Moving into the New Year

I keep having a recurring dream about moving, which seems benign on its own, but I actually classify it as a nightmare. I’m usually surrounded by half-filled boxes, fretting about how much packing I still need to do and thinking about how little time I have left. Sometimes Mom makes an appearance in the dream, which just makes the dream that much more distressing.

Then I wake up in my bed, with Stephen next to me. I remember that I am perfectly settled in my home. My family is sleeping peacefully and there are no boxes to pack, no movers to arrange, no physical upheavals coming. Nothing is is waiting to be dismantled and packed away.

Except, of course, there was. Moving out of my childhood home almost four years ago nearly broke me. Then Mom died amd so much of my life became about figuring out what to do with the things she left behind. Not just her belongings, but the life that had existed when she was still here. There was suddenly a before and an after, and somehow I had to pack up the before while continuing to live in the after.

Maybe that is why my brain keeps returning to moving. Grief is its own kind of relocation. You don’t choose it, and you don’t get enough time to prepare. One day you simply discover that the place you have lived your entire life no longer exists, and you are expected to gather what you can carry and make a home somewhere else.

In some ways, that is what we are asked to do at Rosh Hashanah.

Every year, we arrive at the threshold of a new year carrying boxes of our own. Some are filled with things we are eager to bring with us: people we love, moments of joy, lessons we have learned, traditions that ground us. Others are heavier. Regrets. Grudges. Mistakes. Losses. Versions of ourselves we have outgrown but haven’t quite figured out how to leave behind.

The High Holy Days ask us to open those boxes and take inventory.

What is worth carrying into the year ahead? What have we been dragging from place to place simply because we don’t know how to put it down? What needs to be repaired before we pack it away? What do we need to leave behind so there is room for something new?

Teshuvah is often translated as repentance, but more literally it means return. And I have always found something comforting in that. The Jewish year does not demand that we become entirely new people. It asks us to return, to ourselves, to one another, to God, to the people we are still trying to become.

But return becomes complicated when the place or person you most want to return to is gone.

No amount of teshuvah will bring Mom back. No amount of reflection or prayer can return me to the world in which I could call her, ask her a question, tell her something ridiculous that happened, or watch her be a grandmother.

So I have had to learn another kind of return.

I return to her through stories. Through the things she taught me without realizing she was teaching them. Through the pieces of her I recognize in myself and the pieces I hope Eliza might someday recognize in herself. I cannot go back to the home I had when she was alive, but I can carry parts of that home into the one I am building now.

And I have built a home.

I have a husband and children and rooms filled with our own memories. There are toys and books on the floor and dishes in the sink and a pets running about, all the ordinary evidence of a life being lived. I am happy and rooted here.

Perhaps that is another lesson of Rosh Hashanah: beginning again does not mean beginning empty-handed.

We enter the new year carrying everything that has made us who we are, both the sweetness and the sorrow, the people who are beside us and the people whose absence has become part of us. We cannot bring everything forward. But neither are we asked to abandon everything that came before. Our task is to decide what is sacred enough to carry.

And yet, somewhere in my subconscious, I am apparently still standing among those half-filled boxes, terrified that I am running out of time and that I have forgotten something important.

Maybe Mom appearing in the dream is the answer to what that something is, because she is the one thing I could never pack into a box and bring with me.

But as another year begins, I am realizing that maybe I didn’t have to. There are just some things we carry differently.

Shanah tovah!