There is a particular quality to grief that arrives not in a wave but in a season. You are going about your life — efficiently, even cheerfully — and then the light changes. It happens every year at roughly the same latitude of the calendar, and you recognize it before you can name it: the way the afternoon empties out earlier, the specific color of the sky in late afternoon, the smell of something cooling in the air that was warm just weeks before. Your body knows what your mind has not yet consciously acknowledged. Someone is missing again. Or rather — more precisely — you are again in the part of the year when you most notice that they are gone.
My father died in October. Not last October, not recently — it has been long enough now that I have stopped counting the years in a way that feels urgent. But October still does this to me. Not every October and not the whole month, but there are days, usually when the light is doing something specific and beautiful and irreversible over the Charles, when I feel the loss as though it were fresh. Not with the acute, destabilizing pain of the early months after his death, but with something quieter and, in its own way, harder to manage: a simple, clear, unadorned awareness of his absence. He would have liked this light, I think. He always noticed the light.
The Jewish calendar is not designed to let you forget. This is, I have come to believe, not a flaw but a feature — and one of the more psychologically sophisticated features of a tradition that has been thinking seriously about grief for a very long time. Yahrzeit, the annual observance of a death, requires you to stop once a year and be present with your loss. You light a candle. It burns for twenty-four hours. You say Kaddish if you are able, or you sit with the memory if you are not. The calendar insists on a formal encounter with grief at regular intervals precisely because grief, left to its own devices, tends either to be suppressed until it erupts or to become so ambient that it loses its specificity and simply becomes a gray quality of daily experience. The Yahrzeit says: not today, not in the background. Today, this person. Today, this loss. Today, you stop and remember.
There is wisdom in this that I did not fully appreciate until I had lost enough people to notice the pattern. The first year after a death is often survivable precisely because the loss is so total, so present, so undeniable that it organizes everything around itself. The second year is frequently harder. The acute grief has softened enough that the world expects you to have moved on, and perhaps part of you expects the same thing, but the loss has not actually resolved — it has simply become less visible, less socially legible, more privately yours. And then the anniversaries come, and the seasons, and the particular quality of light in October, and you discover that the grief was never gone. It was waiting for the calendar to call it back.
I have been thinking lately about what it means to carry someone who is no longer living — not as a burden, which is the metaphor grief culture tends toward, but as a practice. Something deliberate. Something that requires effort and attention and, on certain days, courage. Because remembering someone well is not passive. It is not simply the automatic retrieval of pleasant memories whenever the right trigger appears. It is an active, ongoing relationship with a person who can no longer participate in the relationship on their own behalf — which means that you are responsible for both sides of it, at least sometimes, in the way that you might be responsible for holding the thread of a conversation when the other person can no longer speak.
My father was a man of specific enthusiasms and specific opinions, and he expressed both with a directness that some people found uncomfortable and that I found, by turns, exasperating and deeply reassuring. He had views about the right way to make a hard-boiled egg, about the relative merits of various New England coastlines, about the precise moment in a negotiation when you should stop talking and let the silence work. He had a story about every situation, and the story was never quite the same twice — not because he was careless with the facts, but because he was sensitive to what the particular moment needed, what lesson or what laughter was called for, and he adjusted the telling accordingly. He was, in this way, a better storyteller than he would have admitted to being.
I remember sitting with him once at a table not unlike this one, in the kind of deli that has largely disappeared from Greater Boston — the kind where the waitress knows your name and the knives are always slightly dull and the menu is laminated and enormous and you somehow manage to order the same thing every time anyway. We were talking about something that felt important at the time and that I have since entirely forgotten, which is itself instructive: the content of many conversations disappears; what remains is the quality of attention. The way someone listens to you. The way they look at you when you have said something they find genuinely interesting — not politely interested, not performing interest, but actually arrested by what you said. He listened that way. It was one of the things I did not know to appreciate until I was old enough to realize how rare it was.
What I carry from him is not primarily the content of the stories, though I remember more of those than I would have predicted. It is the orientation. The attentiveness to what a situation calls for. The willingness to be direct about what you think. The habit of noticing the light. These are things he transmitted not through explicit instruction but through the accumulated weight of presence over decades, and they are now so thoroughly mine that I cannot always locate their origin. This is, I think, how the dead continue to participate in the lives of the living — not as memories that we retrieve and return to their filing cabinet, but as ways of being that have become indistinguishable from our own.
The Passover table was, in my family, the event that most concentrated what I mean by ritual as a container for grief. We had the same table, the same people, the same liturgy, the same food whose recipe my mother would never fully disclose because that would have eliminated the only leverage she had. Year after year, the structure was the same, and that sameness was not boring — it was load-bearing. The ritual held the shape of the family, year after year, so that you could see, clearly and without having to say it directly, who had been added and who was gone.
