My Father’s Last Yizkor

T he doctors said it would be a year but we all knew it was my father’s last Yom Kippur.

That was the terrible autumn, and it followed our wonderful autumn the previous year: a birth, a bris, and a bar mitzvah, then a bas mitzvah; a time of growth and simchah and celebration. A time when we were all together, a magical, suspended moment — in hindsight — before things fell apart.

In shul that Yom Kippur, I wept for my dying father. He was in the hospital, getting chemo, and he wasn’t doing well. He’d withered over the summer while his diagnosis was delayed; by autumn, it was too late. A quick, agile man who’d never understood slowpokes and stammerers, he now walked and talked haltingly, with the yellowy, mummified air of a man struggling to remain with the living.

But that Yom Kippur, he was in the hospital — a foretaste of the years ahead when he wouldn’t be with us. I’d loved having him in shul while I was there, though he’d usually join a different minyan or a class instead — our shul believes in options. Just knowing he was there, somewhere, in the building, was a comfort.