I learned of my grandfather’s death through an Internet search.
I had been estranged from my paternal grandparents for more than a decade, but four years ago, I decided that the time had come to reconnect; they were getting old, and I longed to share some family news with them—I was expecting another child. I didn’t have a current address or phone number for them, so I entered my grandfather’s full name into a search engine, hoping to find contact information.
Instead, I found an obituary. He had died of a stroke two months earlier.
Stunned, I continued to read the notice of his death. My father, uncle, aunt, cousins, and great-aunts and uncles appeared on the list of surviving relatives. But there was no mention of my twin sister or myself. We had been obliterated.
The next morning, I called my best friend from college and cried wretched tears as the story poured out. “They want to erase our existence,” I complained.
She was sympathetic but candid: “How can you complain when you removed them from your life,” my friend replied, “just like they removed you from theirs?”
***
My parents split up when I was 4 years old. To describe their divorce as “acrimonious” would be an understatement. Raised first in the Congregationalist Church and then in the United Church of Christ, my father underwent an Orthodox conversion to Judaism during his marriage to my mother, who is Jewish; after their divorce, however, he gave up both Judaism and Christianity. He became a follower of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and took a Hindi name.
After my mother won full custody, my sister and I visited with my father only sporadically. He occasionally sent exotic gifts from his extensive world travels but remained distant from our everyday lives. My mother continued to raise us Jewish in a traditional, though not Orthodox, home, and her Jewish parents played an integral role in our childhood.
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