Kaddish for Dad

Each recital punctuating the service,

Yitgadal veyitkadash…

I join my brothers in mourning.

At times I recite alone

At times with a cacophony of mourners,

Each with different cadences, accents, fluencies,

We bow and move three steps backward

Taking leave of the King.

How do I do this?

The mechanics of repetition

The prosidy of ritual

The obsessiveness of halachahic process…

So different from Mum!

Where the pain of recitation tore my heart

A serrated knife in my heart being twisted by each oseh shalom..

And the challenge of even getting through to the end.

With Dad however,

It is more a deep gnawing sadness

More in the head,

His gaping absence

No longer sitting on his perch, receiving the world

Blessing me just two weeks before he left

Responding to my singing die Lorelai

Now,

The overpowering nature of his life, his legacy and his longevity.

The memories of my childhood and the times spent with him

during the summers, his picking me up from the airport monthly

and the chats, walking to shul and back in Rehavia,

these bubble up during the monotony of the kaddish.

The weekly zoom forces us to review the recent past,

deciding among the siblings regarding disposal of the bric a brac,

the books and the contents of an apartment once lived,

And, as yet his personal items to be determined who gets what

Delaying the last agonizing decisions of his most personal items.

I imagine each Kaddish as follows,

My lowering a shovel of holy earth onto the coffin

Each kaddish another shovel-load,

Each service another lowering of earth into the grave

Despite in reality there was no box, just his body in shrouds,

But it comforts me,

Each Kaddish

Another clod of earth leaves my shovel and falls onto the coffin,

It hits the wood with the sound only those having lost loved ones recognise.

It comforts me that it will take the full 11 months of daily services-

Three times each day

To fully fill the grave itself..

The earth inside rising bit by bit to meet the surface,

And as the months progress the sound will dull

once the coffin itself is covered,

I will only see earth then, no more the Ark of Dad’s remains,

And the completion will occur when the entire gravesite

meets the ground around it,

Leaving only the shape of fresh earth, an oblong of dirt

surrounded by green, green grass.

As the earth rises to the surface ever so slowly

My acceptance and surrender to the fact and the ending

and the closure becomes internalized,

And I turn to my own life

And the inevitability of my preparation for my own mortality.

The daily aches and pains, the loss of energy and earlier fatigue

as the day winds down, all markers of decline despite good health.

I am learning that each day, each kaddish is a spiritual opportunity

to not just mourn his loss but also prepare for my own.

The spiritual path might just be a daily meditation

on the analysis of one’s path, one’s character defects,

one’s surrender to the reality of life on life’s terms,

and the surrender to the higher will of the divine.

The digging and shoveling of chthonic psychic material

is a prerequisite for opening the higher self to the light.

From panic to depression to acceptance and serenity

Each clod of earthiness covers what was, the past, the dull thud

spilling onto onto the coffin of past betrayals, deceits,

harms done to others and self- destruction.

The earth falls as does the self-constructed ego

into the reality of realization of failure, a free fall

into the brutal awareness of the picture of Dorian grey

is no longer in the attic.

Hopefully I will have accomplished the inner work

of acceptance and surrender when it comes to my turn

to be at the bottom of this opening in the earth,

Meanwhile the daily kaddish is a gift reminding me

of the ongoing painful work of shoveling and digging

into memory and trauma and healing needs attention.