Rock of Aces

My first thought was it had to be the fish.

Our friend's father has been dying for a while, so the funeral home and the Jewish catering place were already on speed dial (and not necessarily in that order). Moments after he passed away on Sunday, cell phones all over the neighborhood vibrated with the news. The group texting session in which I was included descended almost instantaneously into a bit of gallows humor. Death tends to bring that out in the best of us, even those who usually have a filter. It's just easier than feeling sad. The banter stopped abruptly when one friend mentioned that only one among us still has a living father. My phone went silent; it was as if everyone had stopped breathing.

For a moment anyway. A friend was bereaved, and arrangements had to be made. Death was bad enough; the uncertainty about when the funeral might be was almost too much to bear. Nobody wanted to have to cancel a tennis game or a round of golf. The death of a friend's parent always gives us pause but, hey, life is for the living. Life is short, and summer is even shorter -- particularly in Chicago.

All the same, though, we prepare ourselves for the worst, brace ourselves to make the ultimate sacrifices for a friend in need. Like everyone else, we Jews have our rituals to get us through, and everybody bands together like little tug boats ushering a wounded and grieving ship into dock. And we do it with enough food to feed a small African nation for at least a month. Shiva (the ritual condolence period) is about comfort, and, for Jews, that means food and lots of it. If you want alcohol, head to the wake one suburb over.

The group text had turned from tee times to the menu. "They want a fish tray." This had to be a joke. Nancy, our bereaved friend, is allergic to fish. Really allergic, to the point where she can't even sit next to someone eating fish. And the shiva will be at her house. Seriously? "Seriously. Her mom wants it." Apparently the Torah commands it: Thou must have a fish tray at a shiva. Or something like that. We launched into a discussion of whether our friend Martha -- the queen of the alphabet poem -- would compose one for the funeral. She was in on the group text, and we all began to weigh in with ideas. "A" is for allergic. "A" is for anaphylactic shock. Yipes. "A" is for appalling. And "A" is for anyway,  there's just no time at a brief Jewish funeral for a 26 stanza poem. (Yes, I know, my friend, you are reading this, and in all fairness, I also know that the only thing longer -- and by far more tedious and less clever -- than one of your alphabet poems is one of my bar mitzvah speeches.)

So fish it would be, and, because everything had been on speed dial, the fish would be arriving in about twenty-four hours, at about the same time our friend's dad was to be lowered into the ground. Which is how I found myself helping out, waiting for the fish tray (and the bagels and the rye bread and the fruit platter and the cookies and the cakes and, thank God, the meat tray -- Torah be damned). And following the instructions about exactly what time the coffee pots should be plugged in and the ice and soda transferred to the cooler and the ice bucket filled. There were lists and post-it notes everywhere. Nothing was left to chance; the entire kitchen was mapped out, and there would be hell to pay if the kugel ended up on top of the bagel post-it.

I get it, sort of. Having a parent die is bad enough. You certainly don't want anything else to go wrong. Which is why my thoughts immediately went to fish and anaphylactic shock when I returned to the shiva house after an hour hiatus to find the street being cleared for fire trucks. Okay, well first my thoughts went to the delicious firemen who were no doubt inside the trucks, but then I thought about the fish. All the post-its and lists in the world could not protect Nancy from having a fatal allergic reaction at her father's shiva. I was torn between horror and amusement.

The good news is it wasn't the fish, and it wasn't Nancy. It was her father-in-law. The excitement and heat of the day had gotten to him, wreaking havoc with his blood pressure. I think he looked okay as they carted him out in a wheelchair, but to be honest, I was too mesmerized by the firemen to notice. So far, this was the best shiva ever.

Within minutes, I pulled myself together and turned my thoughts back to bereavement; I encouraged Nancy to find herself some alcohol and a straw. Thankfully, she's not very religious, and there was some vodka close at hand. As I berated myself silently for having impure thoughts about firemen in a shiva house, a gentleman approached our group and announced he had lost his wedding ring. The ring he had not taken off for more than twenty-five years was gone; he wiggled his fingers in the air to prove it. Crazy. It was about a hundred degrees, and I could tell his fingers were as swollen as everyone else's. I was intrigued.

As it turns out, the man's own father had passed away only two weeks earlier, and he had seized upon the opportunity to visit him at the cemetery after participating in the dirt shoveling ritual for Nancy's dad. His dad, as it turns out, is resting above ground, in a mausoleum.

"It's in the mausoleum," I practically shrieked. "Your dad wants you to come back." I was not in the least bit surprised when the man looked at me as if I were nuts.

"Seriously," I told him. "I'm not a kook. I write a blog." He was still looking at me funny, but he didn't move. "It's a sign."

He suddenly looked as if he had seen a ghost. He told me he and his sister had talked to his dad, weeks before he died, about what kind of signs he might give them just to let him know he was there. A family of poker players, they had settled on a pair of aces. Four aces seemed too untenable, but a pair, that would be a reasonable sign. So, about a week ago, my new friend had been in a casino, playing poker all weekend, and, all weekend, no aces. Until the last hand, the one just before they left to come back home. There were his two aces. Pocket aces, he called them. I don't play poker, so I have no idea what that means. But I know his dad put them there.

"It was cold in the mausoleum, wasn't it?" I was as sure as ever he would find his ring there.

"Yes."

"So how do you put a rock on a grave in a mausoleum?" Jews don't put flowers on their loved ones' graves. They use rocks, selected carefully from the ground near the tombstone. I imagined that maybe there were rocks stuck on the mausoleum walls like little refrigerator magnets.

My new friend was literally jumping out of his skin. "There's a box of rocks!" And yes, he had dug his fingers in, just as I would have done, looking for the perfect rock. The ring had to be in there, in the air conditioned box. He went outside to call the cemetery. I slipped out just in case somebody called the men in the white coats to cart the two of us away.

Our parents are the ones who love us unconditionally. When they leave us here, we feel as if we have been cut off at the knees, rootless, unable to stand. It's been fifteen years since my father left me, but I still get signs from him every now and then, usually just a small, almost imperceptible gesture to let me know he's still looking out for me. And to remind me to say hi every once in a while, even when I get wrapped up in nonsense. Sometimes, when I'm not paying attention, I miss the signs. But I think I get the really important ones.

Dad, you would have loved this shiva. And the fish was to die for.