Geography Of The Heart: Memory Eternal To My Babushka Alexandra

Далеко. Далеко. (Pronounced “Daleko. Daleko,” it means “Far away. Far away.”)

From my early childhood until my maternal babushka (grandmother) Alexandra Dimitrievna (Dimitrieva) Grishaev lost her ability to speak and was bedridden for nine years until her death 21 years ago, she and I bantered about where she would go when she died. She’s buried alongside my maternal degushka (grandfather) Grigori Ustinovich Grishaev, at the largest of three cemeteries at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York, where celebrated Russian composer and pianist Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich and his wife Nina Varzar lived and left a home to their son, conductor and pianist Maxim Dmitrievich Shostakovich.

Born March 3, 1913, in Dubrovka, a village in Vitebsk Oblast, Belarus, my babushka died one day after he 85th birthday on March 4, 1998, in Wilbraham, Massachusetts.

In stark contrast to all of my school and neighborhood peers, I attended countless funerals as a young girl, and visited my grandparents’ mostly older friends confined to some of the most dilapidated, under-staffed, and sometimes unsanitary nursing homes, municipal homes, and municipal and veteran’s hospitals, nearly every Sunday after Liturgy and Orthodox Holy Days. This was the fate of so many forced immigrants from German displaced persons camps who fell ill before they could save enough money working hard labor jobs around the clock to pay for more humane facilities.

Death wasn’t a taboo subject as it was for most of my non-church friends. It was an intrinsic part of daily life, and part of my childhood dialogue along with visceral stories of the countless murders, killings, and untimely deaths of my mother’s three infant brothers, dozens of close family members, and hundreds of dear friends, under Stalin, the Belorussian Partisans, and Hitler. My mother, her parents, and family and friends, were trucked “like cattle,” by my mother’s recollection, from labor camp to labor camp, with the fortunate few surviving to find access to food, clothing, education, and church services at the DP camps in Germany.

Holy Trinity Monastery was some three hours without traffic from my childhood home, mostly along a desolate stretch of I-90. To me that ride always was the future route of my babushka’s final resting place. Somehow, referring to it being “Далеко. Далеко.” made it easier to think about that last drive following a speeding hearse on the fiercely policed interstate.

I was days shy of my 27^th birthday when my babushka died at my parents’ home, and thereby expected to drive the car. The Ukrainian-American funeral director, who respected Slavic customs, illegally agreed not to embalm her and not to seal the casket, which would remain open overnight at the Monastery. I feared a State Trooper pulling over the hearse and discovering this carefully rehearsed crime.

Bringing my babushka “home” to Jordanville didn’t seem “Далеко. Далеко.” It seemed endless. She’d been waked, in an open casket, at my parents’ home where she spent the night in my parents’ dining room ahead of the voyage to a hamlet in the town of Warren, Herkimer County, New York, at the intersection of New York State Route 167 and County Route 155. It’s nowhere to most people, but a sacred destination to thousands of Russian Orthodox Christians. Settled by European Americans after the Revolutionary War, the name was derived from the nearby Ocquionis Creek, which was used by settlers for baptisms and likened to the Jordan River. Jordanville is now best known for the Monastery. Most Russians from my grandparents’ and my mother’s wave of immigration in 1950 refer to the Monastery and cemeteries simply as Jordanville.

When taking our son Michael Alexander to his first sleepaway camp on Lake Oneida this summer, I drove past the exit to Jordanville. Guilt poured over me, even as my focus was the pending lifetime adventure for my son and the complex emotions that accompany leaving your child alone for the first time. I had to fight an impulse to make that left-hand turn. It’s been too long since I’ve been to Jordanville. I’ve taken my husband Mike to see the graves of my father and my maternal grandparents, but haven’t, in nearly nine years, taken my son.

Далеко. Далеко. Jordanville is about four hours from my home of two decades in New York City, as I-90 cuts through western Massachusetts making the route from there an hour shorter. It may be far, especially for a family that has to rent a car, but it’s forever close, imprinted on my psyche.

