Tag Archives: grief

February 9, 2026 · 7:30 am

Long Grief

by Pam Adelstein (Newton, MA)

There used to be much to do. Recite the Mourner’s Kaddish daily. Phone calls, waiting on hold, forms, estate management. Sorting and donating Dad’s personal goods. Panicked phone calls and texts from my mother. Explaining my status as a mourner — taking the year off from dancing at celebrations, declining blindingly joyous events that chafed against my mourning soul. Friends checking in. Feelings to process. All the “firsts” — first Thanksgiving, first Father’s Day, first birthday, etc. — without Dad.

At the three-year mark, I am relieved that these urgent and important tasks are completed. Now, less urgent, less important tasks remain. Paperwork. Boxes to sort through. When I consider tackling these, my energy wanes suddenly, and I tell myself “Another time.” Honestly, who knows if that time will ever arrive.

My acute grief has evolved into long grief — not found in a psychiatry book, and not identifiable by observing me. I am my usual self, except when I am not. I have not discovered anything to do with this long grief, except to feel it. When I see my dad’s handwriting. When I gaze at a photo of his smiling face and deep blue eyes. When I hear his voice in my head. When I repeat his words and favorite phrases. When I try to better understand who he was. When I share an anecdote about him that makes me chuckle. When my birthday nears and I experience the pang of his absence, knowing there will be no happy birthday phone call from him this year — or ever.

Since his death, December triggers foreboding, and January brings me an uncomfortable cloak of vague sadness. Attempts to shove down feelings of not-rightness are unsuccessful. And then I remember, January is when my dad died of COVID complications. When my mom called the ambulance. When his oxygen saturation was in the 60s. When he was hospitalized. When he went to rehab. When rehab called to tell me that they were doing CPR and later called about his death on day 10 of isolation. When the visit I had planned on day 11 became time I spent with his body, saying goodbye. COVID is uniquely fraught for those of us who work in the medical field and who have lost loved ones to the disease. With each COVID surge, fraught feelings resurface. Images and memories intrude in my day. A complicated facet of my grief.

The Yizkor service occurs four times a year. It is a time for Jews to remember and honor loved ones and those who have died and been martyred. We recite parts of the service privately and quietly, and other parts aloud and together. I suppose this separate-yet-together praying brings comfort to many. For me, since my dad died, Yizkor has not brought such comfort. Instead, it spotlights that my father is no longer alive. Participating in the Yizkor service reminds me viscerally of the year I stood daily and recited every kaddish, feeling alone with the dissipating sound waves of my voice. In the time “before,” I took for granted the carefree privilege of leaving the sanctuary during Yizkor to shmooze in the hallway. Today I am part of those who remain in the service. I am a newbie. Most of those in the service are more experienced at this than I, their loved ones having died many years ago. During the private, quiet portion of the Yizkor service I wonder whether others feel like an old scar is pulled away. Do others feel tethered to a similar long grief?

Pam Adelstein is an active member of her Boston-area minyan. She lives with her husband and has two grown children. She enjoys hiking, yoga and kayaking, and works as a family physician at a community health center. Writing is a way for her to express the emotions around her work and personal experiences, connect with others, and be creative. Her writing can be found at Pulse Voices (search Pam Adelstein), at WBUR, Doximity, and STAT.

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December 16, 2024 · 7:30 am

On That Day

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

It rained that day. The gray sky 

matched everybody’s mood

and as my face was pelted 

with large, heavy drops that hurt,

I reassured myself that I would never cry. 

I was almost 10.

I stood lost in the crowd. I didn’t 

have a need to be up front

but someone nudged me, 

pushed me closer to the grave

and I looked down and saw

the plain pale brown coffin 

decorated with a matching 

Jewish star, the place in which

my mother slept (that was the current 

euphemism), and I was numb. 

An old man speaking through 

his beard, dressed in a long black coat, 

a rabbi whom I’d seen in my rare visits 

to Temple Emanuel in Parkchester when 

certain holidays occurred, said words 

I didn’t understand, made noises 

that offered a young child no comfort, 

and sporadically others, most of which 

I didn’t recognize because my family had chosen 

isolation as a way of life. He mumbled what I guessed

were prayers, and all I felt was the heavy rain that

seemed determined to replace the tears that wouldn’t come.

