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Sitting with the Dead
Giving my Father a choice: Be with your own son
for a week, or suffer the consequences
Date: 4/29/2005 6:13:42 AM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 1299 times It is before 5 PM on Thursday.
I am doing healing with my father.
We are sitting on chairs outside his
apartment a block from Fairfax Avenue.
We are not far from the Silent Movie Theatre
where I first met Charlie Chaplin,
one of the Kings of Creative film making
and doing it all yourself creatively.
I want to get to the post office at the
Original Farmers' Market at Third and Fairfax.
I am going to mail a copy of "Your Creation"
to my Aunt Rita. Aunt Rita is the one who
took me first to Dr. Jensen in 1972.
Aunt Rita has the balls in the family.
She is my father's sister. She lives in Israel
and in her Orthodox tradition is among the most
learned of Jewish women.
So it is time to point blank tell my father
the message of a lifetime:
Dad, I love you.
I know you did your best raising me.
There is more healing to do between us.
If you want me to say the prayers of mourning
for you after you depart this body,
there is something I am asking of you now.
I want you to tell your work
that your son is more important than your work.
I want you to go with me to Rancho La Puerta for a week,
the spa in Tecate.
I want you to bring your Hebrew books.
Do you remember who taught me my Bar Mitzvah?
(He smiles...of course he remembers...
he taught me...!!!)
"Dad, I know this is going to be difficult for you.
I am asking you to go away with me for a week."
I tell him he can teach me the prayers when
we take this retreat.
He says, "You know the prayers!"
"I do not remember the prayer!"
I tell him.
I have blocked these prayers out of my consciousness.
The pain goes too deep.
He tells me it would be very hard to go away for a week
with his son.
I tell him, he has never fulfilled the obligation of a father
to a son. He has never--or rarely--
spent quality time with his son.
he tells me that sitting with the dead--
the job he does--is higly competitive.
(Oh My God, am I hearing this????????)
He says that if he took off for a week,
the Groman's Mortuary would find someone else
to do the work. He would be replaced.
He has been running with that fear for years.
Here he is, a man going on 87, and he is afraid
that if he took a week off, or was not on call
when the mortuary calls, he would be out of a job.
I ask the name of the boss.
I am thinking to call him.
My father says, they would not matter.
He is convinced he would be out of work.
He says he gets $150.00 a night for sitting with the dead.
In the Jewish religion, this is considered a high honor,
and as a Soul my father, in his simple mental ways,
is a very high Soul. We are talking here to a man
who is carrying Childhood Trauma that goes back and back
and back generations.
I am the one who can stop this generational trauma.
I am stopping it now.
Later in the day, I pick up a copy
of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
In my mind's eye, I see a story about the son
of one of the most devout, Beloved,
and respected of Orthodox Jews in the entire
LA Jewish Community.
The article says that the son has served the father
an ultimatum.
The ultimatum is that unless the father--
who has spent more than 40 years--praying and sitting
with dead--and saying prayers for the families of the departed--
agrees to go and spend a week with his son,
that son--me--refused to say prayers of mourning
for his own father.
What a hoot.
Tit for tat.
IF this man who has prayed for others as part of his
religious work, wants to be prayed over,
he is going to have to fulfill the obligations of a living
father to a living son.
in the article, I am asking for volunteers
who will sit in for Solomon Goldman with the dead.
Are their any sub dead sitters in LA who are also
Holy Men who will not steel my father's job if he
takes off for a week to be with his son???
(I do not believe I am writing this...)
AND, then Groman's Mortuary...they are in the article too!!!
I can see the headlines now. Groman's finds a new Holy Man
to replace Old Holy Man because Old Holy Man takes a week off
to be with his SON....
Great.
Great PR for Groman's.
###
Do you have healing to do with your past?
This thread of Blogs can help:
http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=92&i=146
To read the Blogs, here is a list.
This is where you will find the story of my 30th High School ReUnion
that begins this series about a Radical Healing surrounding my 40th ReUnion:
http://curezone.com/blogs/m.asp?f=92&i=120
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