Standing in my eldest brother’s house in Montreal during my mother’s shiva, one thought kept going through my mind: Why were the walls slanted?
They weren’t, of course. I was just stoned out of my mind. And I could not figure out why the entryway to the living room looked like some kind of freaky trapezoid. Weren’t walls and ceilings supposed to form right angles?
I hadn’t intended to get baked. But I’m glad I did. It made the shiva—an ancient ritual that I had long assumed was intended to bring closure and comfort to the bereaved, but in the event brought me nothing but tsuris—easier to handle.
For one thing, my mother’s death caused my father to lose his mind, or at least his filter.
When I stepped down from the podium at Paperman & Sons funeral home after delivering one of my mother’s eulogies, my father was standing in the aisle, propped up on the hiking sticks he uses as canes. I thought he had risen to embrace me. Yet after I hugged him, he looked at me and said, stone-faced: “You did very well . . . for a dummy.”
When I told a therapist friend what had happened, she offered the measured response one would expect from a trained mental health professional, “Oh my god, you must have wanted to punch him in the face!”
That came later; at the time, I was simply stunned.
I shouldn’t have been. With friends and strangers, my father could be charming and gregarious. With his children, he was far more mercenary in his affections, more prone to mockery and sarcasm. I never knew what I was going to get from him, and though I was now a middle-aged man with kids of my own, his toxic outbursts invariably blindsided me—perhaps because I still could not help but hope for something different. Now grief had robbed him of all restraint, making him wildly unpredictable. I dreaded what might come out of his mouth next.
I was right to worry. The following day, the family gathered at my eldest brother’s home for dinner before the evening visitation session. My father hobbled in late, plunked himself down, and immediately launched into a vulgar joke. Sort of.
“I just got off the phone with my sister, and she wanted you all to know that you left some very important facts out of your speeches,” he said, betraying no sign of levity.
Oh no, I thought, a spoonful of carrot soup halfway to my lips. What now?
“First, your mother was the person who taught her how to use a squat toilet in Istanbul . . .”
“Okay, dad,” my brother said in the tone and manner of a man attempting to defuse a ticking bomb.
His mother-in-law was more direct. “Please, we’re trying to have a nice dinner here!” she snapped.
“This is my party!” my father erupted, his face contorted in petulant rage.
At no point did he acknowledge that his sons, too, were grieving; that while he had lost his wife, we had lost our mother. As far as he was concerned, he wasn’t just the principal mourner; he was the only mourner—something he made clear when he tried to eject from the shiva a frail and elderly cousin who had once offended a long-dead relative. (“Grab her arm and get her out of here!” he hissed at me.)
Never before had I seen my father’s id slip its leash so completely, and I was so shocked by his behaviour that I couldn’t make sense of it. Instead, I felt a helpless fury welling up inside me toward the old man, who seemed intent on preventing the ritual from helping us all deal with my mother’s passing.
Meanwhile, the constant influx of visitors was only making matters worse. I don’t do well in large groups, especially when they’re comprised of people I don’t know. Having left Montreal decades ago, most of the shiva guests—and there seemed to be no end to them—were either strangers or people whom I hadn’t seen in so long they might as well have been. Wading through that mob while dealing with the loss of my mother and the presence of my father was almost unbearable.
Enter the accidental stoning.
I suffer from chronic foot pain, and my feet were now throbbing from all the standing I was doing during the visitation sessions. A few weeks earlier, I’d eaten a mild cannabis gummy back home in New York to see if it might help my condition but all it had done was given me a slight buzz. I mentioned this to my other brother, who suggested that I try one of the more potent gummies he had lying around. “These are strong,” he cautioned, handing me a bag of colourful, star-shaped edibles. “I cut them into eighths.”
No problem, I thought. I can do fractions!
Thus did I find myself in the basement, haphazardly carving up an ultra-powerful weed gummy using one of the blunt balsa wood knives that had been provided for hungry guests looking to schmear some cream cheese on a bagel.
After eating the first morsel, I immediately began second-guessing my handiwork. Had that really been a full eighth? Probably not. A little more couldn’t hurt, I thought, hacking off another chunk; better too much than not enough! A couple more pieces later, I went upstairs and steeled myself for the arrival of the afternoon callers.
By the time the first visitors began wandering in, my brain was tingling, my body was numb, and I couldn’t understand why the walls were leaning inwards at those impossible angles. Perhaps it was because the entire room was spinning. I went back to the basement to lie down and see if that might help. No such luck. The bed was spinning, too. Back upstairs I floated, my feet barely touching the carpet.
I was relieved when, a few minutes (hours?) later, talking to some guy I hadn’t seen in 20 years, I was able to form complete sentences. By the time I got to the end of one, however, I could no longer remember how it had begun. At some point I made a comment about the political situation in Israel, and my conversation partner shot me a sideways glance through narrowed eyes. The most likely explanation was that I’d said something he hadn’t liked. But all I could think was, Can he tell I’m stoned? Can everybody tell I’m stoned?
