Eugoogalizer: One Who Speaks at Funerals
-Derek Zoolander (that ain't me.)
It has been 19 years since the last time the first night of Hanukkah fell on Christmas Day. For the uninitiated, Hanukkah celebrates the victory of the Maccabees over the Greek-Syrian Army. When they reclaimed the temple in Jerusalem, they discovered they only had enough oil to light the menorah for a single night. However, by some miracle, the oil kept the menorah lit for eight. And thus we now celebrate eight nights of Hanukkah.
If you’ve been reading Narrative Musings (and Subject to Change1) since its inception, you’re likely aware of some of this past years’ happenings and how they’ve impacted me. With the support of the incredible community I’ve fostered throughout my lifetime, I’ve been managing the deluge of grief resulting from the deaths of three family members2 in quick succession and the fear (and now relief!) surrounding a scary medical diagnosis of another. Unsurprisingly, it has felt like I’ve been running on fumes for the vast majority of this year. But quite like that small amount of oil outlasting its projected lifespan, I’ve continually found the energy to make it over every bump I’ve stumbled across on my journey through 2024. Every time it felt like I might flicker out with a little menty b, I surprised even myself with more grit and resilience than I expected to muster.
Despite death being an obvious theme of my 2024, I somehow managed to make it to the end of the year without attending a single funeral. But where there are funerals, there are eulogies, and where there are eulogies, there is often closure for surviving parties. I guess that’s what I’m going for here.
Jeffrey Green (June 12th, 1953-July 21st, 2024)
Most eulogies are meant to honor the life of the deceased individual, and to provide a space for those attending the funeral to reflect on the person’s life and legacy. However, my father was a difficult man to honor, and my reflections on his life and legacy are often mired by all of the muck that constitutes most of my memories of him. As I’ve done all year, I’m going to try my best here.
Truthfully, despite knowing that I acted with integrity, empathy, and compassion throughout a situation in which none of that was even warranted, I feel pretty terrible about every decision I made as his power of attorney, because each decision that served to protect him meant putting other people at risk. By nature, each of those decisions also served to minimize risk for all parties, but it was a mutually disadvantageous paradox each step of the way.
I have to hand it to him, though: he put me in an uncomfortable position of responsibility that taught me a lot about myself, about him, about elder care, about selling a house, and about the stark contrast between what each of us valued most. And while I could write ad nauseam about all the ways in which his existence in my life was more harmful than not, his rapid deterioration and ultimate untimely demise led me to rekindle other meaningful relationships3, immense personal growth, and a small but not insignificant financial safety net.
My father was a storyteller, in every sense of the word. He was a pathological liar so a lot of his stories were entirely fabricated (like the one he told about Dave during his toast at our wedding). But whether or not his tales were each founded in reality, I also fell in love with storytelling (both sharing and consuming) and it became one of the very few values we shared. What better way to honor his legacy (whatever that means) than to share a few stories:
As a kid, I generally looked forward to visiting my father at his home in Las Vegas, a strange place for a child to explore. My infrequent visits were filled with hours of arcade time, running around casinos, eating more candy than I should have been allowed, and making a few memories here and there. When I was not yet double digits, my brother and I once4 visited my father for Thanksgiving and he prepared a lovely feast of KFC for dinner. I probably ate at least three pounds of mashed potatoes that afternoon, and he fell asleep before the sun set. While my brother watched TV, I grabbed the only marker I could find (a black Sharpie) and a stack of printer paper. I drew for hours while, unbeknownst to me, each stroke bled straight through to the table, soaking into the beautiful wood. When I realized what I had done, my blood ran cold and I started to panic. My brother told me I would be in big trouble, and my father eventually woke up to find me crying, hiding in corner. I thought he was going to be livid with me, but instead he told me that the damage I’d done would serve as a reminder that I had been there.
To his credit, he was actually a very sentimental man in many surprising ways. When I was cleaning out his house in preparation for it’s sale in January, I discovered a hidden drawer5 in his dresser that was entirely filled with every card and drawing I ever made him. This one was his favorite and he kept it on the fridge:
Until the Alzheimer’s really started to eat away at his brain, he would call Dave and me in late October to wish us a happy anniversary. Perhaps he could sense his memory slipping away earlier than the rest of us, or maybe he thought he was teaching us valuable life lessons; instead of wanting to hear from us, he called to share stories from his early life. Over the years, he told us some absolutely bonkers tales that will forever live rent-free in my brain, and now I have the pleasure of sharing some highlights with you:
He bragged about being expelled from Quinnipiac University in his first or second year of college for selling cars out of the student parking lot (spoiler alert: they weren’t his to sell).
