For Small Creatures Such as We by Sasha Sagan

Author:Sasha Sagan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

chapter nine

Anniversaries & Birthdays

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

—MARK TWAIN, allegedly

A few years ago, when my grandpa Harry was at the end of his life, I came home to Ithaca to be with him. He was 99, but until very recently he had been preternaturally, almost jarringly youthful. So much so that despite his very advanced age our whole family felt confident he still had a good number of years ahead of him. His mother lived to be almost 102, and that was thirty years ago. He could surely make it to 103 or 104. He’d only stopped driving a few months before. But the reality was that his kidneys were failing and he decided against dialysis. He was a lifelong lover of things of very high quality and in the end he chose quality over quantity. I spent his last few weeks in Ithaca relishing time with him as he slipped away. It was very difficult knowing it was a one-way street leading, sooner or later, to loss. I was an emotional wreck but tried to be positive for my granddad. Jon came on the weekends, which helped. Grandpa Harry was increasingly mixed-up and sleepy, in and out of lucidity. One day he turned to me and asked very frankly, “Who’s having a baby?”

“I don’t know,” I said, smiling.

Jon and I had been trying to get pregnant for about six months. I thought maybe I would take a test in a few days and get to tell my granddad that I was pregnant before he left us. Two days later he slipped into a state somewhere in between life and death. I got my period that morning. Then he died. I was devastated and heartbroken. I had thought losing my grandpa would be easier if I was able to tell him he had a great-grandchild on the way. But that was not to be.

And instead of planning for a baby, we had to plan a funeral on October 28.

English is missing a concise, simple word that means “death day,” or the anniversary of someone’s death. But Yiddish has one: yahrzeit. In Judaism, there is a traditional candle lighting on the yahrzeit of a loved one, using special candles that burn for twenty-four hours. It’s the paradoxical antithesis of a birthday candle that gets blown out right away. From the time I was small, my mother taught me to light yahrzeit candles to commemorate Rachel, Tillie, Benjamin, and other ancestors I had only known from pictures and stories. As I grew and lost people I knew and loved, I had my own grief and lit my own yahrzeit candles. I love this tradition because it feels like a miniature version of dead stars that appear to twinkle even after they’re long gone. When someone we love dies here on Earth, the news can take a long time to absorb. It’s shocking. Something about that small light gives us the appearance that they’re not all the way gone yet.

We do something like this on a countrywide scale, too.

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