Friday morning, on the day we buried my mother, the sun shone bright and the birds whistled from the trees at the Rehovet cemetary– the kind of day she loved. I had checked the forecasts before leaving Tulsa; the weather was expected to be cloudy and overcast. That the sky was clear astonished everyone.
Her body was wrapped in a white burial shroud, over a black carrier, lain on a stone in the mausoleum. The rabbi ushered in those who wished to view her. He had pulled back the top of the shroud to show her face. My uncle tried to keep my aunt from entering. Aaron held her arm and kept saying there was no need. He didn’t want her to get upset. She might become hysterical. To him, such drama was unnecessary. Sola pushed past him and saw her sister for the first time in two years. “She looks like she’s sleeping!” She said my mother’s name twice, quietly, perhaps to wake her, and began to cry in earnest.
The sun continued to shine, as the body was carried out. Among the bearers was Aaron’s son, my cousin Leo, along with Sola’s husband Haim and her ex-husband Michael. My aunt called it a surreal vision out of a Felini film, seeing her past and present husbands carrying her sister’s body to the grave.
The next evening, with the start of Shiva, the rains began over Tel Aviv– as if the sky was crying for us, who had already wept too much. During this week, the rains have come on and off, flooding the area around us.
The Israeli paper Ha’aretz reports:
- The heavens open, and swamp Tel Aviv
Storms accompanied by heavy rain swept the center of the country yesterday leaving large sections of the Dan region flooded, closing roads, and even disrupting air traffic.
The rain began falling on Monday night and by yesterday afternoon 90 mm. had fallen in Tel Aviv alone, most of it during a two-hour-long cloud-burst in the late morning.
