Where we put our grief
Reflections on land, identity, and tradition for Passover + my Dad's Yarhzeit
Today is the anniversary of my Dad’s death. Six years ago today my sister, Jordyn, and step sister, Jess, and my BIL, Joel, stood by his bedside in a large, roomy hospice room in Little Rock, Arkansas. We held his hands, and each other’s, while he took his last, quiet, gentle, breaths. We played Willie Nelson and wept, holding each other.
The staff at the hospice center prepared his body for transportation while we made emotional phone calls to his cowboy friends we hardly new and family we hadn’t seen in decades, sharing the news. As his body was moved for transfer and put into the van that took him to the funeral service building, the hospice folks did this marvelous and surprising thing. The hospice staff lined the halls and each member had a white rose. They held their roses up in the air as he was wheeled out and placed in the van. I think they might have sang something? I don’t remember. It was gorgeous and made us feel so special.
I am good at missing my Dad, I’ve been grieving the loss of him in my life since my parents spilt when I was 8 years old. I know how to feel him close, I know how to connect with the memory that I have of him. I am probably, truth be told, better at missing him than I was at being with him. I tell my kids the stories he told me. He was an artful storyteller, my Dad. It’s how I know where I come from: he told me. Over and over again (insert adolescent eye roll here), whether I wanted to hear it or not. I am so grateful for those stories. I am so grateful to be his kid. Truly.
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The year that my Dad was dying (lung cancer, he was the Marlboro Man so that diagnosis was expected) I moved room by room, closet to closet, organizing, purging, making order where I could. That helped. For the first year after he died I contained my grief, allowing myself to access it in the following ways + places: when listening to county music, when doing yoga, when physically in Arkansas. That worked out for me. Now I lean into the yearly anniversary and let myself have it. I put my grief there and it fits into mostly one day now. Somehow, mostly, miraculously.
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This year the anniversary of my Dad’s passing (Yarzheit) overlaps with the first day of Passover. I love this holiday. It was my gateway drug into Judaism. A long, leisurely meal with a book you read together with friends talking about social justice you say? Hell yes, sign me up, I said quickly without ever looking back.
I love being Jewish. I chose it, that helps, I think. I love Passover, too. The first Seder that I hosted was in Hanoi, Vietnam in 2005. Adam and I were living there doing public health work. My soonish to be in-laws were visiting and brought us matzah, Manischewitz, and horseradish. We sat on the floor with Adam’s boss (also a Jew) and her family, a friend visiting from Portland, and Adam’s parents reading about an exodus into a desert of a people who’d been enslaved. We talked about the history of Adam’s family as holocaust survivors, many who didn’t make it, and about how essential it is that that story be told each year. I learned that day, sitting on the floor on Vietnamese silk cushions, that the holocaust is the connective tissue in Adam’s family. Like our family land in Arkansas is for part of mine.
We moved from Vietnam to Israel where Adam would go to medical school. We lived in a sandy, dirty hamlet called Be’er Sheba. We made friends that will last a lifetime. We ate GREAT food, everyday, easily and cheaply. We traveled to Asia, Africa, other places in the Middle East, and Europe easily and cheaply. We had a baby. In Israel. The easy part of this travel was 100% a result of our American Passports that we used liberally with wild abandon.
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That kid, our first kid, Naz, named after the city where he was born, is bound to the land of Israel now in a way that I simply cannot understand. We took him back there in the spring of 2022 for his Bar Mitzvah. Showed him around, took him to where he was born, the first house he lived in. He met the family we lived with during his first war (he was two months old). We ate shawarma, floated in the Dead Sea, and he was Bar Mitzvah’d at the Kotel in Jerusalem. We spent time in the West Bank in Ramallah with a dear Palestinian friend that I organized coexistence work with. We then headed to Egypt from there, in great part to ensure that he and his brother could experience first hand the “truth” (who’s truth, right????), significance, and power of this region and find their own stories there. Writing this this morning I am hit with fresh and old grief knowing/remembering that that trip we so easily enjoyed won’t be possible for a long time and for many, it never was possible for many others, as well.
I believe that part of the reason I can separate my love of people and “place” ie government and leadership in the Middle East, is because I do not have an ancestral lineage to bind me to this place. My personal, chosen brand of Judaism and my own identity as a Jew is not linked to Israel. I converted while living in Vietnam. I lived in Israel not because I was Jewish but because my Most Beloved wanted to study Global Health at a place that just happened to be in Israel. While living there I spent my time working toward coexistence, justice, and learning from women who had ancestral skin in the game, as one might say, and I listened. Deeply. Then decided that it wasn’t any of my business what happens there anymore than it is in Burma or Pakistan or Haiti or any other colonized place. That my role there was to love, care for, and listen to those who are in danger and show up for them on their terms.
This is not the same for most of the Palestinians, Jews, and Israelis that I love and it’s hard for me to understand. But I think I found a way to relate more deeply, recently. Since this most recent war has started I have found myself comparing my binding to the ancestral land that my family owned for five generations in Arkansas as being of a similar design to the binding of those who feel bound to the land Israel and Palestine. I have the river that I grew up on tattooed on my arm. When I cross the state line into Arkansas I cry, every time. This is place is 100% where I am from. It holds my heart and soul, much of my family, and most of my most formative memories. It is a deeply complicated place. The first town I lived in in Arkansas is a place called Harrison. It’s a sundown town and is often referred to as the most racist town in America. This is where I am from.
I love Arkansas with my whole being. Hard, dark, harmful history and all. The land I grew up on in Arkansas was taken from Indigenous people that we didn’t think about. I still have no idea how the super low-income family that I come from was able to acquire this land while newly freed slaves did not (a research project I am working on, stay tuned). I was told that this land, our land, was my inheritance, my birth right. That to defend and protect (and expand) it was to be my greatest priority (sorry, Dad).
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Israeli kids, Palestinian kids, they are told the same things. Probably kids all over the world are told this. Its a tale as old at time: owning land will keep you safe during hard times. Buy it, protect it. Do not give it up. At any cost.
This is what I am thinking about this year at Passover. I am thinking about what reparations means for both my Arkansas family and my Jewish family. I am thinking about the ancestors that my kids come from and how their identities were/are linked to land, place, a people. In Arkansas and in Holland and in Israel in North Dakota, in Germany in The Czech Republic in Vermont and now in Texas.
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The Passover Seder, it seems to me, was designed as a community container for grief. It is an agreed upon place to be in your feelings about loss and in your cups should that be your thing. It is a thoughtful, curated invitation to go where you don’t go on other nights and even, generously, offers you a way back to yourself at it’s closing.
I will drink a shitty beer for my Dad today and then a few hours later we will Seder while eating foods linking us, through story, to places and people who are offering us lessons about justice, community, and forgiveness. I will bring my grief into the Seder, that is a very appropriate place for it, and I will share it with others. I will not be lonely in my grief on this night, on this day.
What places, what grief, beauty, and sense of self, links my kids to land in the places that they love? What struggles are they seeing themselves in as we read the Haggadah? Why? These are the questions that I am bringing into Passover with me this year. I will meet my grief there, at the Seder table. I will pour it some wine and we will listen to each other. Then, we will put it away, moving from there with more understanding of ourselves and hopefully (always) with more empathy for each other.
L’ Chaim + Chag Sameach + bottoms up, y’all!