The three of us are back in Seattle on vacation and for the Goldstein-Roberts wedding. On the way here we stopped off in Michigan to pay our last respects to our Grandma Helen. We love her very much and she will be missed. This was the first time I officiated at a funeral for a family member. Here is the eulogy:
Eulogy for (Grandma) Helen Apsel
חנה בת אברהם ופרלה
We have a tradition that Reb Zusia taught the following: "When I will face the heavenly court after my demise, I am not afraid that they are going to ask me, Why were you not Moses, or the other great ancestors? I have no such fear for I am sure that they will not ask me these questions. However, I am afraid that I will be asked, Why weren't you Zusia, the Zusia that you could have been, the Zusia that we had planned for you to be through the talents, abilities, time and opportunities that were granted to you. That is what scares me,"
Fear is a very powerful emotion. Fear is what keeps people up at night worrying about everything under the sun. What is at the root of fear? The answer is mortality and the unknown. We are scared of things because we feel like they might end our lives or alter them in some way that we might be unable to cope with. We are fearful of things because we have no idea what they will lead to and thus they are scary. Thus it should be, and indeed it is, death is the single greatest feared thing in the world… Almost everyone has a great fear of their own deaths and the deaths of those around them. And then there was Grandma Helen. I will call her Grandma Helen throughout this eulogy because from the moment Carrie and I began dating she would never allow me to call her anything else, she was my grandma. (In fact although she only had five “grandchildren:” Paul, Laura, Eric, Carrie, Dayna, she had so many more. There were those of us who married into the family, myself, Likivi and Isaac, and we all knew her as grandma Helen.
Today is the most prepared funeral I have ever officiated. Grandma Helen would often turn to me when other people were napping in her apartment and tell me, “when I go, it is all arranged, I have it all setup with Dorfman. It is all paid for and everything.” We would talk about it because nobody else wanted to hear her talk about it. The truth was that she knew that life was wonderful, that life was a gift and that nothing that was wonderful could remain wonderful forever and no gift truly ever came without strings. Grandma Helen left us with a legacy so large and so incredible it is hard to imagine where to begin. Clearly today is not a day of celebration but we are celebrating a life. What more could Grandma Helen have asked from her life? Lived to see 100, to see grandchildren and great-grandchildren (almost to see yet another one). She lived in a world that changed a great deal over time. She knew enough was enough and so she let go, she released her grip and embraced the unknown that caused her no fear at all, and so she lived and so she died a woman without fears because her mortality was of no fear to her and neither was the unknown.
If we were to go and visit McDonald Towers today (the place that Grandma Helen called home for some 30 odd years and if we were to look in their library we would find the letters H.A. in nearly every (if not every) large print book. Especially ever book by Louis L’Amore. Grandma Helen was a voracious reader, it is a love that was instilled in her at a very early age by her father, Earl Thum, and her mother, Pearl Thum. She recalled to us many times how her father would in the evenings sit down with her and her brother and read a book to them as a family. They would snack on apples (I never saw her eat apples but I am sure if we dipped an apple in chocolate she would have eaten it). (Of course all of this reading took place when she was not playing in the streets of Brooklyn and her mother would lower a sandwich down to her for lunch.) Her brother used to get into trouble for trying to continue to read after bedtime. Reading was who she was. In fact, would it be such a stretch to say that Grandma Helen was a book? A book has an exposition/beginning, rising action, climax, falling action and a denouement/conclusion. Grandma Helen had all of the same in her life story as well.
And Grandma Helen’s story is one that she told to us herself over time. I think that Grandma Helen was a storyteller. We have a tradition of storytelling in the Jewish tradition. The storyteller was called the מגיד, but as Grandma Helen was a woman lets feminize that role and call her our מגידה. It just so happens that the numeric value of the word מגידה is 62. Grandma Helen’s name in Hebrew was חנה and the numeric value of her name was 63. Where is the extra one? Every storyteller needs an audience to hear their stories and so that is where the extra number one comes from… It is all of us… We were what enabled Grandma Helen to narrate her stories. We were her audience and like every great מגידה her stories will always live on in the lives of her audience.
