Departing Soon

The parameters and logistics have yet to be determined, but it already has a name: the Dead of Winter Tour.

There won’t be any media accounts or “merch” booths. This isn’t a concert series by the surviving members of a ’60s jam band.

It’ll be a personal trip to as many as four cemeteries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It wouldn’t necessarily have needed to occur in the next few months. But then that name hit me, and a voice in my head channeled Starship Captain Jean-Luc Picard commanding “Make it so.”

Actually, it has grown into a tour. It began with a simple desire to revisit the graveyard in southern New Jersey’s Pine Barrens where my maternal grandmother has been interred since 1981 and my paternal grandfather joined her 16 years later. I last was there for my grandfather’s graveside service in 1997.

But I’ve also had it in mind for a while now to pay visits someday—separately or on the same trip—to the final resting places of a pair of memorable if utterly dyspeptic ladies I first encountered as a volunteer and ended up counting as friends. Both have been referenced in this blog. Helen was a client of Iona Senior Services in Northwest Washington who lived in DC. Mildred was a resident of Springhouse at Westwood, an assisted living facility in Bethesda.

Helen was the long-divorced wife of a doctor who, in her telling at least, left her for a younger woman and screwed her big-time in the settlement. She’d had multiple sclerosis since the early 1970s, which forced her to give up her job as a nurse and had consigned her to a wheelchair by the time I met her early in this century. The disease would cripple her much worse by the time she died in a nursing home a few years ago. When Helen still was living in her high-rise condo building near American University, I’d look across the back courtyard to the pool in which she told me she swam regularly before her body betrayed her.

Mildred, conversely, had no real physical issues until the last. But, whereas I could imagine Helen having experienced periods of pleasure in her younger years—she loved to talk about a trip to South America she’d taken in the late 1950s, and the many concerts and shows she’d attended at the Kennedy Center and other venues in the ’60s—I was pretty sure the stridently discontented Mildred who I knew in her '70s hadn’t been temperamentally or philosophically much different in her younger years.

To me, Mildred was the embodiment of the joke Woody Allen tells in Annie Hall, of the old Jewish woman who complains, “The food at this restaurant is terrible! And such small portions!” In fact, Mildred was an old Jewish woman. And, at holiday dessert parties thrown by Springhouse, Lynn and I more than once heard Mildred pronounce a piece of cake or pastry “lousy” while denouncing its chintzy size.

Mildred never married. I like to think she’d at least had some dates, but nothing she ever said suggested it. She had lived in Philadelphia most of her life, working in various secretarial and administrative jobs. The only trips I can ever recall her having talked about were to Florida and California. Both vacations were bitter disappointments. Florida was too hot, and Mildred didn’t like Floridians for reasons I no longer can remember. A girlfriend with whom Mildred had once worked invited her to California, but then mostly left her on her own once Mildred got there, the way she told the story.

Mildred’s widowed and decidedly infirm sister also lived at Springhouse. I seem to recall that’s why Mildred ended up there. The sister died years before Mildred did, leaving Mildred stranded in Bethesda, where she often rhapsodized about Philadelphia and wished she was back there. Although it was easy to imagine she’d ragged incessantly on Philly when she actually lived in the City of Brotherly Love.

Helen, too, also was from Philadelphia. In fact, it wasn’t until I started seriously thinking about this Dead of Winter Tour that I was struck by how much the two women had in common—marital  status, religion, and collar hue (Helen’s was white, Mildred’s blue) notwithstanding. They not only came from the same city and held the same worldview—everybody had it in for them—but they were experts at ill-serving their best interests. They both treated worst the people on whom they depended the most.

Helen hired, then lost to temper flares, a succession of paid caregivers in the years that I knew her. Day nurses came and went. She berated her regular cab driver about his tardiness, lifestyle and weight until he finally stopped returning her calls. Volunteers felt her wrath, too. She reduced one kindly old woman from her Catholic Church to tears because the “stupid” octogenarian had brought the wrong groceries.

