Light all the candles (8th Night of Hanukkah)

menorah on 6th night

It is the 8th night of Hanukkah tonight, and so we're done. Hanukkah came early this year, putting us at a bit of a disconnect with the rest of the country. We'll be well all done before the Christmas frenzy is in full bore. But so it goes some years.

Last year Christmas Eve was the 5th night of Hanukkah, the holidays overlapping nicely. Next year, thanks to simultaneous oddities of the standard western and Hebrew calendars, Hanukkah will actually cross paths with Thanksgiving, beginning the night before!

I'm still weaving in and out of my seasonal ennui, some days lighter, others darker.  Holidays are always about family, family, family and I am missing some members of mine. This week the universe conspired to remind me of my father constantly, now gone nearly three years.

I sat down to get a cup of coffee in the middle of the day on Wednesday and gather my thoughts, when I noticed the man seated next to me in the cafe, heartily enjoying a bowl of potato leak soup, one of my father's favorites. I just had to get a some myself, the silent tears dripping off my face and dropping into the bowl rendering it a bit on the salty side. Just how Dad liked it.

I was thinking about the last months of my father's life, how even up until the very bitter end, when he was barely eating anything, becoming more of a skeleton day by day, I could still often get a little soup into him, if nothing else.

Nabeyake udon or vichyssoise, pasta fagioli or avgolemono, clam chowder or chicken noodle, goulash or gazpacho; the man loved soup. And every time I make some, I conjure Dad up, if just for a little while.

And then on Thursday night, my husband and I got to spend some time with dear friends who are a generation older than we are (but young, so young in spirit and full of life).  I love them to pieces and we had a wonderful dinner and lively conversation and I enjoyed every minute of it while simultaneously feeling so sad that my father is gone and my mother fading fast. And there was our friend Al (OK, I'll name drop: Al Jaffe) a year older than my mother, but still working, still living completely independently (yes, it probably helps that his lovely wife Joyce is a decade younger, but still, that makes her no spring chicken herself).

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OK, this post was supposed to be going up yesterday, on & about the 7th night. I had written this much by Thursday and was going to finish Friday. But then I came home from my intense all day appointment in Brooklyn (the impartial hearing concerning Jacob's schooling) having been pretty much in a bubble all day, to find the news... the school shooting... all anyone can talk about, think about. And I froze.

How can I write about a cheerful holiday, about missing my father who got to live a long, fulfilling  life and become really, really old before he died, in the wake of this immense and senseless tragedy, in the wake of twenty dead children? And yet, there were my thoughts, up until Friday evening.

And so I am walking around dazed and shell shocked today; doing what I have to do, boys to basketball, lighting the final menorah, feeding everybody and washing up the boys weekly five loads of laundry. Because life, for the living keeps going on.

I cannot write about Newtown yet. I don't know if I ever will. There is no sense to be made of it. And, for once, I truly have no words. Except to say that we need vastly better mental health services in America, and with less stigma attached to getting them when we need them.

And so I'll end here, rather abruptly perhaps, because there is no way to stitch this into a smooth and seamless post. There was regular life, skipping, trudging, shuffling along. And then... the thousand ton boulder dropped into the middle of it. And aftermath. There's always aftermath.

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To conclude: last year I shared the Maccabeats & Matisyahu's wonderful Hanukkah song with you, this year I'm sharing a new song from Matisyahu... and hoping everyone had as happy a Hanukkah as possible, in spite of all the insanity and tragedy in the world.

There but for fortune

My Jake

"I love you, Mommy."

He says it quietly these days. Sometimes loudly. Spontaneously. At the dinner table last night, as I sat down. Often enough to almost take it for granted. Almost. But also never. Because my boy is autistic.

Because once I did not know if Jacob would ever say "Mommy" let alone "I love you."

Once I did not know if ever there would be conversation, a back and forth, a flow. And now, of course, I find myself begging for a break from Jake's constant need for engagement.

The conversations are odd, of course, bringing smiles or bewilderment to the faces of the folks waiting at the bus stop with us (for the dreadful will-it-ever-come M104) as we repeat topics over and over, revisiting them cyclically as the waiting goes on and on, and Jake walks in circles, tighter or wider, to relieve the anxiety of the when-will-the-bus-come unknown.

There had been good news from the ophthalmologist: Jake no longer needs glasses. Another thing we had thought might never come to pass. But of course my son being a creature of habit greets this news with none of the joy his twin brother Ethan had three years ago, upon the same pronouncement.

"I. Want. My. GLASSES!" he bellows as I explain patiently (for I knew this would involve much patience, greeted this "good" news with trepidation, fearing just such a reaction) that "the eye doctor says you don't need them any more, the glasses did their job, they're finished."

Jacob's school's half-day Friday had seemed the perfect opportunity for his annual eye exam. And it turned out fortuitous in so many other ways, as I had a real need of my son that day. A need to see him, to hold him tight.