So Grandma Helen’s story: The beginning: Imagine the world that Grandma Helen was born into… How different it is from today. When she was born, ice was delivered to houses to have people be able to keep things cold in ice-boxes. When she was a child most furnaces were heated through burning coal. The Model T was rolling off the assembly lines. Grandma Helen once pulled me aside and told me she had some silver dollars and would like me to have one. She sat there polishing it and I took one look at it, and saw the date: 1880. This coin has seen a great deal, it has been part of our great world for 130 years. It arrived on the scene 29 years prior to Grandma Helen. Imagine the world in which this coin was minted, imagine how out of place it is today. Today we have refrigerators that have televisions, many people have multiple refrigerators in their houses. We have much cleaner methods of heating our houses. And of course today we are beginning to see cars that require no gasoline at all. Somewhere in the midst of all of this Grandma Helen lived her life and experienced our wondrous world. So what is the exposition of this life? December 4, 1909 in Brooklyn Pearl and Earl Thum welcomed their daughter into their lives. She would spend her childhood in New York and in Pontiac, MI. After graduating from high school she went to Michigan State Normal College where she earned a teaching degree. It was in college that she met Velma Lenaker who had never met a Jew before. Grandma Helen would often tell us of this friendship as a paradigm for how we should relate to all people. She worked as a substitute teacher for some time here in Michigan.
But her life would bring her back to New York when she met and married Paul Friedman. They lived there until his untimely death one day. Grandma Helen’s first two children: Peter and Norma were born there. After Paul died she found her way back to Michigan as that was where her family lived. She would eventually meet Nathan Apsel and the two were married and would remain married for over forty years. When we get married we begin a second life and thus it was at this point that the rising action would begin in Grandma Helen’s story. Grandma Helen loved two men in her life. Paul and Nate. And they loved her as well. The enjoyed spending time together. In fact Norma and Kenny told me yesterday that their parents were always happy to send the kids to summer camp as they would travel the world during the summer… Sounds good. But this is not to say that Grandma Helen didn’t enjoy her family. No quite the opposite. While they took some huge trips without the kids, they included them on other road trips in the US. Peter told me that he will never forget how his mom and dad enriched his life through exposing him to the arts on a regular basis. They would take him to symphonies, to plays, to all sorts of cultural experiences… even the rodeo… Grandma Helen grew during the rising action of her life because it was her family that made her the person she was. Her greatest joys were her children and then her grandchildren and eventually the great-grandchildren.
So what of the climax, the greatest part of her life story? Her grandkids. So many people have remarked that the reason they had kids was in order to be grandparents. If this is the case, Grandma Helen lived this out with style and glee. Sitting here today are seven of her eight grandchildren. We all benefited from her experiences and we all had the pleasure of watching her as she taught us so much. Ask any of us what we learned from her and we will have a story to tell. Dayna and Erik both reflected on their trips down to the creek near her apartment. Others have reflected on her great love of nature and her love of birds. Carrie said she adored Canadian geese and could always identify them by the V they flew in. Laura remembers her saying if you can laugh at yourself then you will always have something to laugh at. Paul remembers reading with her and memorizing the entire book so much so that he could recite the book back to her.
