Discovering Joy In Memory Eternal

Roaring laughter and exhilaration breathed new life into my parents’ living room, where a group of my father’s closet friends and professorial colleagues gathered on this day in 1996 to fete his 70^th birthday. It was a radical departure from the everyday remorse that created an atmosphere in that room, so heavy that it was like trudging through cement while blinded by fog. 

The small party was a surprise organized by my mother and me to honor my father, Michael William “Brother Mike” Gural. The house where I was raised and where my mother still lives alone, has played host to more memorials, wakes (including my maternal babushka spending the night in an open casket in the dining room), and other rituals focused on death and loss, rather than cheerful festivities. Up until two years ago when my son Michael Alexander guided me back to the church with a commitment to faith that didn’t involve profound and constant sadness, misery, guilt, and mourning, I thought I was “sinning” if I wasn’t constantly lugging a ponderous sense of worthlessness.

Looking back to Oct. 18 22 years ago, I now realize the joy that transformed the living room into a celebration of life was the most truly Orthodox experience I’ve had there, in the house where I was partly raised. (I spent most of my formative years with my maternal babushka and degushka in a very different multi-ethnic urban neighborhood, which made going to school in a very white, very quintessential New England, suburb a culture shock.) My babushka and my father died in that house. My babushka’s death bed remains as a shrine, and my childhood bedroom where my father drew his last breath is where my husband and I sleep when we visit. My mother tempestuously scolded me several years ago when I commented that it was depressing to sleep in that room and eat in that dining room: “Obviously, you didn’t love your grandmother or your father!”

 (This photo was taken in the early 2002, at my 8th floor walk up on 178 Thompson St.. It was my dad's last visit to New York. His pain, walking up 24 tiny pre-WWI flights of stairs, didn't dull that trademark Brother Mike smile.)

I must remind myself to embrace that joyous Oct. 18, 1996, when Brother Mike’s crystal blue eyes glistened and his impeccably white, straight teeth shined as he flashed a fixed (well, for the duration of the celebration) smile. That’s the image of my father I strive to hold dear, every minute. That image reminds me so much of the grandson he never met. My son’s hand gestures, when he begins to wax philosophical about a correlation he’s just discovered, uncannily mimic those of the дідусь (didus) he never met.

Of course my father had a dark side, though the best of it was his black humor and his penchant for classic horror and the occult, which I immediately adopted. He told me, repeatedly over three decades: “If you can accept that life in 99 percent disappointment, you may find happiness.” He joked on Oct. 18, 1996, “You must all know something I don’t. Clearly, I’m about to die.”

Brother Mike, who never took an aspirin or any prescription medication, who swam and exercised every day, who labored outdoors every day, who never smoked, who drank only socially, who ate vegetables he grew, who voraciously studied natural medicine and curated his own supplements, was in fact “dying” on Oct. 18. 1996. Specifically, despite his doctors’ incessant claims that “you’re healthier than any of 30-year-old patients,” my father was dying of cancer that went undiagnosed until four years later, when it was Stage IV and metastasized to every vital organ, and eventually his brain.

In an effort to maintain the joy that permeated Oct. 18, 1996, I won’t rant about the failures of health care in western Massachusetts, where fraud and incompetence are rampant. I will refrain from wallowing in the regret that my parents chose to not seek treatment with top oncologists at Dana-Farber or Memorial Sloan Kettering, where my former colleagues used their influence to score “impossible” appointments.

Memory Eternal, Michael W. "Brother Mike" Gural, who was born in Newark, N.J., on Oct. 18, 1926, and who fell asleep in Wilbraham, Mass., on Friday, June 21, 2002.

“It's life that matters, nothing but life—the process of discovering, the everlasting and perpetual process, not the discovery itself, at all.” _ Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky

Lament, Regret, and the Eeriness of 14: In Loving Memory of Brother Mike

One of the many books my scholar father gifted me from his vast collection to sate my passion for all things otherworldly was a book of amulets and talisman. I cried just now when I couldn’t find it in our pared-down West Village-sized library, though I found some comfort holding my prized copy of “An Encyclopaedia of Occultism,” by Spence, Lewis (1874-1955).

Both those books served as the 1980s version of an open Chrome tab, as I’d reference them constantly and apply my findings to subvert anything and everything normative that I was forced to write or discuss. I’d get written comments from teachers like “I’m not sure how this fits in. It didn’t. Not in any contemporary and contemporaneous sense. Inserting strange references to facts, myths, or theories that have been long debunked or dismissed, was my way of rebelling, ever so strangely.

I recall re-reading parts of the tome on amulets and talisman and being fascinated by the story of Osiris, the Egyptian god of the underworld. Unlike my son Michael Alexander, who has a photographic memory of everything he reads or learns about science, I have always struggled to remember details and instead relied on my own ability to weave elaborate stories around a few facts. One high school teacher commented on my report card that “Natasha has a great ability to ‘write’ history.” Her interpretation of that comment was meant to justify the lower “effort” grade that didn’t correlate with the higher letter grade. I took it as a compliment.

