time.
    My grandmother took great pleasure in the spectacle of death. She used to attend funerals regularly, most often for persons she did not know. The Frank Campbell Funeral Home was three blocks from where she lived. As I recall, she had no particular sympathy for the living, except for her close relatives, whom she loved devotedly. But she was proud of her own survival to a great age—ninety-three. The longer she lived the more she seemed to enjoy funeral ceremonies for strangers.
    Clearly she was comforted by the number of deaths she had survived. I can still see her, dressed in her decorous black caracul coat, her black fur cloche set firmly on her white head, a matching muff over one gloved hand, in the other hand the Union Prayer Book, walking slowly from the Hotel Milburn, where she lived for many years, towards Amsterdam Avenue.
    Once I walked with her as far as the door to Campbell’s. We stood among the mourners, waiting for a plain pine coffin to be carried into the building.
    â€˜It must be an Orthodox Jew,’ she said. Of most of the rites of her faith she was ignorant; she refused to attend Temple Rodelph Sholom, which her mother had helped to found, because it had begun the practice of charging a hefty fee for the use of the pews. But from