Tag Archives: Mourner’s Kaddish

November 3, 2025 · 7:30 am

Two Yahrzeit Candles

by Miriam Bassuk (Seattle, WA)

February 17th, my mother’s Yahrzeit.

I realized I had forgotten to light 

the candle for my father on February 11th.

They died years apart, my father at 62,

several months before his early retirement,

my mother at 92, a mainstay in my world. 

My father and I remained estranged.

He missed so many chances to be part 

of my life—never came to my wedding, 

my college graduation, or celebrated

the birth of our daughter, his only grandchild.

February 17th, I lit two candles chanted

the Kaddish for both parents, holy words 

in Aramaic that are deeply etched 

in every synagogue service. This ritual 

binds me to my ancestors, sends shivers 

down my spine as I reckon with shame 

at the growing distance from my father. 

There’s no accounting for the candles’ 

wax or for the duration of their burning. 

One candle with barely a flicker, 

while the other still flares two days later.

Who’s to say for which parent the candle 

burns brighter?

Miriam Bassuk’s poems have appeared in Snapdragon, Borderless, 3 Elements Review, and The Jewish Writing Project. She was one of the featured poets in WA 129 project sponsored by Tod Marshall, the Washington State poet laureate. As an avid poet, she has been charting the journey of living in these uncertain times.

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June 9, 2025 · 7:30 am

Folk tale

by Susan Kress (Saratoga Springs, NY)

My aunt died

in the age of letters

and no one told my grandmother

for fear the news would strike her dead.

She couldn’t read

a word of English and

my aunt lived

in another country 

so it was easy to lift sentences

from old airmail letters and pretend

she was still alive.

Years before, when my aunt

had married out of the faith

that no one practiced,

the family mourned.

They chanted prayers, sat on low seats,

folded her away

in a locked drawer—

and for seven years,

until her son was born—pretended

she was dead.

Susan Kress, granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, was born and educated in England and now lives in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her poems appear in Nimrod International, The Southern Review, New Ohio Review, Salmagundi, New Letters, South Florida Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, La Presa, and other journals. Her poems have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

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February 24, 2025 · 7:30 am

Saying Kaddish for an Unworthy Parent

By Karin Joy Sprecher (Newton, MA)

Dear Friend,

Though I could not attend your Shiva in person – my husband stood there for both of us – I’ve thought of you every day since our conversation when you borrowed my mother-in-law’s wheelchair.

Funerals are never easy. Shivas are even more difficult, especially when the relationship was less than ideal or even fraught and sad and painful. 

How does one sit Shiva for someone who often caused us pain? How does one say Kaddish for a parent who was also mean, nasty, down-right abusive?  Two different rabbis and a cantor, in different ways, gave me essentially the same message: try sitting Shiva & saying Kaddish not for who that parent actually was. Instead, try sitting Shiva … try saying Kaddish for the parent you did not have, but that every child deserves.

I had my doubts.

But I was truly surprised that, over time, it felt not only like something I could do.  It felt right! 

What the rabbis and cantor specifically said — that there was a place in Jewish practice which not only acknowledged imperfect, damaging parenting and how that affected one’s ability to follow Jewish rituals for death and mourning — eventually became, for me, very powerful.  It enabled me to find solace in rituals which originally seemed inappropriate, even untenable.

It gave me a place to sit with other mourners in community, even if my feelings were different, even if my raison d’être for being there was the opposite of what others were experiencing.

Over time I remembered there were other warm, loving, nurturing adults in my life who, intentionally or not, filled a parent-like role in my life. Those who became role models for good parenting. Those who enabled me to become the kind of parent I wanted to be … the kind of parent I needed to be … for my children … because  I saw the way they parented their children. 

I saw that their children felt seen, were nurtured, were loved just as they were, whose strengths were appreciated and whose negative behaviors were lovingly redirected. I saw what was possible, and I saw its wonderful effects. I saw what I believe every child needs and deserves.  And, through parenting my own children, I finally realized that I was becoming the parent I deserved to have as a child.

