Page 406 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
night dinner and proceed to fall asleep and snore as I tried to read or watch TV notwithstanding the noise. Phyllis would usually disappear when this happened.
Having learned the stages of mourning from Rabbi Turetsky, from Phyllis, and from a book by Rabbi Hayim Donin that I read when Sylvia died, I put my trust in the calendar and prayed that the eleven-month period of Kaddish would end or, at the least, that we would get through the cycle of a year and that things would then change, that Harry would no longer be a persistent presence in our house. That was not to be. It got so bad for me that when Friday night rolled around and I’d get off the train at the Scarsdale station, thoroughly exhausted from a hard week at the office, I would freeze in my tracks. I could not bear to go home. I would stand on the platform and stare into space for what seemed like a long time before I would go to the parking garage to find my car and make a very slow drive to Farragut Road. And either Phyllis was totally without perception concerning my need to live with some- one who was my wife and not just someone’s daughter—or she understood the issue and didn’t care. Not once did she acknowledge that there was any basis for concern on my part or that she had to try to reconcile her obligations to her family and to ours.
And the tension that was created in my mind by Harry’s omnipres- ence was compounded by Rabbi Turetsky’s. As I mentioned, before Sylvia’s death, the rabbi was already an increasingly important factor in our lives, at least in Phyllis’s life. As was appropriate, he was with us on the night of January 29. It struck me as somewhat unusual, however, that he would be with us every day during the shiva as well. It was, after all, an enormous congregation. He was also with us or with Phyllis with a great deal of regularity thereafter, as he very obviously took “Fraydel,” as he persisted in calling her, under his wing. I came to believe that Phyllis had a continuing and strong need for a powerful authority figure to guide her and that Arnold Turetsky was filling that role, much as Rabbi Margolies had when she was a young girl, and as the shaman who performed Rachel’s wedding ceremony filled it many years later. And Harry, who loved to be in the presence of rabbis, was another magnet for
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