The Day Mom Died

Buenos Aires, 1961.

Mom’s given name was Rebecca, yet everyone, including Dad, called her by her Viennese nickname, Riqui. Everyone, except me. In good Latino-American fashion, I called her Mami. But Riqui is the name that Dad wanted chiseled on her tombstone and, for all time, that is the name on her grave.

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As I told you in Blog 13, Two Portraits of Mom, my mother died early on a wintry Friday morning when I was eleven. I promised that I would describe what happened that day in more specificity and I will do so here. The unspoken particulars of that ill-fated Friday became more significant the older I got. Decades later, my shrink helped me see the events in a new light. Therefore, some of the things I choose to tell you suffer from hindsight. Much happened that day, yet I will focus on details that, with the understanding I gained on the couch, had a big impact on my life and on my relationship with Dad.

Mom’s moans woke us up before dawn. Our small apartment was unheated and I could see my breath as I rushed to my parents’ bedroom. She was gurgling loudly, her eyes were shut, her teeth gritting. Her wails went on and on, like a ghostly lament from the afterworld. We could not wake her. It did not matter how much Dad shook her or called her name. I ran out of their bedroom in a panic, stopped in the living room, and vomited air until it hurt. I said the Sh’ma Ysrael Mom had taught me and, for good measure, crossed myself several times, as Nilda preferred. I prayed to god to save her. Nothing worked. (That morning it dawned on me that, notwithstanding my crossings or my yearly visits to the synagogue, there was no one up there.) By the time the neighborhood doctor arrived, she was gone.

Dad, Omi, and Nilda were speechless. Dad looked at me and asked, “Call Onkel Max and tell him.”

It sounded more like an order than a request and it took me aback. Me? Call him? I thought. But I was not going to say no to Dad, not that day, so I picked up the handset of our black rotary phone and dialed.

After a few seconds, Onkel Max’s voice came over, “Sí, quien es? Who is it?”

“Onkel Max?”

“Sí? Ja . . . quién es?”

“Schorschi.”

“Schorschi? What time is it? Is something wrong?”

“Sí, Onkel Max . . .”

“Qué pasa?”

“. . . Mom . . .”

“Riqui? What’s happened?”

I did not know what to say. That she is still sleeping? That she is dead? I couldn't get myself to utter the word. Muerta. Dead. The word was scary.

“Schorschi? Are you there? What happened?”

I froze and held up the phone to the grown-ups, begging with my eyes to be relieved. Dad finally grabbed the handset and explained.

At that moment, Omi, looking at me, hissed, “I told your father not to get a walk-up apartment, but he wouldn’t listen to me.” She was angry. “Dein Vater, your father, is a stubborn man.”

Soon our small apartment filled up with grownups, mostly Mom’s large circle of expat friends. Very few of them talked to me, although one man told me to be strong, to be a big boy, and that big boys don’t cry. I stood in the living room by myself, taking in the adult scene. No kids came since it was a school day. Another man came over and told me that I had to be strong for my father, that he would need me to be strong.  “Sure,” I said, “I'll be strong.”

I had inklings throughout my childhood that Mom wasn’t well. There were plenty of clues but I had no idea what was going on. I often saw her climb the two floors of our walk-up apartment and arrive at our landing panting and weak, her lips bluish in distress. A long time would pass until I learned that the little green pills she regularly took for her breathing troubles were nitroglycerin, a drug used to treat angina chest pain. “A sudden cardiac arrest, maybe a stroke, fluid in her lungs,” is the way my American doctor described it years later when I finally started asking questions. No one explained much that day—or afterward.

Dad seemed bewildered the whole day and let others take care of funeral arrangements. Onkel Max knew about such things and took charge immediately upon arriving at our home. He was the only one who explained what he was doing. He promptly  implemented two traditions of Jewish mourning. He covered all the mirrors so—he explained—people would not look at themselves in vanity. And he rended our garments: with a razor blade he made small cuts into Dad’s, Omi’s, and my clothes. The cuts, he said, symbolized the rip in our hearts. He told me that it was almost the Shabbat and if Mom was not buried the same day they’d have to wait until Sunday.

So, Mom was buried before sunset at the Tablada Jewish Cemetery of Buenos Aires. The cemetery is at least an hour if not more from barrio Coghlan. I was lost in thought during the long trip in the quiet car. I remembered that, after dinner the previous evening, I wanted to stay up and watch TV a little longer, but Mom forbade it.  

