Dear Grandpa,

This letter is somehow hitting you, gently, isn’t it? Metaphorically, you open your eyes. There’s enough light, yes?

As you read this and become conscious again for the first time in almost 46 years, don’t be scared. It’s from me, Gene. I would have written sooner, but the idea that I could wake you up with a letter didn’t hit me until just now. Why now? I need your advice. Tell me if you think I’d be wrong to kill myself. But, first, you need to know about the rest of the family.

I can tell you were just looking around for Mom, knowing inevitably as you awoke that Grandma, Yonkie, and Danny had already joined you in death, wherever you are, and, yes, they’re still sleeping. I’m not writing to them today, but to you. I don’t even know if I could wake them if I tried.

So, having mentioned her, I’ll start with some good news. Mom lives and has a small apartment nearby. I see her about once a week, and, although her mind is shot, she still remembers you as a doting father. She’s not big on details these days, however. She thinks dimly that she used to live in Brooklyn (only for the first 22 years of her life!), but if you ask her where she moved after that and where she raised her own family and where she spent 49 years of married life, she will look at you with a puzzled expression and guess “Las Vegas?” – a place she’s been to only twice.

You remember she was very pregnant when you made your last trip to the hospital? She had a third boy two weeks after you died, my brother Jonah. Mom says often that she wishes she had tried again for a girl, and all I can think was what a disaster that would have been. She says it would have been fun to dress her up and probably believes that a daughter would have been more sympathetic than I am, but I can just see that she would have created someone in her own image, and then my mind goes numb. A kid sister would have been spoiled, a brat, a pain in the ass, all in one.

Look -- am I making you sad? or angry? I didn’t wake you just to tell you a fairy tale about how your kids were great and grandkids became successful doctors and lawyers. I wanted someone to talk to – you, of all people, who were my constant companion when I was a small tot – and I want you to tell me what to do.

Actually, you do have two grandchildren who have been successful lawyers – including me – and one great-grandchild (my daughter Emily) in medical school. She plans to be an Emergency Room doc, of all things. I wish you could see Emily now from where you are. Perhaps you can, I don’t know. Having her – a child who has survived and thrived – required no skill at all but only good luck. And a doctor, to boot! What is luck, really, but God’s will, a will that we can never understand?

Since I’m disturbing your eternal rest with this letter, I realized right away that I needed to be honest, as honest as I can be. Mom says that you and Grandma weren’t too keen on Aunt Susan as a wife for Uncle Danny, because she was a sickly girl. Ah, but she was sick, wasn’t she? She died in her 40’s and it’s a good thing you weren’t around for that. And Uncle Danny … well, he never quite got over it. Uncle Danny had four heart attacks – it would be presumptuous to attribute them to the stress of Aunt Susan’s death, but it couldn’t have helped – and died after the last. I missed his funeral. I mean, I had just started a new job, but I went to the men’s room to cry when I heard the news. He was one of Dad’s best friends.

Grandma rebounded from your death as one would hope. She kept up behind the counter at the gas station six days a week, and she had Uncle Yonkie or Aunt Annie to take her there at 12 and bring her home at 5. She stood behind the register for hours at a time, arthritic legs and all, and stayed there until Uncle Yonkie and Aunt Annie closed it down forever and moved to Vegas. Well, maybe that’s where Mom got Vegas in her head. Uncle Yonkie got an accounting job at a casino, fulfilling his lifelong ambition. Aunt Annie got a saleslady job in a swank boutique, and I always planned to visit them, but didn’t actually set a date until I planned to visit in April 1978. I waited too long.

Yonkie died suddenly – tragically – after being hit by a bus and, the saddest thing, we had to tell Grandma. We did the funeral on one day – Grandma still not knowing, still at the nursing home – and then went to tell her the next. Aunt Annie, Dad, Mom, and all the grandsons we could scrounge up went along as well for the grim duty. I can still hear Aunt Annie telling Grandma “Yonkie is gone, Mom.” As the crushing realization fell over Grandma, we grandsons surrounded her wheelchair, hugged her, and we all had a good cry. I recall Grandma sobbing that her “husband” had died -- except that what she really meant was that her son had died -- and I knew that she understood.