I paid attention to my heavy breathing 

because, I guess, it took my mind away 

from that pine coffin that held what was left 

of the woman who used to comfort and care for me 

when I was sick, who used to cook for me in her 

Jewish-Latvian way, from scratch to tasty,

with the constantly secret sacred ingredient 

being love.

I had been her companion as she prepared the food,

the one who licked the bowl … but what exactly 

was my role now that she was gone? Who would be

my mother? A little child needed a mother, but she was gone.

These thoughts bombarded my defenselessness

while wise men said their Hebrew words and still 

the tears refused to visit me, and the rain kept falling 

and the shovels lifted senseless dirt and dropped it 

on my mother and I felt like screaming and running 

to her but she was no longer there for me. Instead, 

the sounds replaced her voice, those holy sounds 

that meant nothing to a ten-year-old, 

a boy who simply wanted to hear

his mother’s voice again.


Herbert Munshine grew up in the Bronx and graduated from C.C.N.Y. with both a B.S. in Education and a Master’s Degree in English. You can find his baseball poetry on Baseball Bard where he has had more than 100 poems published, and where he was recently inducted into that site’s Hall of Fame. He lives with his wife in Great Neck, NY.

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March 6, 2023 · 6:30 am

Ending Kaddish

by Pam Adelstein (Newton, MA)

Eleven months of showing up and standing up. The days blur together, sometimes feeling short, and other times feeling endless. People tell ME that it feels like I’ve been saying Kaddish forever. I think in response, it has been longer for me than it has been for you.

Countless Kaddishes feel like exposure therapy for public acknowledgment of grief.

I feel vulnerable and exposed each time I rise and hear the Kaddish uttered from my lips, as my voice fills the room.

In the traditional call and response, the kahal overpowers my voice. I know they are listening to me. Me –  one tiny insignificant mourner among centuries of Jewish mourners around the world.

Humbled and grateful, I take comfort in our togetherness. A daily minyan, where I stand with a group of mourners, who implicitly understand, no questions asked. I march blindly forward in their footsteps, often the youngest in the room. This has the effect of making me feel way too young to have lost my dad.

At our evening services the shliach tzibbur reliably inquires, “Is anyone observing a yahrzeit who would like to speak about their loved one?” Each time I stare blankly back, thinking, “Nope, still a poor schlepper.”

Finally, I learned what I have dubbed “the paragraph.” The talmedei talmedehon of the Kaddish D’Rabbanan.

Though I no longer feel nervous trepidation, sometimes while reciting the Kaddish I still feel as if the poetic Aramaic words are rocks in my mouth, projectile phrases from my throat, lyrics from my grieving soul.

The Kaddish words sometimes come out differently with every recitation. Someone jokingly asked if the words rearranged themselves on the page. I shared that reciting an imperfect Kaddish reminds me that my grief is imperfect. Like the Navajo people, who intentionally weave a flaw into their rugs to show that only a Supreme Being can produce perfection.

The end of my daily Mourner’s Kaddish is here. I have ordered my life around this prayer. I have observed the sun and the moon, the snow and the rain, and the day and the night through the skylight of Gann Chapel. Thinking about and searching for my father. Is he out there somewhere, looking in?

It feels as if a cliff’s precipice awaits me. A leap of faith, knowing that the sages thought we mourners would be okay at the eleven-month mark without the daily scaffolding of coming together briefly in community. Without those snippets of conversation before we return to our daily lives outside these walls.I wish those sages could guide me through the next phases of mourning, of integrating further back into regular life, as I ask: what do I do with my grief now?

Pam Adelstein is an active member of her Boston-area minyan. She is married, has two children, and is on the verge of becoming an empty-nester. She enjoys hiking, yoga and kayaking, and works as a family physician at a community health center. Writing is a way for her to express the emotions around her work and personal experiences, connect with others, and be creative. Her writing can be found at Pulse Voices (search Pam Adelstein), at WBUR, Doximity, and STAT.