But there is another climax: Grandma Helen answered that question for us herself. Volunteering. Grandma Helen was a life member of Temple Israel. Let me say that differently, she was an extremely proud member of Temple Israel. She was a Charter member, she was active on the Sisterhood, and she sang in the choral group for 40 years, and she always said that the greatest part of her life was when she was there. It was her involvement there that led her to a path of service to other people. Dayna and Carrie mentioned to me yesterday that the delicious, incredible, great chocolate chip cookies. The cookies that had their own special recipe (pretty sure the recipe was similar to the toll-house recipe) , the recipe involved a special seat on which she sat and stirred the batter. Well anyways those cookies… turns out she never ate a single one of them. She made them for other people because she enjoyed helping others. Her incredible apple sauce that always found its way to every family get together… never consumed by Grandma Helen… Too healthy. But she always made it for others and the list goes on. Grandma Helen never had Parkinson’s, and yet she helped to lead a Parkinson’s support group for years in her building. There was also her eye support group. Grandma Helen provided so many people with a listening ear, an ear that would not stop listening until the person stopped talking, and then she would begin… And we never knew what to expect. She told us last year at the end of a video interview for Ayelet, “I don’t like that name.” She knew what she believed in, and she knew what was what and so she made it known. Her vision of volunteerism was shaped in part by Rabbi Syme ז''ל, who taught her to do simple things to help other people each day. She managed to fulfill the words of פרקי אבות, לא עליך המלכה לגמור ולא אתה בן חורין להבטל ממנה… you are not responsible to complete the work, but you are not free to stop trying. Grandma Helen spent her life living these words. Ellen said she was an incredible mother-in-law and was always there to volunteer to watch the grandkids when she had to work. Aunt Linda mentioned that cooking with her was a treat because she always volunteered to clean up. Big or small, her impact was always great. She always managed to improve our small family world, her larger community and the entire humankind.
You can always sense when a story is drawing to a close. You can always feel when the מגיד or the מגידה in our case has had enough of the story and is trying to draw it to a close. Those were Grandma Helen’s last 10 or so years. When her eyes were getting worse and worse. When her hearing was getting worse and worse. When the things she loved to do were being taken from her. When her independence that she clung to was being wrestled from her grip. She maintained her dignity and her spirit. She kept her sense of humor and was delighted to have reached the century milestone. When she came to family get-togethers it was with a little less bounce in her step and with less ability to converse in large groups. But she held her own. She would not go quietly and she would not allow age to define her. I mean this was a woman who only gave up driving in her 80s when her car was stolen. She gave up line dancing in her 90s because she said she was tired, but perhaps her partners couldn’t keep up with her. Yes her falling action was made up by her last years not when she was dying but was living and thriving in a world she loved.
The end of Grandma Helen’s story happened on 10/09/2010. It was on that day Grandma Helen left her earthly form and left us feeling a deep void. She died not of any disease but of a content disposition that she had seen and done all that she needed to. The void that we all feel is one that we will never fill. You do not replace people. But the gift of every good story and of every good storyteller is that you can always live with them in your inner-self and thus Grandma Helen’s story will provide with immortality.
"When I will face the heavenly court after my demise, I am not afraid that they are going to ask me, Why were you not Moses or somebody else great? I have no such fear for I am sure that they will not ask me these questions. However, I am afraid that I will be asked, Why weren't you you? That is what scares me," Grandma Helen, if this is true, has already met that heavenly court and has answered that she was Helen. That she was the best Helen Apsel she could be and she did her best.
Grandma Helen left this world on שבת, it is said in our tradition that when a person dies on שבת it is with a kiss from God. But the שבת on which she died was not an ordinary שבת, it was ראש חודש as well. And it was the beginning of the month of חשון. We have a tradition of calling the month of חשון – מרחשון because it is a bitter month as it has no holidays and comes just as we commemorated all of the fall festivals. These holidays run one after the other and it is a very hectic and jam packed time of the Jewish year. But then ראש חודש comes and suddenly we have a rest. Suddenly we can breathe a little. It is when we reach a place of solace, a place of security and relief. After all of those holidays we now have a month off, we have the time to reflect on the beauty that was our holidays. Grandma Helen celebrated life. She was always an active participant and always a lover of living. At a certain point in time living became more a burden than a privilege. Grandma Helen was aware that she had gotten everything out of this life that she could and she had given her all. She had earned her חשון, her new month without the burdens. She had made it past the holidays and was now ready to embrace her next steps… Her חשון.
On that ראש חודש, on that שבת, we were reading פרשת נח. We were learning of the destruction of all of creation. We saw that it fell upon נח and his family to restart and continue that which had been already started by those who came before them. And so it is with us today. We witnessed the ending of the world of Grandma Helen. We witnessed the end of her story. And now it falls on us to pick up where she left off. We are the next steps in her story. We are the continuation.
תהי נשמתה צרורה בצרור החיים
May her soul be bound up in the bond of life and let us say: אמן
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