He killed his own mother. The way he told it, she was suffering from brain cancer and begged him to end her life, so he smothered her with a pillow. According to the death certificate I discovered when cleaning out his house, her cause of death was “hepatic failure as a result of metastatic breast cancer to liver”. So: grain of salt, eh?
He followed that story up with his experience after his father’s death, whereupon he was tasked with sifting through his parents’ belongings. In my grandfather’s bedside table, my father discovered a stash of lube so impressive that he felt compelled to share this story with his daughter decades later for her anniversary.
Details of most other stories over the years are hazy for me, but there were many about his time in the mafia, hookers in Las Vegas, being friendly with Fred Trump (barf), attending elementary school in Mt Vernon, NY with Denzel Washington, and selling cars to and subsequently befriending Brooke Shields and Andre Agassi.
The thing about my father’s outlandish stories that gets me the most is how unsubstantiated so many had seemed at the time that have later proven to be legitimate. Even some of my own experiences with him sound absolutely insane when I share them, but I was actually there for these ones:
In the early aughts, on a weekend trip to Vegas, my father took me to a coffee shop where we ran into someone he knew standing in the line directly in front of us. They started chatting and catching up, and before I knew it we were at the guy’s house and he was showing my dad how to ride a Segway (which were a new phenomenon at the time). This house was remarkably like a museum, but instead of displaying fine art or fossil collections, each wall of his home was lined with photos of him with every musician you could possibly imagine. While my father was figuring out how to delicately shift his 350 lb + weight so as to avoid tumbling forward off the Segway (an impossible feat, he would later declare), I was inside trying to figure out how to ask this guy how he had so many pictures, across at least a couple decades if my fashion knowledge served me right, of him and each of The Beatles. When they came back inside, he found me staring at a wall that was lined with signed records and told me to follow him upstairs to his office, where each wall was also lined with all sorts of celebrity snapshots. I began my perusal anew, mouth agape. At some point, my father pulled me out of my mind’s spiral after a few unsuccessful attempts to get my attention. His friend wanted to know what instruments I played, so I listed them out and mentioned that I had just gotten my first drum kit. The rest is a total blur because we somehow went from me asking how he knew The Beatles to him calling Ringo Starr and handing me the phone. We had a brief conversation that I nervous-laughed my way through, but when I asked Ringo if he would ever consider playing in my non-existent band, he politely declined.
In a neighborhood called Spanish Oaks, my father lived on the same block as BB King. I don’t remember the context around how we wound up inside his house on Halloween, but I do remember sitting in his living room, on a purple velvet couch. In my mind’s eye, the lights in the house were also purple (like: the whole room was illuminated by the purple aura of black lights). I didn’t even know who BB King was at the time, and I still don’t understand why he invited us inside his home. Nevertheless, he gave out king-sized candy bars, so he won my heart.
My father always wanted to be special, which is why so many of the stories he shared, and experiences of mine in which he had a hand, revolved around celebrity encounters. Trust me, he wanted you to know these stories, too, despite (or perhaps because of) how outrageous and absurd they sound. To that end, there’s one final story to share in honor of his life and legacy:
Back in April, we went to Vegas so that Dave could see Phish play at The Sphere for his birthday. That morning, I took Dave to the memory care facility for the first (and only) time, so that we could take my father out for breakfast. When we arrived, my father was excited to see us and proceeded to show us how he “practiced depth perception” by stacking single-serving Frosted Flakes cups on the floor of his room and stepping over them. His demeanor changed rapidly and he suddenly became agitated, insisting that I move him to a room he didn’t have to share (to be clear, though: he lived in a shared room, but only shared it for a grand total of three nights, because he created problems that were so significant with each potential roommate that they moved the others out immediately). While walking toward the exit, he caught the attention of the director of operations, who invited us into her office to discuss the matter. She mentioned that the room next to her office was recently vacated if he wanted to move in there, and joked that they would be close enough that they could communicate by knocking on the wall in Morse code.
My father’s response was the most sincere and outrageous flex I’ve ever heard: “I used to pee in Morse code.”
