So...to recap the past couple days: wednesday was John's funeral, yesterday I went to work with my mom and we had shiva here at my house from 6-8 PM, and today my mom and I did errands, and then we all went to temple at 7:30 PM.
The funeral was, in one word, horrible. It was at the church where John's mom is a parishioner (that's the word for someone who attends church services, right?? I feel like that sounds right, but I'm not sure. If you're Jewish and you go to temple, we say you're a "member of the congregation"...that's all I know) and the priest was like Haitian or Ugandan or something and had the heaviest accent that no one in my family could really understand. Before the service even started one of John's sisters came over to my mom to apologize about the whole name thing in the obituary that John's family had written for him. I just don't understand how my mom and John could have been married for 12 years and no one in his family knew that my mom had changed her name. ::SHRUG:: Go figure. Anyway, the priest hardly knew John (he had only met him like twice) and spent his whole speech referring directly to John's mom and sisters, and then just giving a generic list of all the other people in John's life at the end. Also, he kept switching back and forth between talking about John the Apostle and John Lutz and it was hard to tell when he was talking about which. I think my uncle and one of the women who had cared for my grandma went up to him and complained, because after the service he came over and apologized to me, my mom and Ben. The reception was at a nice Italian restaurant near where John's mom lives called Bensi. The food was really good, and they pretty much closed the whole place down for us, which was nice. After the funeral my aunts came back with us for a little while before they went back to the city.
In case the people who read this didn't know, I LOVE preschoolers, especially 4 year olds. It's soo much fun to go into work with my mom because she's an assistant teacher in a preschool with a 4 year old class. This whole week they had been learning about Israel. On tuesday the kids got to go to the desert (in Eilat, I believe) and make necklaces and go fishing on the coast and have a sandstorm with a parachute. The lady who teaches drama (and is friends with my mom) was all dressed up in Israeli desert woman's clothing (sunglasses, head-covering, long skirt, etc.). She also had a paper camel attached to 2 chairs, and was explaining to the kids that people in the desert don't have cars, so their kids ride to school on camels. It was funny because some of the kids recognized her and were calling her by her name. :D Yesterday was their last day in Israel and they got to eat falafel and hummus on pita, sing songs (it is sooo cute to see and hear them sing, that I am literally brought to tears every time...not kidding), and then board the "plane" (which was just a bunch of seats in a tiny chapel in the mansion of the temple) back to New Jersey. While were on the "plane" we watched a "video" (which was actually a slide show of photos that had been taken throughout the whole week). It was cute to see their reactions to seeing themselves in the pictures, because they would laugh and scream when they saw themselves. There were actually several pictures of me in the slide show, because I helped with the parachute sandstorm on tuesday, so that was fun to see.
For shiva literally ALL of the women that my mom works with at the preschool showed up, in addition to some of my friends, two of Ben's teachers, my aunts, one of my mom's cousins, two of the guys that worked with John, one of John's friends that he had known since 3rd grade, some of our neighbors and several of my mom's other friends. Almost everyone brought some kind of food, so we now have enough stuff to last us for at least the month of february.
Temple was good tonight. A lot of the music is different from what I remember growing up, but the words are all still the same so it didn't really matter. The rabbi said John's name before the mourner's kaddish and we (mom, Ben, and I) stood up. It was interesting because I knew it was coming, but I still cried a little when his name was read.
Not much else is going on here...but before I completely forget, I wanted to give you the url for the other obituary that my aunts wrote for John and put in the paper the day after the one that his mom wrote:
http://obits.nj.com/obituaries/starledger/obituary.aspx?n=john-l-lutz&pid=138983924
Most of it is pretty much the same, but my mom's name is changed from Kaplan to Lutz (as was done 12 years ago, but like I said no one in his family seemed to notice...::SHRUG::), and I think it just puts us in a more favorable light instead of having all the focus be on his mom and sisters.
Ummm...I think that's all for now. More soon.
--Emily
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