Ending a Year of (Not Really) Saying Kaddish

Tomorrow is my mother's yahrtzeit. 

2020 was supposed to be a good year. A year when Gavi started university. A year when Jesse and Keren were graduating university and high school. A year when Mom was supposed to finish chemo and get her life back. But instead, it would be a year of Kaddish. 

2020 began with a New Year's Day trip to New Jersey, just 2 days after arriving home, to possibly say goodbye to Mom. The trip ended settling her in home hospice care with two wonderful nurses with her around the clock. Home again January 9. After the longest ten days of my life (which is saying something ten months into a pandemic lockdown), Sunday evening, January 19, around 7:00 PM, Mom passed away. 

Wednesday, January 22 we said our final goodbyes. A split shiva in Merrick, Monroe Township, and Toronto, and the cycle of Kaddish began. Each morning I drove Keren to school and went across the street for Shacharit and Kaddish. Each evening I went to minyan in the synagogue where my office is or I came home and went with Sean. I didn't ever sleep in. I sent a note to Mirvish Productions explaining that I would not be renewing our theatre subscription, but it wasn't because I didn't want to. 

Just as everything closed down, after Keren's school closed, after Gavi vacated his dorm, leaving, as Jesse and Sean drove cross-country, I skipped minyan and Kaddish one morning to take our cat Gandalf to the hospital. He never came home. Acute kidney failure. That same week synagogues shut down. 

For a few weeks, maybe a month or so, there was no minyan, no place to say Kaddish. Then synagogues began to set up Zoom, then streaming. Kaddish moved online. 

I've written before about my experience with Kaddish online. I don't like it. My year has not be the comfort within a community that meant so much after my father died. But meaningful or not, it ends tomorrow. Tomorrow, I will be in shul, not online, in shul, with nine other people - masked and disinfected, most of us saying Kaddish. 

And that last Kaddish, especially because it will be in shul, especially because I will be standing with others, but so far away, especially because we're all in this together, that last Kaddish will make up for everything that came before.

With my prayers tomorrow morning I will say a prayer that next year on Mom's yahrtzeit I won't be masked, I won't be distant. I will be standing with friends and family, with my community, and we'll say goodbye one more time together.