The Greenberg Funeral

1. The Ones They Touched

They had to hold the service out in Brooklyn, in this place run by goyim which had seating for fourteen hundred. There was standing room only in the back, and before long, men in shtreimels and women in sheitels were lining the hallway, clinging to separate sides, saying “Baruch dayan emes” or else “Tch… so sad.” But also secular people, too—people who called her parents Carol and Irwin, instead of Chaya and Yitzchak. People who spoke of “condolences” and “heartfelt sympathy.” And then there were people who were not quite secular, not quite frum: the ones who unfolded suede yarmulkes from back pockets and answered to the Kaddish, but then like thieves slipped off the yarmulkes the moment they slunk out the door. And there was someone from the governor’s office who didn’t know why he had been sent, and there was talk also of Hillary Clinton coming to the shiva.

The funeral director was a kind bald man, rotund and bare-cheeked at forty with a face like he was twenty-five and a name like Tim O’Malley. He filled an adjacent service room with the overflow crowd, and set up the microphone so the audio would carry in both rooms. Afterwards, he told his wife it had been years since he had seen a funeral with that many different kinds of people and by the end not a dry eye in the crowd.

It wasn’t just that Leah had been twenty-one, or the tutoring she had been doing through Kerev V’Yavneh (when not studying for her first year at medical school); it wasn’t just that she was beautiful and sweet and loved by both classmates and professors; it wasn’t even the tragic timing of it all, the series of increasingly optimistic indicators, which rendered her death even more...