My Mom's Yahrzeit

This past week, on the evening of December 22, David and I lit a yahrzeit candle for my mom.

This is a Jewish custom that takes place on the anniversary of the date of the loved one’s passing, when the mourner kindles a memorial candle that is to be lit for a 24-hour period, until it extinguishes on its own.

The date is based on the Hebrew lunisolar calendar, in which months are lunar but years are solar; on the Gregorian (or civilized) calendar, the date for the one and only Florence Cohen is January 10.

Without realizing why, I had channeled my inner Florence the night before the yahrzeit, when I had reached for the one pair of pajamas that always reminds me her. This set is flannel, has a matching top and bottom in a very colorful winter pattern (mine has snowflakes), and the top is short, boxy, is button down and has a collar.

On the morning of December 23, with the candle still burning, my daughter Allison called from work to ask a question about punctuation for a memo she was writing. The words she was writing were “members satisfaction,” and “members” in her correspondence was both plural and possessive.

She was pretty sure that the apostrophe would go after the “s” in “members,” but after debating it multiple times due to a co-worker’s questioning of it, she started to waver...should the apostrophe go before the “s?” Thus, the call for help.

For the minute or two that we talked about where to place the apostrophe, I became my mom. She, like I, had talked it through with our daughters and assuredly weighed in. In this case, using an apostrophe after the “s” (s’) at the end of a plural noun to show possession was definitely the way to go.

My mom was a master of the English language, and she was a stickler when it came to punctuation and grammar. I so appreciated that she could get me out of any kind of writing pickle I had created, but there were times she’d get carried away with the explanations and would lose me at “participle” and other verb tense rules that never fully sunk in.

The sense of déjà vu I experienced - with a twist, given that instead of my doing the asking, it was my daughter this time - on the date of my mom’s yahrzeit, was especially sweet.

I often wonder which memories of me my kids will hang on to.

Perhaps they’ll write a blog post about them one day.