By the end of saying Kaddish, I gratefully realized that there were people in my life who truly loved me, nurtured me, just as I was. They were my “real” parents, just not my biological parents.

Karin Joy Sprecher, an artist specializing in Judaica, was inspired to begin writing again the year before Covid shut everything down thanks to a Hebrew College class  “Writing Through a Jewish Lens: A Jewish Women’s Writing Workshop.”  She lives with her husband in Newton, MA, where she continues to sing, virtually, in Jewish choirs and take online classes in Jewish and secular subjects.

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November 18, 2024 · 7:30 am

I Said the Words

by Herbert Munshine (Great Neck, NY)

I said the prayer for a very long year
to remember my mother
(as if I could forget)
to honor her
(as if I needed to)
to show my love for her
(as if that was the so official way
as if that could replace the feeling
fading just too quickly from my mind).

I journeyed to the synagogue
one vacant block from where my father worked
and sat with bearded ancient men
who shared a musty smell
with the hall which they inhabited,
who sought responsibility to guide the child
that I was and would forever be.

I listened to the words of the Kaddish
spoken quite precisely in a foreign tongue
a phrase at a time
and then I found myself repeating sounds
that had no meaning and no substance to me,
but it was my job, as I was told
(as if I had a choice).

And so I went, day by day, and I obeyed
and parroted the words
but never had the chance to say
the words that needed to be said,
about the ties we’d had, my mom and I,
about the caring that we knew
and love and strong security
now shattered — and the joy
of helping her whenever she put on
that apron and began to cook
from European scratch.

I said the words that were my duty,
words so alien to me
with men so distant from my needs
but with each word I mispronounced and mumbled
was the childhood-crafted
realization of what I no longer had
but needed very much.

I said the prayer
but wondered in my elemental way
why any God could be so cruel
to cleave a mother from a child
and substitute the words that had no meaning
to my soul.

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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December 4, 2023 · 7:30 am

I forgot to light a candle

by Dennis Gura (Santa Monica, CA)

I forgot to light a candle the other day:

It was an uncle’s memorial,

But he was gone before I was,

And the recollections second-hand:

What my father mentioned,

The documents entrusted to me,

The rare, very rare, comments of my grandfather.

I did not know the precise date until

After they too were gone, when

I dug through the papers

And figured out the World War

Two details. They did not mark

The date.

Nor did they light a candle,

And certainly no prayer was uttered.

No kaddish for the boy gone in France.

My grandfather might have

Been bemused, or likely annoyed,

That I would recited the doxology

For his sons, or for him,

For that is an obligation I have

Saddled myself with.

But this year, I neglected

To consult my calendar in

A timely fashion, and the

Day on which I should have

Lit the candle to

Honor the sacrifice of

The too-young uncle

Had already passed.

No candle this year.

Perhaps this scribble will do

To recall the uncle gone

Before I, or my elder sibs,

Arrived, though both of them bear

His name in some fashion. Perhaps

Their lives will make do

For the absent flame.

Dennis Gura is a father, husband, and an engaged and serious Jew who tries to understand a complex and confusing world as best as possible. A native Angeleno, he has been deeply engaged in Jewish thought and experiences his entire life–the ethnic, the ethical, the secular, and the religious.  He was privileged to study at Machon Pardes in 1982-83, and has since bounced around various LA synagogues and Jewish groups.

If you’d like to read more of his work, visit his Substack page, where this poem first appeared (and is reprinted here with permission of the author): https://dennisgura.substack.com

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June 26, 2023 · 6:30 am

13 Ways of Looking at a Jew

by Bill Siegel (Boston, MA)

1.

Evil takes many forms. To monologist Spalding Gray (Swimming to Cambodia), it’s a nameless cloud drifting around the planet, randomly settling down on humanity now and then –  a Jack the Ripper, an Adolph Hitler, a Pol Pot, an Osama bin Laden. Like a bad dream.

I knew a girl in high school, in the late 1960s, who had recurring dreams in which Nazi soldiers break into her family’s home and take her parents and brother away. When they come to take her, she invariably wakes up screaming, never knowing if, in the dream, they’d taken her or not.

