Memoirist Idol

Posting Comments About Post-Life

With aid and comfort from Jean Smart and HBO’s HACKS

My wife and I love watching Hacks, the HBO-Max series starring Jean Smart, an actress whom I’ve not only grown to adore — I wasn’t much for “Designing Women” but everything she touches now [Mare of Easttown!!!] shines on like a crazy diamond— but who reminds me of my mother in that way you get reminded of your deeper angst when someone swings and connects a solid gut punch.

Not to give anything away, so hold me while I type as vaguely as possible, but Smart’s “Debra Vance,” and co-star Hannah Einbinder’s “Ava,” are working at a Sacramento comedy club (which should just about set the scene for anyone needing to know the tone and theme, with apologies to Joan Didion who would understand, I’m sure), when Debra is reunited with a very old friend — a woman from the early days when men were men, meaning that emcees would squeeze women’s asses as regularly and often as they’d burp, sneeze, or urinate.

I could tell you more about the scene, the routine, this entire episode “$1.69 million,” but either you already know or need to experience it for yourself, and anyway, what I really want to tell you more about is the hug this other woman gave Debra, which reminded me of the most comforting, consoling hug I ever received.

“WHEN I DIE I HOPE I WILL BE, A BETTER MAN THAN YOU THOUGHT I’D BE…”

That old song from an obscure band called Motherlode (Buddah Records 1969), always comes to mind when I think too long about dying. A neighborhood cat disappeared this past Sunday, and he was old and I thought in good health, but with cats, I suppose you can’t always tell — as opposed to people who wear most things not so well — so either he was taken or decided to spare us his troubling end.

My comforting hug, though, didn’t come in these days; it’s just that watching Hacks last night made me remember.

It’s been almost 22 years since my father died — Christmas Eve, 2000. What a day for a Jewish man to go and for a half-Jewish son to grieve.

Two days before he passed, I arrived to see him at the nursing home. I had been warned:

“He looks like a wild animal,” a friend suggested.

I went alone to the facility; my mother had already been in the afternoon and was now trying to scrape up supper for me, my wife, and our two little girls.

I can say this much: that friend stated my father’s state accurately.

A Parkinson’s victim, Dad didn’t know me, I think, except that he stared intently at me. And then, the wall, and then his roommate, and then his hands.

“What am I doing here?” he might have wondered, and of course, I felt the same.

His roommate was in better shape, or at least aware of me, and conversant. I told him of my daddy’s fighting in WWII, though why that mattered right then, I don’t recall. I held my daddy’s hand for as long as I could, and this might have been an hour, or three-and-a-half minutes, the time of a song on 45.

I knew he didn’t have long, and the other thing I knew was that I had not cried in front of my daddy since I was six, and fell against an iron ornamental chair in a neighbor’s yard one summer night while chasing fly balls Daddy hit to me with our whiffle ball set. My only trip to the emergency hospital.

So I kept gathering myself, kissed his hand, said goodbye, and made it into the corridor some good distance away from the room. A member of the staff, a nurse, saw me there.

“Honey, you ok?” she asked.

She, of course, knew I wasn’t.

And without asking if she could, she took me in her arms, allowing me to cry as hard and as long as I needed.

I don’t know her name, didn’t then, and when we returned the next day to say goodbye to my father, she wasn’t on duty.

A stranger’s hug — a woman whose job it was to comfort and nurture both the dying and the grieving. Someone I never saw again.

I could have used her comfort over the next few days after he passed when I experienced these realities:

• My mother’s telling me to pull myself together, as I began crying while drying dishes, because she needed me.
• An in-law from my wife’s side who walked into the house and broke down in MY arms; she had met my father once before.
• An old friend of mine who showed up as we were leaving the funeral home and stuffed multiple copies of his brand new, hackneyed country music CD into my bare hands.
• Another old friend who, in the midst of our gathering at home just before the funeral, called, demanded to speak to me, and then suggested that we pray to Jesus together, never mind that we weren’t close; never mind that I didn’t pray to anyone, and really never mind that, you know, Dad was Jewish.
• My Dad’s first cousin, the man who owned the jewelry store where Dad worked for fifty years, bringing me corned beef, pickles and rye bread from our favorite deli, in a brown paper sack, delivered just after the graveside service.
• Our Methodist preacher, performing the service at the secular cemetery where my mother’s family is buried, because separating parents in death is unthinkable to me, and anyway, Dad’s rabbi was out of town on a skiing trip.
• And the moment after I gave the eulogy when I sat down next to my brother and he put his arm across my shoulders.

I got hugged by almost everyone during these days, especially by my wife. Still, nothing compared to the arms of a woman who, like the character who embraces Debra Vance on Hacks, was coming from a very different place — someone who knew what grieving was, and would be, and, I think, was trying to set me off with the understanding that I’d need so much more, and maybe wouldn’t get it.

As we finished that one episode of Hacks last night, we had to keep going. And wouldn’t you know it: we got to a funeral scene, which Debra, not known for her empathy, saves. After the service, Ava asks Debra about crying, and how it happens, and when.

“Little bits at a time,” Debra says, or something like that.

Which I think is just another way of saying that time and grief, and the recurring nature/reality of loss are not things we ever get over. Most of us just get through them, and then we flip the record over to see and hear what will start next — what will distract us from that old reality until a new one comes along, as it, of course, inevitably will.

Thanks to KiKi Walter and everyone playing at Memoirist Idol! And if you need a story to make you wonder more about reality and relationships, try this one from the VOICE of Deb Groves Harman who made me think of “Night Moves” and how what happens in the water, in the dark, stays with us long after we’ve emerged from the pool, and from those teen years which almost drown us:

And here’s one of my earlier entries, too: