A Single Link: Kaddish For Grandpa Mike (A reflection on memory, love, and loss)

Since I became a grandfather, now several times over, I’ve begun to think backwards more often. Everyone knows they came from someone, who came from someone else, and back and back as far as the imagination can carry a person. But lately I feel that connectedness in a tangible way, more than I once did. The chain of generations. The Jewish people are, in some sense, a tribe built entirely on memory, and on the imagination memory requires.

Today is an auspicious day for such thoughts. On the Hebrew calendar, which follows the waxing and waning of the moon, it is the 22nd of Cheshvan: my birthday, and also the yahrzeit of my paternal grandfather, the anniversary of his passing. Tonight’s moon is the same waning half-moon that hung in the sky the night he died, and the night I was born.

I was young when my Grandpa Mike died. Maybe six years old. My memories of specific times spent with him are scant. One that comes to mind is of him greeting me at our front door, lifting me in his arms, and showering me with kisses. All of it followed by a stick of Juicy Fruit gum. The very best flavor, I thought then and now.

And while the details of Grandpa Mike are hazy at best, one thing remains clear. His warmth.

A child doesn’t know much. They don’t know how to write a check, or file a tax form, or put gas in a car. But one thing they’re especially adept at is knowing whether someone makes them feel loved. A child doesn’t fall for phoniness the way an adult sometimes can. They intuit their way through the world. That intuition creates the kind of memory that gets sealed somewhere in the brain and in the soul. It’s the kind that turns up in dreams, and in the strangest places. In a drugstore, near the checkout counter, where the gum rack is.

I said Kaddish for Grandpa Mike today. It’s the Jewish prayer one says for a loved one who has passed on to… Who can say? I surely can’t. I can only say they are no longer here, no longer touchable and no longer able to touch.

The prayer is strange. It is meant to console, but it says nothing about loss, says nothing about the bereaved or the dead. It speaks only of praise for the Creator of Heaven and Earth.

Adulations. Exaltations of every sort.

One would think the beneficiary of such glorification must be very needy. I don’t think that’s so. I think the need is to bestow truth upon the world. What greater consolation is there than the truth? The prayer, in its way, tells us to look beyond our mortal selves, to peer through the prison bars of the temporal world and see past the usual limits we put on all things.

I have, unfortunately, found out first-hand how helpful this sort of looking can be.

My dad loved Grandpa Mike, and so did my mom. She told me this. Insisted I know. Others whose names I never knew loved Grandpa Mike’s father, and his father before him.

May His great name be blessed forever and for all eternity.

Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted,
extolled and honored, uplifted and lauded
be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He,
beyond all blessings and songs,
praises and consolations
that are spoken in the world.