This Is A Yahrzeit, My Dear
Last night, on the eve of my brother’s yahrzeit, we taught our four year old about death.
It wasn’t a conversation we planned to have nor that we discussed for a single moment prior to having it. It wasn’t some big, grandiose thing that we all sat down and braced ourselves for. No Google articles were consulted; no parenting forums perused. It was completely spontaneous. Something born out of a dreaded moment. A moment that comes once a year. A moment that forces us to reremember the worst pain we’ve ever felt.
Amazingly, even though it’s ravaged us, it’s left our doe-eyed daughter untouched. She’s been spared the underlying grief that colors so many of our moments. The grief that’s now sitting on the kitchen table in the shape of dozens of books to be signed and shipped off. Up until now, she’s been spared; her innocence, preserved. But last night, it touched her for the first time.
It was 7:30 pm. The sun had set. It was like any other night. Soon, we would begin the bedtime routine of pajamas, potty, teeth-brushing, book-reading, lights out, “Mommy, rub my back and my tummy,” and, finally, sleep.
But before heading upstairs, I lit the yahrzeit candle that was sitting on the kitchen counter to commemorate the third anniversary of my brother’s death. On February 19th, 2015, we lost our beloved Harris. It was tragic. It was untimely. It still haunts me every day, and I imagine it always will. But after three years, it’s something I’ve come to accept. The heaviness and acute pain has subsided. It’s morphed. It’s changed me. It mostly lives in the background now until a ceremonious milestone places it at the forefront again, where it lived for so long.
“Mommy, why are you lighting that candle?”
I looked at Mike, desperate for an answer.
“Well, it’s something you light once a year to remember someone you love who has died.”
(Mike is the best.)
“But who died?”
“Uncle Harris,” he replied.
Her eyes widened, and her face twisted into this pained look of shock and dismay.
“Uncle Harris died?” she asked incredulously, her voice shifting up an octave.
“Yes, baby. He died,” I replied.
Immediately, as if I’d flipped a giant switch inside of her that had never before been touched in the history of her life, she began to weep. She wept out big, huge, un-four-year-old feelings. Because no one had broken this news to her before now. She had no idea. She’d heard us talk about him constantly over the years, but she didn’t know he was no longer here, that she’d never be able to see him in the flesh. That he’d never be able to come to her house and play school, explorers, or princess. That he’d never watch a movie with her on the couch. That he’d never meet all of her baby dolls, who she so lovingly cares for. In her four year old mind, he was a guy we all loved, who was featured in dozens of photos around her house. She never saw him, sure, but in her mind, he was still very much alive, because why wouldn’t he be?
“But I don’t want him to die,” she cried.
“I know, baby.”
“I want to to meet him,” she demanded, as if this could somehow change things.
“You did! You did meet him,” Mike assured her. “And he loved you so much, more than anything in the world.”
Upon her request, we pulled up photos of the two of them together. One when she was a newborn, sleeping on his chest on the sofa in our old house. One from our vacation to Park City, Utah, right after he gave her her first taste of Dippin’ Dots. Another when he came to visit and rocked her back and forth before bedtime.
“But I want to go to his house,” she whined.
“You did go to his house.” I pulled up the photo of her in his house in LA the week we were there packing up, the week after he died. She studied it. She tried to remember, but she couldn’t. “You were just a baby then,” I explained.
“But he’s all around you here,” Mike told her. “That’s his painting over there.” (The one of Johnny Carson.) And those are his chairs. (The big huge spinning ones that swallow you up.) And this is his painting over here. (The print with all the pop icons.) He’s everywhere.”
And then, out of nowhere, she asked: “Did he work hard? Did he get help?”
This is when Mike, who had been physically holding her in his arms this entire time, lost it. I cried even harder, audibly now. She looked at our pained, tear-streaked faces. She pressed her nose to Mike’s nose, then she pressed her nose to my nose. We all held each other.
Mike finally choked out a sentence. “Yeah, he worked really hard.”
