Every year, as Pesach approaches, my phone fills up with messages. Emails from my children’s school and our shul, texts from friends, posts on social media-all of them wishing me a Chag Kasher V’Sameach, a joyous and meaningful holiday surrounded by family. I know these messages are sent with love. I know the people sending them mean well.

But they are hard to read.

Because my family looks different now. And most people do not know what that means, or how to talk about it.

Pesach is unique among the Jewish holidays in that its observance is centered in the home. Unlike Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur where we spend long services in shul, or Simchat Torah where we dance with the Torah, the observance of Pesach belongs to the home. We spend the days leading up to the chag cleaning our homes and preparing our kitchens. The primary observance, the Seder, takes place around our tables, within the walls of our homes.

And the Seder itself is built around children. “V’hegadita l’bincha”, and you shall tell your child. The Four Questions. The songs. The rituals designed to keep young eyes open and young minds curious. From the very beginning, the whole evening is shaped around passing something forward to the next generation.

This is why Pesach, more than any other time of year, brings my grief to the surface.

My daughter, Gavriella Esther z”l, died three weeks after her seventeenth birthday. Her death was sudden, and it shook our family and our community. Gavriella was funny and warm and deeply caring. She was the one in the family who was always trying to make everyone laugh, always looking out for her siblings, always the first one to notice if someone was having a hard day. 

She was, without question, my biggest helper when it came to the holidays. Gavriella had opinions about how things should be done, her way, and she was not shy about sharing them. As the years pass, I find myself clinging to the small details. She loved my mother’s Pesach rolls. When she was little she always asked me to make them for her. As she grew older she started making them herself. Every year, without fail, she reminded me that she did not like parsley. These are the memories that remain, and I hold onto them tightly. 

Now, when I need help in the kitchen, I have to ask. My other children help, and I am grateful for them. But it is not the same. Gavriella showed up with purpose.

This will be the fourth Pesach we are celebrating without Gavriella. Every year her absence is never more visible than in that empty chair.

People talk about the empty chair at the Seder. It is a powerful image in Jewish tradition. After the Holocaust, families left chairs empty to honor the millions who were lost. During the years of Soviet Jewry, empty seats represented those who could not celebrate freely. After October 7th, many families left a place at the table for the hostages. These acts of remembrance matter. They carry real meaning.

But for me, the empty chair is not a symbol. It is her chair. The one where she sat every year, the one where she made everyone laugh, the one where she wrinkled her nose at the parsley. That chair is empty now, and no amount of ritual or framing changes the weight of that emptiness when you sit down to begin the Seder.

In the first years after she died, I could not sing. Songs I had known since I was a child, songs I had sung at every Seder for as long as I could remember, stayed silent in me. I knew the words. I just could not reach them.

I have learned to sing again. But it takes effort, and I expect it always will.

What I have learned, slowly and not without struggle, is something that is actually inside the Pesach ritual. During the Seder, we spill a drop of wine for each of the Ten Makkot, the ten plagues that Hashem brought upon the Egyptians. We do this to acknowledge that even in our moment of liberation, we diminish our joy in recognition of the suffering of the Egyptians. The happiness of our freedom is real, but it exists alongside awareness of pain.

I think grief works the same way.

For a long time, I believed that if I could just get through the holiday, get through the cooking, the Seder, the songs, I could hold the grief at a distance. But grief does not work like that. And more than that, I have come to understand that I do not actually want it to. Because the pain I carry for Gavriella is inseparable from the love I have for her. If I close myself off to one, I close myself off to the other.

To feel joy, I have to let the grief stay. The joy I feel now is quieter than it was before Gavriella died. But I am able to feel it, and it is real.

So that is what my Pesach looks like now. I cook, even when I do not feel like it, because the holiday is coming anyway. I sit at a table that holds both Gavriella’s memory and her absence. I sing, even when my voice is unsteady. I tell the story to my children, because that is what we are supposed to do.

V’hegadita l’bincha. And you shall tell your child.

I tell it for all of them. Including her.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)