My community was hit by tragedy Thursday: a family lost two children to unfathomable, senseless violence. And when I say my community, I mean more than just we live in the same neighborhood, I mean we have a connection to this family (although I do not know them personally). 

There was a bit of the same feeling around the Upper West Side right afterwards as there was on 9/11: a sense of shell shockedness, a sense of there-but-for-fortune-ness. Not as universal, more of an echo; but still, more than a bit spooky.

"Why? why? why?" drummed over and over in my head as I walked about the streets. Taking Ethan to school Friday, morning the parents were out in full force. Those of us who often send our kids in with "the neighbors" could not seem to do it, needing to kiss their heads personally at the last possible moment and watch their backs recede into red brick buildings.

So many of us appeared with eyes dark circled, earned from 3 am checks of our slumbering children. How long had it been since I had stood in a doorway, watched two small rib cages rise and fall in the near darkness?

My mind kept curling back, all day long, to the mother, the family. The mother (like so many of us) employing others to watch her children, in spite of being an at-home hands-on mom, because when you have more than one child, having help is... very helpful.

I return again and again to the screaming everyone says was bloodcurdling, primal, knowing that such sounds would be erupting from me were I ever to come upon my children, likewise undone.

I cancelled my Friday evening plans (an old friend's play). We sat together for a family dinner, dusting off the Shabbat candlesticks and lighting them, finding comfort in familiar, in ritual, in ancient things that continue.

Finding more than comfort in my son's words as I sat at the table; "I love you mommy" taken for granted never, appreciated now more than ever. And now I attempt to embrace sleep, to resist the siren call of watching my children slumber, reassuring myself of their continued existence on this planet.

If will alone could protect them, keep them safe all their lives, then all our children would live forever.

And so I hug my sons a little tighter now.

Please hug your children every day.


Finally, I can never say or think the words "there but for fortune" without hearing Phil Ochs sing them. So here he is, now doing just that:

Imagining the unimaginable

On Friday I received a chilling set of Twitter messages from my friend Alexandra:

I went, I read, I left a message. Words, just words, but they were all I had. No one could do what we all wanted to: turn back time's hands and undo the undoing of this boy.

I cried and cried for a boy I didn't actually know, the son of a woman I had never met. But whose words I knew. A woman like me: a blogger, a mother.

The mother is Anna See, of the blog An Inch of Gray.

Her son is/was Jack.

12.

Now, forever.

He was playing in his friend's yard. A back yard just a few houses away. Just a typical boy, at play. The creek had breached its banks. He tumbled in, was swept away.

And just like that, a light is snuffed out, a life is gone.

Unimaginable.

But not to me, the mother of an autistic son.

Tragedy is not distant, but in fact stalks me. It's the shadow that walks by my side always, the fear that because of his autism, because he understands the risks of the world so much less than a typical child of his nine years, my son Jacob will be lost.

Swept away.

That chasing a pigeon or ball bounced wrong he will run into the street...

That drawn to water, as so many autistic children are, he will step into a river too rapid, fall into a pool too deep...

That with his friendly, too trusting nature he would walk off with a seemingly kind stranger without a backward glance...

That, strong, willful boy that he is, he will loosen himself from my hand when we are in the ocean and be carried out to sea...

That, large boy that he is, he will walk up to an armed police officer, saying and doing something innocent but seemingly provocative when he is no longer a still cute 9 year-old but a six-foot-plus seeming adult teenager...

That, curious boy that he is, he will take one step too close to a raging, flood-swelled creek, and be swept away.

I know, I quake, that one short twist of fate could put me right into Anna's awful shoes.

So I weep for her, and for all the mothers who have lost their young.

And I hug my sons a little tighter, watch over them a little more hawk-like. Knowing it can never be enough. That the unforeseen moment of disaster can not, by its own nature, be seen, known, avoided.

But still, the instinct is there. The magical thinking: "I can keep my children safe."

But I live with these statistics: Autistic kids are often bolters, runners, escape artists. Approximately half of all autistic children wander, at least once. And the number one cause of death among autistic children that wander? Is drowning.

We like to think this cannot be us, our family. But it can be. In the blink of an eye, a moment's distraction; a step taken into exactly the wrong place at the wrong time.

Anna is an incredible woman, capable of tagging her memorial post for her son "thank you for loving us" as well as "heartbroken."

So go there, now, leave her family your love.

Write your own post for Anna, and link up here, where Kate of The Big Piece of Cake is gathering them all. (And read them.)

Our hearts pull toward Anna's. We offer words of solace knowing they can never fill the empty son-shaped space on this earth.

But they are what we have to offer her.

Our words of love.

Our prayers, from those who pray.

Our sisterhood, no less real because it is digital, ethereal.

As her son is no less real, now that he lives on in memory, in spirit, and on Anna's blog, smiling his incandescent smile.

Beautiful boy.

Forever 12.

(Anna, you and your family are in my heart, tonight and forever.)


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