Apparently, they could not. The next day, when I told my eldest brother and his wife what had happened, they burst out laughing. They hadn’t a clue I was wasted—perhaps because, despite remaining high for 10 hours, I hadn’t acted any weirder than usual.
Curious, my brother and I tried to figure out how much weed I had actually consumed. With the help of a digital scale and a proper knife, we estimated that I had ingested roughly 20 times the amount of THC that he occasionally took for medicinal purposes.
As we were slicing and weighing the gummy, my 19-year-old niece wandered into the kitchen and asked if she could try some.
“There is no safe amount of this you could take,” my brother said.
I’m sure there’s something in the Talmud about not getting fucked up at your mother’s shiva. But I haven’t read the Talmud in a long time, and getting frosted turned out to be a blessing: For the first time in days, I wasn’t angry at my father; I didn’t feel the urge to run screaming from the assembled masses; and, wonder of wonders, my feet didn’t hurt.
Shortly after I came down from my unintentional high, the shiva was paused for the Sabbath, then cut short by Yom Kippur. (Saved by the Day of Atonement!) My eldest brother and I recited the Mourner’s Kaddish at the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue a few times, and I flew back to New York.
More than a year later, I’m still pondering the events of that brief, intense period.
I had assumed that a shiva was meant to provide the bereaved with a measure of emotional support. Yet, to my surprise, it turned out to be more a source of stress than of solace.
This led me to wonder if the act of sitting shiva isn’t simply intended to ease our pain at the passing of a loved one, but is instead meant to help us navigate a major transition by reframing our perspective on the world of the living, regardless of how difficult that might be. My gummy overdose may have played a role in this, altering my consciousness at the precise moment when I most needed it. (There’s good precedent for this: Just a few years ago, archaeologists found evidence of ritual cannabis use at an ancient Israelite shrine in the Negev desert.)
Whatever the reason, it was only when I had to confront the fact that my father had become my sole remaining parent that I was finally able to step back, see him for who he truly was and accept that he was never going to change. As epiphanies go, it was a tough one: I found myself grieving not only the loss of my mother, but also the loss of whatever illusions I had left regarding my father.
As difficult as this whole process has been, however, I’d rather have clarity than false hope. It took the death of my mother for me to bury my childish expectations of my father. Better late than never, as my mom would say.
Standing in my eldest brother’s house in Montreal during my mother’s shiva, one thought kept going through my mind: Why were the walls slanted?
They weren’t, of course. I was just stoned out of my mind. And I could not figure out why the entryway to the living room looked like some kind of freaky trapezoid. Weren’t walls and ceilings supposed to form right angles?
I hadn’t intended to get baked. But I’m glad I did. It made the shiva—an ancient ritual that I had long assumed was intended to bring closure and comfort to the bereaved, but in the event brought me nothing but tsuris—easier to handle.
For one thing, my mother’s death caused my father to lose his mind, or at least his filter.
When I stepped down from the podium at Paperman & Sons funeral home after delivering one of my mother’s eulogies, my father was standing in the aisle, propped up on the hiking sticks he uses as canes. I thought he had risen to embrace me. Yet after I hugged him, he looked at me and said, stone-faced: “You did very well . . . for a dummy.”
When I told a therapist friend what had happened, she offered the measured response one would expect from a trained mental health professional, “Oh my god, you must have wanted to punch him in the face!”
That came later; at the time, I was simply stunned.
I shouldn’t have been. With friends and strangers, my father could be charming and gregarious. With his children, he was far more mercenary in his affections, more prone to mockery and sarcasm. I never knew what I was going to get from him, and though I was now a middle-aged man with kids of my own, his toxic outbursts invariably blindsided me—perhaps because I still could not help but hope for something different. Now grief had robbed him of all restraint, making him wildly unpredictable. I dreaded what might come out of his mouth next.
I was right to worry. The following day, the family gathered at my eldest brother’s home for dinner before the evening visitation session. My father hobbled in late, plunked himself down, and immediately launched into a vulgar joke. Sort of.
“I just got off the phone with my sister, and she wanted you all to know that you left some very important facts out of your speeches,” he said, betraying no sign of levity.
Oh no, I thought, a spoonful of carrot soup halfway to my lips. What now?
“First, your mother was the person who taught her how to use a squat toilet in Istanbul . . .”
“Okay, dad,” my brother said in the tone and manner of a man attempting to defuse a ticking bomb.
His mother-in-law was more direct. “Please, we’re trying to have a nice dinner here!” she snapped.
“This is my party!” my father erupted, his face contorted in petulant rage.