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January 9, 2023 · 6:30 am

Sanctuary

by Alison Hurwitz (Cary, NC)

Incongruous, that towered height among the holly, butternut, 

hydrangea, along the oaks, camellias, black-green laurel hedge —

there it rose, so tall it steepled everything, as if to say, remember,

pray to what grows green above us.

A field-worn, furrowed man called Shorty came knocking once. He said

when young, he’d planted a young redwood seedling there, brought back

from California, vaguely hoped that it would someday grow to be 

a landmark. He’d removed his crumpled hat, his hand a map of years, 

his eyes as wide as forests, asked if he could go and touch the trunk, 

already girthed to temple, breathing dusk. My mother understood,

she a tree parishioner, so both of them remained a while in silence.

When Shorty went away, he left his story grafted to its branches. 

Dad cut back the deck each year, to give the redwood room to ring. Rare 

days when grandparents sat dappled on the deck, polite and tightly furled,

Jews and Catholics baffled past translation, they sat in shade below it, and 

in stillness, shifted into softening; green a common tongue between them. 

At seventeen, I’d park with my first love across the street, and kiss until the night 

dipped branches dark with longing. When, same car, same street, same boy, 

time wrenched us into ending, the tree stood by to witness, a shelter until 

my loss let go its spores, until my heart referned with undergrowth.

Ten years later, beneath the tree, my new husband and I stood quiet while my parents, 

faces filigreed with leaf-light, planted blessings in us. They prayed we’d tend

a sapling, make a small repair, something to green the broken world. My parents’ hope 

could sing the music out of wood.  Mitzvot and Meritum. Their reverence, ringed.

The day after my father died, when all I had was absence, I stumbled out to sit 

below our redwood tree. There, grief burrowing among its roots, I stayed until 

I found a seed and held it in my palm. I breathed and felt the way that branches 

lifted into blue, its birds built nests, the fledglings flew, each ending bending to beginning: 

holy as the timeless sky.

Alison Hurwitz’s work has appeared in Global Poemic, Words and Whispers, Tiferet Journal, Writing in a Woman’s Voice, Anti-Heroin Chic, Book of Matches, and The Shore, and is forthcoming in Amethyst Review, Rust and Moth, Thimble Magazine, Academy of the Heart and Mind, and SWWIM Every Day. She writes gratefully in North Carolina. To read more about her and her work, visit alisonhurwitz.com

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April 18, 2022 · 6:30 am

Condolences

by Rita Plush (New York, NY)

People have surprised me since my son died—and not always in a good way. Some of those I thought would be there with a note, a call, a “How’re you doing?” have fallen by the wayside. Yet others I hardly knew have reached out in a most caring way. One such person called out, “Rita?” as I was leaving the synagogue one Saturday. 

Never having spoken, I knew this man only by sight. And name, if I could ever recall it.

He told me he had read an article I wrote about my son’s death (such a terrible and final word) when I had volunteered as a phone friend to an elderly shut-in as a way of reaching out to someone instead of wallowing in my sorrow. The man offered his condolences. But I sensed in his manner, in his almost hesitant way of speaking, that there might be more on his mind. I waited a beat and he asked if I had a minute, or did I have to get going? I said I had time.  

He shared that his father had died when he was five and a half, and his mother when he was 21. 

“Everyone has their own grief,” I said. “That must have been very difficult for you.” 

I wondered if this was going to be one of those conversations—if you can call it that—where people insist their grief is just like yours, or tell you about someone who has it worse than you (no one has it worse when you lose a child!). Or what you should be doing to get out of your funk.

But then, as if not to take anything away from my suffering, he said, “Losing a child is the greatest loss of all.” He was glad I had come to services and not stayed home brooding, grieving alone. It was important to get out, he said. To be with others, to socialize. “It’s key in the healing process.”

It’s also key in Jewish tradition to perform acts of kindness. The 12th-century sage Moses Maimonides wrote that by comforting mourners you fulfill the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. My neighbor was doing just that. 

“I hope you don’t think I’m preaching or telling you what to do,” he said. “I’m just passing on what worked for me.” 

