Talking To The Dead, A Yahrzeit story
Talking to the dead July 12 2022
Today is the 16th anniversary my father’s death, known in Judaism as a Yahrzeit. Last night we convened a minyan in Whistler British Columbia so I could say Kaddish. It wasn’t easy but we ended up with 11 people. The last minyan in Whistler was last year on my dad’s yahrzeit. Whistler is remarkably beautiful but not a bastion of Jewish life, although in ski season there are hundreds if not thousands of Jews, many who consider skiing on powder to be a religious experience.
This morning I was able to join a minyan on a livestream from my first synagogue in Vancouver where I was an assistant Rabbi in 1976. Later I will join them for minha.
Serendipitously on Sunday the New York times published an article by Maggie Jones called, “How Talking to the Dead Dislodged Some of My Sorrow”. I had no idea what it was about but I was already in a Yahrzeit frame of mind, so I read the piece.
Her mother passed away last February during the height of the pandemic. She found out that her mother’s cell phone was still operating, and her mother’s voice was still there prompting the caller to leave a message. Losing a parent is always difficult but losing them in the disconnected and isolated world of the covid epidemic left her with a big void of connectiveness to everyone including her nuclear family. She called the phone. She writes,
“’Please leave me a message after the tone.’ They were typical words, of course. But also so much my mom — her voice clear, steady, to-the-point. And when the phone beeped, I began talking, and then sobbing for the first time since her funeral. I filled the two-minute voice mail, talking until it cut me off about how much I missed her, how much I needed her. There was something about the physicality of speaking aloud — rather than internally as I had done with my father, who died almost two decades earlier — that dislodged some of my sorrow. The air pushed out from lungs, my vocal folds vibrated, I heard my own words in my ears. It worked like a spoken prayer: slowing me down, giving sound to my pain and loss and, in the process, making me feel more connected to the person I could no longer see or touch.”
Every few weeks after that initial call she would call her mother and share with her what was happening with her or the grandchildren. Though her mother did not respond she could hear what her mother would be saying, and the connection was there even though it technically wasn’t.
She explained, “Eventually I realized there was a pattern to my messages: They often reflected how I thought my mom would reply to me or the advice she would give. Like when I bought a piano and restarted lessons. ‘I just know,’ I said into the phone to no one on the other end, ‘what your reaction would be: ‘Oh, I’m so thrilled for you, honey. That’s just the right thing to do.’ After I suggested to my siblings that it would be too painful to replicate Mom’s Christmas traditions, I left a message channeling my mom’s pushback: “ ‘Don’t be so sentimental,’ you’d tell me.” And after a hard week when I felt exhausted and my kids were struggling, I told her: ‘I know you would say get a massage and stop taking on everyone’s emotional stuff. It’s not all your problem.’ Without being fully aware of it in those moments, I was invoking her words to internalize her guidance, something I’d done most of my life.”
Maggie’s story hit home with me. The year my father died I said the memorial prayer for him 3 times a day for 11 months. I came to see every service and every kaddish as appointment time for me to visit with my dad. I would review with him whatever was on my mind. I “negotiated” with him on unresolved issues that would have been subjects of historical review and maybe reconciliations if he hadn’t mentally declined with alzheimer’s disease that left him unable to explain or even discuss the issues I wanted to bring up. During kaddish they were all resolved.
I remember one conversation that I had with him during the year. My dad loved to come to my Temple and see me on the Bima as the Rabbi. We used to joke that he needed to wear sunglasses because he was radiating such light from his smile that I was being blinded on the bima.
This particular Shabbat, 2 of my then young grandchildren were visiting and I motioned for them to join me at the lectern as we were singing the Aleynu prayer that would be followed by my recitation of the mourner’s kaddish. They came flying up the stairs to the bima and I caught each one in an arm and held them as I turned to the ark for the Aleynu. At that moment I experienced what I felt my dad would be feeling and I said to him, “You would really have enjoyed this moment.” I could feel the light shinning on my back.
As the time passes and wounds heal, we think less and less about our losses. Occasionally something arouses a memory and we feel the loss and then quickly go back to our real life. That is where yahrzeit comes in. It is on the calendar; it is a nonnegotiable date. We can’t be too busy that day so that we have to reschedule it for another time, next week. Yahrzeit is a fixed appointment, a guaranteed time to think about them, to remember and maybe if we are lucky to have a conversation. As Jews we have 4 other moments of collective remembering called Yizkor, but those are different. They are communal remembering days when everyone remembers all their losses. It is personal and collective and we remember all those we have lost; not just the one person who died that day. Its like having a birthday cake at shule for all those who celebrated a birthday that month. Its nice but its not special. At yizkor I remember 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 2 uncles and a cousin. It is important, but not special like the Yahrzeit.
At some point Maggie realized that they were paying regularly for the phone and that it would cost over $1000 to continue for her to leave messages for her mom so they finally terminated the phone, but as Maggie wrote,
”’ I knew I could keep the practice of sporadically speaking aloud to my mom without the phone. Still, I wasn’t sure if the line would go dead immediately or in a few weeks, and I didn’t want to experience hearing: “This number is no longer in service.” So, I left her one final message: “I will miss this, Mom. But I know what you would say: ‘It’s OK, darling. Time to move forward.’”
Forward yes, but on yahrzeit days backwards as well.
May the soul of Yehoshua ben Chaim, Isaac Plotkin, continue its ascension.
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