Eulogy For Evelyn Blockstein Amdur
October 28th, 1921 – February 29th, 2004
In going through old files, I found this eulogy to my mother, something I’ve not read since her death. Upon reading it again, it comes to me how wonderful a thing it is that we have been gifted with life, and that almost everyone living, if only for a few fleeting moments, has loved someone as much as I loved her.
My name is Ellis.
I am Evelyn’s son.
I was talking with my cousin, Danny, speaking of my mother’s Hebrew name—Chaya Rifke (Rebecca)—Isaac’s wife, and Danny said, “What an important figure in Jewish history, Rebecca, who ensured that Jacob, not Esau, got his father’s blessing, Jacob, who wrestled with God and became Israel.” I laughed and said that I’d always identified more with Esau. Rather than silk, my tallis, my prayer shawl, has always been the hair on my back.
In many ways, I was a typical Jewish kid—intoxicated with books and intellect—but I always had a wild streak, only partially suppressed at home under the gaze of two such powerful parents as mine, for as formidable as my mother was, my father was even more so. Trying to “get my own” in such a family, I became increasingly rebellious, and my mother got what those without understanding might merely simplify as disrespect. Whatever the explanation, I was a hurtful young man. But one day, age sixteen, lounging on my angry bed, a single pride of adolescent lion, my father, already unwell, knocked on my bedroom door and came into my room. He smiled sweetly at me and said, “Ellis, I cannot begin to tell you how much I love you. But you must know that I love your mother more than anything in the world. I have heard from her that you are causing her grief. If it does not stop—if I hear of it again—I will gladly throw you out of this house and never see you again.” With another sweet smile, he held my eyes in his, and then left the room. And as he looked at me—underneath my fear, my rage and my shame, was a wild joy—“So this is what a man is! And this is how a man loves a woman!”
And as I write this, I can see again my mom dancing in the morning kitchen, singing along with Mary Wells, “Nothing you can say can take me away from my guy;” can see, wandering into the living room, small and sleepy-eyed, my mother cuddling on my father’s lap; can see, in my mind’s eye, a black-and-white film, three minutes long, taken on the morning after the first night of their honeymoon. My mom is asleep—beautifully asleep—and the whir of the camera wakes her. Her eyes open, momentarily confused, and then, seeing my father, they light up and on her face, all at once, is every emotion that a man prays will appear on the face of the woman he loves.
As for my mom and I, after her man, my father, was long dead, we were walking on a windswept hill—late spring—knee-deep in grass and wildflowers. And in that beautiful setting, I was complaining, that whining regurgitation of old issues that some of us in our psychologized culture call “processing.” My mother stopped, and with the wind at her back blowing her brown hair like an auburn halo, she held up her hand, and looking up at my 20-something self, said, “Ellis, I am sorry. I am sorry for all the things I did to hurt you that I have already apologized for. I am sorry for all the things I have done to hurt you that I have not yet apologized for. I am sorry for all the things you have not yet remembered, giving me no opportunity to apologize. I am sorry for all the things I have done to hurt you that you don’t remember, that I don’t remember, that neither of us will ever remember. I am sorry. But I want you to know that I did the best I could do at the time.” And that was it for me—I had nothing left to complain about.
And from that day on, she and I walked in loveliness—literally—for walking became, perhaps, our favorite thing to do together.
People have asked me, “Was your mother always this strong?” My mother was brought up in a small town that certainly had its charms. But it was very rural, it was a long time ago, and they were the only Jews, and as a young girl, people would come up to her and feel her head, because everyone knew that Jews had horns. She had to grow up strong.
When she was twenty-one, she became a music teacher in a high school, a coal mining town in Western Pennsylvania. On her first day, in response to her request that the class open their books, a young man smirked and said, “Fuck you.” She said, “What did you say?” And all six feet something of him, he strutted up the aisle, stood over her and said, “Fuck you.” She decked him with a single slap and standing over him, said; “Now you go to the principal’s office and tell him what you just said to me.” He said, “Yes, ma’am,” and off he went. At the end of this, her first day of work, my mother went to speak with the principal, concerned that she might be fired. He got up from behind his desk, shook her hand and said, “I’m glad we got that out of the way already . You’ll do fine here.” The young man was suspended, sent home, surely got worse from his parents, and was back in three days, he and the rest of the class quite well-behaved during music class from that day forward. So for all you Zen Buddhist and New Age devotees, who have struggled with the famous Zen riddle, “What is the sound of one hand clopping? (קלאַפּ)” The answer is “Evelyn.”