At no point did he acknowledge that his sons, too, were grieving; that while he had lost his wife, we had lost our mother. As far as he was concerned, he wasn’t just the principal mourner; he was the only mourner—something he made clear when he tried to eject from the shiva a frail and elderly cousin who had once offended a long-dead relative. (“Grab her arm and get her out of here!” he hissed at me.)
Never before had I seen my father’s id slip its leash so completely, and I was so shocked by his behaviour that I couldn’t make sense of it. Instead, I felt a helpless fury welling up inside me toward the old man, who seemed intent on preventing the ritual from helping us all deal with my mother’s passing.
Meanwhile, the constant influx of visitors was only making matters worse. I don’t do well in large groups, especially when they’re comprised of people I don’t know. Having left Montreal decades ago, most of the shiva guests—and there seemed to be no end to them—were either strangers or people whom I hadn’t seen in so long they might as well have been. Wading through that mob while dealing with the loss of my mother and the presence of my father was almost unbearable.
Enter the accidental stoning.
I suffer from chronic foot pain, and my feet were now throbbing from all the standing I was doing during the visitation sessions. A few weeks earlier, I’d eaten a mild cannabis gummy back home in New York to see if it might help my condition but all it had done was given me a slight buzz. I mentioned this to my other brother, who suggested that I try one of the more potent gummies he had lying around. “These are strong,” he cautioned, handing me a bag of colourful, star-shaped edibles. “I cut them into eighths.”
No problem, I thought. I can do fractions!
Thus did I find myself in the basement, haphazardly carving up an ultra-powerful weed gummy using one of the blunt balsa wood knives that had been provided for hungry guests looking to schmear some cream cheese on a bagel.
After eating the first morsel, I immediately began second-guessing my handiwork. Had that really been a full eighth? Probably not. A little more couldn’t hurt, I thought, hacking off another chunk; better too much than not enough! A couple more pieces later, I went upstairs and steeled myself for the arrival of the afternoon callers.
By the time the first visitors began wandering in, my brain was tingling, my body was numb, and I couldn’t understand why the walls were leaning inwards at those impossible angles. Perhaps it was because the entire room was spinning. I went back to the basement to lie down and see if that might help. No such luck. The bed was spinning, too. Back upstairs I floated, my feet barely touching the carpet.
I was relieved when, a few minutes (hours?) later, talking to some guy I hadn’t seen in 20 years, I was able to form complete sentences. By the time I got to the end of one, however, I could no longer remember how it had begun. At some point I made a comment about the political situation in Israel, and my conversation partner shot me a sideways glance through narrowed eyes. The most likely explanation was that I’d said something he hadn’t liked. But all I could think was, Can he tell I’m stoned? Can everybody tell I’m stoned?
Apparently, they could not. The next day, when I told my eldest brother and his wife what had happened, they burst out laughing. They hadn’t a clue I was wasted—perhaps because, despite remaining high for 10 hours, I hadn’t acted any weirder than usual.
Curious, my brother and I tried to figure out how much weed I had actually consumed. With the help of a digital scale and a proper knife, we estimated that I had ingested roughly 20 times the amount of THC that he occasionally took for medicinal purposes.
As we were slicing and weighing the gummy, my 19-year-old niece wandered into the kitchen and asked if she could try some.
“There is no safe amount of this you could take,” my brother said.
I’m sure there’s something in the Talmud about not getting fucked up at your mother’s shiva. But I haven’t read the Talmud in a long time, and getting frosted turned out to be a blessing: For the first time in days, I wasn’t angry at my father; I didn’t feel the urge to run screaming from the assembled masses; and, wonder of wonders, my feet didn’t hurt.
Shortly after I came down from my unintentional high, the shiva was paused for the Sabbath, then cut short by Yom Kippur. (Saved by the Day of Atonement!) My eldest brother and I recited the Mourner’s Kaddish at the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue a few times, and I flew back to New York.
More than a year later, I’m still pondering the events of that brief, intense period.
I had assumed that a shiva was meant to provide the bereaved with a measure of emotional support. Yet, to my surprise, it turned out to be more a source of stress than of solace.
This led me to wonder if the act of sitting shiva isn’t simply intended to ease our pain at the passing of a loved one, but is instead meant to help us navigate a major transition by reframing our perspective on the world of the living, regardless of how difficult that might be. My gummy overdose may have played a role in this, altering my consciousness at the precise moment when I most needed it. (There’s good precedent for this: Just a few years ago, archaeologists found evidence of ritual cannabis use at an ancient Israelite shrine in the Negev desert.)
Whatever the reason, it was only when I had to confront the fact that my father had become my sole remaining parent that I was finally able to step back, see him for who he truly was and accept that he was never going to change. As epiphanies go, it was a tough one: I found myself grieving not only the loss of my mother, but also the loss of whatever illusions I had left regarding my father.
As difficult as this whole process has been, however, I’d rather have clarity than false hope. It took the death of my mother for me to bury my childish expectations of my father. Better late than never, as my mom would say.