Two Years Later: The Strange Mathematics of Time

It is hard to believe that this week, כ״ד אָב, it will be two years since my father, Rafael ben Moshe, ז״ל, was nifter. Some days it feels like forever. Other days, I think I could still pick up the phone and call him. Time is funny that way. It is long and short all at once. It has a way of making something feel impossibly far away while, at the very same time, making it feel like it happened only yesterday.

I have often thought about the Jewish concept of time. We tend to think of time as a straight line, moving from birth to death, from childhood to adulthood, always forward. But there is another perspective.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks describes Jewish time as both cyclical and linear. Our lives move forward in a straight line. We grow older, and our experiences make us the person who we are; no stage of life is exactly like the one before. Yet the Jewish calendar continually brings us back. Every week we bring in Shabbat. Every year we celebrate Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and yahrzeits. Rabbi Sacks describes this as “a fugue between these two themes, the eternal and the ephemeral, the timeless and the timely.” He is saying we live in fleeting moments, but we connect those moments to something eternal.

I picture this as a spiral, not a circle. A circle suggests we return to the moments as unchanged. A spiral returns us to the same place, but from a different vantage point. We hear the same shofar, read the same parashiyot, celebrate the same holidays, and commemorate the same yahrzeits. Yet each time we arrive, we are different. We are changed and molded by another year of life. The day is familiar, but we are different.

Maybe that is why people often say, “It gets easier.” Or, “Time heals.” I don’t believe either.

Time doesn’t heal. Time changes us; we learn how to carry what never leaves us.

Now, year two, I still return to this day as my father’s daughter, but I am not the same person. The memories are no longer as piercing, but they are also no longer as crisp. There are times when I have to work harder to remember exactly how my father laughed or the sound of his voice, and that realization carries its own ache. The sharpest edges of grief no longer feel the same, but the passage of time has also blurred memories I want to hold onto.

Life has continued moving forward, as it should. My father, however, remains exactly as he was the day he died. He doesn’t get older. He doesn’t meet the grandchildren who have grown taller. He doesn’t celebrate new milestones. The rest of us keep changing while he stays the same in our memories.

This year, my youngest daughter celebrated her bat mitzvah. It was the first major family simcha without him. There was so much joy, and yet there was an unmistakable empty space. And now, with Hashem’s help, my oldest daughter, IYH, will get married this fall. This milestone is something I have quietly thought about ever since he passed away. 

It is painful to picture family photographs with a space that can never truly be filled. Painful to celebrate one of life’s greatest blessings while simultaneously feeling the absence of the person who should have been there to share it.

This is exactly what that spiral of time is. I have now returned to the same Hebrew date on the calendar once again,  but I have not returned as the same person. I have lived another year. I have experienced new joys and new heartaches. I have celebrated milestones I once imagined he would experience with us.

The yahrzeit doesn’t become easier. It becomes different. The sting is just a little less sharp; grief no longer overshadows every happy moment. Instead, it takes its place beside it. I have learned that joy and grief are not opposites. They walk hand in hand.

One thing I have learned over these past two years is that while our society has become better at acknowledging many of life’s transitions, we still struggle to understand the lifelong nature of grief. We celebrate graduations, weddings, new jobs, retirements, and birthdays. Yet somehow we expect grief to have an endpoint, as though one day we simply graduate.

Maybe that is the strange mathematics of time. Every year the calendar comes back to this same place, whether we want it to or not. Now, in year 2, I return as someone slightly different.

Time doesn’t heal. Time changes. Because time changes us, we learn how to carry what never leaves us.