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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Crossing over
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By Alexandra J. Wall

May 1, 2000 |  Not too long ago, over dinner, my grandfather described to me the epitaph he wants to have inscribed on his tombstone. When I dutifully reported his wishes to my mother, it did not go over well. My grandparents and I live in New York, my parents in California. Although she speaks to them often, my mother relies on me to be her conduit for information on her parents' lives. And so I transmit dispatches of news from the Upper West Side to the suburban desert where I grew up.

As I awaited my mother's response to this latest communiqué, I could envision the tears welling up. And sure enough, when her words came through the receiver, she had elevated the simple wish of an old man into the next family crisis.

My mother was not upset simply by the idea that her father was planning for his death. After all, it isn't that unusual for a man in his late 80s, whose days are defined by which doctor he has an appointment with, to treat his own death as imminent. It was the inscription itself that she found so offensive; that in his final resting place, in addition to his name, my grandfather wants to be remembered by a five-digit number.

At first, I, too, could not understand why he would deliberately choose to resurrect the number that was assigned him at the lowest period of his life; the number that was meant to dehumanize him, to keep track of whether or not he was still alive; the number that defined him solely as a survivor of the Holocaust. Why would he choose to give that one attribute of his complex personality greater significance than his other accomplishments -- of which there are so many?

But I felt it was not up to us to dissuade him from this most personal choice, no matter how distasteful we found it. His ailments were mostly physical; his mind remained clear and sharp. He had made his decision; the only thing I could do was try to understand why he would choose to be remembered for the life he had endured, rather than the life he had created.

After the war, my grandfather became a renowned professor of geography at City College of New York, staying active enough to deliver a paper at the Library of Congress when he was 85. He was fortunate to have a long, loving marriage, and raised a daughter, my mother, whom he could not possibly care about more, even if she were of his own blood. He experienced the joys of having a doting granddaughter, me, whom he would take to Broadway shows, always buying tickets for just the two of us, in the second or third row.

But his life would have been entirely different had there been no war. In his prewar life, my grandfather had a son, not a daughter. And the mother of that son was not my grandmother.

My grandmother and grandfather had known each other before the war. They both lived through the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto in Lithuania and their subsequent incarceration in several concentration camps. They both survived. Their respective spouses did not. And neither did my grandfather's little boy.

Next page | They will see the year of his birth, the year of his death and the many years in between