It was a joyous family occasion – the first night of Chanukah and the wedding of my brother’s daughter. But, as with so many family occasions, it was tinged with sadness. My mother and father, my niece’s grandparents, were no longer here to share in the happiness. And we all felt it. Yet the bride and groom were determined to include those they missed. One of the most moving ways they did this was by placing my parents’ menorah on the table where the grandchildren were sitting. Somehow, despite their lack of presence, my parents brought in light.
My wonderful mother, Ann Ebner, died on February 5, 2016, and my brilliant father Henry in October 2020. Astonishingly, that means it is now a decade since I spoke to or saw my mum. I wrote an article for the JC a year after she died explaining how much had changed in 12 months. How can we now have lived another nine years? In that time my son has left primary school, had his barmitzvah and is now in his final year at university. My daughter went to university, graduated and has a real job. Two nieces have got married! The world moves on, while the absence of those we have lost becomes woven into everything that follows, the milestones they should have witnessed and the conversations we still want to have.
But is ten years really so significant? Rebecca Soffer, author of The Modern Loss Handbook and the woman behind the Modern Loss website, says it is, if only because of agreed wisdom. “We’ve spent our entire lives being told that these turn of decades or big round, notable numbers [after a bereavement] are times when you should simultaneously think about how far you’ve come, but also where you want to go,” she says, describing hitting the decade as a “loss milestone”. It’s a moment when someone’s absence – what they have missed and what you miss – is thrown into starker relief, and Soffer is keen to emphasise that surprisingly strong emotions may arise even years down the line.
After ten years, I sense a dulling of the pain, and yet an increase of the loss. I have so many questions that did not seem relevant a decade back, but which I would like to ask my mother now
“You live with loss for ever,” she explains. “Time going by proves that as long as one of you is living and breathing, then your experience with grief is always evolving and shifting.”
The cliché says time is a “healer”, but Rabbi Miriam Berger says this owes as much to poetic licence as reality. “Things shift,” she says. “How you cope with a bereavement plays out very differently from person to person, and is also heavily dependent on the relationship you had with the person who died. But there’s something specific about a mother dying and continuing for them, knowing they’re not here to see it any more and carrying on their legacy that is particularly poignant.”
Grief and loss alter continuously and Soffer says the passage of time does not erase this, but instead stretches it. After ten years, I sense a dulling of the pain, and yet an increase of the loss. I have so many questions that did not seem relevant a decade back, but which I would like to ask my mother now. I miss her wisdom, her advice, her experience and definitely her hugs.
I also never thought I looked at all like her, but now, when I look in the mirror, I often see her gazing back at me. “You do find yourself turning into them a bit,” says Rabbi Berger, who is a facilitator for “Doing death Jewishly”, an initiative of Progressive Judaism run for its bereavement volunteers. “My mum died in her early fifties, and now that I’m nearing that age, I can look in the mirror and feel as if I’m finding her again. I hadn’t yet had a child when she died, I couldn’t understand how she felt about me, but now I can sense that much more.”
Keen to emphasise that everyone has a different experience, Soffer says the wound of losing her mother, who died in a car accident when Soffer was only 30, “will absolutely never close”.
“There’s no one else in your life who loves you quite like the person who brought you into the world,” she adds. “That kind of love doesn’t get replaced.”
Certainly I felt as if my mum – and my dad – were always in my corner, always interested in me and my life and always keen to help. I know, like Soffer, that I was extremely lucky.
But my mother is there in so many of our Jewish rituals. Judaism, I think, does death well. The shivah envelops you with support, while the yearly yahrzeit is another form of commemoration.
“I love the concept of yahrzeit,” says Rabbi Berger. “In Britain, there’s a sense that time heals and you move on. But in Judaism we are gifted the opportunity to remember the person personally and mention them in community settings. Hearing someone’s name read out when it’s their yahrzeit enables everyone around to re-share their stories every year.”
Judaism also allows us many other occasions to evoke a missing person’s presence, whether in recipes, customs or actual mementoes (that menorah, or the Kiddush cup we now use at Seder, and which used to be my parents’). Last year my nieces both got married under a chupah containing my father’s tallit, which was given to him by my mother. As one of them told me: “It felt like having both of them above us.”
“Being able to ritualise is so important,” says Rabbi Berger. “Our rabbis were top psychologists and understood wellbeing, from the burial and the act of filling in the grave – doing one last thing for someone – to the permanency of the stone at the stonesetting, marking a new reality.”
Soffer says her site and books are intended not to be religious, but that her personal background makes it “Jewishly informed”. Her main message is that there is no timeline for loss or grief. “Grief is painful no matter which way you cut it and while there’s no silver bullet, there is time and the ability to figure out and practise coping mechanisms,” she says. “These days I don’t self-identify as a ‘grieving woman’. It’s more about living with the loss and accepting that the waves will come as they may, but then always subside.”
modernloss.substack.com and The Modern Loss Handbook
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