Carole Goldfeder (October 26th, 1939- October 8th, 2024)
In the last conversation I had with my grandmother (lovingly referred to as Debba in my immediate family6), we made plans to spend some time together in mid-October when Dave and I would be in San Diego for a friend’s wedding. We talked about celebrating her birthday a week early, and she remarked that she had already lived longer than any of her relatives. When she was hospitalized in mid-September, Dave and I flew to San Diego to see her, and we left knowing that we were likely saying goodbye for the last time. I hope she knows we were there.
Despite not being related by blood (she was my mom’s step-mom), Debba was the most grandma of grandmas to me. She came to each of my theater performances and dance recitals, and was one of my greatest champions throughout each of my entrepreneurial endeavors. She’s the one who encouraged me to become a Certified Educational Planner (the only credential that really exists in my industry for the time being), and whenever she read an article about higher education, she took the time to send me a physical copy. I have a whole file folder dedicated to these articles that she deemed important to my success, and paper clipped to each one is the note she sent explaining what she learned from it. I think my proclivity to write in cursive stems from my admiration of her own cursive penmanship.
My admiration didn’t stop there, though. She was a wonderful painter and had great taste in fashion. As a child, my birthday gift each year was a clothes shopping spree with her. I hated shopping (still do), but always looked forward to lunch at the Nordstrom’s Cafe and having a whole day to spend with her at the mall. I find it funny now that she was so seemingly supportive of my stylistic choices as a kid (like: she once bought me pastel rainbow sneakers and neon green capris), but she was far less filtered by the time I reached adulthood7.
Even though she was often critical later in my life, and she occasionally forgot that I was also her grandchild when my younger cousins were being introduced to her friends, she never intended to offend. She was always generous and thoughtful, as evidenced by that time I arrived back home in Colorado to a matching flannel on my doorstep because I had complimented her on how soft and cute the one she wore was.
One thing I’ll miss most (I’ve already been missing it for many years since moving out of state) is the absurdity of our family Thanksgivings. It was incredible how she managed to cook that many dishes for all of us. One year, things got so out of hand that she made us each take a survey of the food offerings wherein only the most voted upon items would return the following year. I don’t even recall which dishes didn’t make the cut, probably because there were many other favorite family Thanksgiving traditions that remained (like the inevitable burning of the first batch of marshmallows on the sweet potato dish and our brilliant habit of leaving car keys on top of the leftovers in the fridge so we’d remember to take them in our tryptophan stupors).
My immediate family never celebrated Christmas, but on December 25th each year, the family tradition is to gather at my Aunt Michelle and Uncle Mike’s house in San Diego because they do celebrate. I haven’t been in years because I’m rarely in San Diego over the winter holidays anymore, but I truly can’t imagine what Christmas morning was like today without Debba’s opinionated presence (“You can’t put olives in that dish because that’s not what it was made for!”). I’m grateful I can still hear her voice in my head (and on a voicemail she left me a few days before she wound up in the hospital), even if some of what I hear makes me roll my eyes.
Whether or not you’re reading this while locked in a bathroom on Christmas—the standard escape from family holiday shenanigans, I assume— I appreciate you taking the time to get to know two of the people who were quite formative figures in my life’s journey (my father in his absence and my grandmother in her presence).
זיכרונם לברכה8.
Spoiler alert: the hiatus is almost over!
One of whom I don’t feel is my place to write about.
My aunt Elynne and a long-lost step-brother I had for a hot minute in the mid-90s from my father’s second marriage.
Truly, may have only been the one time.
There were a lot of hidey holes in his home, probably because he was in the mafia.
My mom’s version of the story is that my brother tried saying “grandma” and it came out “Debba”. My father’s version of the story is that he used to refer to her as “the devil” behind her back, and thus the title “Debba” was born. I’ll let you decide which one sounds more plausible.
To wit: On a three-day girls’ spa trip for my mom’s 60th birthday, she made a point of telling me on no fewer than four occasions that I would be prettier with make-up. If she had known I don’t even own any make-up, she would probably have made a point to send me home with some. On the same trip, she told my 12-year-old cousin that she shouldn’t eat so much sugar (it was a special occasion!!) and didn’t have anything nice to say about my mom’s badass long leather jacket.
"May their memories be a blessing.”
wow! wow. I could probably pee in Morse code
Wow, Jess. So wise and funny and heartbreaking and WEIRD. It's not disrespectful to say that your dad was objectively weird, is it? Among, obviously, many other things.
What a perfect tribute you've written. Grateful that he passed on his gift of storytelling to you, and in total awe of your ability to keep soldiering on through a year of crap with humor and grace.