My mother was, for a time, the cantorial soloist of a temple, among the first women in the United States to fulfill this post. I once asked her if, while singing, she ever felt herself come close to God in a state of mystic exaltation. She replied, “I cannot allow myself to do that. It is my responsibility to offer my voice so that it lifts others in their prayers that much closer to God. If I allowed myself that closeness, I would lose either the words or the melody, and no one could draw near.”
After my father died, my mother was in her fifties, and I asked her once why she didn’t date again. “Ellis,” she said, “the men my age are so old.”
At age fifty-seven, she entered graduate school, and by sixty, she was a social worker, first in a burn unit, and then, doing the work she truly wanted, as a hospice social worker, so that she could offer others what she did not receive when caring for my father in his last days.
On January 29th of 2004, there was an ice storm and her driveway was sheathed in black ice. She took handfuls of salt and threw it on the ice, stood waiting in the cold for it to melt a bit, and chipped the ice away, took another handful of salt, and advanced the next couple of yards. She chipped the driveway free of ice in a four-hour period.
On January 30th, she drove thirty miles into a snowstorm, visited a hospice patient, and then drove back. She got lost in the winter snow, but calmly kept driving and found her way home.
On January 31st, she sat down to play at the piano and noticed her right hand no longer obeyed her: noticed that she couldn’t really follow the notes. She called her brother to take her to the hospital and they discovered the first of what turned out to be at least eighteen tumors, metastases from a long-gone melanoma that apparently nestled dormant in her lymph system, then, fifteen years later, flitted through her body like malevolent dandelion seeds, taking root in her brain. In one day, as if a landslide suddenly dropped out from under her feet, she became profoundly ill. That it attacked her brain was the most devastating thing of all because she had seen in her hospice work how brain disorders violated one’s thoughts, one’s behaviors, one’s dignity, even causing such profound personality changes that one becomes someone unrecognizable to family members. When she told me this, her voice shaking with horror at what she might become, I said to her, “Mom, I will know you. I will remember you, but more than that, no matter what, I will know you still.”
But my mother suddenly became old. Believing my sister and I too bound by our own lives, she immediately checked herself into a nursing home, intending to exile herself from her own home. My mother’s home! When my father died, someone asked her, “How will you live in that big house all by yourself?”
“I will grow big enough to fill it,” she said. And it was true, it became almost part of her body.
In trying to do what she thought was protecting both herself and us, my mother did a marvelous job of covering her tracks. She had both my sister and I believing that residence there was necessary for her treatment.
That horrible, horrible place—an ordinary, well-run nursing home—that sad and horrible place.
It took me several days to get past mom’s cloud of vague explanations. When it became clear she was trying to protect us, I took her home, promising her that she would either heal at home or die there—but either way, we would care for her. My mother worried that she might have a long drawn out illness, and I promised her that, in that case, I would take her home to Seattle with me. When I spoke with my inamorata, Magali, she said, “Of course, what else would we do.” One way or another, mom was going to be at home, cared for and protected.
As we passed through the doors of the nursing home for the last time, she carefully shuffling her feet with her walker, I said to her, “Ya know, mom, you’re probably the first person ever to get out of here on her own feet.” She laughed and laughed.
So she and I returned to her home, and lived there, just the two of us, for weeks, until my sister could also come home as well for her last week. And as the days passed, she grew frail and as the disease attacked her mind and jumbled her words, she grew more and more devastated. But even then, within a few days, even as the cancer ripped away parts of her sense of self like a giant claw, she told me, “Ellis, I’ve not been doing this right. I’ve told myself what I’ve told my patients, again and again, ‘You either choose life or you don’t.’ I’m still alive.” Not happy perhaps—sometimes achingly, hauntingly sad—but alive.
Each day brought further losses, but like the lights going out at the outskirts of a city, all that was destroyed was the periphery. What remained throughout was her loving nature, her concern for others, her dignity that she retained no matter what indignities her disease forced upon her—and as she, herself, laughed about it, her more than slightly obsessional streak. It must be said that one way my mom rooted herself in the world was through the things she worried about. Nothing—nothing—nothing must ever be left undone.
One thing she did not leave undone was to say goodbye. One-by-one, she spoke, on the phone or in person, to almost everyone who was close to her. And every time, in a sad and elegiac tone, after saying something that was unique and special about the person to whom she was talking, she’d say something like, “I’m going to say goodbye now. I love you. Perhaps we’ll see each other again someday.”