Grave Matter: The Privilege of Proper Burial

Many, if not most, Americans I know generally put off planning for funerals, picking burial plots and selecting tomb stones as long as possible. I’ve known people who have had to make final arrangements for elderly loved ones, something unthinkable for my mother and her parents. Leaving that responsibility – financially, emotionally and socially – to another person would be cruel, unfair and well, unthinkable. Beyond the added benefit of the cost savings that comes with paying in advance and the comfort of knowing that everything will be executed properly, there is a compelling reason why people like my mother and her parents take pride in such morose tasks. My mother’s brothers – among dozens more family members and childhood friends – were dumped into mass graves that have never been marked, unearthed or in any way recognized as burial places.
 

Of all the villages I’ve researched in Vitsebsk Oblast, Lemnitsa is by far the most elusive. My (for lack of proper term) cousin, Tanya Grishayeva (her paternal grandfather was my maternal grandfather’s younger brother), who was born in Mozyr, Belarus, and now lives in Minsk, helped me cobble what little information – mostly photographs -- is out there.

Perhaps one day the government or an organized group in search for bodies of fallen soldiers will get around to excavating Lemnista, the burial place of my mother’s three brothers who died in infancy. In September 2011, the remains of soldiers of the Red Army were discovered near the village of Noviky, Vitebsk, as part of the CIS International Memory Watch 2011. The effort includes volunteers from Belarus and Russia seeking unearthed remains that will be re-interred in one of the mass graves in Vitebsk Oblast.

For now, the village of Lemnitsa seems lost in time, with a grainy image of a 19^th century

water mill that was destroyed and mention of a church in honor of Saints Kosmy and Damiana (Orthodox Saints Cosmas and Damian, or Kosmas and Damianos in Greek) built in 1836 but destroyed around 1910, among the little evidence such a place exists.

There is a haunting consolation that comes with learning that the ghosts of brothers (in some stories, twins) Kosmy and Damiana share my uncles’ burial place. Their history represents a trinity of stories, one for each of my mother’s brothers: Pyotr (Peter), Mikhail (Michael) and Ivan (John.) The Holy Trinity is a key belief in the world’s second-largest (yet most often neglected and ignored by the West) Christian church, and the theme permeates culture, literature and secular life. By the 4th century, a polarity developed between Eastern and Western Christians over their respective understandings of the Trinity. The West viewed God primarily as one essence (the Trinity of Persons being conceived as an irrational truth found in revelation), while the East considered the tri-personality of God the primary fact of Christian experience. The Cappadocian Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus and Basil of Caesarea) were accused of being tri-theists because of the personalistic emphasis of their conception of God. Modern Orthodox theologians tend to emphasize this personalistic approach to God.

Orthodox Christians celebrate three different sets of saints by the name of Cosmas and Damian, each with their own feast day:

·      Saints Cosmas and Damian of Cilicia of Arabia on Oct. 17. Legend claims the brothers were beaten and beheaded together with three other Christians: Leontius, Anthimus and Eutropius.
·      Saints Cosmas and Damian of Asia Minor or Mesopotamia on Nov.  1. This story offers some solace with the twins sons of Saint Theodota dying peacefully and being buried together at Thereman in Mesopotamia. Note that my mother’s brothers Mikhail and Ivan were twins.
·      Saints Cosmas and Damian of Rome on July 1. In another Christian tradition, the brothers were martyred outside Rome by a jealous pagan physician during the reign of Roman Emperor Carinus (283–284).

St. Michael's Church in Munich as well as the convent of the Poor Clares in Madrid claim to have the skulls of Cosmas and Damian. For Orthodox Christians like my mother, the need to worship and believe in the authenticity of such relics is powerful. Imagine as a young child not only watching all three of your siblings suffer and die, but also to never know exactly where they were buried or have any way of paying proper respects.

This makes the opportunity to choose and arrange for your own final resting place something of a privilege. I do respect anyone’s desire to decide how their own body will be treated upon death and how they will be remembered. But I always shudder when I learn of people who bury loved ones without any sense of tradition or ritual, assuming that is what the deceased had intended. I believe that those who want no ceremony or guests clearly state such desires long before their demise, and such requests are to be honored. But the notion of simply cremating or arranging for burial without even a dinner featuring the departed’s favorite food or a gathering of some kind, albeit secular and informal, is to me a form of neglect.

Most of the images that exist online of Lemnista are of a railway station connecting the village to routes into Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania. A photo of the passenger building at the station is especially eerie, as there are two rectangular cement-enclosed flower beds in the parking lot that resemble the open grave covers filled with flowers at the cemetery at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, N.Y., where my mother’s parents and my father are buried.