Similarly, Mildred always had some problem with Springhouse staff, and she wasn’t shy about expressing it. I’m not saying her criticisms always were off-base. At assisted living facilities, as anywhere else, you get the staff you pay for, and those places tend not to pay much. I understand that it’s maddening to be ignored because your aide is jabbering in a foreign tongue on her cell phone, engaged in an extended personal call during work hours. But Mildred, like Helen, never much had the patience with the old attracting-bees-with-honey approach. If, indeed, either woman even believed that was a valid way to get things done.  

But here’s the thing. I genuinely liked, and still miss, both of them. I’m not exactly sure why, because they drove me crazy in various ways, and Helen in particular could be mean. (She once reamed me a new you-know-what after I returned from a multi-store search with what I thought were precisely the lidded disposable cups she’d wanted. “They’re all wrong!” she screamed.) Neither woman liked having her narrative of woe or summary of another's incompetence challenged by any suggestion that maybe things weren’t quite that bad, or that perhaps so-and-so was just having a bad day.

But I did have some success distracting them from their negative narratives. I could make both women smile. Sometimes visually, more often inwardly. All it took was sitting and listening, which made them feel validated, I think, in a way they seldom did otherwise. They shared with me happy memories that few other people had bothered to solicit from them. And they rewarded me for my efforts. They asked after Lynn, our cats, later our dog. (Although Mildred hated cats, and made a point of telling me so.) They always thanked me for coming to see them. Honestly, I can’t think of a time that a visit didn’t end on a good note.

Anyway, when Mildred died, her niece ran a brief death notice that named the Jewish cemetery in Pennsylvania which she was buried. Helen had no local relatives, and had no obituary or death notice in any newspaper that I could find online. But I wrote to her sister in New Jersey, who gave me the burial site. At this moment I have no idea precisely where in the house either bit of information lies, but those cemetery names and locations are around here someplace. I just need to find them.

So, let’s recap. I started off this post by writing that I didn’t originally envision this as a winter tour. I simply wanted to visit my maternal grandparents’ graves. And I’ve had it in mind for a while now to seek out Helen’s and Mildred’s resting places—sometime. When this became a tour was when, maybe two months ago, I was leafing through some old scrapbooks my mom gave me and found the obituary of my paternal grandfather, who died in 1966, when I was 8 years old. So, now I know where he’s buried, too. (Not that I couldn’t have asked my parents, but I’d never really thought about it.)  Grandpa’s cemetery is in north-central New Jersey, which just happens to be within reasonable proximity of the other three graveyards. As soon as I realized this, the concept of a tour was born.

I’ll still need to work it all out: where I’ll stay along the way, how many days I’ll take off from work, whether I’ll really want to include all four cemeteries or perhaps add to the itinerary a visit with someone who’s alive. (I have a standing invitation to see a friend in New York City.) But I definitely want to do this.

It’s entirely for me. I’m agnostic at best about the afterlife. I don’t fancy that the departed will be interrupting their harp lessons in Heaven to look down with a big smile and thank me for making such a long drive. (I doubt Mildred could find much to smile about in the Great Beyond, anyway, presumably deeming both the bright color scheme and the relentlessly upbeat vibe hugely annoying.) I’m sure that I’ll talk to each dead person out loud while I’m on premises, because that’s what I do. (I once thanked Johnny Mercer for writing the lyrics to “Moon River” at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah.) But I’ll doubt that anyone really is hearing me.

That won’t matter, though. I have few memories of Grandpa, although the ones I do retain are happy ones. (He took me out in a rowboat the last time I saw him; that’s etched on my mind.) I remember Nana and Papa vividly enough to miss them often—especially Papa, who lived to be 95, when I was 39 years old. As I’ve already stated, I miss both Helen and Mildred more now than I ever would’ve thought. I often run past Helen’s old building, and it still feels weird that she’s not there, keeping the doormen hopping with her endless requests and demands. Springhouse, meanwhile, now sits abandoned—awaiting demolition so an office-retail complex can be built on the site.

In a practical sense, I’ll be driving a few hundred miles to stand briefly before a few headstones or burial plaques and talk to myself. In an emotional sense, though, I’ll be touching base with people who were and important parts in my life—people who merit remembrance in deeds and not just words.

It feels appropriate that Thanksgiving is coming up. That's a sentiment that will carry into the forthcoming Dead of Winter Tour.