Dying is a cruel paring down, a cutting away, loss after loss after loss. My sons came home, one from Japan, and one from Arizona. They helped care for her, and they laughed and cried with her. And on a Saturday afternoon, she told them of her passionate love for music, what she loved and what she had accomplished and it came to her that she would never sing, never play music again. As the immensity of that loss hung in the air like a slowly descending blade, she began to achingly weep. And then one of my boys asked, “Did you ever make any records?” And she smiled, through her tears and said, “Yes I did.” And we played her tapes, one from 1947, then a young woman, little older than my sons, singing arias and light opera, and one made in 1993 or so, playing piano to accompany her own singing.
But the disease progressed at a terrible pace, like a coal fire, long underground, that suddenly finds a crack in the earth and roars out in an all-consuming inferno. As the days passed, she let go of her music, she let go of her legs and took to her bed, she let go of her home, she let go of her friends and family, and realizing the illness far outstripped the radiation treatment, let go of medicine, let go of hope, let go of privacy and a week ago, stopped eating and drinking, her last taste, some drops of pomegranate juice from her sister.
Finally, most painfully, she let go of words, no longer able to order her thoughts into logical chains. For days, she was silent, mostly sleeping. One evening, she returned, because although she could not move anything except her left arm, she began to hurt terribly. With that arm, she pulled me close, so that my ear was next to her lips. What merely appeared to be restlessness was, in fact, pain, and she had to tell me so. She opened her eyes, and spoke—breathing her words, not even whispers, so soft they were, so that I could get her help. But even then, with so great a need for relief, making so great an effort to order her thoughts and speak past the malignancies, the first thing she said to me was, “I love you,” the words mere wisps of air against my ear. Thankfully, with medicine, we were able to suppress the pain.
Day-by-day, I sat beside her or held her. Night by night, I slept, first in the next room, leaping up to her at the slightest sound, then during her last days, with a pillow on the floor beside her in her bed.
She had grown old so fast, but as she let go, she became younger and younger. Her skin was as soft and smooth as a young girl’s, and as the flesh of her years melted off her frame, she became as shapely as she must have been on her wedding day.
In the dim light, her face took on an uncanny beauty, and I saw the woman with whom my father fell so deeply in love.
She moved in-and-out of a twilight sleep. I’d turn her from side to back to side again. We’d carefully dance—her lead—and if I missed her cue, she’d silently take my wrist and guide me where I needed to be. And very occasionally, eye’s closed, she’d take my hand and move only her left thumb, infinitesimally slowly, one or two ridges of her fingerprints slowly fitting/slowly sliding over one or two of mine.
Earlier we’d talked of her dying—and she truly did not wish to die, was torn with grief because she so loved living, but she told me that she was also looking forward to death, because she knew “Sid will be waiting for me, and I haven’t seen him in such a long time.”
So as the nights passed, for me long and often sleepless, I began to pray:
Oh beautiful, beautiful death
God’s sweetest angel
Take my mother into your arms
Come through the window like a messenger
And carry her home to her beloved.
On Sunday, she slept all day, her breathing rough and labored. And then, in the evening, as if suddenly everything came clear to her, she took one, then another open full breaths, her face soft and peaceful. I took her in my arms. She was silent, and then sighed, a long, slow breath against my cheek.
This substack is free. As a professional writer, I do hope to have my work supported, so for those who want to do so, here’s a far less expensive way than a paid substack subscription, one that will truly be welcome. Please purchase one of my books, in this case, Evelyn’s own story. A few years ago, I was belatedly able to assist my mother (fifteen years after her death) and my sister, Shelley, in finishing their book, FINAL CHAPTERS, concerning her career as a hospice social worker, something she started at the age of sixty and finished at the age of eighty-two, when death stole her away. Of this book, Ondrea Levine, the author of The Life I Took Birth For, wrote: “I’ve only met Evelyn Amdur through the pages of this book. She seems like a character from the old days, when people connected personally, with genuine care and love. She knew, intuitively, what others needed to hear, understanding their moral dilemmas. A multi-talented and gifted being, perhaps what stands out most for me was her genius at common sense. Particularly at the end of our lives, she’s what we wish for and rarely receive. This is a book for social workers, to be sure, but beyond that, for all of us. Most of all, it is a message from a remarkable woman on how to face our final days, and also how to care for those who walk that road before us.”
Thank you for sharing this, Ellis.