But it’s not a dream. We don’t get to wake up in the morning and shake off the nightmare, breathe a sigh of relief, and return to normal. It can’t be understood and dismissed that easily, because it keeps happening – day after day, night after night, week after week, year after year, generation after generation.

2.

Some people say they are tired of hearing Holocaust stories.

“Enough already, let’s move on,” they say.

“Don’t be such a victim,” they say.

“Don’t try so hard for attention,” they say.

“Stop living in the past, it’s all so boring,” they say.

“It never really even happened,” they say.

That’s what they say.

3.

My nieces – part French-Canadian, not Jewish – are talking. The older one is working on a high school project. “I have to do a collage of images about the Holocaust,” she says. Her younger sister doesn’t even raise her head from her magazine. “Which one?” she asks.

4.

I read a newspaper account of two teenagers who slipped a note into a girl’s backpack as they sat in class studying the work of minority authors. Addressed to “My sweet Jewish princess,” the note explicitly described sexual acts the writer would perform with the girl while pretending to be Hitler. It was written by a girl with her boyfriend’s encouragement. Both of them were charged with second-degree harassment and intimidation based on bigotry or bias, which carries a sentence of up to five years in prison. I don’t know if they were actually tried or convicted, but this was not a first-time occurrence. They apparently had a history of such “antics.”

This happened in the next town to me, in Central Massachusetts, on the eve of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, ushering in the Jewish New Year 5758, in the very Christian year of 1997.

5.

I have letters written by my father from the World War II battle-front in France. Written in Yiddish, using carefully scribed Hebrew letters, they are addressed to his parents, my Bubby Rose and Zayde Harry. I can’t read the Yiddish, but I can make out my father’s name in the letter’s closing. It reads “Dzakie,” the closest he could get to his Americanized name, “Jakie,” since there is no “j” sound in the Hebrew alphabet. His given name in the new land, America, is foreign to his own people.

6.

On Sundays we regularly visited Bubby and Zayde, where my father and Zayde huddled together in a corner of the tiny den, having a lively, though hushed, conversation in fluent Yiddish.  My father might be reading from letters written by Zayde’s brother, who never left Ukraine for America. Other times, Zayde would tell my father what to write, in Yiddish, of course, in letters back to Ukraine.  During these conversations, my mother or Bubby might contribute some valuable bit of information or commentary in Yiddish, though the rest of us, second-born American kids, had no idea what anyone was talking about. Other than a few choice and creatively formulated insults or compliments, they didn’t teach us much of the language.

7.

When my sister was about 16, she rebelled against our weekly visits to Bubby and Zayde’s house.  She was put off by all the “old language” talk and refused to go there again unless everyone spoke English. To this day, it feels like one of the holes in life that can never be filled, something to mourn: the ability to converse with my grandparents in their native language, or at least bathe myself in the sound of it, like a warm, comforting shower.

8.

In Marge Piercy’s novel, Gone to Soldiers, a woman is sitting shiva for her son who was killed in World War II. She is, understandably, devastated. Another woman castigates her for “excessive” grief. “It’s been three days,” she says. “Enough already. Get over it.”

Typically, at the end of the shiva period, which can last for 7 to 8 days, the rabbi takes the family for a walk – around the block, through the village, the neighborhood. The walk guides the family back to an active, purposeful life, and reminds them that the death of their loved one does not signal the end of the world, that though they must never forget the deceased, they are still obligated to continue moving forward — or else, as the rabbi told my mother at shiva for my father, “They will never get all the way around the block.”

What it is not, is an occasion for scolding anyone for their grief.

9.

After my father’s death, after sitting shiva, I find myself in a synagogue that I’ve never been to before. I’ve come to say the Mourner’s Kaddish for him. It’s early morning, but the service has already begun. I’m wearing a black lapel pin and black ribbon snipped by my mother’s scissors, identifying me as someone in mourning, someone who has lost someone. One of the men, dressed in a tallis and cradling an open prayer book, greets me at the door and welcomes me in. Another one comes over to me before I’ve found a seat, and asks who my people are and who I’m mourning for. 

