We buried my grand­mother this past Sun­day. She was 101 years old, and while I would not want to be 101 like she was 101 – espe­cially in the last six months or so of her life, her body failed in ways that made it hard not to hope for her to be at peace sooner rather than later – she lived a long, fruit­ful, adven­tur­ous, engaged and mean­ing­ful life; and so her death, while very, very sad, feels nei­ther tragic nor unjust. Indeed, the time she was here, with us, is some­thing to cel­e­brate, to be grate­ful for, not just because the qual­ity with which she lived is some­thing to aspire to, but because her being here gave us a chance to be part of her life, to make it a part of our­selves in the inti­mate, com­pli­cated, fraught and deeply pro­found ways that only come with being a family.

We used to laugh that my grand­mother would out­live us all, and while we knew of course that this could never be lit­er­ally true, there was, there is, some­thing endur­ing about her. In part, this comes from her per­pet­ual opti­mism. One way or another, she would always tell me, usu­ally over Hebrew National salami sand­wiches across the small table in the very small kitchen that was just the right size for her barely five foot frame, things work them­selves out. She was mostly right. Indeed, I can think of only one prob­lem that she con­fronted over the course of her long life, or that she helped oth­ers con­front, that did not con­form to that principle.

In that very small kitchen, on the two or three occa­sions dur­ing the year when the whole mish­pocheh would gather together – Rosh HaShanah, Passover, Thanks­giv­ing, and occa­sion­ally other times as well – my grand­mother would single-handedly, and then, later in her life, almost single-handedly, pre­pare a feast. Some­times, when I was younger, there were as many as twenty peo­ple seated around the table in her din­ing room, maybe more, and the food was always plen­ti­ful and deli­cious. Per­haps my most endur­ing over­all mem­ory of those meals is the gusto – I can think of no other word for it – with which my grand­mother would eat when she was finally sure that every­one else had been fed and that all the food that could be put on the table had been put on the table. She enjoyed food, per­haps espe­cially meat, and I owe to her my own habit of pick­ing off the bone – turkey, chicken, lamb, beef or pork – every last bit of the ani­mal that can be eaten.

My grand­fa­ther, when he was alive, always sat at the head of the table, and then after he was gone, I sat there, espe­cially on Passover. It’s funny what you remem­ber, but my two most vivid mem­o­ries from these fam­ily meals are from Passover seders that took place more than thirty years ago. First, I don’t remem­ber how old I was, is the time we were read­ing Chad Gadya, in Eng­lish of course, and every time I had to read the line in which the cat eats the goat, I butchered it, because in our trans­la­tion the cat didn’t sim­ply eat, it devoured and I just could not get into my head that the sec­ond syl­la­ble in that word rhymed with hour. The sec­ond seder I remem­ber – I had to be fif­teen or six­teen – is the one when my uncle Arthur showed up, and he and I read through the entire hagadah in Hebrew, some­thing I’d never done before, and because I thought, at that point in my life, that I would be a rabbi when I grew up, this made me very proud, espe­cially when my uncle told me I’d done a good job.

Miss­ing from these fam­ily gath­er­ings for far too many years were my uncle’s chil­dren, who, through no fault of their own, were almost com­pletely estranged from us after their father died. The details of how that estrange­ment came to be are irrel­e­vant here. What mat­ters is that my grand­mother felt great joy that she was ulti­mately able to build a rela­tion­ship with them, and it has been a won­der­ful thing for us as well – me, my mother and my sis­ters – to have them be part of our family’s life, for us to be a family. Ironically, and sadly, as my cousin’s estrange­ment from us has become entirely a thing of the past, my sis­ters’ estrange­ment from each other has grown more and more deeply entrenched. Here, too, the story of how the estrange­ment came about and what sus­tains it now is really not impor­tant. What mat­ters is that it would mis­rep­re­sent the last twenty or so years of our grandmother’s life not to say that the fact of my sis­ters’ estrange­ment caused her great pain and, more, that one of her deep­est regrets is that she was unable to help them unravel the knot of anger, bit­ter­ness and resent­ment that keeps them apart.

I know this because, on more than one occa­sion, she told me so, most recently right before she started to lose her abil­ity to say clearly what she wanted to say. We were sit­ting alone in the room in the apart­ment my mother had built onto her house in Hemp­stead that had, increas­ingly, come to define the bound­aries of the world my grand­mother lived in, and my grand­mother looked up at me from a moment of quiet in our con­ver­sa­tion and said, “You know, I’m bored.”

“What do you mean?” I asked her.

“There’s noth­ing new. Not on TV, not in the news, even the sto­ries I hear from you and your sis­ters, and your mother too, are always more or less the same. There’s just noth­ing new and it’s bor­ing. Some­times I wish I could just go, but I can’t just wish it and make it happen.”

