In loving memory.

I run far, because perhaps I can find her if I run far. She always told me to fly.

I’m confused by the moments of regular living, knowing that in them I keep something distant. Not on purpose, not really. Knowing the novelty (which feels like the wrong word, but isn't) will wear off at some point (it happened last Tuesday), and there will come a time when I walk headlong into a memory, when I hear your name in spaces where no one said anything. When I realize I’m wearing the shoes that you bought me, or that your photo on the fridge is just a little crooked (you always noticed that, when the pictures were crooked), or that I haven’t yet thrown out the shells of yartzheit candles I lit after you died (they're sitting in the same tin pan as the shabbos candlesticks you gave me the day I left home). And I wonder in those moments if I’ll see us running a half-marathon in January with one pink glove apiece because I forgot both of mine, and you taking the photo that would become my birthday gift. Or sitting together on that hospital bed at your very first chemo appointment, when I took you myself on that rainy morning and your nurse told me I have your eyes. Or if I’ll just see myself standing in that room behind a metal door with your body in a box beside that horrid sink where the rabbi told us to beseech your forgiveness, picturing the women who performed your final rites – and left you there. And I know in these moments whatever it is that keeps the finality away will break a little further, because that thing itself can’t be final.

So I let it, in it’s own time.

I suppose my siblings were good at white lies. Whose house they were at when they went to the movies, what time they really got home Saturday night. I don’t think you minded.

I only lied once. When we were both curled up in your bed, and you asked me from under your heated blanket in June if I thought you'd ever run again.

Mom, did you know?

I have this photo that I took of us. A selfie in the car in the dry cleaners parking lot. Your sunglasses. My denim purse. “Why do you want a photo like that?”

“I don’t know. I just want it.”

That was the photo that I placed in the center of our flyer presenting for speaking engagements. Look at us, building through impossible things. That was the photo we both chose, my father and I, to accompany your funeral announcements. In loving memory. It was never meant to be in memory of anything more than a moment in time.

So all I can do now is replay the conversations, but I’ve changed a lot. It’s not the same as having them. I’d shy away less, this time around, from the harder things. Cancer conversations over bowls of cereal. That's what I started calling them.

For seven years, I’ve watched people say Kaddish. Sometimes I even walked them to the place where it begins, a small dip off the main road of the prayer service. A private place, a secret thing. Once or twice I glimpsed beyond the parting in the trees, Yitkadal v’Yitkadash – and left them there to mind their business. Kaddish was a secret path. A not-for-me path. Winding and hollow and in Aramaic. Both strikingly new and strikingly ancient. I tried to follow at your funeral, but the men had siddurim and more confidence with it, and I couldn’t keep up.

I know it by heart now. I only remember stumbling down that path, holding hands with the women who’ve walked it before, and they showed me how. I remember that my brother walked it beautifully the first time, more beautifully than anyone else I’ve ever watched and I wonder when he learned to do that.

Yitkadal v’Yitkadash.