Without warning, mid-sentence, mid-sip of morning coffee, the grief ambushes— a hand at the throat from behind.
Not the slow tide of Kaddish months, the regulated mourning, the prescribed descent, but this: feral, ungoverned, as if the נשמה יתירה of Shabbat had an inverse twin— a grief יתירה that enters uninvited through a crack in the Tuesday afternoon.
Dad
The word itself a wound that never quite scabbed over, just thinned to translucence so the slightest pressure— a phrase in his cadence, a man in a hat on Hendon Avenue, the way light falls on my own aging hands— ruptures the membrane.
And suddenly I am weeping in the car, in the corridor between patients, in the strange privacy of a crowded room where no one notices the grown man drowning in broad daylight.
The Zohar speaks of הארה— sudden illumination, light breaking through the shells. But this is its shadow: sudden darkening, the kelipah of absence cracking open to swallow me whole.
I thought grief softened. They said it would gentle. But this is not gentle— this is your hand on my shoulder that isn't there, your voice answering in the room where no one speaks, your presence precisely calibrated to the shape of its missing.
At 102 you died with fingernails trimmed, skin unbroken, that Viennese discipline holding the body together until the soul released.
But my grief has no such grooming. It erupts— an infected thing, a fungoid outgrowth of love that refuses excision.
And maybe this is what they meant by עולם הבא containing עולם הזה— that you persist not as memory alone but as sudden presence-in-absence, this gripping, this ambush of the ordinary that proves you were never merely historical, never only past tense.
You continue to father me in the very shape of my shattering.
And I— I am still your son, still the crying baby on the Dunera, still being held by hands that dissolved into the Infinite but somehow, somehow, still grip.
