Recently, an obituary for master stone carver, John Everett Benson, appeared in the New York Times. Written by reporter and capsule biographer Penelope Green, Benson’s obit read, “… whose chisel marked the deaths of presidents, playwrights, authors and artists as well as generations of American families — and whose elegant inscriptions graced museums and universities, government buildings and houses of worship — died on Thursday in Newport, R.I. He was 84. … the art Mr. Benson practiced is mostly devoted to mortality, though it is designed for eternity, or something close to it. It is often described as the slowest writing in the world. Mr. Benson could spend a day carving a cross; a gravestone might take three months. Stone carvers on public sites invariably draw a crowd. And inevitably someone will ask, Q: What if you make a mistake?” A: Don’t worry, they won’t.”
They don’t, but I did. Deadlines — press dates for publications and on-air dates for advertisers — ruled over me my entire career. On every project, there were always last-minute changes and panicked clients, writers, re-touchers and designers pleading to fix something. I would always try to accommodate and said, “If it’s not etched in stone, we can fix it.” In the Jewish tradition, a headstone is placed at the head of the grave within a year of someone’s death, and friends and family gather to unveil it. After my mother died, the job of engraving the headstone fell to me, and I handled all the details with the monument maker. The date of the unveiling was set. We gathered at Old Montefiore Cemetery on Springfield Boulevard in Queens.
Everyone who was there to show their respects waited at the entrance gates of the section of the cemetery that belonged to the Bronx Bakers Mutual Aid Association, a burial organization to which my mother had paid ten-dollars-a-month dues to ensure that my parents would have an appropriate final place to rest. They shared the plot with the friends my father played cards with on Monday nights when he wasn’t baking. Following custom , a cloth covered my mother’s headstone. The rabbi opened his prayer book and we began. My sisters cried, the cloth was lifted and the crying stopped. Etched in stone, the date of my mother’s death was wrong. My mistake. My sisters were in a rage. I had given her three extra days. Today, forty-three years later, I have reframed the error. It wasn’t that I wasn’t paying attention, I just wasn’t ready to let go.