Does anything good ever come out of a death? I’d have to say yes. That’s because, when Uncle Yonkie died, and we buried him right next to you, and we told Grandma together, the importance of family blasted its way into my guts as perhaps never before. Maybe it was Dad breaking down during the funeral itself, for his brother-in-law and close friend. Maybe it was the small congregation huddling around the wheel chair. Maybe everything together. I resolved to marry Karen and make our plans official. We’d been together then for nine months, living together for almost three months. We’d danced around the marriage question occasionally, and I think we both knew that’s where we were headed, but we hadn’t yet confirmed it with each other. Coming back from Uncle Yonkie’s funeral I took the next formal step.

Karen and I were back in New Jersey shortly, telling my parents – not only were we engaged, but Karen would convert -- and then over to the nursing home to tell Grandma. So one of the last things she knew before she died, the last family news of any importance that she heard, pleased her very much. She approved of Karen as my mate for life and was delighted that Mom had given Karen the diamond and sapphire ring that you had given Grandma so many years earlier. “That’s my ring,” she said, weakly, but with a smile, as Karen held out her hand and displayed it. Grandma was gone two weeks later, and I missed her funeral too because of a document review project in Texas that could not be canceled, even for death. Her last word, according to Mom, was “Love.”

There’s just a few more things that you should know. Aunt Annie died on Mothers Day in 2003, having continued to live and work in Vegas, have friends, entertain family, help her sons, and generally make a life for herself as a widow. She was always a very strong woman, as you know. Happily, I kept in touch with her through the years, called her on occasion to say that I loved her, but every telephone call was short, Annie being of the view that long-distance was very expensive. I was able, not only to attend her funeral, but to conduct it and her unveiling as well.

OK, enough beating around the bush, as they say. I think I’ve reached the end of my rope. Karen died last week. I just finished shiva. I will go to shul for the required 30 days to say the Kaddish praising God, but then I think I’ve had enough. I don’t see the point of going on without her.

It doesn’t really matter why she died, does it, Grandpa? If you must know, she had leukemia, it came suddenly, just as we made our final plans for retirement, it was lethal, untreatable, almost but not quite as rapid as what happened to poor Uncle Yonkie. Karen had enough time to say her goodbyes. Some people say that a cancer diagnosis changes their perspective on life, and that every day becomes a treasure, but I think these are the survivors. For us, well, it sped up our already complicated lives. There was so much to try to do, what with the doctors, the chemo, the wills, the financial records, the keepsakes, breaking the news to Emily, to Mom, and to our friends. We cut back on sleep, and what sleep we had was not restful, even at its best. It was like falling into a bottomless well, we kept accelerating, but inevitably we found that it wasn’t bottomless after all. We crashed.

Sure, we didn’t scream. We tried to be stoic, but Karen was much better at that than I was. We talked about God’s will, not understanding a word of what we were talking about, or why we were even talking, knowing even as we spoke that minutes slipped away and could never be recovered. I will say that we found some comfort together in these quiet conversations about God, but frankly it didn’t matter what we were talking about. We might have been talking just as well about baseball, frankly, something I understand a lot better.

If good luck is God’s will, then also bad luck must be part of the same, right? You and I could never have had a discussion about this before, because I was so young when you died, and these are subjects that a seven year old cannot fathom, but in bringing you up to date about our family’s history I can at least tell you what I feel now and why I know that you will answer my letter, somehow.