“Not at all,” I said, taken with his compassion.  

There had been mentors, he said: a neighbor, an uncle, later on teachers, role models who shaped him and became important in his life. A job well done, I thought, considering how he had sought me out, a stranger, to comfort. 

We stood there talking by the exit door but I don’t recall seeing anyone come or go, so absorbed I was in our exchange. And though he spoke more than I, it wasn’t a me, me, me assault. An us talk is what it was. One sufferer (he) trying to make another (me), feel better in the most sincere way. 

How kind. How lovely. How a five-minute conversation, if it was that long, cut to the heart of things. 

“You’re Sam, right?” 

He nodded.  

“Thank you, Sam.” 

He reached out his hand to me. I could feel the slight damp. This had not been an easy talk for him. Then gently, almost shyly, as if the gesture might be too familiar, he drew me in. It did not occur to me then how much I disliked being touched by strange men. Perhaps because it was I who was the stranger, and he had welcomed me, as the Torah says one should. So that when he brought me closer and his cheek tapped mine, it seemed the most natural thing in the world. A complete understanding of what had passed between us.

Rita Plush is the author of the novels Lily Steps Out and Feminine Products, and the short story collection Alterations. She is the book reviewer for Fire Island News and teaches memoir at Queensborough Community College and the Fire Island School, Continuing Ed. Her stories and essays have been published in The Alaska Quarterly Review, MacGuffin, The Iconoclast, Art Times, The Sun, The Jewish Writing Project, The Jewish Literary Journal, Down in the Dirt, Potato Soup Journal, Flash Fiction Magazine, Backchannels, LochRaven, Kveller, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Broadkill Review, Avalon Literary Review, Jewish Week, and The Best of Potato Soup 2020. 

If you’d like to read more about Rita and her work, visit her website: https://ritaplush.com

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November 5, 2018 · 7:32 am

Pittsburgh 1918, 2018

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

My father, an immigrant,
crossed the ocean,
went to live with his older brother,
in Pittsburgh.

My father, an immigrant,
went to 5th Avenue High,
worked hard to understand
the strange English language,
in Pittsburgh.

My father, an immigrant,
went to doven each Shabbos
in the local synagogue
a world away from the
sumptuous temples of Squirrel Hill,
in Pittsburgh.

My father, an immigrant
knew anti-Semitism, later escaped Hitler,
was spared the horror of that morning,
in Pittsburgh.

What would he have said
were he born a century later
to witness murder so heinous?

Would he have cried out to the heavens
in mourning for his lost brethren,
knowing it could have been any Jew, anywhere?

Would he have recognized the
the darkening of the national identity
as human behavior descends into blind hate?

Would the ghost of my father have screamed
in the sanctuary with the fallen?

My father, an immigrant,
died in 1974, a devout believer.
His soul lingers with the eleven,
immigrants or not, who died,
in Pittsburgh.

He never questioned
the existence of evil in the world.
Would he have been surprised
that it came home to Pittsburgh
to shatter, until the next news cycle,
the spirit of man?

Coda:

And I, my father’s son,
fail to find the fitting words
necessary to speak of this tragedy.

The stop in my throat,
the tears in my eyes,
reduces me to silent outrage.

Others may be able to speak
more emotionally, more eloquently.
Instead, I will go out to my father’s grave,
put a stone on his tombstone,
and carry eleven other stones in my pocket
in remembrance of those Jews
who can no longer speak for themselves.

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in the YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy, edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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September 7, 2015 · 1:18 pm

The Poet Receives A Tool Box

by Janet R. Kirchheimer (New York, NY)

Teacher and philosopher, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz writes in his book, My Rebbe, about a holy person, “…we see the connection with the beyond or hear it more in the spaces between sentences…. As they speak we understand that there is more above the line and below the line or between the lines.”

