What does it mean to be “dead / but not”—marooned on the border between being and having been? In “Kaddish for the Living,” a daughter faces her mother’s disappearance into dementia (memory by memory, skill by skill) with heartbroken tenderness. Jacobs reminds us that the Mourner’s Kaddish makes no reference to death. Perhaps the power of the prayer lies in its context: as we say the words that countless Jews have said before us, we acknowledge the universality of grief while honoring our own singular loss.
—Jody Bolz, Poetry Editor
KADDISH FOR THE LIVING
While Abraham and Isaac were up on the mountain,
Satan dropped by to schrödinger Sarah,
saying her son was dead
but not—
unable to hang on that particular cliff, her heart
plunged over and, before the story’s end,
stopped. Stopped
as a perpetual motion machine
given in to its impossibility—
though how we love
the myth of them, how we believe our bodies are,
until they, abruptly, aren’t. Like the brakes
on my bike, which the mechanic said were
worn to paper, worn out
from working so well for so long. Like
my mother’s mind.
Like Isaac, my mother is dead
but not: the automatic operations
lost—driving, turning on a stove, following
a plot—while the ingrained etiquette
remains. Lawyer-wife-mother no longer
yet still a sweet shadow in the soundtrack
of every call home. In the Mourner’s Kaddish,
death is not mentioned, just praise and petitions
for peace. Though only noon, I tuck her into bed.
And though she breathes beside me,
I am saying goodbye.
There is so much guilt in my grief. But, oh,
I mourn her—I mourner—while I still hold her
in my arms. While I fit
my body to hers. Like a cloak. Like a shield.
Like she taught me.
Jessica Jacobs is the founder of Yetzirah, a nonprofit literary organization for Jewish poets. She is the author of Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going and Pelvis with Distance. Her third book, unalone—a collection of poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis—is forthcoming from Four Way Books in March of 2024.
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