I’ve found a place to be.

10.

The Kaddish prayers, unlike almost all of the other Jewish prayers, are written in ancient pre-Hebrew Aramaic, likely dating back more than 2,600 years, to mourn the destruction of the First Temple. Every time I chant it, I feel grounded in the here and now, but with tendrils connecting me to Jews all around the planet reciting it at the same time I am, as well as  to an unending stream of mourners going back millenia. 

Kabbalah teaches that Creation is made up of “worlds beyond our world,” in time, in space, in spirit. Standing with congregants in early morning, reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish, I feel at home in that multi-dimensional, eternal Universe.

And that is good enough.

11.

There are rules: 

Keep a kosher kitchen. 

Stay with your own kind. 

Go to shul. 

Fast on Yom Kippur. 

Find a nice Jewish girl. 

Get an education.

Be a doctor or a lawyer. 

Be a mensch. 

Don’t marry a shiksa.

But so many Jews try so hard not to be Jewish. Or at least not to be recognized as such. Even in shul, I was taught from a young age to “assimilate” into American culture and society. They never taught us quite how we were supposed to do that, but even as a child I somehow knew that “assimilate” meant “camouflage yourself,” hide, blend into the background, don’t call attention to yourself and your Jewishness. That way – maybe, just maybe – you’d be safe.

12.

“That’s funny, you don’t look Jewish” — the bitter-sweet punch line that doesn’t really need a joke. It’s a tag line in and of itself. We laugh at it, almost proudly, as if it’s recognition of having done a good job of assimilating.

13.

I sometimes believe that there are many people (Jews among them) who will be secretly, and perhaps not so secretly, relieved when the last Holocaust survivor passes on. Maybe they don’t want to confront the truth so directly, the horror, the pain.  But they’re mistaken. Yes, the day will soon come when the last of the victims of Hitler’s death camps are gone. 

But “last survivor?” Never. Survivors of the Holocaust are born every day.

* * * * * * * * * *

Bill Siegel lives in the Boston MA area, and writes both prose and poetry – about family, fishing, jazz, and more. He has two manuscripts in process: “Printed Scraps”, poems inspired by Japanese woodblock prints; and “Waiting to Go Home”, about family and memories of growing up. His work has been published in “Beyond Lament: Poets of the World Bearing Witness to the Holocaust” (Northwestern University Press), and “Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop” (University of Arizona Press). His poems also appear in Blue Mesa Review, Rust+Moth, JerryJazzMusician, Brilliant Corners, and InMotion Magazine, among others.

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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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February 14, 2022 · 7:56 am

Shevat—the month that makes my soul ache

by Carol J. Wechsler Blatter (Tucson AZ)

Shevat, it’s the month that makes my soul ache, my heart hurt. It’s a cruel month, usually cold and bleak, sometimes damp and dark. Rarely do the rays of sun seep through my windows and lift my spirits. It’s during this month that I light three yahrzeit candles–one candle on 2 Shevat for my mother, one on 9 Shevat for my sister, and one on 13 Shevat for my father.

***
It was on January 16, 1965 that my mother, sister, aunt, uncle, and I were present at the burial of my father, Albert, in the oldest Jewish cemetery in Middlesex County, NJ, Mount Lebanon. It was a frigid, snow-covered Sunday morning in central New Jersey. Rabbi Yakov Hilsenrath (of blessed memory) gave a very brief eulogy. Over my down winter coat he pinned a black ribbon cut to simulate the physical act of death ripping me apart from my father who, from that time forward, would only be in my memory.

I remember how bleak and alone I felt losing my father. I was only twenty-two years of age. I was angry. I felt cheated at not having a father. Even when my father was alive, he worked so much to provide for us that I had very little time with him. He had grown up with minimal emotional support, love, and self-esteem, and as a result he was unable to be supportive and complimentary. He was an expert in delivering put-downs. Yet once he was gone, I imagined that if he had lived longer, things would have been different between us. How could I have fooled myself into believing he would have changed his ways and been more fatherly to me? Yet, despite his flaws, I still miss him. After all, he fathered me and, in his own way, he loved me.

