Looking like Bergman’s characters,
they grieve for the body in the coffin.

In the forties, it was a tradition
among Hungarian villagers
to take a mourning portrait
with relatives and close friends
gathered behind the open casket.

I have one of Papa’s mother,
my grandmother Catherine,
and relatives I never met,
trapped in Transylvania, given
to Romania after World War 1.

I wrote her a letter every month
translated for her by my parents.
She would reply in Hungarian, thanking 
me for my letter, but she never got to
rock me in her arms or kiss my cheek. 

When grandmother was seventy-six,
a sepia-toned mourning photo arrived.
A black babushka covered her hair
amidst the mountain of white lace
draped over her and the coffin.

My father’s sister Elizabeth, all in black,
and brother John, who most resembled Papa,
sat in the front row, the only two left at home.
John wore a suit that looked familiar
and was the only male wearing a tie.

I remembered all the boxes of 
used clothing hiding paper money
Mama sewed into the thick linings, 
because they easily got through 
the stringent customs of Romania.    

I never met anyone in the photo
but scoured all the faces for any 
resemblance to me.  I found none 
in the expressions drooping with grief.
Papa said I looked like his mother.


Many, many years later, Papa died
suddenly of a massive heart attack.
I wrote to tell relatives in Transylvania,
the ones who might still be alive,
and now spoke only Romanian.

They hired an interpreter to write to me
and ask why I sent no mourning portrait. 
I wrote back, finding it hard to explain
that we take no such photos in America,
preferring to remember the dead as they lived.

I never heard from my relatives again, making
me feel as if I had robbed them of their due.
Seventy years later, I stare at the aging photo
of my grandmother and relatives I never met,
and mourn the loss of my Hungarian family.