In the Company of Grief

They’ve had a week now to let their grief percolate, to let the stabbing pain seep from their souls.

It hasn’t helped.

On Sunday, more than 400 relatives and friends of Beverly Grant gathered at Santa Ana’s Temple Beth Sholom to recall a single life. Grant was among the 217 people who perished Oct. 31 in the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 in the North Atlantic off Rhode Island.

“It’s still difficult to believe. A numbness sets in,” said Joan Royal, who drove Grant and three friends to Los Angeles International Airport Oct. 30 to see the four off on the ill-fated flight. “You go to share your grief with these people, but these are the ones who are gone.”

The Santa Ana service followed by several hours a similar, private remembrance in Rhode Island by relatives of other victims. At the crash site, a second ship operating a submersible drone arrived in heavy seas Sunday to try again today to recover the flight’s black box from a debris field in 250 feet of water.

Investigators hope the black box will offer clues to what caused the Boeing 767, flying a route from Los Angeles to New York then on to Cairo, to plunge 33,000 feet into the ocean.

Grant, 82, was aboard the flight with friends Tobey Seidman, 71, of Irvine and Sheila Jaffee, 67, and Judith Bowman, 57, of Huntington Beach. The women, who had spent a year planning their trip to the Mideast to see the pyramids and the Nile in Egypt, then Jerusalem, were part of a group of friends who gathered for weekly card games.

“It was more than just a card game,” said her son, Michael Grant. “It was a unique fellowship of women.”

The four friends were among 10 Orange County residents aboard the flight.

On Sunday, Grant was celebrated as the sparkplug of her family and a generous connector among far-reaching friends. The service allowed that wide circle to “remember every moment, and to hold her deep within our hearts,” said Rabbi Heidi Cohen.

Grant, who was born in Brooklyn and moved to Orange County at the end of the Great Depression, worked five days a week in the family’s Grant Boys sporting goods shop in Costa Mesa.

But her real focus in life was her family and her fellow celebrants at Temple Beth Sholom, which she and her late husband helped bring into being more than 50 years ago.

And she also focused on living.

“She left us doing what she loved to do,” Randy Garell, a son-in-law, told the mourners.

Rabbi Bill Cutter, a family friend, told those in attendance that Sunday morning marked the beginning of a new week. The previous week was wrenching, filled with tragedy and death and mourning.

The new week, he said, was a step up from the emotional abyss “that will open to other weeks of some light, and some promise.”

He said the depth of darkness felt among the mourners was testimony to the amount of light that Grant and her friends had brought to their lives.

And he warned that their grief will not lessen soon, given the continuing search for clues to the disaster and the unlikelihood that remains will be found for burial.

“Our closure will not come quickly,” he said.

Perhaps not. But the family has already begun to find solace in the outpouring of support, they said.

Michael Grant, the son, described his mother as “unstoppable,” a woman propelled by a reservoir of energy that belied her age.

Attention has now focused on her life, he said.

“This tragic accident . . . has shocked the world,” the son said. “The only good thing that has come out of this is worldwide, everyone knows what a wonderful woman my mother was.”