Don't Forget to Write: A Novel(91)

“Are you ready?” Lillian asked me as she parked the car in front of the synagogue.

“No,” I said honestly. “But I’m as ready as I will be.”

She patted my arm. “You don’t have to speak.”

“Yes. I do.”

Lillian nodded. “I know she said she wanted this, but she would have hated the fuss.”

It was true. Splashy as she was, she preferred to be the one pulling the strings. Which she was to the last, with the exacting funeral plans. “That’s why she chose cremation—she didn’t trust anyone else to pick her clothes or do her makeup.”

Lillian smiled sadly. “You know, I think you’re right. Heaven forbid she spend eternity in a dress from a sales rack.”

I almost laughed. “Or in the wrong shoes.”

“She’d haunt every last one of us.”

I imagined Ada as a ghost, yanking the blanket off my bed if I slept too late and howling if I yelled from room to room. I would welcome the haunting if it meant I could see her again.

“I’ll try to do her proud today.”

“You already have,” Lillian said. She opened her car door. “Come on. Let’s give the old girl what she asked for.”

“You’re definitely getting haunted for that one.”

Lillian smiled less sadly. “I hope I do.” She turned to look at me as we got out of the car. “She’s not really gone, you know.”

I nodded. She would be with me for the rest of my life, even if she wasn’t haunting me. I knew that much.





We were the first to arrive, and we were brought to a room for family in the back with the rabbi. My parents and Dan arrived shortly after, as did Dan’s parents—an unwelcome surprise. My mother’s sister, Mildred, entered with her family as well. I asked them all to excuse me as I went over my eulogy in a corner. I didn’t want their sympathy. My father tried to say he was sorry again, but Dan successfully navigated him away, with a nod to me.

Eventually the rabbi told us it was time and led us into the sanctuary, where I stopped in my tracks.

A sea of heads turned to look at us. It was standing room only, people lining the back and side walls, pressed tightly together, with only the front two rows, reserved for family, open.

“Who—who are these people?” I asked Lillian in a whisper.

But the rabbi turned and answered. “Ada brought thousands of people together in her lifetime. This is just a fraction of them.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Dan. She hadn’t been paid for us, but we numbered among those. Mama and Daddy too, in a less direct way.

As we moved through the crowd though, two people caught my eye—largely because they stood out from the rest of the assembled throng, but also because one of them was just about the only person I recognized other than my family. Thomas stood, in a suit, next to an elderly woman, whom I assumed was John’s wife.

We reached them, a few people from the back, and I wrapped my arms around Thomas in a hug, drawing both whispers and a couple of gasps, all of which I ignored.

“You okay?” I asked him.

He nodded. “This is my grandmother. Grandmama, this is Miss Ada’s niece, Marilyn.”

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said, shaking my hand.

I clutched hers with my left as well. “Thank you for being here.” The rabbi cleared his throat at the holdup, and she extricated her hand, using it to pat me on the arm.

I didn’t know her. But somehow that kindness gave me the push I needed to make my way to the front, where Ada’s urn rested on a cloth-covered table.

The rabbi spoke first, leading the congregation in two readings before giving his own eulogy.

“We gather here today to remember Ada Heller. So many of us were blessed to know her, though this may be the first time she set foot in this building for anything other than a wedding.”

People stirred uncomfortably, unsure of whether they were supposed to laugh or not. The rabbi shook his head as his joke fell flat.

“Ada dedicated her life to the service of others. Both as a nurse, serving in the first World War, and later as a matchmaker, bringing together the Jewish community of Philadelphia in so many happy marriages, which is one of the greatest mitzvot a person can provide.

“There are those who say that a person who creates three successful matches automatically ascends to the highest level in the afterlife. I don’t know if Ada believed in all that. But I do know why this is such a holy calling. It is the first thing that the Lord did after creating man—creating a match for him. We are each only half a soul, and when Ada made a match, she created whole families, both the partners and the children who were born of those marriages.”

He paused, taking a deep breath. “I, myself, am one of those children, born of an Ada Heller match. As are my own children. How many here can say the same?”

There was the sound of fabric swishing all throughout the room and I turned, watching how many dozens of hands went up.

“None of us knows for sure if there is an afterlife until we leave this world. But what I do know is that we live on through the memories we leave. And that is Ada’s legacy. She will live on through all of us in this room. As long as we remember her and tell our children and our children’s children of the woman who created our families, Ada will never truly die.”