This time last year, we knew that my mother wasn’t healthy. By the winter, it became clear that she was in mortal peril.
She tried to die twice before in my lifetime. Not from any conscious effort; simply from overly enthusiastic cellular structure. The kinds of cells that decide that maybe one thyroid isn’t enough, and we really should be trying for two. Or additional lymph nodes. Or, as in the current case, extra lung linings.
It has meant that when she and my father moved into my happily crowded home to begin hospice, we were particularly aware of some of the emotional arc that this moment may bring. And how beautiful and uncomfortable it can be.
This year has been an exercise in radical presence.
It turns out, when death moves into your guest room, it doesn’t ring the doorbell. It cozies up on the couch and asks what’s for dinner. My mother has always been a helpful guest — but now, in her eventual boredom with death’s constant companionship, she also happily folded the mountains of laundry that naturally arise in a house filled with four children. Nonetheless, her illness and impending death has a way of rearranging our interiors, both literally and spiritually.
What do you do when your life becomes a slow-motion goodbye?
Here in the US, we are not trained to do this well. American culture doesn’t hand us a playbook for watching a loved one die. We are great at productivity and constant, never-ending motion; we are not practiced at sitting with the overstuffed emptiness of existential dread. However, in Judaism, we exercise this skill once a year, on Yom Kippur.
Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, is the one day we’re asked to rehearse our own death. We wear white, we fast, we recite a confessional prayer (Vidui) traditionally spoken on one’s deathbed. We imagine, for a moment, what the world would be like without us—and how we might want to return to it, changed. And then, typically, 25 hours later, we go home and eat bagels and salmon and go back to checking our email.
But this year, we’ve been in a nearly year-long Yom Kippur of our family’s own making. A slow, beautiful, terrible rehearsal of goodbye. This is not spiritual theater; we are in the main event. This is the year we learned what it means to live with radical presence of the reality of what is. In our case, hosting death as a houseguest.
There are days when radical presence looks like existential clarity: sitting with my mother on the back porch, watching the light hit her cheekbones just right, and knowing—knowing in my bones—that this moment is a blessing. And there are other days where radical presence means I have to sit with the cold, metallic truth: my mother is dying, and there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop it.
The question, then, becomes not “how do I avoid this pain?” but “how can I swim with this weight without drowning?”
Psychologists talk about “anticipatory grief”—the mourning that begins before a loss has actually occurred. It’s a real, documented phenomenon, especially common among caregivers. It allows us to process parts of our grief in advance, giving the mind and heart a head start on the impossible. Jewish tradition, too, acknowledges this kind of living-liminality. The Talmud records the idea that a person should “repent one day before their death,” to which the obvious reply is: but how do we know what day that will be? The answer, of course, is that we should repent every day. (Pirke Avot 2:10)
So, here at our home this year, every day is a mini-Yom Kippur—a chance to let go of the illusion of permanence and try to live more tenderly, more honestly, more here.
Over this time, I learned that there are techniques that help.
One: Narrative therapy. This means telling the story again and again. Experimenting with different framing if you need to. In conversation, in consultation, in letters, in journals, in prayer. We retell our stories not because we’ve forgotten, but because memory is fluid. Our understanding of a moment or a time together evolves, naturally. And saying it out loud is a way to stay present with what’s true and fleeting.
Two: Ritualize the ordinary. Grief is an un-morring from the status of one’s current means and methods of connection and ritual. It can make everything feel wild and unstructured. Ritual is one tool amongst many to craft structure in a time that buffets the heart with winds of chaos and unknowing.
Three: Practice non-attachment. This does not mean detachment. It means learning to love things without gripping them. I still want my mother to live forever. But I am learning to hold that want lightly—like holding a bird in your palm. Tighten your fist and it suffocates. Loosen it, and it might sing.
Four: Body-based grounding. Some days, I am held not by theology or poetry but by my own two feet on the ground. Breathwork, weight-lifting, walking meditations, a hot bath with eucalyptus oil—these are not luxury self-care practices. These are survival tools. As Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said, “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid.”3 But even he didn’t say “don’t fall”—he said don’t fear. You’re still going to fall. All of us do sometimes. But being strong enough to lift and be lifted is a powerful tool.
Finally: Permission. Permission to cry. Permission to laugh in the same hour. Being capable of feeling a variety of feelings is a sign that this is a natural grief and not a spiral into clinical depression or other single-noted challenging (but normal) emotional reactions. This year of radical presence means weighing each of these feelings in turn and judging all parts of myself – and the feelings that they bring – as worthy to be here in this moment.
In some ways, this year has been one of the most painful of my life. In others, it has been astonishingly rich. My mother is still alive as I write this. We still discuss politics and books and laugh together. And I am here. Fully. Awake. A little broken. But not numb.
This, I think, is the gift of radical presence. Not that we avoid pain, but that we allow ourselves to feel it fully. To sit with death—not as an interruption of life, but as a part of it. After all, death didn’t come to steal anything. It just showed up a little early to remind us how much we love being alive.
Rabbi Lauren Ben-Shoshan is a co-founding rabbi of the Tahoe Jewish Community, a project of the two historic communities in the beautiful Lake Tahoe Basin. This year, the TJC’s Cheshvan’s Women’s Retreat will focus on developing a holistic practice of Radical Presence.
