This week, we had a family dinner at my parents’ house. Everyone was there. Well, almost everyone. There used to be eleven of us around the table, with my dad sitting at the head, always next to my mom. Having the whole family together has taken on a different meaning since March, when my father passed away. Now there are ten of us, and his absence is felt on a visceral level.
In recent years, having even that many of us has been a challenge. My daughter, at 22, is the oldest of five grandchildren with a ten-year age span between them. When they were younger, we used to have at least one family meal a week. The kids loved being together, laughing around the table and running off to play when they were finished, leaving the adults to talk and clean up. My parents had a large movie room where the grandchildren liked to put on elaborate skits for us, complete with scripts, sets, and costumes. Every Halloween, my mother hosted a parade and scavenger hunt for the kids, and they would come dressed up and go from room to room looking for candy. As they got older, we tried our hardest to plan nights when everyone was available, but inevitably someone had a conflict, and schedules became harder to coordinate. We were often satisfied if any one of the kids were there.
Holidays were the exception. On Rosh Hashanah and Passover, my parents’ dining room was filled with extended family. The card tables and folding chairs were pulled out and we gathered as a group to recite the prayers and light the candles. On Hanukkah, we would sit on the floor of my parents’ living room, passing out gifts and playing dreidel. Every New Year’s Day, after a late brunch, the kids ran to the upstairs balcony that overlooked my parents’ front foyer for a balloon toss to welcome the new year.
So last week, when we were all together on a weeknight, there was something special about the otherwise ordinary occasion. It was the night before my youngest daughter was to move into her dorm for her freshman year of college, and our evening was a sort of send off. Recently, my mom had begun the difficult task of cleaning out my father’s side of the closet, and she invited us to come look through his belongings to see if there was anything we wanted to keep. I stood amongst his tailored shirts and sports jackets, staring at the row of his polished shoes and his colorful ties, and it hit me that he isn’t here anymore.
This feeling comes over me at the oddest times: when I hear a song on the radio that we used to sing along to, or I sit at his desk, which has now found a home in my office, or I see his name pop up in my contacts on my phone. How I long to call him just to say hi and hear his usual greeting of, “Hey, Mitz.” Somehow the reality that he’s gone still hasn’t sunk in. Intellectually, I know he is no longer with us, but my heart still feels a connection to him. I find myself talking to him, often just to say, “I miss you Dad. I love you.”
As we all stood in the closet, my nephew took one of my father’s plaid flannel shirts from a hanger and I helped him pull it on over his t-shirt. It fit him like a glove. “Papa would love seeing you in that,” I said. Each of the kids, now young adults, lovingly selected sweaters that used to belong to my father for themselves. They talked lovingly about their memories of him reading “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus,” and my mother said she would buy them each a copy. Toward the back of the closet, in a keepsake box, my nephew found an old camera that used to belong to my dad. It wasn’t charged and my mom didn’t know if she still had the charging cord for it.
“I’ll take it home and see what I can do with it,” my nephew said.
Later that evening when I was back home, I received a notification in our family chat. My nephew had found a cord that worked on the camera. “Aunt Melissa, I found some stuff on the camera for you,” he wrote. Eagerly, I clicked on the link he’d sent and discovered four folders of old videos and photos. One of them was of my daughter’s baby naming nearly eighteen years earlier.
I watched the clips of my husband and I holding our daughter while the rabbi recited the prayers over her for a long life of health and prosperity. I couldn’t believe the timing of discovering these videos! In our hallway, my daughter’s bags were packed and ready to be loaded into the car for our trip the following day to her school, where she would be embarking on her college career. Yet watching the videos of her as a baby felt like just yesterday.
In many of the video clips, the camera panned the room filled with friends and relatives, and I counted the number of people no longer with us, including my father, grandmothers, and my beloved aunt. The last video I clicked on immediately brought tears to my eyes. There was my father holding my daughter in his arms. He was talking to her in his soft voice, and I was behind the camera, encouraging her to reach out to him. “Give Papa a hug,” my voice reached out from the past. “Grab Papa’s beard.” My father laughed as my daughter pressed her chubby baby palms to his face, and he nestled his head against hers. I played that clip over and over.
If there’s one thing I’ve realized this year, it’s that loss touches everyone. No one is spared. For the longest time, I felt immune to loss. My grandmothers were in my life well into my 40s, and I couldn’t imagine a time when my parents wouldn’t be there. Now, whenever I go on social media, I see posts from those I went to high school with who have lost a parent, and I’ve stood by my own friends who have lost theirs. I have hosted shivas and attended funerals of not just my grandparents’ generation, but my parents’.
But I have also come to realize how blessed I am to have had so much love in my life for so long. I was shaped by my family’s love and support, and it helped me become the person I am today. To have a loving family is the most anyone can ask for, and it is not something I will ever take for granted.
Today, August 26, is my father’s birthday. He would have been 78. Tonight, we will all gather as a family at his graveside to wish him a happy birthday. Tonight, we may not be eleven in person, but we will be eleven in spirit. That will always be the case.
