Illumination

Lighting a candle of remembrance, especially in the black night of winter, is a primal gesture. It says….I will look for you and find you, even though I don’t really know where you are. It says….the flame that you kindled inside me will always illuminate the darkness. If I came from a Catholic background, I would light a votive candle. But following the directives of my own culture, doing what I know how to do, I bought a yahrzeit candle at Big Y. I plan to light it for a friend who died last February. This in itself is transgressive. According to tradition, you only observe the yahrzeits of members of your immediate family. And when I say the Mourner’s Kaddish, an ancient rhythmic incantation in Aramaic, I’ll also be a rule-breaker. You only say Kaddish in the presence of a minyan of ten people. But I have always be an outlier, making it up as I go along, renovating the tradition so that it fits the chambers of my heart. I do what I have to do.

It tends to feel disruptive when I find myself wandering down the aisles past the oven cleaner and the English muffins in search of the Jewish department in the supermarket. We are far from Borough Park here, but even in the outer reaches of the diaspora people die and we want to remember them. Part of the disruption is a very low-grade, barely noticeable fear about asking for the Jewish stuff. Maybe this discomfort is elevated just now at this moment after the hostage stand-off in Texas and the banning of Maus in Tennessee. It only happens if I have to engage with mainstream commerce when I need to buy something particular to my lineage like a lamb bone at Passover or a yahrzeit candle on the anniversary of a death. I worry that the customer service representative at Big Y will give me a funny smile that masks not a revulsion, but at least a distaste, and that between us a chasm will open up revealing centuries of mistrust.

The candle comes in a small glass with a label affixed to the outside. The label says “made in China.” Historically, there have been Jewish communities in China, as well as Jewish communities in Chinese restaurants. I deeply regret that there were people in my extended family who would say of a Sunday evening, hey let’s go to the Chinks for dinner. We have all been on both sides of that exchange. Still, it never occurred to me that globalization would result in “made in China” yahrzeit candles. Somehow, the laws of the market have shaken down so that the best way to manufacture this item so that it can sell in Lee, Massachusetts for $1.09 is to make it in, yes, Wuhan.

I remember the candle my mother lit for my grandmother, appearing every spring and glowing faintly in the funk of the narrow hallway between the kitchen and the back bathroom on 83rd street. The candlelight was disembodied, deracinated, just something you did once a year. I buy the candles on an as-needed basis. I don’t like to stockpile them like cans of cat food. When the season comes around, I go out and track them down, usually one at a time, beginning the ritual in the supermarket parking lot. In the late fall, I buy two because my mother died in November and my father in December. I seem to recall overworked Chinese-speaking nurses in the facility in Berkeley where I last saw my mother ten days before she caught the flu that went marauding through the rooms of frail elderly. And my sister and I picked up take-out from Lingnan’s after they shut my father’s eyelids at New York Hospital twenty-eight years earlier. She said “we’re orphans now,” which of course wasn’t really true since my mother was home setting the gray formica kitchen table, waiting for her two fatherless daughters to come home with the consoling egg rolls and lo mein. We were all famished from grief and wolfed down the salty, greasy food which my father would have loved.

When I light a yahrzeit candle, as I will next week in memory of my friend, I watch it on the kitchen table on and off over the twenty-six hours that it miraculously burns. During the night, I get up to pee and there she is, my mother, reaching out to me, casting a glow. When the light is extinguished, I wrap the glass in newspaper before throwing it in the trash so my father isn’t lying there on top of old chicken bones. I remember my gifted friend, making space for a gratifying melancholy that rises up unexpectedly from the little glass shipped in from China.

Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.