I'm grocery shopping, and in between tomatoes and hummus, I place a yortzait candle. My father's yortzait is coming up. Isn't that the province of older women, with shaking wrinkly hands and eyes teary from age? Aren't they the ones prowling the kosher aisle, looking for memorial lights? What am I doing here, buying a yortzait candle next to a lunchbox for preschool and three gallons of milk?
It's eight years later. It's three kids who never met their grandfather. It's my grief, feeling my hair turning grey under a gorgeous sheitel and a plastered smile of "Okay!" It's years and years of grief, of absence, of an absurdity of celebrating while there is a yortzait candle in my cart and a gaping hole where parental presence is supposed to be.
I check out. Another celebrity proclaims from the tabloid how she found happiness and got her life back, and you can, too! It is so pointless, so silly to listen to this. How can I get my life back?
I am loading groceries into van's trunk. As I click it closed while I return the cart, it beeps and doesn't close. The candle got tangled in the bag and is blocking the lock. The item that does not belong got in the way.
Why am I writing this? Because I have learned that there are other young moms, going through their days while experiencing the incongruity of being bereaved. It's been years, people do not talk about it any more, people do not ask, people assume that you have moved on, came out of it, are busy, do not want to talk, or simply do not know that you feel so alone as you are buying that yortzait candle.
May my father's neshama have an aliyah.
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