Love and apology - The Jewish Standard

Yom Kippur…and my thoughts circle back like homebound birds to my departed parents and husband. Wingbeats of joy and sorrow, longing and regret. Today, this is what I’d say to them with both love and apology:

Dear Mom: In your final days, you spent your afternoons hunched over all those adult coloring books I’d brought for you, quietly filling in outlines of fanciful forests and gardens. I’d look over your shoulder, watching in silence as you added a few spare details of your own — a bird on a branch, a rabbit in the grass, a noonday sun, round and bright as a cherry, against a blank, white page of sky. You were like a child again, lost in your box of crayons, and after a lifetime of seeing you bring canvas and fabric to life, it filled me with sadness to see you so intently color in those lines. But it filled you with pleasure, and today, I regret it never occurred to me to pull up a chair to join you — to spend a quiet hour in that otherwise cheerless room, coloring together like we had when I was still your little girl.

Dear Dad: I remember two of you. In the morning, you were my dad the writer, squirreled away in your bedroom roost, tapping out tales while I listened at the door. But in the afternoon, abandoning your desk, you became my other, sunny dad, the one who belonged to me. We’d walk to the bakery, stop to chat with strangers, and on our way home, you’d tell me stories about time travel and the expanding universe, while we stood in the damp grass at the pond’s ragged rim, feeding scraps of warm bread to the hungry geese.

You led me to my life; passed all your sharp-edged sensibilities down to me, your blood to mine. And now, on long wooded walks, as I breathe in the bewitching world around me, I think of you and whisper: I’m finally catching up, walking in your shoes. But it pains me that your melody faded before mine essentially began. Your mind waltzed in a web of words, as mine does now, and I regret that I can’t answer your songs with ones of my own — songs I long to share — because everything that matters I learned at your knee.

Dear Sanjeet: You craved only the lightness of life, stitching your darkness deep inside. You were scarred in childhood by eyes that had seen too much, yet it made you tolerant and tender. In all our years of marriage, you never raised your voice. You remained calm in a crisis, knew when words were needed and when they were not — small gifts that made the rivers run smooth. Those waters, now silent and still, remind me how grateful I am for our days and daughters, who carry so much of you inside them. But a decade out and counting, there’s something that still keeps me up some nights. The memory of our final conversation.

The girls and I had just taken a train from Paris to Avignon and called when we arrived at the charming country house, nestled in a field of sunflowers, where we’d be lodging for a week. We were sad you hadn’t joined us because of your new job, but we texted you sun-filled photos of us laughing in the field. Later that night, at 3 a.m., my cell phone rang, bolting me awake. My mom was old and frail, so I answered with alarm, my heart beating in my throat. But it was you, cheerful and lively as ever, just calling to say hi. My first response was relief. But my second was profound annoyance because you hadn’t considered the difference in our time zones. And unlike you, who never raised your voice, I raised mine. “It’s the middle of the night here, hon,” I whined. “You woke us all up. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

But the next morning you suffered a catastrophic stroke, and we never spoke again. I mourn that call, which replays in my mind and ends the same way, over and over again — in unspeakable silence as your voice trails off and the line goes dead. If I could speak to you now, I’d tell you everything.

Rochelle Lazarus Saxena of Tenafly is a writer, artist, meticulous reader and crafter, and devoted mother of two creative daughters, Kiara and Alika. She graduated from Douglass College and served for decades as a PR and communications specialist in the nonprofit sector before she retired. Reach her at rochellelazarus6758@gmail.com

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