Closing One Door, Opening Another

by Linda Burghardt
Special To The Jewish Week

Like many homeowners, I live in a house with a front door I seldom use. Good friends and groceries come in through the side door, nearest the driveway. Only my mother, rickety with age but undiminished in drive, preferred the formality of the front door. And though I grumbled about moving the random matter that accumulated there between her visits, I never minded the sense of order I felt afterwards. That I privately drew a sort of sustenance from it was something I didn’t understand until, just before her 97th birthday, she was suddenly gone.

For someone as entrenched in midlife as I was, with a husband and two grown daughters of my own, I was surprised by how hard I found those first few motherless days. As a Holocaust survivor who’d lost her parents at Auschwitz, she’d spent little time examining her feelings or talking about mine. But just because the words never passed between us doesn’t mean the weight she carried didn’t somehow find its way from her shoulders to mine.

Each day as I pinned on the black mourning ribbon, I felt a stab of sadness bigger and deeper than the one before. After a week I called my rabbi.

“I want you to take a walk around the block,” he said, “to mark the end of the first mourning period. Call a friend and go together.”

Perhaps he couldn’t tell my smile was pasted on.

“Just step out the door on your right foot,” he continued, “go around the block and throw the black ribbon away. Then enter through the same door, with your right foot, to start a new chapter in your life.”
“That’s it?” I asked.

“Make sure you use the front door.”

“The front door,” I repeated. “But we never use it” — I swallowed — “anymore.”

“Promise me.”

I nodded, but I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know then, as he seemed to, that a parent’s death can be as much a prelude as an ending.

So when my neighbor Rose came by, through the side door, of course, I told her what he’d suggested. “Let’s go,” she said.

I shook my head, but she led me through the living room to the front foyer. Together we cleared the way and opened the door. Light poured in, almost as if it had been collecting there for days.
“Remember, right foot first,” she said.

As I stepped over the threshold, I felt myself momentarily suspended in time, one foot tipping toward tomorrow, the other leading back into a long-ago yesterday. My twin daughters, now 26, were newborns again, nestled in their double pram, and I was wheeling them past the hedges and out into the world, trying to quell my trembling doubts about my ability to mother. I would tell myself it would be fine, that my own mother would tell me how. But I never asked, knowing somehow in my body that it would make her remember the mother she lost.

Rose touched my arm. “Left or right?”

Not trusting my voice, I pointed west, toward where the sky was turning pink. But as we started walking I felt my mouth fill with words. Rose had raised five children; she would understand — not only about the sweet babies and the strong fears; not only about the strong bonds but the fragile anvil on which they were forged; not only about fragile love but about ambivalence; and, finally, about my mother.
“Rose,” I whispered, “what if I can’t let her go?”

We had come to a lamppost with a wastebasket nearby, but we walked around the block three or four more times before we stopped there and I unpinned the black ribbon from my collar and brought it to my lips.

Then I closed my eyes, stretched my arm over the basket and opened my grasp. Had I been a good daughter to my mother? Had she been one to hers? I knew so little, next to nothing, really. Not even if she had she felt strong and triumphant in her ability to survive, to live beyond her mother’s death, or whether it had somehow felt like betrayal.

I heard a plinking sound as the pin touched metal. Rose took my empty hand. The sky had turned a dark orange. I thought of my daughters, of how straight and strong they had grown. I thought of how they had sometimes rested their tiny hands between my breasts while they nursed, almost as if they were trying to touch the heartbeat beneath, and how it had seemed one day that all the wisdom I needed to mother them was right there. Perhaps I could find that place again, or let it find me.

We walked the rest of the way in silence, up onto the front step and in through the front door, right foot first, more nearly ready, this time, to start that new chapter.

Linda Burghardt is a Great Neck-based journalist and author who writes frequently about Jewish issues.

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