Amy Feiman, in memoriam

Amy was commemorated and layed to rest today in North and South Brunswick, both curiously south of New Brunswick. After 6 years of fighting breast cancer, almost the entire period I've known her, she lost at the age of 49.

It was a memorable service. Her husband Aryeh got up and spoke movingly, but with the calm and restraint of someone who was not surprised by a loved one's death. Of how they met by the copier, were engaged three days later, and married on a mountaintop in Israel. Compare with Forrest Whittaker getting both the Golden Globe and the Oscar, the latter he should have seen coming. On both occasions he was so overwhelmed that he could barely get a coherent sentence out. Either way works.

Many of the speakers chose to bracket their emotions with formal point by point recollections. I'm sure that's about all I could muster. I was impressed that her daughters had it together to speak as well as they did.

There was much wailing. I, personally, was a salt-faced mess, thinking of my sister going through breast cancer at the same time, and how it must be to be her family, etc.

And as I saw Jewish funeral rites for the first time (some beautiful singing, the assembled shovelling dirt in the grave as a "last act of kindness", intensely uniform gravestones), I was both impressed and acutely aware that I was the foreigner here, not just in this congregation, but in this Garden State, so lacking in red clay.


I'm donating to the Dana Farber Center for cancer research.