The Blogs: A Year of Firsts

I have no one to bless me this year.

That thought has been stuck in my head since Rosh Hashanah.

In my family, my father didn’t bless us every Friday night. Some families do. It wasn’t our minhag. But Erev Yom Kippur was different.

Every year, before Yom Kippur, my father would bless us.

I haven’t actually stood in front of my father and felt his hands on my head in years. I live in Israel. He lived in New York. Most years, the bracha happened over the phone.

But somehow, it was still physical.

I have the memory of standing there with his hands on my head, and it is such a core memory that even when the bracha came through a phone thousands of miles away, I could feel it.

His voice could bring the physical memory back.

And this year, I don’t even have the voice.

I don’t know how to explain what that does to me.

There was something about my father’s bracha that felt ancient. Visceral. Almost guttural. Spiritual in a way that I don’t often experience spirituality.

It was my father blessing his daughter, but somehow it felt bigger than the two of us.

It felt like family. Like generations. Like ancestors. Like being connected backward to the people who came before me and forward to something I can’t quite name. For those few moments, I knew exactly where I belonged in the chain.

I don’t know if my father knew what those few minutes meant to me. I’m not sure I ever told him.

Sometimes I wondered if perhaps they meant more to me than they did to him.

But now, thinking back, maybe they didn’t.

Because every year, he would get choked up.

Every year, he would try to hold back the tears.

This morning I spoke to my uncle, my father’s youngest brother.

He blessed me.

And we both bawled our eyes out.

It meant something. Of course it meant something. This is my father’s brother. Someone who loved him, someone who misses him, someone connected to the same family and the same chain I am trying so desperately to hold on to.

I am so grateful he did it.

But it wasn’t my father.

And maybe that is one of the cruelties of grief. People can love you. They can hold you. They can stand beside you in the empty spaces. Sometimes they can even step into one for a moment.

But they can’t make the space not empty.

My uncle could bless me.

He couldn’t give me my father’s bracha.

And then, almost as soon as I let myself think about Erev Yom Kippur, I realized there was something else waiting for me.

Yizkor.

For my entire life, I have been one of the people who leaves the room.

This year, I stay.

I don’t actually say Yizkor yet. During the first year of mourning, our custom is to remain in the shul while Yizkor is said but not recite the prayer.

I just stay.

There is something about those words that terrifies me.

I stay.

For forty-five years, I belonged to the group that walked out because my parents were alive.

Now I belong to the group that stays.

I don’t know how to make that transition.

I don’t know how to stand in that room.

So I did what I do when death presents me with another thing I have absolutely no idea how to do.

I called Hindel.

Hindel is, unfortunately, the death guru in my life. She does grief on my level: crying, sarcasm, and then a lot more sarcasm.

I called and asked, “Where are you going to shul for Yom Kippur?”

Before I could even finish, she said, “Are you going to do your first Yizkor with me?”

Lucky me.

Except, actually, yes.

Lucky me.

Because I don’t know how to do this alone.

It feels like the firsts just keep coming.

My first birthday without my father.

My first Rosh Hashanah without him—a Rosh Hashanah when I was so frozen that I literally didn’t leave my house.

Now my first Yom Kippur.

The first Erev Yom Kippur without his bracha.

The first time I stay in the room for Yizkor.

His English birthday is September 21.

Another first.

His Hebrew birthday is on Sukkos.

Another first.

They just keep piling up.

And it isn’t only the dates that have names.

Those might actually be easier because at least you see them coming.

It’s the ordinary firsts that catch me.

A new Israeli show comes out, and I want to call my father and talk to him about it.

I’m trying to figure out the meals I’m doing at the hotel, and I want his advice.

Something happens at school. Something happens with work. Something ridiculous happens. Something good happens.

My instinct is still to call him.

For forty-five years, there was someone on the other end of that instinct.

And now there isn’t.

A friend of mine just had a baby.

She’s older, and I don’t know that she ever really thought this was going to happen for her. I am so unbelievably excited for her.

Her father and my father were best friends.

And when I heard the news, there was one person I wanted to call.

I wanted to call my father and say, “Holy shit.”

Because he would know exactly what this meant.

And I don’t even have that.

There is no “but also” here.

I’ve been trying to write about grief, and I think sometimes we feel like there is supposed to be one.

There is pain, but also.

There is loss, but also.

Here is what I learned.

Here is how I’ve grown.

Here is the beautiful thing that makes the unbearable thing somehow bearable.

I don’t have that right now.

These days, there is no also.

There is pain.

There is moving forward amongst the pain.

And there is this enormous feeling of being very, very far away.

My family is in New York.

They’re together.

I’m here.

I know, rationally, that nobody is cutting me out. I know things aren’t being kept from me. I know they’re making plans and living their lives and grieving in their own ways. I am thousands of miles away. Of course I am not part of every conversation or every plan.

I know all of that.

And yet sometimes it feels like I am standing outside my own family’s grief, looking in.

I hate that I feel that way.

But I do.

Maybe grief doesn’t care what you know.

Maybe it doesn’t care that something isn’t rational or fair. Maybe you can know with absolute certainty that you are loved and still feel completely alone.

And right now, with all these firsts piling one on top of another, I feel very alone.

I don’t know what I am supposed to learn from this year of firsts.

I’m not even sure I want to learn anything from it.

Right now, I am just trying to get through them.

My birthday.

Rosh Hashanah.

His birthday.

Erev Yom Kippur.

The bracha that isn’t coming.

Staying in the room for Yizkor.

Sukkos.

And all those tiny, unnamed firsts in between.