Not Everyone Gets To Be An Orphan
It occurred to me as I stood at the bathroom sink, getting ready to dry my hair, that this will be my first Thanksgiving as an orphan. It’s already been my first birthday, my first Jewish New Year, and my first Day of Atonement as a parentless child. Now it’s the day before Thanksgiving, the American holiday most about the ingathering of families, and the counting and admiring of generations. This year, I’m missing an entire generation on my side, the source of everything for me.
Our Thanksgiving table will be small. There’s this general assumption that tables grow bigger as your kids grow older, that more people show up, whether spouses, grandkids, or other extended “family,” however one defines that. In our case, our eldest is living abroad, our middle child is autistic and has no friends to invite, our daughter’s boyfriend is with his family in Philadelphia for the holiday, and my parents are deceased, z’l.
On my husband’s side, only his eldest sister hosts family gatherings, and I’ve begged off for years now, for reasons long in the making. My daughter, however, will show up Thanksgiving afternoon at my sister-in-law’s house to be with her cousins, including my brother-in-law’s kids. That table will overflow with generations, including my mother-in-law and a whole flock of grand-and great-grand-kids.
There’s a part of me that feels a pang about that, about not being a part of such a big gathering. My eldest sister is going to her sister-in-law’s for the holiday, and my younger sister is not part of my life, so we won’t be seeing each other. I suppose this all sounds terribly dysfunctional, but the longer I live, and the more I learn about life, the more I think it’s just one among many stories about how families are. In fact, my daughter invited to our Thanksgiving dinner a friend estranged from her own family, who live just a subway ride away. There’s every kind of family in the world it seems, every kind of coming together and separating.
As I stood at the bathroom sink, I thought specifically of one kind of separation, the kind that is permanent, that cannot be undone. There were fifteen years — almost exactly — between my father’s passing and my mother’s. I was very close to my father, and have felt his absence literally every day since he left me. My mother’s passing I still count in months. She and I were not close, I think it’s fair to say, though I do believe I made some kind of peace with her in her later years. She became so much less cantankerous, playful even. And something my eldest said at her graveside funeral in January 2021 hit me hard, and with deep truth. He noted that my mother never judged anyone because she herself was so judged by others. If I unpack that, I’m not sure it’s perfectly true. But I can say that she provided unvarnished encouragement and support to my kids, only praise to my husband, and her version of support to me. She didn’t quarterback my parenting, my marriage, or any of my other choices. And she didn’t traffic in gossip. She asked year upon year after the same people who never asked after her. So kudos to my son for seeing goodness (not to mention wacky humor) in his Grandma Ruth, z’l.
As for his Papa Jack, z’l, my son was much younger when his grandpa died, but has embodied him in almost eery ways since. Not just the way he looks — the limited hair on his head, the toothpick in his mouth mannerism — but his essence too, I think. My other kids also have an awful lot of Mogilnik in them. No offense meant to my husband. But I joked to him years ago that my genes just kind of pummeled his. And I think for the most part, he’s learned to live happily with that.
So where does all this leave me? I’m all Mogilnik, and the Mogilniks from which I came are all gone. And now my mother, on the Bass side, is gone too. Inheritance and loss is a strange thing. We grow up making assumptions about how life might be. One of those is how tables might expand through time, about how families only grow. As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I know that to be a lie. Some families are fated, it seems, to become catastrophically small, if not gone altogether. The shoots and small branches that have grown up from the genocide from which I came to be are not terribly numerous, so every loss, every empty seat at every table, can feel excruciatingly hard to bear. But there is at least one thing I know to be true: not everyone gets to be an orphan. Which means not everyone gets to grow up with two parents, knowing two parents, tolerating two parents, rejecting two parents, rebelling against two parents, leaning on two parents, learning from two parents, embracing two parents, loving two parents, having two parents leave them. And for that bit of ordinary heartbreak, I hope to be able to find a way to be grateful, this Thanksgiving. And always.
