A Year of Firsts

I have no one to bless me this year.

That thought had 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, for the first time, I didn’t have the voice.

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

There was something about my father’s bracha that always felt ancient to me. 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 year, I knew I couldn’t have my father’s bracha, so I did something I had never had to do before.

I called his youngest brother and asked him to bless me.

He did.

And we both cried.

It meant so much to me. There was something about hearing those words from my father’s brother, from someone who carries some of the same history, that I needed.

But then, as Yom Kippur was beginning, something else happened.

I got a voice note from my Uncle Zalman.

Uncle Zalman is different.

Aside from my father, he has been the other father figure in my life for as long as I can remember. He helped raise me. He is simply one of those people who has always occupied that place in my world.

And I hadn’t asked him for anything.

But there, on my phone as I was going into Yom Kippur, was his voice giving me a bracha.

And I cried.

Of course I cried.

But I also listened.

And somehow, that bracha carried me through Yom Kippur.

It didn’t replace my father’s. Nothing can, and I don’t think anything is supposed to.

It came from somewhere else.

From someone who has loved me my entire life, who somehow knew what I needed without my having to say it.

And I needed it, because waiting for me that day was another first I had been dreading.

Yizkor.

For my entire life, I had been one of the people who left the room.

This year, I stayed.

During the first year of mourning, according to my custom, I don’t yet say the Yizkor prayer. But I stay in the room while it is said.

I had been thinking about that since Rosh Hashanah.

I was frozen by it.

What was I going to do? How was I supposed to suddenly become one of the people who stays?

So obviously, 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 her 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 didn’t want to do it alone.

And so I went.

And I stayed.

This is what this year seems to be becoming.

A year of firsts.

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.

My first Erev Yom Kippur without his bracha.

My first Yizkor.

His English birthday.

His Hebrew birthday on Sukkos.

One after another after another.

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

Those might actually be easier because at least you can 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 something out with the meals I’m doing at the hotel, and I want his advice.

Something happens at school. 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 recently had a baby.

She’s older, and I don’t know that she ever really thought this would 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.

Maybe those are the firsts nobody warns you about.

Not the first birthday or Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur.

The first incredible piece of news you can’t tell him.

The first stupid television show you can’t discuss.

The first question you can’t ask.

The thousand tiny moments when your brain hasn’t yet learned what your heart already knows.

He’s not going to answer.

There is another part of this that I don’t particularly like admitting.

My family is in New York.

They’re together.

And I’m here.

No one is doing anything wrong. No one is excluding me. They’re living and grieving and figuring this out too.

But distance does something strange to grief.

Sometimes I feel very far away from all of them. Sometimes I feel like I’m standing outside something that is also mine.

I hate that I feel that way.

But I do.

And I don’t want to turn that into a lesson either.

I’ve been trying to write about grief, and I think there is sometimes an expectation that eventually you arrive at the “but also.”

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.

These days, there is no also.

There is pain.

There is moving forward amongst the pain.

Uncle Zalman’s bracha doesn’t change that.

Hindel standing beside me doesn’t change that.

My uncle crying with me doesn’t change that.

They aren’t silver linings.

They’re people who love me meeting me inside something they cannot fix.

And maybe that is why the voice note from Uncle Zalman meant so much.

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

He didn’t try to.

He just gave me his.

And somehow, it carried me into Yom Kippur.

Into the shul.

Into the moment I had been dreading.

For my entire life, when Yizkor began, I left the room.

This year, I stayed.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to learn from that yet.

Maybe nothing.

There are more firsts coming.

Sukkos.

My father’s Hebrew birthday.

And then all the ordinary Tuesdays and Wednesdays and phone calls I will instinctively want to make.

I don’t know how I will do all of them.

I only know how I did this one.

I was scared.

I was loved.

I cried.

And I stayed.