eulogy

by Dina L. Relles

Every time I borrow my father’s car, I see the black Rabbi’s manual sitting on the console. Sometimes I’ll pick it up—tattered and dense with wispy yellowed paper. He holds the same book at weddings, at births, at funerals. There’s a prayer for everything.

Tucked between the thin pages are index cards covered with his cryptic, slanted scrawl:

Born in Yonkers, Simon and Claire. Loved hiking, jazz, scrambled eggs. Married high school sweetheart. Daughter out of state. Died alone.

All of life on a 4x6 card. After a funeral, my father files the cards away, unless he forgets and then they litter the house, scattered across countertops, stacked in the center of the kitchen table. Little tokens of loss

I lost an umbrella stroller once. Or I thought I did, until one evening, after it’d been gone awhile, we pulled up to the local ice cream shop only to see the stroller propped against the brick exterior. After we placed our order, I asked the teenagers working the counter about it.

“Take it,” they said. “We don’t know who left it here. Been like that for weeks.”

I remember when I bought it off a discount rack at one of those big box stores. “You need something more substantial,” my mother had said, pivoting toward the larger models—with their luxury wheels, cup holders, canopies to shield from the weather.

“No,” I mumbled, carrying the thin swath of nylon stretched over a bare frame. “This is all I need.”

We used to memorize the stock language from the Rabbi’s manual—my siblings and I could recite whole paragraphs by heart. Our specialty was the introduction to the Mourner’s Prayer:

May those observing the Yahrzeit of a close one now rise…to magnify and sanctify Thy name in the words of the Kaddish, page 161.

It was a silly pastime to sit in the pews and mouth the words along with our father, perched on the bimah. What did we know, back then, about loss? When I got older and realized I was still reciting by rote, I stopped praying altogether.

I’ve left other things behind—eyeglasses swept away by an ocean wave, a vintage t-shirt forgotten in a hotel drawer, someone I thought was the love of my life.

Still I sometimes picture people as index cards.

Liked cheap strollers, mine would say. To feel the rain on her face and the earth under bare feet. Never took the easy way. Lost things. Sometimes got them back.

Dina L. Relles’ work has appeared in The Atlantic, matchbook, Monkeybicycle, DIAGRAM, and Wigleaf, among others. She is the nonfiction editor at Pidgeonholes and assistant prose poetry editor at Pithead Chapel. More at dinarelles.com or @DinaLRelles.