I feel you had your share of both good and bad luck during your life. How unlucky you were that your own father died when you were a young boy, that you were largely abandoned by your mother, and that you had to be brought up by a grandparent and uncles and aunts. But perhaps that made you lucky, as well, willing to take the plunge to leave Russia for the long, uncertain, and dangerous journey to America. And how lucky you were to get here intact, healthy, energetic, ready to tackle a new life. And then, weren’t you full of good luck when you met Grandma and fell in love? But you were full of bad luck when your businesses sometimes failed to provide a good return on your investment or when other schemes did not work out well. You were full of good luck when you saw two sons march off into the Army during the war (not to mention a son-in-law to be and fixture around the gas station) and return home safely four years later. You were full of bad luck when you had your first heart attack at age 56, but good luck when, as Mom has said, the doctor “pulled you back from the brink of death.” I believe that each step along the way was guided by the unfathomable Divine plan.

So there we were, Grandpa, in my folk’s house on Third Street, the small black and white t.v. in the living room. I’m only three and I haven’t even started nursery school yet. You’re sickly and all you can do every day is sit with me there, you in your chair, me on the floor playing with cardboard blocks or a toy phonograph. You turn on the television, switch to Channel 9, and I hear the voice of Red Barber announcing the Dodgers game from Ebbets Field. You teach me about baseball and to love the Dodgers. I’ve heard that you became a Dodgers fan only because Dad was a Giants fan, and you wanted some rivalry going on in the household. Maybe, but I bet you really liked the Dodgers anyway, and who wouldn’t, with Jackie Robinson and the other boys of summer? One quarter of my genes come from you, but my love of the Dodgers comes completely from you and ties us together in a unique way.

It’s about time for me to bring this letter to a close. Forget about world events since you died. You don’t want to know. I imagine that when you get to the end of this letter you will shortly drift off again. As you drift, you will be thinking about all of the family news, wondering why I bothered you, wondering about all the details I’ve left out, those that were left out because I simply didn’t know, and those that were left out because I had to choose which were really the most important and which were not.

I need to ask you to forgive me for taking it upon myself to disturb what otherwise would have been your untroubled, eternal repose. If death is an end to suffering, one of the sufferings that it should truly end is the anxiety about loved ones, the fear that your children or spouse will die before you, or that you will see your children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren abandoned, afflicted by illness, bereaved, brokenhearted, disabled. Now I’ve told you about some bad news as well as some good news, and you’ve heard things that can’t have been pleasant to hear.

You understand what I’m asking you, right? You understand why I don’t want to live any more, having just lost Karen, but also having Emily to lose as well if luck continues poorly, you know what I mean, right? How I don’t want to be the one in the wheelchair when a grandchild comes up alone and tells me my daughter has preceded me in death? And how I don’t want to go on for years alone, as Uncle Danny did? Do you hear me? Will you tell me, please, that it’s OK for me to end this loneliness and this smothering anxiety?

But who am I kidding? You’re never going to tell me that, not in a million years, are you? I don’t blame you. It runs counter to our Judaic teaching and is selfish beyond all measure. I know that. Well, I guess I have to decide myself, don’t I?

Time to end, and forgive me for waking you up. Despite my morose state of mind, I will ask you to try to focus on some good things as you toss this letter away into the nothingness where you lie and settle down again, the good things that may have been and those perhaps to come that we pray for, even in after personal tragedy and even when we don’t believe in them or in prayer or even in God for a second. There is a lot you can still pray for before you are fully asleep. And you can imagine with a smile a great-granddaughter saving someone’s life in an Emergency Room, perhaps as your own life was saved once so that you could spend more years and share your love with your own . . . Gene

##

In the darkening home office of the late November night, Gene Steiner sat at his desk and reread his letter, written on the yellow legal pad in his legible but shaky hand. Satisfied, he placed it into a business envelope, sealed it, and locked it in his small safe. The house was deathly still. He’d have to get the dogs back from the kennel on the morrow. He wondered how he would manage to buy their next sack of dog food, had no idea where Karen had bought their rations and how she managed to move the 30 pound sacks on her own.

A sign is all I want, Grandpa, he thought. Then, the light bulb in his desk lamp made a soft, static noise and burned out. He sat in complete darkness.