The last Hanukkah with my mother
Some months more than others bring up old memories.
Some of them appear as vibrant as on the day they happened. The other day I
looked at the calendar and saw that Hanukkah is only twelve days away. Suddenly
it hit me, the memory of my last Hanukkah with my mother emerged from a faraway
memory land.
It was Hanukkah of 1999 when, for the last time, I
spent time with my mother.
We always went to Jerusalem to celebrate this holiday;
my husband our four girls and I together with my parents would lit the candles.
The girls, each had their own Hanukkiah. They got to choose the colors of the
candles, listen patiently to my father’s instructions which candle to lit
first. Then we placed the lit Hanukkiahs in front of the big window in the
living room, and the dancing flames framed our images in the dark glass.
My mother insisted on going through the ritual of
blessings and traditional songs, which we did rather hurriedly to make it to
the best part of the night; food and games.
Her homemade jelly donuts covered with fine powdered
sugar never looked like the store-bought ones but tasted so much better. The
dreidel games made for hours of fun.
That last Hanukkah did not feel the same. For the past
two years, my mother wasn’t herself. Irritated, forgetful, disoriented at
times. Even without an official diagnosis, we could tell. We went to Jerusalem like we did every year
but spent the night in an old monastery, in a small village on the outskirts of
town. We thought that the sense of adventure would distract the girls from the
fact that they couldn’t stay at my parents’ house. But the rooms with their
soaring ceilings and the thick walls of Jerusalem stone were bone freezing.
The lightning of the candles was a somber event that
evening. Did we know, in the way one sometimes sense things before they happen?
Less than two weeks later my mother passed away. The
windows of her hospital ward looked over the small village and the monastery
where we spent our last visit.
The day she was buried, the tenth day in the Jewish
month – Tevet, is also a day of mourning and fasting commemorating the
beginning of the siege of Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE, resulting in the
destruction of the first temple and later it became Memorial Day for Holocaust
victims whose date of death is unknown.
Completely irrelevant, perhaps.
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