Two Yahrzeits

By coincidence of the calendar (different years, same date) my father’s mother and my mother’s father died on the same day. It’s pure chance, but it still feels strange. Each year, when the date comes around, I pause and remember them both. Not in any grand or ceremonial way, just a quiet internal marker: this is the day.

I think about my grandmother and my grandfather’s business in Raleigh. I remember visiting them again and again, the feeling of the place as much as the place itself. I remember stealing candy as a small, low-stakes rebellion. Later, stealing vodka from my grandmother, which felt much more daring at the time. Eventually, I graduated to holiday visits where I didn’t need subterfuge to acquire a drink, just a raised eyebrow and a glass set down in front of me. There’s a particular kind of affection in being indulged by people who know exactly who you are and love you anyway.

I think about my mother’s father. His life was hard in ways that don’t compress neatly into anecdotes. He grew up poor in the mountains during the Depression, taking government work when public works jobs were available, often not eating much at all. Then World War II came. He enlisted, reached the rank of Private First Class, and served in the European campaign. He fought in the Battle of the Ardennes and, for a time, became a guest of the Wehrmacht. War has a way of compressing a human life into a few lines of history like that.

(In case that was too subtle: he was a P.O.W.)

I think about who they were in the fullness of their lives, not just the fragments that survive in family stories. I think about the stories I remember, and the stories I never heard and now never will. Those untold stories are gone with them: the private fears, the small joys, the moments that never made it into the official narrative of a life but were probably what it mostly consisted of.

I can’t visit them anymore in lazy Appalachian mountain summers. I can’t steal drinks from them in the winter. I am permanently deprived of their company. And even in the years when I didn’t think much about it, I loved them. I still do. Time doesn’t erase that; it just makes the absence quieter, easier to live with, but no less real.

There are many things people say about death, and some of them I don’t believe. I don’t believe we are put on a shelf to await judgment somewhere, waiting to see how well we did. I don’t believe we sit in some holding place, waiting to be prayed out of it. Those stories may comfort some people. They don’t do much for me.

When I say prayers for them, it isn’t for the fate of their souls. I pray because the experiences I could have had with them are gone. Because the human love and contact I received from the people who bore my family, my direct ancestors, has ended in this world. The prayer is for the living: for what we’ve lost, and for the love that shaped us while it was here.

Because, even in mourning and remembrance, we are enriched, and this is part of life. I could say the world is diminished by their passing and by their absence, but the world is better for them having been here at all. So let me say, today:

Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba.