Sit Shiva

My mother, describing her mother

Fought back tears, it’s weird, I thought

The intimacy of seeing someone try

Not to cry in close-up on a screen

Cousin Lincoln told a story about the Pietà

He saw at the Metropolitan Museum

And after a silence of some time

Grandma turned to him and said

You know, I think of myself as a Jew

But I really love Jesus

And we sit cross-legged on the edge of the bed

Leaning into the laptop to hear what’s just been said

In the manner of a modern family honoring the dead

Aunt Susan, in her one-room schoolhouse

Sang grandma’s favorite songs, simple hymns

Of love and loss. And though her connection

Was unstable, she was able to get

Her message, more or less, across

And we sit cross-legged on the edge of the bed

Leaning into the laptop to hear what’s just been said

In the manner of a modern family honoring the dead

At the end of the afternoon

Grandma’s grief-shattered husband

Whom she’d met in the fall of 1939

Milkshake at the Automat in Morningside Heights

Before he was shipped off to Europe to fight

Fifty years, not a word, not a sight

’Till the touchtone phone rang in 1995

Raymond, it’s Judith, my husband has died

Back to New York, and they gave it a try

And the photographs of great-grandchildren multiplied

These two ancient lovers walking side by side

His body ravaged, and hers turned to light

He raised his hand to speak at last

And everyone held their breath or gasped

As he said: Goodbye, my darling, goodbye