Tonight will mark the first yahrzeit of my mother Dr. Eva Doreen Orlow z”l. In the last years of her life my mother lived with a myriad of competing physical and mental challenges. My experience of the Shiva process was remembering who she was before her decline. I needed to get back the cloud of who she had become at the end of her life and center my memory of her around who she was for the rest of her life. My mother was as her namesake Eve, the mother of life and filled with life. She was a firecracker, bursting with energy.

But as we come back around to the anniversary of her death I cannot escape the pain and sadness of her end.

This moment presents me an opportunity to reflect on this year. Over the last few months I have meditated on the music that my parents introduced me to throughout my life as a way of connecting to them. They were both involved in starting the first Philadelphia Folksong Festival. For reasons I cannot track down I am drawn to old music anew. Recently have found myself listening to David Bromberg‘s cover of Linda Ronstadt‘s Nobody’s on a loop. David Bromberg is one of those artist that my mother introduced me to at an young age. This song was on David Bromberg Band’s Midnight On The Water album and I can still vividly recall this record album cover. This is an old memory. Hell I can even smell it. That is powerful.

It is completely worth a listen:

In this melancholy song he explores a relationship with a woman he new. But alas she is in pain and suffering. This song gives me all the feels. And listening to this song now takes on new meaning. There he sings:

She hides the hurt as they leave her
And then she takes everything that her system can stand

Didn’t she think that I’d seen someone in pain before?
She’s dying and she knows it
She’s dying and she shows it on the outside now

Whatever happened to the girl that was?
Did she go inside, because it’s cold out here?

I never understood, what is the inside and out side that he is referring to here? This got me thinking about Perkei Avot. There we learn:

Rabbi Jacob said: this world is like a prozdor- vestibule before the world to come; prepare yourself in the prozdor- vestibule, so that you may enter the banqueting-hall. (Avot 4:16)

Between all of the wars and all of the strife this last year I take solace in the fact that my mother was not around to witness it. On her first yahrzeit, I miss my mother and I am pleased that she is no longer in pain, physically, mentally, and psychologically. I am happy that she has “gone inside” and has passed from this world to the next. In her absence I wonder, “Didn’t she think that I’d seen someone in pain before?” How do we deal with all the pain out here?