“To bed, Schorschi,” Mom had said, “it’s a school night, and you know the rules.”

“Unfair!” I had complained.

Well, I thought in the car, if Mom had only let me watch TV last night I would have been with her a little longer and maybe she wouldn’t have died. Or maybe I got her upset? Omi was always saying, “If you don’t obey your mother, you will get her sick. Don’t you know that arguing is not good for her?” Maybe it was my fault that she died, I thought.

Everyone was at the cemetery, all of Mom’s dozens of friends and acquaintances, her whole Austro-Hungarian circle. A dense crowd surrounded her closed casket while a rabbi prayed in Hebrew. I couldn’t tell what he was saying or what was going on and I only caught scattered words in Spanish, Madre . . . Viena . . . Tristeza . . . Mother, Vienna, sadness. Afterward, we all walked through the cemetery behind her casket. Dad and I were next to each other all the way to her gravesite.

Her casket was on top of a metal cart. While the cart was being pushed through that enormous city of the Jewish dead, the thing squeaked and squeaked, block after stony block. It was the only noise you could hear, that interminable squeak. I kept looking at the cart and figured out that it was squeaking because of a wiggling wheel that sometimes touched the ground and sometimes didn’t. I was unhappy that there were no pallbearers carrying the box, like in the movies, since that would have taken care of the squeaking. I obsessed on that wheel all the way to her grave. I can occasionally still hear it.

We eventually turned a corner and stopped in front of a fresh hole in the ground. More Hebrew, then the casket was lowered into the hole and, first Dad and then I threw handfuls of dirt on top, and two guys covered the hole with shovels, and that was that. I was the only child, lost in a crowd of adults, a tiny rabbit in a dark forest. I am a big boy, I kept saying to myself. I’ll be strong for Dad. 

I don’t remember much more. I returned home and must have gone to bed and must have tried to sleep and must have wondered what life would be like without Mom. I don’t remember. The weekend must have been dizzying with visitors but the years have blurred it away. We did not sit shiva, as Jewish tradition would require.

On Monday morning I was sent to school. That day I had my first inkling of what a motherless life would feel like. Ironically, it was both a sense of loss and a sense of freedom. Mom had not warmed up the small bathroom as she had always done all of our years together. It was winter and I braved the cold bathroom on my own. When it was time to  get dressed I realized that Mom was not there to force me to wear the woolen itchy pants that I so hated. Since Dad did not seem to care I decided that I would never again wear those pants. That was my first, sad, taste of freedom.

In the next months, the shadow of Mom’s death settled upon us like the ashes of a volcano. Her loss sucked the sun out of our lives. The mood around home was somber. No one talked about her. No one talked much at all. She had disappeared in the middle of the night without explanation, and we were just going to charge ahead, no questions asked. I kept my ache to myself. No one ever again threw colorful birthday parties with clowns and magicians. She was not there anymore to sing Wien Wien nur du allein, Vienna, Vienna, only you, her most beloved waltz, with me standing on her toes looking up and dancing along. We gave up our cottage on stilts by the river. I stopped playing the accordion.

Mom’s death was a moment that cleaved our lives in two. There was life before and life after, and as the years moved on the two became more and more disconnected. It would be decades until, on a Freudian couch, I could understand how deeply affecting the events of that cold Friday had been on me. It was only then that I cried.

***

Following Jewish tradition, it took a year after Mom’s death before we went back to the cemetery. We unveiled a large brownish tombstone and Dad had her nickname, Riqui, chiseled on the surface. Her name is italicized and, as Spanish grammar requires, it is flanked by two exclamation marks, one up and the other down.

Mom’s nickname is an eternal—and painful—reminder that Dad never asked me whether I also wanted to write something on her tomb. Perhaps something like . . . ¡Mami!

The deeper significance that the tombstone’s inscription had on me did not become apparent until years later. The impact was similar to that of the two different portraits I told you about in Blog 13, Two Portraits of Mom. I realized on the couch that the unspoken message of both the inscription and the portraits  seemed to be that Dad had a separate relation with Mom, which somehow did not include me. That I was on my own.

He was a lonesome man, my dear father, never having healed the enormous losses of his own youth. The day that Mom died set me on a course precariously close to his.