I don’t often talk about my mother from the bimah anymore, although if you’ve read my book you know she continues to loom large. Some of you knew her – some of you had meals with her or long chats with her at Ner Shalom or even in Chicago. Some of you showed up in her Santa Rosa hospital room to chant for her or sing for her or do reiki on her or read to her or arrange meals for us while we sat at her bedside. Most of you who are now Ner Shalomers never met her, and that continues to astound me – how can you possibly know me without knowing her?
I’m talking about her because Wednesday was my mother’s birthday. A good, wintery November date, with regular family implications. Her birthday often fell on Thanksgiving. When it didn’t, it fell within a day or two. Year after year she would feign surprise at the birthday cake her aunts or cousins would unbox and carry in at the end of Thanksgiving dinner.
Because of her birthday, I think, Thanksgiving is, for me, always intrinsically tied up with her. For her, Thanksgiving was often fraught, or at least it was every third year when the family gathering rotated to our house. She was a nervous and reluctant host, a working woman who was not a natural in the kitchen, but still expected by the culture to be one. My mother’s anxiety dreams always took the form of family showing up for a party or holiday she had forgotten about, and without notice she would be expected to host them.
In her waking life, Thanksgiving was a heavy lift, and disaster would sometimes follow in the wake of her anxiety – maybe as a result of it, or maybe just memorable because it would tend to prove her anxiety right. There was the year that the ready-made Parker House dinner rolls somehow went into the oven without first coming out of the plastic bag, and then having to explain to each dinner arrival in turn why the house reeked of burnt plastic. Or the year that she innovated by making sweet potatoes in a pressure cooker and the walls of the house began to sweat orange. I can still see my father on a ladder, amidst the already-set tables, wiping down the living room walls and ceiling with rags rubber-banded to the end of a yardstick, working against the clock before family showed up.
Mom was able to be far more relaxed when Thanksgiving was at Cousin Sue’s in Milwaukee or at Cousin David and Margo’s in Highland Park. So she was unfazed the year that Uncle Maury spilled Margo’s entire serving bowl of kasha-for-20 onto the floor, and Sandy the collie was on it in a flash, as if this was the moment he had been born for. As the dog inhaled the spillage, my father publicly dubbed him “Hoover,” a nickname that at least the Kellers called him for the rest of his life, and now beyond.
Thanksgiving is also intrinsically tied up with my mother because it was to celebrate Thanksgiving and her 85th birthday that she last came to visit a dozen years ago. She arrived on Sunday. On Monday she was in the Emergency Room at Memorial Hospital having a stroke. On Tuesday, her birthday, she was in the ICU, non-responsive. On Thursday, Thanksgiving, our celebration was diminished and shaken as we took turns rotating between home and hospital. Despite some rallying, a month later she was gone.
Since then Thanksgiving has had a flavor of loss, and for most of these years my Thanksgiving grief has had a kind of resentment to it. She should be here, was the sentiment. And not just Thanksgiving. Many holidays and gatherings and world events would elicit that reaction from me. Ari’s bar mitzvah, less than 4 months later – she should have been there.
Looking back I realize: she was 85! This is a ripe old age by anyone’s standards. I have friends and loved ones who lost parents as children or as young adults. My mother was 85. How can I have felt cheated? Perhaps it is because she was so full of life and because the end was sudden. There was no long illness or cognitive decline. She was lively and had her full faculties and it made it easy, if lazy, to imagine she would simply always be that way. So her death had a quality of incompleteness, of life getting cut short. Her death felt unfair.
Earlier this week I was thinking about her. I realized that this year Mom would have been 97. And something new hit me. It dawned on me that it was very unlikely that she would have lived to be 97. Despite some favorable genetics that included two uncles who lived past 100, the odds were very slim that she would still be here now. I would now be without her either way. The Irwin who lived in the parallel universe where she pulled through the stroke would now be grieving, more freshly, and probably after having accompanied her through some painful illness or other suffering. That Irwin would also be sitting at a Thanksgiving table without her, and thinking about her birthday.
That realization shifted something in me. I suddenly saw myself as the adult at the head of the generations, not as the child whose parent was taken. After over a decade of resistance, I felt an acceptance that of course at age 65 I would be a human without living parents, as is the case for most of my peers and elders. It suddenly felt like I was in the right flow, the right spot in time, with proper ownership of where I sit in the unfolding of generations.
So Thanksgiving felt different this year. It didn’t have the bitter taste of tragedy. I sat at the table, the elder in my family, and raised a glass to toast my mother. Not because she should’ve been there, but simply to honor her birthday and all the years of Thanksgiving birthdays I celebrated with her. It was lovely and sweet and came as a relief. It wasn’t tragedy; it was simply memory.
To all of you who didn’t know her, I wish that you had. You would’ve liked her. She would’ve liked you. And it’s also okay that you didn’t know her; that is the course of things. You know me. She made me. That will have to be enough. That is enough.
With love to my sister, the only person who also holds all the memories.
And to the family of Beth Kon, of blessed memory, who was my mother’s close friend and birthday buddy.
Thanksgiving Weekend Bonus: learn with me about a hidden message right over the door of a synagogue my family helped build in the 1830s. Click on the button below to see the essay in My Jewish Learning: