What to Wear
by Leah Garchik
Standing at heaven’s door — or consigned to oblivion, Jews don’t believe in hell — asking the receptionist to look in the Book of Life (it’s spelled G-A-R-C-H-I-K) I want to make a good impression, and she’s the person who most taught me how to do that. In keeping with her rules if I am to wear gloves, they should be short and white, and no seamed stockings, please. My hair should be left its natural color; she always thought that everyone who dyed their hair was a floozy.
After my mother died, when making preparations for her body to be sent to New York for burial in the family plot, my sister and I chose what she would be wearing. It was an outfit we thought would necessitate an explanation and express directions to the morticians.
“Please put her in these clothes we have packed,” we wrote. We’d selected a bright yellow silk shirt, a plaid skirt, and a hot pink jacket to be worn over the blouse. She’d spent most of her life in a kosher household, attending an orthodox synagogue, and these clothes aren’t what the religion specifies, which is that the body be draped in a simple white shroud. But our mom wasn’t the shroud type, and she always told us we should be proud to look “different.”
My father, who’d been a school teacher in New York, didn’t make a big salary. The way other men fantasized about owning Cadillacs, however, he fantasized about a brand of suit (Hickey Freeman) and tie (Sulka) he thought would be out of his reach always. For his 70th birthday, two years before he died, she’d made his wish come true He wore that suit and tie only a few times.
But that’s what she had him wearing when he was laid to rest. The two of them left the living dressed to go out dancing if they ever met up again in the afterlife.
As to my own last outfit — that is, what to wear to the cremation campfire — I’ve pretty much decided it should be the blue denim coveralls I bought on the night, in late 1967, that my husband proposed.
I want to be remembered as a woman who knew how to celebrate a life-changing moment by finding high fashion in an army-navy store. .