She looked around at the other women, realizing with a shock that she was one of the oldest. Yes, this was the way it was. You got married, and everyone around you seemed to be getting married. Every other week, there was another chuppah you were invited to—years of cakes with white frosting and vigorous Hasidic dancing. And soon it was the circumcision ceremonies you were attending, the crowded synagogue halls, the mohel and sandak in white—the former to do the slicing and the latter to hold the baby still while reaping the honors of being enthroned in the Chair of Eliahu the Prophet. Before you knew it, it was the bar mitzvahs you went to, boys in their first Borsalinos and custom-made dark suits that could do nothing to hide the fact that the guest of honor was still a little boy playing dress-up. Then suddenly all the little boys and their sisters were getting married. Suddenly, the cycle started over again, this time with the grandchildren. But the invitations were fewer. Sometimes they invited their grandparents’ friends, and sometimes they didn’t. If you got an invitation, you went gladly, sending your wig to the beauty parlor, buying another silver kiddush cup engraved with the young couple’s names as a gift, and forcing your arthritic legs to get up and dance a hora.

And after that it was a simple hop, skip, and jump (actually, more of a long downward slide, she thought) to this, the rectangular box on the metal gurney.

It was an hour before Rav Alter finally got up, the last of the eulogists. They were all used to hearing him speak. He did so every week in the short break between the end of the Torah reading and the beginning of the Musaf prayers. He was a good speaker, not taxing his audience with too many complicated pilpulim or burdening them with heavy doses of mussar. His eulogy was short, and to the point, his face open and lively with a natural warmth.

But this was not the familiar face they had known. He looked ravaged, she thought, finding it hard to catch her breath. Like a completely different person! Without the shine of joy that usually moistened his face like an expensive cream, his face sagged in all directions. The deep lines of aging that smoothed out when his cheeks were raised in a smile, making them hardly noticeable, now dug deep canals into his forehead and around his eyes. His complexion was frighteningly white, and his head seemed too heavy for his frail neck to hold it erect so that his hat seemed to fall forward, as if even its slight weight, added to all his new burdens, could no longer be borne.