“Is Momo sad, too?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“How come she doesn’t cry?”
“She does,” I explained. “She just doesn’t want you to be upset, so she doesn’t cry in front of you. But you know it’s okay to be sad. It’s okay to miss people who you love.”
“Okay, but can I still have my dessert?” she asked, more concerned now than ever. Thank God for four year olds.
We moved into the kitchen, and while she ate her cookie, she asked: “Am I going to die, too?”
“Not for a very very very long time, sweetie,” I insisted.
“But I don’t want to die!”
“You don’t have to worry about that right now. People don’t die until they’re really really really really really old.”
“But was Uncle Harris old?” she asked.
“No. But he was sick,” Mike said.
“That’s why we have to eat our vegetables and take care of our bodies so that we stay healthy and strong,” I added.
We assured her again and again that she was safe, that she didn’t have to worry about dying, that all of that darkness and ugliness was a million miles away from her, where I want it to stay forever.
But that feels wrong, too. Because at this point in our shared American experience, safety is a hard thing to promise a child, or anyone for that matter. In the shadow of the latest school shooting, it’s both tragic, and likely critical, to be having conversations with children about death. And untimely ones, at that. Because the truth is, I can promise my four-year-old that she’s safe, and that we’re going to protect her forever and always, and that she’s only going to die when she’s very very very old, but we all know that’s not necessarily true.
Tragedy is everywhere. Hard to focus on anything else, to be honest. Kids are getting murdered at school. Young people are dying from drug overdoses. Terrible things are happening all the time. So when my beautiful, sweet, funny, charming, kind, spirited, lovely four year old asks me if she can have a cookie, my answer is yes. And when she asks me if it’s okay to stop crying now and make some funny faces, my answer is yes.
On the way upstairs, my husband picked up one of the books stored in a box on the kitchen table and told her that her mommy wrote this book about her Uncle Harris, and that it’s a really special book. And next week, I will get on a plane and spend a week visiting various people and places around the country talking about the book, talking about Harris and comedic genius, talking about grief and loss and drugs and darkness, talking about WHY I wrote the book in the first place. This is a question I often get. There were many reasons for writing the book, but mostly, I was trying to make sense of something so terribly senseless. Trying to make sense of the fact that my 30 year old brother, who should now be 33, is dead and gone, and in his place is a yahrzeit candle that sits on the kitchen counter like it did last year and the year before that. And like last year and the year before, it will burn out on my birthday.
Tomorrow I turn 37. One more year around the sun. One more year of not knowing what kind of shit will be hurled at me next. I know that I have a son in my belly, and a daughter who’s now tucked safely in her bed. I have a husband by my side and two incredible parents down the street and lots of friends and family spread around the city, the country, the world.
I know suffering, but I also know love.
And, Harris, I’m going to fight to change things, to make sure my children live in a safer world, a world that you’re, sadly, no longer a part of. And I really wish you fucking were because I think we could all benefit from your perspective right about now. I’m not religious. Neither were you. We were very much Jew-ish, so the after life part is still such a mystery to me. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust works on an intellectual level — it’s a lovely little phrase — but when it’s your own flesh and blood in the ground, you have to hope he’s still out there somewhere, doing what he loves, loving whomever he’s doing.
I hope that, wherever you are, no one has a gun. I hope that, wherever you are, everyone has a soul and a bleeding heart and the ability to love and care for each other intensely and unconditionally.
I also hope, for your sake, that there’s an endless stream of Phish and Drumsticks and Chili’s nachos and Shipley‘s donuts and late night drive-thrus and buttery steaks and all-you-can-eat buffets and Hungry Man frozen dinners and melted string cheese and cigarettes that don’t kill you. And laughter. Lots of laughter.
“You know what your uncle Harris did for his job?” I asked Iris on our way upstairs. “He made people laugh. He made jokes that made people laugh.That was his job. That was what he got to do.”
“I wish he was here right now,” she said.
“Me, too, baby. You would love him so much.”
