[powerpress]
Tonight’s Kaddish is for a once-joyous household that is now in disarray.
My wife and I are getting divorced, and we’re taking turns having the house to ourselves while she prepares to move out. I returned home tonight after a weekend away to find boxes, emptied shelves, and the general mess of a joint household being disassembled and divided—a physical manifestation of the internal disassembly and divisions that we are also going through—we two people and our four critters.
I initially recorded this one the usual way, in a second track while listening to Mira’s previously-recorded spoken track, but this particular recording of Mira is quite brief and compact, so I had most of “Kaddish” left to play alone when Mira’s voice concluded. It was while playing the rest of the piece in this sonic loneliness that I realized the whole thing needed to have that loneliness, so for the mixdown, I moved the prayer to the front, to stand alone, and left the horn to stand alone as well—an aural reminder that the sadness in this situation stems of course from the loneliness, the profound personal and existential loneliness, that follows a division of lives like this one.
We grieve more than just death.
One reply on “daily kaddish: for a household”
Yes we do. Grief is about loss. The death of dreams, the death of an envisioned future, the death of “things as they were” and of the expectation that they would continue to evolve gradually. Grief is about discontinuity.