***
It was on January 2, 1986, twenty-one years later, that my husband, my sister, my brother-in-law, my brother-in-law’s mother, and I were present at the burial of my mother, Bertha, in Indianapolis. Rabbi Dennis Sasso spoke about my mother and described her as a powerful, intense, and passionate woman filled with love for her family and her heritage. “You could agree or disagree with Bertha,” said Rabbi Sasso, “but you could never be indifferent to her.” I was forty-three.

Unlike my father, my mother supported, nurtured, and loved me. She was always my cheerleader and made certain that I had every possible opportunity to be successful. It was a shock when she died to find that she was no longer at my side. It was very hard to let her go.  

***

And it was on January 14, 2019 that I lost my sister, my life-long friend, who died unexpectedly of a catastrophic brain hemorrhage. Although we had a minyan prayer service in her memory in our home in Tucson with our rabbi and many congregants, we were unable to attend the service and burial in New York. I never had the opportunity to say goodbye to my sister. I never had the opportunity to put shovelfuls of dirt over her coffin. I never had the opportunity to sit shiva with other family members. This has left an emotional gap in my life and an unfillable hole. There is one thing I do, though. I keep on my bed a tiny green velvet embroidered pillow which she gave me which says, Sisters Are Special.

***
As long as I can remember I have sensed God’s presence, as a supreme being who governs my life in unexplainable and unknowable ways. It’s as if God beams a light leading me to insight so I can glean what had been until that moment unseeable and unforeseeable. I feel that God is — and will always be — my protector.

But is this the same God who allows death? How can I praise God, I ask myself as I recite the mourner’s Kaddish prayer with a broken heart? And I tell myself it’s because I also believe that God is not all-powerful. God cannot prevent death. This is not God’s job. Death is not about blame. Death is what death is. It is my job to accept death.

***
The Kaddish prayer is always said in the presence of ten adults, a minyan, and a community of worshipers. As part of a minyan for eleven months after the death of each of my parents and my sister, I reaffirmed and praised God’s presence in unison with other mourners.

Healing took place slowly.

Day by day.

***

Now I’m seventy-nine years of age. I am acutely aware that my time on earth is limited. I am here only for an extended visit. Some day I know I will die. So I am trying to make each day count. I am trying to be fully present, especially when I arise at all services, on Shabbat, and on holidays, and say my prayer:

I give thanks before you, O God living and eternal, for You have returned within me my soul with compassion; abundant is your faithfulness!

_____

Carol J. Wechsler Blatter is a recently retired psychotherapist in private practice. She has contributed writings to Chaleur Press, Story Circle Network Journal, and One Woman’s Day; stories in Writing it Real anthologies, Mishearing: Miseries, Mysteries, and Misbehaviors, Pleasure Taken In Our Dreams, Small Things, & Conversations,The Jewish Writing Project, and in 101words.org; and poems in Story Circle Network’s Real Women Write, Growing/ Older, and Covenant of the Generations by Women of Reform Judaism She is a wife, mother, and grandmother of her very special granddaughter who already writes her own stories. 

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November 2, 2020 · 7:05 am

Whether I Was Counted Didn’t Matter

by Rita Plush (New York, NY)

I was not a religious woman. I did not keep kosher. I drove and carried on the Sabbath, but when my mother died in 1995 I decided to say Kaddish for her. She had honored the role of motherhood in her quiet and loving way for so many years of my life; it was my turn to honor her. When I told her rabbi I’d decided to take on the responsibility of Kaddish every day for 11 months, he said it wasn’t expected of me. A polite way of saying I wouldn’t be included in the minyan, the ten people required for communal worship—ten male people that is. 

A bar mitzvah boy, still sleeping with a nite-lite? According to ancient rabbinic decree and prevailing diktat in the Conservative movement then, that pisher would be counted; he was up to the task. A 58-year-old female who had raised three children, gone to college and was running a business? Talk to the hand! No matter; I wasn’t there to make noise and change the rules of female inequality in Jewish ritual. I was there to pay tribute to my mother’s passing, a loss so profound, it felt as if my very connection to the universe had been broken. 

Yiskah-dol v’yiska-dosh sh-may ra’bbo begins the ancient Aramaic prayer. 

The words had a power I could not name but when I recited that opening line, I was part of the world again! Part of all Jews who, for centuries past, had shown their respect for their loved ones the way I was respecting my mother. I felt connected to them and to Jews in present time, whoever and wherever they were, remembering their beloveds as I was. I was not alone in my grief. Yet a need began to bloom in me. Reading the Kaddish phonetically was not enough; something was missing. 

Had been missing, every time I held a siddur. When I sat and when I stood during High Holiday services; when I bowed my head and beat my breast, following the prayers and blessings, silently reading in English. I wanted the language of my ancestors on my lips. I wanted to read Hebrew. 

And so I learned, in a classroom with other like-minded adults, part of National Jewish Outreach’s Read Hebrew America program, hieroglyphs in the booklet, square and blocky, rather than actual letters. I tried to commit to memory the significance of the undersized T’s, the dots and dashes under a particular letter—the new world of sound that was Hebrew. It took study and time; it took some sweat as I labored over a service’s opening prayers while the morning minyan was wrapping up the closing Aleinu. But I kept at it and after a few months I was reading along (struggling along, is more like it) feeling the presence of the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebekah and Leah, my matriarch, Malka, now among them. 

Soon after my mourning period was over, my synagogue became egalitarian—sort of, or as my Grandmother used to say, nisht du, nisht ort, not here, not there. To appease the older, more traditional-leaning congregants, women were included in the minyan in the smaller, downstairs chapel, while upstairs in the main sanctuary, it was business as usual. So be it; they built it and I came, called upon to be present for others saying Kaddish, as others had been present for me. Every Tuesday morning, with gratitude and my faltering Hebrew I joined the minyan and helped a mourner honor their loved one. 

In time, my synagogue became fully egalitarian, and it felt good. It felt right to be a fully acknowledged member in good standing of my Jewish community. But whether I was counted downstairs, upstairs, or no-stairs, it didn’t matter. In the tradition of my people I had given tribute to all my mother was to me. And… I learned my alef beis.

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, Continuing Education, Queensborough Community College. If you’d like to learn more about Rita and her work, visit: https://ritaplush.com

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June 1, 2020 · 6:54 am

“What do you want?”

by Mel Glenn (Brooklyn, NY)
Unscathed, I live comfortably in hibernation, 
my larder stocked, my outlook optimistic.
The morning air wafts through my open window,
and I can hear the call and response of birds
punctuated by the screams of ambulances.
Then there is a knock at my door.
It grows louder, and, finally, I say,
“What do you want?”
I peer out my window and go downstairs 
and see a strange man dressed all in black.
“I have some terrible news,
about your friend, Tony, I believe.”
“Tony?”
“Yes, I see you and Tony at the diner most days.
You often eat breakfast together. Is that not true?
And he’s a paramedic and loved by many?”
“He is a good friend. What’s wrong? Tell me!”
“He is in the hospital with Covid-19.”
“Oh, my God, Is he OK?”
“I’m sorry to say he’s on a ventilator.”
“Which hospital? Can I see him?”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible. Can I come in?
Perhaps we can pray together.”
“No, no, go away. You’re scaring me.”
“But there is more.”
“Don’t tell me he’s gonna die.”
“Most probably, but there is even more.”
“Are you coming for me?”
“Yes, possibly, and quite soon, I might add.”
Panic-stricken, I double-lock the door and shut the window.
I collapse in a chair and start praying for my friend,
but, upon reflection, I begin to say Kaddish for myself,
somehow hoping these words might save me.

 

Mel Glenn, the author of twelve books for young adults, is working on a poetry book about the pandemic tentatively titled Pandemic, Poetry, and People. He has lived nearly all his life in Brooklyn, NY, where he taught English at A. Lincoln High School for thirty-one years. 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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