Passover, One Year Later

My mother, last Passover, in the hospital

Although I've spent my life as a non-observant jew, Passover has always been a big thing in my family. I don't recall exactly when my mother and sister inherited the holiday from my cousin Anne and began doing it in the house in Brighton, but it swelled in size, at times approaching 40 family members and friends. NO ONE did Passover like my mother and sister.

Last year, shortly before Passover, my mother fell ill, with what appeared to be a recurrence of the pneumonia she'd had in the fall. She was admitted to the hospital, but kept getting worse and worse. She and my sister Amy made the decision to have a slightly scaled-down Seder at the house anyway. At the last moment, I decided to skip it and spend the evening with my mother in the hospital. I drove in, bringing a guitar in the car, thinking that if she was dying, I'd sing to her. Realizing that this was what I was doing, I burst into tears as I put the guitar on the back seat of the car.

Instead, I found that they'd drained the fluid that had been building up around her heart and lungs, and she was suddenly and clearly a step-change better than she'd been in a week. She was surprised to see me, asking "Why aren't you at Passover with everyone else?" Typical; the fact that she'd otherwise be alone when her entire family was at HER HOUSE for Seder meant nothing to her. But she had a haggadah in her hospital room because she thought she'd work on it to trim the length of the service down for Amy. Again, typical, thinking about us, not herself. And the haggadah itself was a microcosm of my mother. She'd written it herself and had been refining it and tweaking it for years, folding in current issues of freedom and Palestinian rights.

So, neither my mother nor I had planned to "do Passover" in her hospital room—I hadn't brought a roasted shank bone or charoset or anything like that, not even a piece of matzoh—but that's what happened. I went out to the car and brought in the guitar. We did the entire service front to back. We sang all the songs (within my family, I do a legendary rendition of Chad Gad Ya). Then we just talked, the first of many long substantive conversations about our lives and her mortality.

You probably think she looks like hell in the photo below (which I took because family members at Passover kept texting me asking "How's Bim?"), and she does, but I see the opposite. This was in fact the start of a temporary rebound. She recovered from this bout, went back home, and for a time was doing pretty well. She lived for another three months before the underlying cause of the fluid buildup (amyloidosis) took her.

I look at this photo and see what was possibly the single most meaningful evening of my life.

So, this year, it's Passover via Zoom with the family. It is what it is. My sister Amy understandably had a lot of emotion surrounding the idea of doing it in the house without her anyway. And, the virus notwithstanding, it's perhaps appropriate in response to the tectonic shift of a world without my mother in it. But if she were still around, I'm sure she would've been working tirelessly to tailor an online Seder and the haggadah specifically for these new times.