Back to Osiris and his myriad identities. As I lay awake early this morning profoundly saddened and anxious because Michael Alexander is being repeatedly bullied and physically harmed at an after-school program (born into poverty in Newark, N.J., my father taught me to always fight back, yet my son must be a pacifist and is applauded by the program site director for his “good behavior,” which means he does not strike back as the victim of ongoing attacks by two boys), many random thoughts sifted through my brain. For some reason, I thought of Osiris.

In some retellings of the myth (there are many), Osiris was slaughtered and carved into 14 parts by his brother Set. Isis, the sister Osiris married, recovered 13 pieces of his body. The 14^th piece, his penis, was devoured by fishes. Somehow, 14 stuck in my head, the subject of a perverse and playful song like a miscreant version of the “Number of the Day” segment that premiered on “Sesame Street” in Season 33, which aired in 2002, the year my father died. No, I was not watching “Sesame Street” daily before I had a child in 2010.

The 14 stuck in my mind like the jingle in Mark Twain's 1876 story "A Literary Nightmare.” I was stuck with that earworm, as the only way to ditch it is by transferring it to another person. Somehow, 14 was distinctly mine in the early morning hours enveloped in anxiety.

Michael W. "Brother Mike" Gural died 14 years ago today, on June 21, 2002. It’s essential that I make Father’s Day a joyous occasion for my husband and son. I last saw my own father on Father’s Day, June 16, 2002. Because of a female boss who treated my emotional struggle over my father’s demise from Stage IV colon cancer spread to the liver, the peritoneum (the lining of the abdominal cavity), and eventually the brain, with callous disregard, I had just returned from a shift at The Associated Press when I got the call from my sister on my landline.

How I could I not have been at his side? This cavernous regret will follow me to my own grave, haunting me forever like an unwanted spirit.

After crying for a few hours, both because of my lament and remorse over being absent at the time of my father’s death, and because I know how enraged my father would be over the institutionalized abuse being perpetuated by a program director who laughs off any criticism and leaves it to her powerless site director to apologize but do nothing to stop the cycle of bullying and attacks on my son, I fell asleep for a precious short time. Gurals are not victims. Gurals fight back. Gurals do not put up with institutional abuse. Yet my son is as much the prey of bullies who go unpunished, as I was the sucker who worked extra shifts, filing thousands of pieces of copy, as my father lay dying just four hours away.

I can change my son’s fate by switching him to another program in the fall, though he already has been conditioned to believe that it’s “good news” when he won’t raise fist back at his assailant, which makes me fearful and ashamed as the daughter of a man who taught her to always fight back -- if not physically, socially. But I will never reclaim that moment when my father took his last breath.

Waking with the alarm this morning, I was overcome by grief, like Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s short story “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” Thankfully, I do find value in the world and would not commit suicide, but in darkness and despair I identify with the narrator ahead of his chance encounter with a girl who reinstates his will to live and his faith in humanity.

“Then such grief took possession of my soul that my heart was wrung, and I felt as though I were dying; and then,” according to the English translation by Constance Garnett, “then I awoke.”

It takes 14 days (or one fortnight, short for fourteen-night) for the moon to wax from new to full or to wane from full to new. Yesterday, at 22:34 UTC (6:34 p.m. in New York), the sun reached its highest declination in the sky, its farthest point north for the year, otherwise known as the June solstice. The June full moon occurred on the same day.

Leaving Lyssenko: Displaced Memories

The years my mother spent at Lyssenko Displaced Persons Camp in Hanover, Germany, were “very good.” The young girl who’d spent her first half decade herded from labor camp to prison camp to concentration camp had finally found a “home.” Those formative years at Lyssenko were not rife with killings and rapes and bombs and grenades and constant fear of which enemy would strike next and at what gate.

The notion of leaving a displaced persons for a new life in a faraway land sounds like a dream for most people. To my mother it was an end to the first era of her life that didn’t involve constant suffering and instability. And it meant saying goodbye to people she came to know as family in the wake of losing so many blood relatives. It was horrifying. It meant recalling all the previous tragedies and again losing friends by separation.

“And then people started to immigrate to different countries, and they started to place us. Two of my father's friends went to England. And they had lost their families, too, during the war. Whether they were killed or what happened to them, I don’t know. They sent us pictures from England. They were handsome men and when they got to England, they had sent us rubber boots, which were beautiful, and chocolate candy. I can't find any here like that. It was like a candy bar, but it had crispy part inside of it. That was delicious.”

I’d brought home, from my first trip to England in 1991, what I thought my mother had described but she insisted it wasn’t the same. That time in her early childhood offered her very first taste of joy and nothing since could be sweetening to comparison. It was as if anything from those years was magical, almost otherworldly, and could never be duplicated again. I can only imagine the shifting emotion from a life of desolation and destruction to one that offered her very first creature comforts. They were so simple, yet perfect, those articles of clothing or pieces of chocolate. I think my mother begrudges herself any of life’s comforts, partly because of the guilt, but also because she can never again feel such immense satisfaction that comes with the very first experience.

For my mother, all of these places are defined by whatever iconic item she received in a care package or the descriptions in letters written by those who had relocated. She has never left the United States, save for Canada and the Caribbean, since childhood, and to her those places where other families from Lyssenko ended up remain frozen in memory and unchanging by time.

It makes sense that she would hold on to any image or idea from those years, as they were her first happy memories. All my wanderlust is lost on her, and I feel like a criminal, stealing her childhood snapshots of places she’d never visited by informing her of sweeping social change.

“A lot of our best friends, my best friends, my mother's best friends, went to Australia, some went to Brazil, some went to Argentina. But my father wanted to go to America, because from what he knew from the history lessons in school, it was the best country to go to. And because I was the only child, it was easier for us to choose to go to a different country, and my parents were still young and healthy, so we didn’t have problems. But America was the hardest country to get to because we were in British zone, but we used to get coffee, and we used to (barter and) trade it with the Germans because they didn’t have the good coffee. It was chicory, but they liked it, so we never had drank it ourselves. We always used to trade it for clothes or something. At that time, it was very, very good for us, because we could get beautiful clothes for the coffee, and again berries, we used to go pick berries and trade those. And I sang and we had a church, and I sang in a church choir. We had Christmas parties. It was wonderful. We used to go Christmas caroling. It was a wonderful life, you know.”

My mother’s explanation that her parents were selected to come to the U.S. because of their savvy in trading with the Germans in the British zone is lost in her happy memories. She clings to those early years, which are forever idyllic for their simple pleasures. There is an innocence that overrides any ignorance that may stem from an unwillingness to acknowledge how culture has changed with time.

My mother and her parents ended up in New Hampshire, not far from Dartmouth, but still in a community that hadn’t been opened to the wider world. Stevens High School in Claremont, New Hampshire, didn’t offer English as Second Language and there was no public assistance available to her family. They had to toil to pay back every penny to the farmer who had sponsored their trip here via Church World Services. They lived without hot water for years, working at multiple manual labor and service jobs around the clock for a pittance of a wage, and saving to have fewer comforts and concessions than those that were available at Lyssenko or through bartering with the Germans. They traveled frequently throughout the Northeast to visit with friends from Lyssenko and to maintain a dispersed community in the absence of the ghettos that allow most immigrants to retain their culture.

“Some of my friends did come to America. One of them lives in Connecticut now. And the others, mostly all of them, live in New Jersey. I went to eleven weddings and I was a bridesmaid. [laughter] But the camp was actually the happiest part of my life at that time, because we didn’t have any cares. And we had food. We had clothes. It didn’t bother us that we slept on cots in just a corner of a room. We were all just happy. People used to go fishing, and they would get fish and we would have parties and stuff like that. My mother's best friend, the ones that went to Australia afterwards, her husband somehow had good luck of catching a lot of fish. One time when it was my birthday, he says ‘this is going be for Luba's birthday’ and he caught so much fish and since we didn’t have a big stove with hot plates, a lot of women, like five or six, were frying that fish. They had a big, big party for me at that time.”

My mother believes it was her 10^th birthday, but the date isn’t a detail that matters.

“That was the best birthday party I ever had and it was the first one I ever remember. And that was very good. There were a lot of people at the table. I don’t know, maybe twenty, maybe thirty, I don’t know. A lot of people. And of course, there was vodka but we kids didn’t drink. [laughter] We didn’t have to.”

It is unsurprising that mother’s happy memories are vivid and retold in great detail. She is not one to repress any memory and the abundance of traumatic ones had to be offset somehow, if only to cope.

In the epilogue of The Brothers Karamazov Book XII, Chapter 14, Alyosha offers life-affirming hope for the next generation when speaking to a group of schoolboys at the funeral of their peer Ilyusha. Memory Eternal (transliterated from Old Church Slavonic as Vechnaya Pamyat) a chant sung at the end of Eastern Orthodox funerals and memorial services is heard in the background. Alyosha epitomizes the ideal human being (or, as my father would have said, a human becoming as humanism is a lifelong pursuit) in a Dostoyevskian universe rife with the conflicts and constraints of faith. Identified at the start of the novel by the narrator as its hero, Alyosha is an exemplar by being open-minded and forgiving. The character is named for Dostoevsky's son who died of an epileptic fit at age 3. 

"You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home.  People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education.  If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us. "