I let that state­ment hang in the air for a bit, and then I asked her, “So what are you hold­ing onto, Grandma?”

She turned her head to look out the win­dow. Her eyes focused inward, and her mouth was set in the thin, pursed line that char­ac­ter­ized one ver­sion of what my mother has called the Anne-Berner-look, and I knew my grand­mother was cal­cu­lat­ing how much to say and how much not to say, that she was weigh­ing what she thought the effect would be on me of what she said, what I might tell oth­ers and how it would effect them. “Well, I guess I still feel like I have things to teach them,” she answered wist­fully, and it was clear in con­text that them referred to my sis­ters and that what she wanted to teach them was how to let the anger, the bit­ter­ness and the resent­ment go.

My grand­mother was a trained col­oratura soprano when she was younger, though she never, as far as I knew, per­formed opera. She did, how­ever, sing com­mer­cials on the radio, and from every­thing I know, she orig­i­nally wanted to be a per­former. Her par­ents, though, would not allow it. The val­ues they brought from the old coun­try jived very nicely with the image of female per­form­ers in the US that was cur­rent at the time, i.e., that they were “loose,” and so there was no way my great grand­par­ents were going to per­mit their daugh­ter to enter that kind of pro­fes­sion. My mother tells the story, though, of how my grandmother’s singing did help to win over her future father-in-law. When she and the man who would become my grand­fa­ther were dat­ing, he would call her from the tai­lor shop his father owned and ask my grand­mother to sing to him. Then he would hand the phone to his father, who just loved to lis­ten to my grandmother’s voice.

And it wasn’t as if my grand­mother gave up all con­tact with the world of artists, writer, singers and musi­cians that she wanted to be part of. I have on my book­shelf two vol­umes of poetry by Henry Bel­la­mann, Cups of Illu­sion and The Upward Pass, each one very affec­tion­ately inscribed to my grand­mother. Bel­la­mann is best known for his novel King’s Row, which was made into a movie in 1942. My grand­mother hinted to me once that there was a story about her and a writer, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was. When I asked, she said, “Maybe some other time,” but, no mat­ter how often I asked, “some other time” never arrived. Then, last sum­mer, after I came across Bellamann’s books on my shelf, I asked her if she remem­bered him. When I said his name, her face lit up, and there was such hap­pi­ness in her eyes, it looked like she was reliv­ing what­ever had been between them, but she either couldn’t or wouldn’t (though I think by that time it was more couldn’t) tell me the story behind her joy.

I have often won­dered if my grand­mother regret­ted not defy­ing her par­ents to become the per­former she’d wanted to be, and I’m sorry now that I never asked her. To be hon­est, though, I don’t know that she would have given me a straight answer. At least with me, my grand­mother rarely talked can­didly about her­self. She pre­ferred, I think, to let her actions speak for her. By the time I was old enough to under­stand that she was a per­son unto her­self and not sim­ply my grandma, she had been for a long time a solidly proper, middle-class, Jew­ish wife, mother and grand­mother, and she had man­aged to chan­nel her con­sid­er­able cre­ative ener­gies very suc­cess­fully into that life. My mother talks about the force my grand­mother was to reckon with when she was grow­ing up, and I can attest to the dri­ving force she was behind both the Jack­son Heights Jew­ish Cen­ter and the co-op where I now live with my fam­ily, for which my grand­mother served as the first man­ager and board president.

Every time I deal with the co-op’s attor­ney – and he has been rep­re­sent­ing the co-op now for about 30 years – he tells me how much he learned from my grand­mother; and when the cur­rent man­ager of the co-op came to pay a shiva call, she told us about the ven­dors who still remem­ber my grand­mother as a remark­able woman to deal with. The Jack­son Heights Jew­ish Cen­ter which, when I was grow­ing up, was the cen­ter of a still thriv­ing Jew­ish com­mu­nity in this neigh­bor­hood, would not have been what it was with­out my grand­mother, and the peo­ple who knew her back then still talk with a kind of awe about the exam­ple she set through her energy and deter­mi­na­tion, her imag­i­na­tion and her commitment.

As I sit here in my liv­ing room, the seven-day memo­r­ial can­dle the funeral home gave us burn­ing behind me, I am think­ing that there is a lot more I could say about my grand­mother, but those four char­ac­ter­is­tics – energy, deter­mi­na­tion, imag­i­na­tion and com­mit­ment – informed by a deep and abid­ing love for the peo­ple around her, and for the insti­tu­tions that mat­tered to her com­mu­nity, cap­ture for me who she was at least as well as any other sto­ries I could tell. They are the lessons I have learned from her and, together, they con­sti­tute the exam­ple I hope to live up to in my own life. My grand­mother, Anne Berner, was a remark­able woman. The world may seem smaller with­out her, but it is def­i­nitely a bet­ter place for her hav­ing been here. I love her and I miss her.