[Stage is dark, except for a burning shiva candle (where?). Lights come up softly revealing an empty space except for the candle and a stool at centre stage. Jacob slowly walks. He regards the candle, then the audience.]

We buried my grandfather two days ago under a hot Florida sun. My father, uncle, sister and cousins came. We divided-up those of his things that anyone wanted to keep with little discussion and no tears. We emptied out the apartment and sent most of his things to the Hadassah Women's' League. There was a lifetimes worth of yellow and beige golf shirts and polyester slacks. We had a few visitors immediately after the funeral, old guys from the club who came but didn't stay long enough to touch the bagels, eggs and little round cakes. But now no-one comes. Why should they? There's no family in mourning. I'm just the only one left waiting for my return flight.

The rabbi put the shiva candle, the Hebrew mourning candle here as a formality. I don't know any of the kaddish prayers. A couple of times I've almost blown it out, or hoped the wind would. It keeps burning there like a taunt, a reminder of what wasn't.

A different me could have filled this room with 5000-years of history and ritual. I could have carried this to Hollywood, Florida, schlepped it out of the Miami International Airport up 14 flights of stairs to a condominium amidst a dyed-hair Diaspora of octogenarian New York Jews. But somewhere along the line the language, the prayers, the details, got lost, or rejected, or hidden. Or someone, just got too scared or tired to keep carrying them.

This morning I went down for a swim in the ocean and swam out until my arms ached. I swam under water as far as I could eyes open in the immense blueness and surfaced gasping. I needed to feel something real and physical and huge. Because when I come back up here to this empty apartment there's just this candle and his memory, the memory of his words. At night when I go to sleep on the floor I expect to see him shuffle out to the washroom in his yellow terrycloth bathrobe and beige plaid slippers.

Once just after my grandmother died I sat down with my grandfather and a tape recorder and asked him about his life. I thought maybe with a tape recorder, a more formal approach like an interview between strangers, he'd talk. I asked him what Jewishness meant to him:

[as grandfather] It means everything to me. It means everything to me. It's my whole being. It's all I know.

So who could I be? Not his grandchild. Sure, later he would pretend, boast to his neighbours, the women leaning on walkers in the lobby that his grandson was a Sabra . Born in Jerusalem, Israel, the Holy Land. But there was always the skin and bone truth: His son had married a shiktza, a Christian, and I was their child.