Poetry and holiness are intertwined. Poetry lives in those spaces between the lines: in the layout on the page, the white spaces, whether it is formal or free verse, what the poet says, hints at or doesn’t say, the grammar and punctuation, the connotation(s) of each word and so much more. It’s what makes me come alive when I write and edit. There’s that initial impulse, a word or line pops into my head or something startles me and lurks or most times haunts me until I write about it. Like the time I was sitting on the M104 bus going down Broadway in Manhattan. I saw a man with one leg shorter than the other, wearing a black leather shoe with a tall heel to make up the difference. I started writing about the man and the wife who loves him, makes his breakfast and kisses him goodbye each morning as he goes to work. I missed my stop.

It’s only in the last months that I feel poetry lurking. My father died three years ago, and I wrote four new poems during the first year. Then I stopped. I couldn’t and didn’t want to write anymore; I just wanted to be quiet. I didn’t want to talk most of the time, never mind try to write.  Then I stopped thinking about it. And then I stopped caring about it. I kept in mind something my poetry teacher, Mary Stewart Hammond, told me, “Sometimes you need to live your life, not write about it.”

Recently, I watched an interview with Sarah McLachlan where she talked about losing her father in 2010 and releasing her new album in 2014. “I don’t think anybody gets to this point in their life unscathed,” McLachlan said. “I’m 46 years old and this is the time when parents die, when big changes happen.”

“When you were dealing with all that, where were you musically?” asked [the interviewer]. “Nowhere …. I would play music, but I didn’t have it in me to write anything,” she said. “My father passed away almost four years ago, and it kind of took that long for me to recognize what I’d lost and what that meant to me moving forward, but also what he’d given me.” I know exactly what she was feeling. After my father’s death, it was not a time for writing; it was a time for grieving, for mourning, for reflecting. I was observing the traditional year of mourning, saying Kaddish, not going to movies, not listening to live music or buying new clothes. Like Sarah McLachlan, I didn’t have it in me to write.

At first, I didn’t care if my poetry came back. But after two years, I thought it might actually be gone. I tried to write a few times, but had no inspiration. I began to realize that I needed to wait for it to come back.  About six months ago while visiting my mother, I went to the basement and into my father’s tool room. After he died, we couldn’t clean it out. There were too many memories. He was a tool and die maker. I looked at jars filled with nails, screws, washers. On his workbench were micrometers, screwdrivers, levels, hole punches, two blue cotton aprons and other tools I couldn’t identify. I opened my father’s wooden tool box, and right there in the top drawer was a beige tin with “Revelation, the perfect pipe tobacco” written in red on the cover. When I opened it, I saw several short, round pieces of metal with sharpened ends. They looked like silver crayon tops. The tin had been in there for over thirty years but I never really noticed it. Until now. Poetry was swirling so fast in my head that I could barely keep up. I ran upstairs and started writing; a few minutes later, I had filled up two sheets of paper.

My father always encouraged me in my writing, was so happy when my book, How to Spot One of Us, was published and was always interested in my teaching and readings. There was my father, in his tool room, helping me to move forward. Encouraging me to write again.

Janet R. Kirchheimer is the author of How to Spot One of Us (2007).  She is currently producing BE•HOLD, a cinematic poetry performance film. https://www.facebook.com/BeholdAPerformanceFilm.  Her work has appeared in journals and on line in such publications as Atlanta Review, Limestone, Connecticut Review, Lilith, Natural Bridge and on beliefnet.com.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and received Honorable Mention in the String Poet Prize 2014. 

This essay is reprinted here with the kind permission of The Best American Poetry Blog (http://thebestamericanpoetry.typepad.com/the_best_american_poetry/), where this essay first appeared.  

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August 31, 2015 · 6:00 am

How To Bury Your Mother

by Leslea Newman (Holyoke, MA)

