Uncle Murray and the Family Gauntlet

A dog-eared business card lies on my desk. It reads Mr. Murray Bernstein, 3701 West McNab Road, Pompano Beach, Florida, then a zip code, a telephone and a fax number. But Mr. Murray Bernstein had not been in any business for at least a decade by the time he created these cards.   An ornate script tells more: The Preserve At Palm-Aire.  And finally, in faint, tiny print as if the letters themselves were embarrassed to admit the truth: Assisted Living Facility #7693.

           

The Preserve was where my Uncle Murray spent the final years of his life, in a suite for one. For one because his wife of five decades, my Aunt Natalie, needed full-time care and so was in another part of the facility.  She could still converse, she was still herself, but she could no longer stand or dress or toilet herself .

The word facility has a slithering reptilian sound, but then the word preserve, however ornately inscribed, is no better. Like a pickle jar? Like a salted herring?  Maybe there are no suitable euphemisms for an institution that is so obviously the last stop

In any case, Uncle Murray did the best he could. Though he and Aunt Natalie had bickered continually in their later years, each day at noon he made a pilgrimage on foot down one flight of stairs, across the parking lot to an adjacent building, up another staircase, to where she sat in a wheelchair in a day room among many others in wheelchairs.  Side by side the couple ate lunch and afterward looked out the window, spoke of the grandchildren. They did not squabble.

           

This was notable because Mr. Murray Bernstein had been, for most of his life, a man who was quick to find fault.  He, and Aunt Natalie too, were enforcers of hemlines and haircuts, if the former was too short or the latter too long.  Even toddlers were not immune to his gravelly asides like  “thin hair,” or “already overweight.”

 Once, as an adult, I sat directly in front to him at a Saturday morning Torah service and overheard him mutter to no one in particular a stream of half-sentence disparagements about the clothes, weight or haircuts of those around us.   It was at that point that I understood two things. First, that he could not stop, his synapses sent out negative chatter no matter where he was. Second, that I do the same, only I know to shut up about it.   If I’m in a new situation or if I get uncomfortable or sometimes just for the heck of it, my dendrites and axons blither on in just the same way. The difference is, I know not to believe myself.

How do I know to do this?  Well – ha ha - I have two advanced degrees, four decades of practicing psychotherapy and several years of studying Buddhist concepts of mind.   It took all that together for me to achieve distance on my own mental grumbling. So it’s not surprising that Mr. Murray Bernstein, former kosher butcher and retired real estate agent, never could.   

Nor was he the only one. For we lived in a texture of “brittleness and nagging ill-temper,” the historian of this generation Ruth Gay, calls it. “A certain vehemence of expression,” a chronic irritability with things or other people.  

The quintessential unpleasant relative, the one who was a distillation of this was a distant cousin, a childless widow, who appeared exactly once a year at our first night Passover seder on Long Island.  She had, I was told, nowhere else to go. Inevitably, as soon as I entered the room, proud of my new-for-the-holidays clothes, she would say in a loud voice, “Michele, can’t you get those things removed?”

           

By which she was referring to the two dark moles on my left cheek.  These moles were my most detested body part.   I spent long moments looking in my bathroom mirror and imagining how beautiful I would be if only they would disappear.   Occasionally I wept to my mother about my face.  She would try to soothe me by declaring, “You’re a beautiful girl.” Or, defensively, “They’re beauty marks. Not moles. They’re called beauty marks.” Which only made me feel worse because this was so obviously a lie.  The old lady at Passover spoke truth.

As far as I know none of the adults at the seder table ever took her aside to admonish her.   But really, what was there to say?  The damage had been done, They probably all agreed with her about the moles.

***

The last time Uncle Murray and I were together, at The Preserve, something had changed.  Kindness had come to him. When I tell this story to friends, they ask if he had had a stroke. So, in anticipation of this query, gentle reader, I can answer no, he hadn’t.  His health was good.

We sat on either side of the couch in the narrow apartment. As I recall, it was just the two of us, which, I am sure, had never happened before.  He was curious about my life, about what my children were doing. And as I reported on us all he kept nodding and saying, “Yes, yes.  Sure.” Indicating that of course we were successful in our endeavors, of course my children shone. “Sure, sure, yes.”  He was warm, he paid attention, he was interested.

Chesed and rachamim, loving-kindness and compassion; late in life, those two blessings from the daily liturgy had drawn nigh to him. And, I hope, self-compassion as well.

That must have been the day I took one of my uncle’s useless business cards, or perhaps he handed it to me. Now on my desk, it nestles among some multi-colored paper clips, right where I can see it.  Something about the Mr. at the front of his name – old-fashioned, courtly, in search of dignity – fills me with warmth and tenderness.  It reminds me, that after all those years, we finally met.