Tired

God, I'm tired. I was working in the office this afternoon when a great wave of fatigue came crashing down on my shoulders. The kind of fatigue that makes you feel physically sick. The kind that makes you feel tired in your bones. It was a battle not to crawl under my desk and sob, a battle that I think I would have lost had I stayed in the office much longer.

Yesterday I took a day off work to go to my grandfather's consecration. Unlike at his funeral, the sun was out, and it wasn't too cold. It was bitter when they buried him. Yesterday the sun was out and people barely cried, although I did get a lump in my throat when my father read the eulogy. We thought the rabbi was going to do it, but he didn't, just motioned to my father, who took a prayer out of the wrong pocket and got flustered and had to start again.

It was a nice ceremony. The rabbi talked about the symbolism of the tombstone, and translated the inscription from the Hebrew, and mentioned that we could keep Papa's memory alive by emulating his good qualities. That was nice. I hadn't thought of it that way before.

It's been a year since he died, and I miss him, but it was his time. What got me the most was seeing the blank stone beside his, and my nagyi's skinny little legs sticking out of her skirt. She always wears slacks, but you can't, not for a ceremony like this. My father renounced Judaism at seventeen, but he made sure my sisters and I wore skirts. My grandfather was a devout man.

The consecration, in Judaism, puts the cap on the mourning process. You sit shiva, do the kaddish, and eleven months later, cease to mourn. It's considered a sin not to get on with your life, because otherwise you're wasting your time on the physical earth, and God's not letting you stay here forever, you know. But deep down, I don't think you ever stop mourning. I'm not sure I believe in souls, and I certainly don't believe in the afterworld, but yesterday I was mourning for a man whose quiet dignity and strength of conviction often blinded him to the potential joy in the world, but whose life experiences made the joy he found extraordinary. That's schmaltzy, but it's true. I was mourning for my grandmother, who, after fifty-eight years of marriage to the decent man she married after her first love was lost in the war, has lost another love. I was mourning, most of all, for my dad, who, on Father's Day, a holiday he disdains, stood at his own father's grave and read the euology, saying, "these words were not written for me to speak - but I will say them."

Anyway. It's not the weight of grief on my shoulders, I know that. It's just a momentary fatigue that's probably come from too many days in the office, too many late nights, too few vegetables, and making countless cups of tea for the extended family who descended on my parents' house and didn't leave 'til dusk. Probably a good nights' sleep is all I need, but also a quiet sob, maybe - a quiet sob, not a sinful one, for the people left behind.

And then maybe I can put the cap on these last few months, and get on with my life.