The Kaddish has been my best friend this past year, always with me, sometimes 3 times in a day, and when I miss saying her I am in a true fog, as if I am walking around alone, without meaning or connection.
She allows me to feel-to focus-to remember-to open-to offer gratitude within a relationship with my mom which was not often possible to experience. Reciting the Kaddish has been my way to continue my conversation with my mother, my dead mother.
I was her daughter, then her caregiver, worrying, fussing, trying to fix, embarrassed by her difficulties, tortured by the pain she was in and caused. Now that she is dead, I am a mourner. I mourn my mother. But now I can finally connect with her. When I recite the Kaddish I help her soul rest and ascend, so she can find that peace I don’t know if she ever experienced even before the dementia, even before the psychosis, and the paranoia.
The Kaddish is a gift to me….it allows me to be the daughter I couldn’t be in her lifetime. Soon I will have to find other ways to love my mother. Soon the Kaddish will let me go and assume I am ready to be a new kind of daughter. Finding my way on my own, still wearing her jewelry.
And yet, every year, five times a year, in the midst of a holy day or on the anniversary of the day she closed her eyes forever, the Kaddish will hold my hand again and say,
“now” “now is the time to send your mother’s soul even higher, it’s OK.”
I will probably still be wearing her jewelry, but in a new way, or with something new, but the Kaddish, my dear friend, steadfast, and reliable, will not be surprised.
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