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.

The Shifting Emotion of an Immoveable Feast

To the modern American, or global citizen, the notion that for the last 11 years I have begun contemplating what to prepare for dinner on October 18 weeks in advance may seen obsessive or silly, unless of course, I am a caterer or planning some fabulous fete for the beautiful people. (The latter, of course, would require my hiring the perfect caterer.)

My father was born on Oct. 18, 1926, and died in 2002. Planning what to make for dinner, generally one of his favorite old world meals – the old world being some mix of what was born of my Ukrainian, Polish and Russian roots.

Call it comfort food, but most certainly not in the mainstream America-meets foodie way of indulging in the food itself. It comforts me to commemorate his memory by creating and serving something he would enjoy. Of course, growing up dirt poor in the slums of Newark, N.J., my father learned to appreciate – or at least to never waste – any food.

My father was not religious in the go-to-church-every-holy-day-or-feel-really-guilty-about-it-way, like my mother. There are 13 major holy days in the Russian Orthodox Church and a much longer list of secondary holy days to commemorate various events in the lives of prophets, apostles, fathers of the Orthodox Church, martyrs, saints and others who have aided the propagation of Christianity and the Orthodox religion, as well as certain events in the life of the church. Those days are divided into movable feasts, which have no definite days or even months appointed for their celebration, and the immovable feasts, which are always celebrated on definite days of the year, by the Julian calendar.

Suffice it to say, commemorating the dead, both on their death days and birthdays, is an immovable feast.

My father, who felt more kinship with Buddhists and Sikhs, practiced meditation mostly at home (though sometimes he’d visit a gurdwara with his best friend, a Punjabi Sikh). He attended Russian Orthodox services on the highest holy days, namely Pascha, and of course always for funerals and other services for friends of the family. In the end, my father, who died of Stage IV colon cancer metastasized to the liver, requested to be buried alongside where my mother will be laid to rest and in the plot next to her parents, at one of three cemeteries at Holy Trinity Monastery in the hamlet of Jordanville in central New York State’s Herkimer County, northwest of Albany and east of Syracuse. Blink or sneeze while driving on remote winding roads past sprawling farmland and nothingness -- save for the monastery with the cathedral’s imposing gilded cupolas and bell tower -- you will miss Jordanville. Founded in 1928, the monastery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011 and is the first Google hit for Jordanville.

Family friends who have made what most call the pilgrimage to the monastery and cemetery have alluded to the mystical, otherworldly qualities of a place so alien from any America (or present time) they’d ever experienced. This includes hardcore atheists and agnostics.

Why my father chose to be buried there will always elude, even haunt, me. Most people closest to me say it’s because he wanted to be besides my mom, at least in the end. Those who have witnessed the terror of Stage IV colon cancer know what it does to the brain. Those who have read Russian literature know what happens to men facing their own mortality. The deathbed confession is not fictional in my world, if not quite as dramatic. My father was a philosopher and intellectual, and in many ways was like Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky (the character in Dostoyevsky's “The Devils”), although my father cared deeply and dutifully for his children while Stepan put his own interests first and was a scumbag to his son. And I doubt my father picked his final resting place because he considered himself immortal since his love for God will never die.

Why my father chose the church burial and ongoing mourning process, with all their ancient and elaborate rituals, I will never know. I do know that his decision impacted me deeply and profoundly and rattled my own beliefs – or lack thereof. If I am not compelled to follow the church rules as a devout Russian Orthodox Christian, I can at least provide a fitting memorial tribute – just twice a year – to commemorate his life on the dates of his birth and his death.

This all now sounds even sillier to most Americans, or global citizens, I’m sure. But I do derive some comfort, some closeness to my father’s legacy and my ethnic heritage by making a special meal.

Along with the menu planning comes an annual bout of profound sadness, if not deep depression. My therapist, who is far removed from this old world where I dwell emotionally, says I need to overcome this depression and to create a celebration where I invite friends over for a feast without telling them why. That’s funny, as Russians (the Russians who raised me, not the people hail from there now) never tell other people about their own birthdays and would never, ever, invite other people out with the expectation of others paying any part of the bill. It is equally wrong to not prepare and present a meal in honor of the dead on “their day,” religiously on the day they died and culturally on the day they were born.

I do not know where I stand in this cultural framework – trapped somewhere between the vast divide of a bygone Russia and a hypersocial world where people celebrate themselves on any and every platform, posting old photos of departed loves ones as a substitute for traditions they have shunned. I'm not eager to revert to a world where the closest women come to heroism is martyrdom in the form of Nastassya Filippovna. I’m also not ready to embrace a soulless world where the number of characters you're allotted dictates the depth of your musings.

I think I’ll make piroshki, to start.  

--- NOTE: This entry is the first in a series of ideas, themes or stories that will eventually appear in a novel based largely on my mother's life. Working novel title: Lubachka