The first wail of mourning that I ever heard in my life was at my great-aunt Trudy’s funeral.
For 45 years, my great-aunts, Trudy and Charlotte, lived together. They shared a small, plainly furnished apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, N.Y., long after the neighborhood had changed from being the Jewish Champs d’Elysees to something much different.
We often went there for Sunday dinner, braving the traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Charlotte was my mother’s aunt, the younger sister of my grandmother. Trudy was her— well, actually no one ever labeled her, or their relationship. They were always simply the “tantes” (aunts). When I was a young child, I asked them, innocently, why they had never gotten married. I meant, of course, to men, which is precisely how they responded: “No man ever wanted to marry us.”
That was it. What was the term back then? "Spinster?" "Old maid?"
Aunt Trudy became sick with cancer. Charlotte cared for her until she died. At her funeral, I heard Charlotte’s wail of grief, which still pierces my bones. As the funeral began, the funeral director escorted Charlotte out to the chapel — as, in the decades hence, I have seen funeral directors escort grieving spouses out, over and over again.
Yes, grieving spouses.
As the pall bearers were carrying Trudy’s coffin out into the hearse, my mother wondered aloud: “I wonder if Trudy’s family will be here.”
To which I replied: “I thought that we were Aunt Trudy’s family.”
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