Sorting

For .95 cents PeopleFinders.com will give me Robert A. Caigan's phone number. It is sooooo tempting, but there is a sanity line that I do not want to cross. My logic may be creative, but paying for a phone number that I know is not possible? It can't be healthy.

I received a letter in the mail from my cousin Jay.

There was a note on it in my mother's handwriting.

"Please take care of this yearly...Thanks Dear"

and the date 6/15/91.

It is a flower bill for our great-grandparents burial plot in Montreal.

While my mother's post-it-note is a bit curt, I did not receive instructions and it came with a forwarded condolence letter about Linda's death.

I called Jay.

E: Hi, I'm just wondering about the letter I received?

J: Well, your mom sent it to me and I thought I'd send it to you. 

 
(I am silent)

J: I wouldn't worry about it. I haven't paid it in a few years, but if you want to, you can. I don't think it mattered that much to your mother.

(I can hear him smiling - he knows that this is somewhere between mean, teasing, and funny.)

E: Oh, okay, thanks, I just needed an explanation.

(We are both eldest children and I know how to play this game - no response is the only way to win.)

J: The letter's from someone who knew your mom.

E: Thanks, yes, I read it. It was very nice.

blah, blah, blah...good to speak with you - best to the family...

I hate him, love him, have wanted his approval for way too long, it shouldn't matter and he's the only person Linda wanted by her side before she died - maybe my brother as well. I know, I'm bitter, she was always "protecting" me. The problem is, that never worked. The silences have always been quite full - Linda taught me that.

Flowers for Rae Wilansky and Max Wilansky.

Unimportant flowers...

I google, that is how I find out about my dead relatives.

I laugh out loud.

Kehal Israel Memorial Park (click)

There is another site that provides a phone number and states:

"Emily Caigan Be the first of your friends to recommend this". Then provided me with a Facebook link.

Seriously, I could not make this stuff up.

What the sites do not say is that Max and Rae came from somewhere in Russia and changed their names to Wilansky because that is the set of passports they could get and he was called "Count Wilansky", because that is what the passport said. This may of course all be false and might have been made up, but that depends how much you trust a man on the run who ends up starting and managing a "card club" in Montreal and importing illegal furs. But he did it - he got himself and his wife out of Russia and his grand-daughter Linda went to Cornell University and then Columbia University for graduate school.

I was told that his real name was Schumacher.

I think about such things. I will find them. I need to make sure that this really is where they are buried. I'll decide about the flowers later.

 

I told Beth, Jay's sister-in law, married to Lee, Jay's brother, that I now know where Rea and Max are most likely buried. She said, "Oh, that would make a nice trip. We should go visit."

xoxoxo,

Bob's Daughter

 

Over the mountains and through the woods...

Loudenville, must visit Loudenville...

I made another phone call in my search for dead relatives. This time to my mother's best friend form early childhood. Ann knows many things about Linda, including where Linda's grandparents (on the Mandelbaum side) are buried. "They are with my grandparents and your Aunt Joan." That means that my great- grandfather, Meyer Mandelbaum set aside these graves. I don't quite understand how the burial system works because Ann said that the cemetery is owned by "the temple". How many plots can a person set aside? Meyer must have purchased plots a very long time ago. What was going through his mind? How many generations into the future was he imagining? Did he lay awake at night thinking about this? Did he simply purchase as many as was allowed and if that is the case, who decides such numbers?

Khem asked if I want to be buried in Loudenville. I told him that I will think about it.

xoxo,
Bob's Daughter

There was a National weather disaster on Sunday
when we buried Linda next to Bob.
A tree fell on the temple.
A tree fell on the house I grew up in.

There was a flood on the NY State Thruway.
There was no electricity in the towns
south of the Tappan Zee Bridge.
An act of Nature.

My brother said,
"There's going to be one hot date in heaven tonight!"
Bob' son is a romantic.

I'm...something else.

Love,
Bob's Daughter