Anticipatory Grief

Can one say kaddish in advance?

After all,  yitagadal veyitkadash is in the imperfect tense

Or the jussive?

May His name be magnified, sanctified!

Each time I leave Jerusalem

The apartment, 

My father,

I hug his slender frame

His bones more and more prominent

Wondering if this is the last time I feel him

His warmth

His stature

His upright posture.

He too saw his father on that Viennese platform in 1938

Not knowing he would never see him again.

Now I replay this scene every time I leave Jerusalem.

An epigenetic wound I carry

A return to the primal scene of trauma

Played out in the next generation.

The pain is unbearable

The not-knowing insane

The slow decline observable now

A loss each visit of this or that.

This time a new unsteadiness on his feet

An ataxia of the soul readying for its dizzying flight to come.

He proudly shows me his new hobby

Having watched Mum, paint for years he has now taken up the art.

And drawing horse after horse in varying poses

His love of equus always expressed in my childhood

From dressage to that disturbing play in the West End

A psychic drama unfolding in the psychiatrist’s office

Of a young boy who violently enucleated a horse.

With a heart as heavy as a stone mountain

I take my leave

In the unknowing that characterizes my life more and more

As uncertainty bathes me like a dark shadow

In so many areas of my life

The only certainty is our mortality

And the slow dying of the leaves

In the chill of autumn.