It is nearly one full year since we lost Toby Emmer, my beloved, queer elder auntie-fairy godmother who helped coach me out of the closet as bisexual and queer (though I more fully came out after she died, I feel she’s been with me as I did so).
In the Jewish tradition, we mark the one-year anniversary of a loved one’s death by lighting a candle and revisiting our memories to mourn them once more in an intimate way. It is called their yahrzeit. For Toby’s yahrzeit this week, here is an essay I wrote and read out loud at her memorial service in New York. I hope you enjoy it! (Long time readers of the newsletter will recognize my story of Toby taking me to try to find my grandpa Abe’s ashes, a trip that didn’t yield what I hoped but did yield so much more. Read on after the self-care updates and enjoy.)
SELF CARE UPDATE
This week:
Lizzo!
Haircut!
Birding! This one requires a bit of explaining. I’m a longtime birder, but my binoculars have slipped into disuse over the years as I’ve been too immersed in parenting and job duties to make space for my hobby. Today, though, I dusted off the field glasses and joined the Baltimore Audubon Society for a guided birding walk through Middle Branch Park and Masonville Cove in South Baltimore. If you are in the Baltimore area and want to meet up for a bird walk, ping me and I will meet you! In 2 hours we were able to see, along with the usual robins and starlings:
Least Terns
Caspian Terns
a Bald Eagle
an Osprey
a Great Blue Heron
Double Crested Cormorants
Orchard Orioles
Baltimore Orioles
Scarlet Tanagers
Warbling Vireos
Yellow-Rumped Warblers
Downy Woodpeckers
Kingbirds
Great Crested Flycatchers
Eastern Pewees
Goldfinches
Northern Mockingbirds
Cedar Waxwings
Cardinals
Bluejays
Least Sandpiper
Semipalmated Plovers
Red-Winged Blackbirds
Common Grackles
Eulogy for Tobe
For Howie
In January 2022, I was on a leave from my job in order to do some family research on the Jewish communist side of my family. Toby was hands down the greatest booster of this effort on my part, and in January she and I had a chance to collaborate on it, finally. She was convinced I’d finally locate some remnant of my grandparents’ lives, both of which ended too soon and, thanks to my grandmother Sylvia’s relentless habit of destroying documents (likely a force of habit to avoid their records being turned over to the FBI),both of whom had left us with only a few scraps of evidence that they ever even existed. This trip to New York, I was investigating my great-aunt Sonia’s work as a medical librarian, and trying to find where my grandfather Abe might have been buried or interred or even simply where he was cremated in 1967. Toby drove the Lexus to meet me outside the library building at the Einstein Medical School in the Bronx. It was an overcast morning, and by noon I’d spent several hours poring over files on Sonia’s tenure as their first head librarian. I more or less staggered outside when I got the text from Toby that she was waiting for me. I knocked on the car window, thinking she and I could have a joyous hug and greet one another. Instead, Toby waved me into the car. She was on the phone with a friend. I sat beside her, processing everything I’d seen and read about my ancestor, holding space for Toby to finish her phone call so that we could head to lunch. That’s what Toby and I did for one other. We held space.
After our sojourn in the Bronx, Toby drove me to Queens to the crematorium and cemetery where I had reason to believe we might find my grandpa Abe’s ashes interred. It was a long drive on the BQE and Toby talked the whole way, as I played my accepted role of active listener. This was our dynamic, ever since I spent the weekend of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in her apartment in 1992, having my political sensibilities tuned to the racial injustices of American politics. Toby talked, I expressed my emotions in response to what she told me. Most of what she told me these last several years were her memories. On this day she filled me in on some of the details of her father Jack Emmer’s upbringing in the Hebrew Orphans Asylum in Queens, and how he became a social worker in order to emulate the example of the amazing social workers who helped him navigate the world as a teenager. Toby took phone calls as we drove, updating her callers that they were on speakerphone and that I was in the car. I didn’t mind, because while some people take phone calls during visits in order to escape their visitors, Toby took phone calls during our visit in order to invite her other loved ones into the relationship that we shared. It was a dynamic that I learned to take comfort in, rather than be annoyed by. She did this because she felt our relationship was strong and flexible enough to include her other loved ones. Now it is up to all of us who loved her to include one another whenever we can.
We got to the crematorium, and it was just as ancient and stifling a place as you might imagine. Any noise we made -- and Toby made plenty -- was muffled by the silence of the place and all the death that had passed through it. A woman came out and took my information, and went away to search the records for my grandfather. Toby chatted about this and that without stopping to ask how I was feeling. I think she knew I needed to hear a friendly voice at that moment. When the woman came back and said she did find a record of my grandpa having been cremated there but that he wasn’t interred there, I felt empty and sad. Toby sat with me and we recited the Mourners Kaddish in Yiddish and English, a printed copy that I had from my rabbi. We went outside into the gray day and I understood that both my grandparents really didn’t believe in any form of life after death or any spiritual aspect to it at all. So it was appropriate that his ashes wouldn’t be buried or marked anywhere. At the same time, I felt a little dejected that my grandmother hadn’t even left a marker where we grandkids could come to remember Abe.
Toby clocked my emotional state instantly. “You’re disappointed,” she said. “Are you disappointed? You’re disappointed. How can I help?” I had picked out a couple of small stones from the crematorium garden ahead of our visit, thinking that I could maybe find a spot to place them if there was a grave marker or a niche for Abe at the crematorium. But now I had those stones in my pocket. What was I to do with them? Toby hugged me and we got back in the car, and drove to Brooklyn.
When we arrived at Toby’s apartment, she had a vegetable soup to feed me and some good bread. We came in the door and she immediately began checking her voice messages; there were several urgent messages from union members seeking her help with their benefits. I listened to her on the phone, and stirred the soup, and realized that I wasn’t actually disappointed. The thing I had been searching for was what Toby was actively giving me right that moment -- a feeling of belonging and family, a feeling of home and of having an elder relative with an interest in me and my well-being. A holding of space for me to be whoever I was. Toby could do that for multiple people at the same time. It was the rarest, and simultaneously the most ordinary, gift in the world -- she was able to hold space for herself and anyone who wanted to be close to her. The caring and presence that she brought to what would have been otherwise a grim and awful experience for me was the great gift I’d been hoping for. I felt that it was going to be okay, even if we never found my grandfather’s remains. We had gone on this journey together, and she had held this space for us. For me. Thank you Toby, thank you for this teaching about presence and holding space for the ones we love. There doesn’t have to be any limit or end to it, does there?
NOTE TO READERS: If you’ve come this far with me, you know there is more to come. I’ve got a lot of material, only a fraction of which is in these dispatches. But I’m doing this research and writing as a labor of love, on my own dime. I’m lucky and grateful to be able to do it! If you’d like to pay for a subscription to this newsletter as a means of supporting this work, Please go for it!