Ten-Year Yahrzeit

Today I did nothing. Yesterday I did almost nothing. In between, I barely slept.

I want to say that I’ve been catapulted back ten years. Maybe because I feel so suddenly unmoored. But it feels more like falling through a wormhole and inhabiting another time-space, as if I’m there and a shadow of myself is (not) here.

Maybe that’s why I’m doing nothing here, these past vacant two days of a yahrzeit. Because I’m sitting with grief, there, a decade ago, feeling my every movement slow to somehow match the slowing breaths of my mom until I could no longer compete with death.

But yesterday, I had that sensation that jostles you when you least expect it: the remembrance that you can never see a person you love again, as if every fiber of yourself had pushed that material reality aside. Couldn’t I just walk down a hall, open the door to my mom’s last room, sink into a big armchair next to her bedside, hold her hand, look out the window with her at a single tree showing off by turning the most bright, cheerful, and hopeful of autumnal yellows (her favorite color and favorite affect, honed as survival technique to ward off her trauma demons), smile together at a small pumpkin I’d brought her and set on the windowsill, and just be? Sit there until she found the energy to squeeze my hand, make eye contact, and say three words that I can still hear in her voice, words she’d barely been able to say or so fully mean (and likewise me) until our last year together, when her sickness and my caretaking blurred into reciprocal relational intimacy and knowing someone accurately beyond words: “I love you.”

Maybe I couldn’t sleep last night because ten years ago, after death-watching awake next to her for days, I drifted off for a couple hours as night faded into hint of morning/mourning, Oct 3, and woke to find her gone. If I just didn’t sleep on Oct 2, whether 2023 or 2013, perhaps I could see her one last time.

If I did nothing today, it was because I was doing everything that grief asked of me. Feeling absence. Being present. Time-traveling. Saying kaddish with my body. Offering my heart as a stone of remembrance. Holding onto love.

May Barb’s memory be a blessing. 💔

(photo: sticker of a shiny-shimmery heart, peeling a bit at the edges but still hugging a lamppost, as seen last summer in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal)