On how bereavement transforms holidays — and every other day.
When I realized my younger daughter, Hana, has a two-week winter break this year, I started fantasizing about taking a family vacation. But what started as an innocuous — even fun — idea quickly turned fraught. Each time I clicked a hotel or Airbnb drop-down menu to select the number of guests (two adults, one child), I had to take a breath. |
Until this past March, I had not one living child but two. Then my daughter Orli, 14, died from the complications of metastasized liver cancer. Since then, there has been an Orli-size hole at our table. It is a space no number of guests could ever fill. |
As I wrote about in a guest essay this week, therapists warn bereaved parents like me to prepare ourselves for holidays and birthdays, religious events and weddings, to gird ourselves for walking into events where intact families will be present, where everyone else is celebrating milestones. So our family has been approaching Thanksgiving, a holiday of gratitude and camaraderie, with some degree of worry rather than hope. |
But as I write in the essay, it's not during holidays when we feel the greatest depth of Orli's absence; it is every day. Bereavement is a peculiar thing: It is daily, and it is constant. It is knowing we need now to make only one lunch, to buy one set of school supplies, to find one new snow jacket. (I wept the other night over just the idea of Hanukkah gifts for one.) We feel off kilter as a family, like a four-legged stool that now must stand on just three. |
Orli has already missed her sister's birthday and her father's. She has been away for all the major Jewish holidays; she has already celebrated all that she will celebrate. We can no longer argue over whether she will attend synagogue or abandon it, in the face of her fraught relationship with religion, made all the more complicated by a three-and-a-half-year battle with chemotherapy and radiation, hair loss, endless hospitalizations and all the other indignities of cancer care. I miss all of it, but mostly, of course, I miss her. I love hearing from those who see a fox, the animal she loved most, and think of her; who wear a friendship bracelet beaded with her name; who tell me they wonder what counsel she might offer when they consider how to face something hard. |
I am aware of what a peculiar, terrible club I am in. And I am all the more conscious, this year, that we are in a season of mass bereavement, in which the mourning of parents is global in scope. I am far from alone. |
And yet on this Thanksgiving, I remain grateful that I had the chance to parent Orli and know her in all her complexity, that I get to continue to parent Hana. And I am grateful for the understanding that this loss gives me, of how human we all are and how, if we are unafraid to look closely, we might see that the universality of loss binds us all in its experience. |
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