Slip out of the dark limo
into the bright light of day
the way you once slipped
out of your mother:
blinking, surprised, teary-eyed.
Turn to your father
and let him take the crook of your arm
like the crooked old man
you never thought he’d become.
Feel your heels sink into the earth
with every sorry step you take.
Weave your way through the graves
of strangers who will keep your mother
company forever: the Greenblatts,
the Goldbergs, the Shapiros, the Steins.
Stop at a small mountain of dirt
next to a hole that holds the plain pine box
that holds what’s left of your mother.
Listen to the rabbi mumble
prayers you’ve heard a hundred times
but this time offer no comfort.
Smell the sweet honeysuckle breeze
that is making your stomach buckle.
Feel the sun bake your little black dress.
Wait for the rabbi to close
his little black book.
Bring your father close to the earth
that is waiting to blanket your mother.
Watch him shove the shovel
into the mound upside down
showing the world how distasteful
this last task is.
See him dump clumps of soil
onto your mother’s casket.
Hear the dull thuds
of your heart hammering your chest.
Watch how your father plants the shovel
into the silent pile of dirt
and then walks off
slumped over like a man
who finally admits defeat.
Step up to the mound.
Grasp the shovel firmly.
Lift it up and feel the warm wood
between your two damp hands.
Jab the shovel into the soil.
Toss the hard brown lumps
into that dark gaping hole.
Hear the dirt rain down upon your mother.
Surrender
the shovel to your brother.
Drag yourself away.
Do not look back.

Lesléa Newman is the author of 70 books for readers of all ages, including the poetry collections, I Carry My Mother and October Mourning: A Song For Matthew Shepard (novel-in-verse) and the picture books A Sweet Passover, My Name Is Aviva, and Ketzel, The Cat Who Composed.

If you’d like to take a look at the book trailer for I Carry My Mother, visit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yf4ubYHObAM

“How to Bury Your Mother” copyright © 2015 Lesléa Newman from I Carry My Mother (Headmistress Press, Sequim, WA 2015). Used by permission of the author.

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August 25, 2014 · 7:48 am

Worms in the Flour

by Jacqueline Jules (Arlington, VA)

The sweet smell of baking bread
widened your nostrils, then your eyes.
“A girl who bakes bread!” Your face,
a nomad finding water in the desert.
It was the seventies.
Men were afraid to open doors, afraid not to.
You were ten years my senior.
“Challah,” I corrected. “Sabbath bread.
An expression of faith.”

When time allows and mood demands,
I still set out bowls and measuring cups,
yeast, eggs, and flour on the kitchen counter,
determined to knead a sticky white mess
into something smooth and solid.
It’s a noisy process. The first time
you heard the sound
of something being punched and beaten,
you ran to the kitchen to watch.

It requires more strength now,
in the house alone.
Finding the cabinet empty of yeast,
I can’t ask you to put down the newspaper
and run to the store. I almost quit today—
opening the flour tin, finding worms.

But there were empty bowls
on the counter, waiting
beside sugar, yeast, and eggs.
They taunted me, dared me to continue.
I grabbed my coat and keys.

Not long after, I came back
with new flour, ready
to start over.

Jacqueline Jules is the author of many Jewish children’s books including The Hardest Word, Once Upon a Shabbos, Sarah Laughs, Miriam in the Desert, and Goodnight Sh’ma. Visit her at www.jacquelinejules.com

“Worms in the Flour” appears in Stronger Than Cleopatra, a collection of poems about going forward in the face of loss. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the author. For more more about the book, visit: 

http://www.booknook-eljpublications.com/store/p4/Stronger_Than_Cleopatra.html

 

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March 11, 2013 · 8:03 am

Crash Victim’s Father

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)

“God is punishing me for my sins.”
Oh, father, are you sure?
Or is this your valiant attempt
to understand what cannot be understood?
A daughter is dead, so is a son,
as is, tragically, an unborn child.
A whole religious community now mourns.
What evidence, I ask, suggests it was your fault?
You load your shoulders with the pain,
to make sense out of the senseless,
but why carry even more sorrow by contributing
the additional burden of perceived sin?
Surely, God in His wisdom does not wish to pile on.
It would seem He has better things to address –
why the accident in the first place? –
as He dons His Old Testament robes of wrath.
Nothing can make the night day for you,
but what value is it to extend the darkness,
by throwing a believed culpability into
the incomprehensible celestial mix?

The author of twelve books for young adults, Mel Glenn has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years.  Lately, he’s been writing poetry, and you can find his most recent poems in a new YA anthology, This Family Is Driving Me Crazy,  edited by M. Jerry Weiss.

If you’d like to learn more about his work, visit: http://www.melglenn.com/

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