The empty seat is the most honest liturgical device. You do not have to explain it. It does not ask for words. It simply sits there, adjacent to the place where someone used to be, and the people around the table know. The first year the seat is empty, it is almost unbearable to look at. The second year, it is still hard but differently so — the sharpness has given way to something more like ache, which is less acute and more durable. By the fifth or tenth year, the empty seat has become part of the story of the table itself. Not healed, exactly. Not resolved. But absorbed into the ongoing narrative of the family's life together, the way a scar is absorbed — still visible, still the record of something that happened, but no longer an open wound.
My mother, in the years after my father died, continued to set the table the same way she always had. Same cloth, same candlesticks, same arrangement of the flowers she grew herself, which varied by year and by what had survived the New England winter but were always, somehow, purple or yellow or both. I asked her once whether it was hard to keep doing it — whether the sameness of the ritual made the absence more painful or less. She thought about it for a moment with the particular expression she had when a question had genuinely interested her, and then she said: "Less, I think. Because when I'm doing it, I'm not only doing it now. I'm doing it all the other times, too. He's there in all the other times."
I have thought about that answer more times than I can count. I think she was describing something true about how ritual works in the context of grief — how it collapses time in a way that ordinary experience does not, so that the present moment contains, simultaneously, all the previous performances of the same act. When you light the Yahrzeit candle, you are not only lighting this year's candle. You are lighting every candle you have lit for this person, and through the act of lighting, you are briefly in the presence of all the years at once. This is not magic or mysticism. It is what repetition does to experience when the repetition is charged with meaning.
The clinical literature on grief has shifted considerably in the past two decades. The stage model — the idea that grief follows a predictable sequence from denial through anger and bargaining and depression to acceptance — has been largely superseded by research showing that grief is neither linear nor universal. People grieve differently. Some people experience prolonged, intense grief that impairs functioning for months or years; others move through loss more quickly without this reflecting any deficiency in love or in feeling. Most people oscillate: they move in and out of grief rather than progressing steadily through it, experiencing what researchers call the dual process of loss orientation and restoration orientation, alternating between confronting the loss and attending to the practical demands of continuing to live.
What the research has also established — and what strikes me as both clinically important and humanly true — is that grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a relationship to be maintained. The goal is not to reach a state in which the loss no longer affects you, because that state would require the erasure of something real: the actual significance of the person you lost, the actual weight of their absence from your life. The goal, if there is one, is to find a way to carry the loss that allows you also to carry everything else — to have grief as a part of your experience rather than the totality of it. This is what the rituals are for. Not to accelerate the resolution of grief, which cannot and should not be forced, but to give grief a form and a time and a place, so that it is held rather than suppressed, honored rather than indefinitely postponed.
There is a kind of courage required for this. Not the dramatic courage of crisis but the quieter courage of return — the willingness to come back, year after year, to the place in the calendar where you most feel what you have lost, and to be present with it rather than managing it from a distance. To light the candle. To set the extra place. To tell the story that everyone already knows but no one is tired of hearing. To let the grief be what it is, which is not a failure of healing but the truest measure of how much someone mattered.
I am writing this in October, which is when I always seem to find myself writing about this. The light is doing the thing it does — that specific late-afternoon gold that my father would have noticed and probably said something about, something that sounded like a complaint but was actually appreciation in his preferred idiom. I miss him with a clarity that I have come to recognize and even, in some years, to welcome. Not because missing him feels good — it does not — but because the clarity is a form of contact. In the missing, he is present. In the noticing the light he would have noticed, I am briefly his son again in the most immediate, unambiguous sense: standing in the same light, seeing it the way he taught me to see it, carrying forward something that would otherwise be lost.
This is what grief is for, I think, when it is working the way it is supposed to work. Not for suffering, not for proof of devotion, not for the endless rehearsal of loss. But for this: the continuing relationship with someone who shaped you, conducted across the medium of memory and ritual and the specific quality of October light. They are gone. The loss is real and does not resolve. And they are here, in the ways they always will be — in the table you set the same way every year, in the stories you tell that everyone already knows, in the light you notice because they taught you to notice it.
Each year at this time, you stop. You light the candle. You remember. And for as long as you do, they are not entirely gone.
At Boston Evening Therapy Associates, we work with individuals and families navigating grief and loss — including the particular grief that arrives not in crisis but in seasons, in anniversaries, in the recurring recognition of absence. If you are finding that grief is affecting your daily life, your relationships, or your sense of yourself, our clinicians are here to help. We respond quickly — we won't leave you waiting. Call us at 617-738-1480 or visit our contact page.
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