Dear Brandeis community,

 

December 1 is my mother’s yahrzeit—8th this year, always attuned in age with my older daughter Sonia, who shared three weeks on this earth with her. And so I sit this morning in the light of this computer screen and a yahrzeit candle just lit shining from the kitchen, thinking of Allen Ginsberg’s opener to his Kaddish for his mother:

 

Strange now to think of you, gone without corsets and eyes, while I walk on the sunny pavement of Greenwich Village.

 

It would have been weird to ever think of my mother in a corset—she was not a woman much concerned with the traditional trappings of the feminine—but there remains still, these eight years on, the almost somatic estrangement of realizing again that she is not here, walking these foggy or sunny streets with us. We do more than miss the family we lose, I think. As Helen McDonald put it, beautifully, in for H is for Hawk, which I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere in these pages,

 

There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things. And then comes a day when you realize that it is not how it will be at all. You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realize, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are.

 

That shining dullness is always particularly close at hand for me around Thanksgiving—the last family holiday we shared with my mom. And so my siblings and I make a point of being together when we can, and of reaching out to each other when we can’t. This year several of us congregated at my dad and stepmother’s home in Santa Cruz (including my 93-year-old grandmother, who I picked up from the Jewish Home here in SF), and had ourselves a day—beautiful food, bountiful pies, excellent beer (I brought a growler of Magnolia Brewing Company’s Proving Ground IPA, which I recommend), and cousins tumbling together in play.

 

And football, of course, that most U.S.-American of gladiatorial exhibitions. Growing up in the Bay Area in the 1980s, before we all knew so much and felt so uncomfortable about concussions and their impact on athletes’ brains, I watched the ballet of the West Coast offense as it came into being with Bill Walsh’s 49ers teams. The calm of Joe Montana, the effortless grace of Jerry Rice. So while I don’t make time for much football anymore (and the 49ers are a depressing sideshow to actual football, anyway), I do enjoy it as a backdrop to Thanksgiving.

 

This year I was struck not so much by the games themselves but by one of the commercials that seemed to be on repeat in the interstices. It was for a Samsung VR set, which seems to consist of a phone and a pair of large goggles with which to strap said phone onto your face (insert joke here, which my brother-in-law did, about the merits of strapping something onto your face that has had issues lately with spontaneously exploding). The subjects in the commercial were largely older, though always in connection with younger people nearby (around a couch, sitting on a stoop)—grandparent-aged people who would wear these devices in the commercial and wave their arms around or sit in amazement, facsimiles of awe. The commercials clearly wanted to communicate the wow moment of virtual reality—of feeling, in your body, that you are suddenly elsewhere, in a different world. I suppose the generational argument being made is that such fun is not just for kids.

 

As an educator and as a parent, watching these commercials is both terrifying and exciting. I see the power of immersion—of not just teaching about ancient history, but actually (virtually) walking through ruins as you do so. Of sitting (virtually) in the Globe theater to see Romeo and Juliet performed. Of building (virtual) bridges and watching trains chug across them to test your learning in 4th grade about weight and measurement and physics. What power, what possibility. And at the same time, I see these people reaching their hands out to grope at empty air and I wonder what is the loss, the absence, that they are feeling for in that virtually full hole. Will we sit there in that imagined future across an imagined table, and talk with the loved ones we’ve lost, rather than light candles and sit with the holiness and the brokenness of their being gone?

 

I have been listening to Leonard Cohen a fair bit in the weeks since his passing, though usually doing so fills me with a sweet sadness. Last night as I drove to meet with a group of poets working on translating prayer into poetry, I listened to Hallelujah, thinking of my mother. This verse in particular resonated as it rang out in my car:

 

You say I took the name in vain

I don't even know the name

But if I did, well really, what's it to you?

There's a blaze of light in every word

It doesn't matter which you heard

The holy or the broken Hallelujah

 

He had such a talent for celebrating the connection between the light and the dark, the same flickering and dissipating here in my living room as the sun slowly rises to greet the day. Holy, holy, holy—even the loss, even the fear, and all those whose absence fills our days.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of blazing light, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan