Why couldn't my daughter ever come to me for Pesach?

Nechami: It’s true we’re not in crisis, but that does mean we can never host our children?

Tzivia: Don’t you realize that without the children we won’t have a semblance of a normal Yom Tov?

Tzivia

It’s been five years and I’m still trying to adjust to this new version of reality.

Okay, I guess to some extent, I have adjusted. I haven’t had a choice. But there are times of year that feel like they’ll always throw me for a loop, all the way back to the beginning, to that whirl of memories and stabbing pain and that sick, sick feeling of things will never be the same.

Of what have you done, and what will I do, and our family, what will be with our family?

It was just after Purim when he left.

I remember I’d been feeling exultant: it had been a great Purim, seamless and organized, and the seudah itself, which had been at my sister Chaya’s, had been lots of fun.

And there, standing in the kitchen, surrounded by cellophane and chocolate and ribbons, the girls busy upstairs, he’d coughed and stammered, and without looking at me, said the words that broke my life apart.

“I can’t do this anymore.” And then some other senseless things, something about years and years and it’s not working.

“It’s not me. I can’t live a lie.”

I’d looked at him stupefied, alternately freezing and then in a flash, boiling and burning, and wondered whether I was hallucinating (was I drunk? Had I accidentally taken something alcoholic at the meal), or wait, maybe he was drunk? But no, he was sober as could be, speaking broken words in a broken voice while I struggled to hold on to my fragmented thoughts. To the fragments of my heart.

I felt like I was having an out-of-body experience, watching him as he’d talked some more, offered the two most stupid, most senseless words in the entire dictionary: “I’m sorry.” Like it helped. Like it made a difference that he was sorry as he ripped apart the fabric of our family life with his bare hands.

Something inside me went numb that day, but it was a numbness punctuated by flashes of unbearable pain, sometimes when I expected it least.