Today’s my father’s birthday, he would have been 84 years old! Amazing. He died at 62 of a massive heart attack while putting on his shoes. He and my mother were visiting New Orleans from Atlanta where they had been living for about 15 years. He was at my brother’s condo on Metairie Road. I was supposed to have lunch with him. I went over there and knocked on the door a bunch of times and then left muttering under my breath because he wasn’t there. My mother was across the lake looking after her mother who had just been diagnosed with cancer.
I drove across the lake to Covington where I lived and later on that evening while my first husband and I were having dinner, my mother called to say my father was dead. Stunning. I then had to get on the phone and call some of my siblings. I called my youngest brother R, who reacted solemnly stunned. Then I called my sister who was working at a restaurant at the time – Houston’s – and she fell on the floor screaming and her coworkers had to come to the phone and find out what was going on.
My second to oldest brother was out of town and insisted that the body not be removed until he got home, which didn’t happen until about 2 in the morning. So we all gathered at the condo with my father still in the bed, grey in color, and a pall hanging over all of us.
My father was immediately buried in a plot that belonged to my oldest brother B. According to Jewish law he was put in the ground in a plain wood nailed shut casket within 24 hours. And the family set about sitting shiva at my oldest brother’s house in Metairie.
During shiva, my sister borrowed my father’s car and drove to the Quarter one night and the car got broken into – she didn’t come home till wee hours of the morning. My mother walked around in a daze talking about how passionate her and my father’s life had been together. My brothers prayed with a minyan of men that showed up to the house to pray with them – no girls allowed. And I scurried around taking care of my mother.
A week later, I was back at home in Covington, and as shiva always makes one feel – I wanted to be as far away from my siblings as I possibly could. But I insisted on going to the synagogue every morning to say kaddish with my brothers – even though I had to stand in back of the partition in the little shule in Beth Israel because once again – girls not allowed or even required.
After one week of driving across the lake to say kaddish, the real coup de grace being when I showed up one morning with 9 men and they couldn’t say kaddish aloud because they didn’t have the necessary minyan of 10 men, then go to work at the law firm – McGlinchey Stafford Mintz Cellini and Lang – I worked for Lang – then to UNO to work on my BA – and head back to Covington at night. Almost a week of saying kaddish later, I was coming across the bridge one morning before dawn and I had my very first panic attack. I managed to pull over to one of the turnaround zones and call for emergency help – I didn’t know what was happening and thought I was having a heart attack. Emergency vehicles came to take me to the hospital.
But shortly after that it became increasingly hard for me to drive across the bridge, so we rented a studio apartment and put our sweet home up for sale and ended up back on Lake Avenue, where I had begun this stage of my life.