Bat Mitzvah Girls

Mom and I had been out shopping for shoes to go with the dress we’d picked out for my Bat Mitzvah. It was a Saturday, October 5, 1974, and my big day was just a month away, on November 9.

All spring, summer and into the fall, I’d been studying my Torah portion, my Haftorah and all the blessings. These were the standard Bat Mitzvah activities at our Conservative Synagogue in South Orange, New Jersey. I’d meet with the Rabbi and the Cantor for lessons after public school, and also in between Hebrew school classes. Cantor Edgar Mills had recorded the tropes for me on a cassette tape, and I spent hours listening to him chant in his beautiful lilting voice, trying to replicate the melody in my nearly tone deaf singing voice. I took my study materials to summer camp and practiced my parts in between sports and swimming when no one else was in the bunk. I had most of it memorized, and could read the Hebrew calligraphy in the torah portion without vowels, which is how it would be displayed in the actual hand-written torah scroll. I pretended I could sing like the cantor, in the guise of Jewish karoke – minus the onscreen chyron. I hoped that I didn’t sound awful, and reasoned that if I pronounced all the words correctly, that might make up for my singing deficit. I was still 12 and wouldn’t turn 13 until November 12.   

We walked in the house and I took my packages to my bedroom. We’d been in every shoe store in our area, and had not found the right pair until we browsed stores in South Orange Village. This was a minor triumph – matching shoes to my dress. I’d found a long floral dress with a knit top, and I loved the pattern and the colors. I was excited to try on my outfit with my shoes, anticipating the day I’d get to wear them in a few weeks. Mom and I had been planning all the details of the event, from the invitations to the centerpieces and catering, and the shoes were the missing piece.

The phone rang in the kitchen. I could hear Mom answer, but I couldn’t hear what she was saying. Then it was eerily quiet. I went back to the kitchen and I saw that Mom was crying. “Grandpa died,” she told me. Everything stopped. Her words hung in the air, and all I could do was sit down at the kitchen table, shoes and dress ignored, and watch my mother sob. I got up and went over to her and folded myself into her arms.

My grandfather, Jacob Lenox, had a rare stomach cancer and had been in the hospital for weeks, with my grandmother, Bess, by his bedside. Mom had continued with the Bat Mitzvah plans despite his illness; we were all hoping he would respond to the chemo treatments.

Now my grandmother and my parents were planning a funeral, and my Bat Mitzvah was all but forgotten.  

I don’t remember the funeral service. It could have been at the synagogue because my grandparents were founding members of the congregation, and that honor was reserved for special congregants. But it might have been at the Jewish funeral home that was nearby. The day was a blur. There was a graveside service and burial at King Solomon Cemetery in Clifton. Grandpa was buried in a plot near other members of the congregation, who had purchased their graves alongside other synagogue family members. The other half of his headstone was reserved for Grandma. You could look around the cemetery and play Jewish geography with dead neighbors who used to sit next to you in the same pew at the High Holidays.

I was twelve years old and attending my first funeral before I had my Bat Mitzvah. My whole family, extended family, friends, and synagogue family gathered at my grandparent’s house for the Shiva, which lasted a week. There were lots of people I recognized but didn’t know very well. Everyone brought food.  

The next week, the visitors were gone, the house was quiet and the last remnants of the Shiva lingered with empty food platters still on the kitchen counter. Grandma would be alone in the house. I wondered how my grandmother would be able to go on without my grandfather, whether my mother would be okay without her father. I loved my grandfather, an iconic figure to me, and immediately felt the void left by his death.

I went back to junior high, and tried to concentrate on schoolwork. On my way home from school one day, I discovered I was bleeding all over my jeans. I got my first period. Puberty had bad timing alongside death and tragedy. Still 12 years old.

The Bat Mitzvah invitations had gone out at the end of August, so now guests were sending in their response cards. Mom and I had picked out the stationery together. It was printed on creamy textured paper with fancy calligraphy, and encased in a envelope with a floral lining. See the theme? Very ‘70s boho hippie chic. I had hoped for a fun, lively party like the ones other school friends were having. Bat or Bar Mitzvahs were rituals of one-upmanship, where families would seek to outdo each other with fancy events. Even if my event wasn’t as elaborate, this would be my opportunity to share a happy occasion with school friends, and show the more popular kids that I was as socially adept as they were – an issue I struggled with as a shy, introverted teenager. But traditionally, our family was still in mourning. Mom organized a lovely, sedate luncheon at the temple that would follow the Bat Mitzvah ceremonial service. There would be no music; no fun. And my hopes were quashed.

I sat on the bema that Saturday morning, November 9, on a blue velvet stool facing the entire congregation at Oheb Shalom, wearing my long flowered dress and my matching shoes. I read my blessings, and my Torah portion in my less-than-melodic voice, gave a little interpretive speech, did my Haftorah reading, and finally sat back down and exhaled.

It should have been a happy day that we could remember together as a rite of passage. Someone took pictures at the luncheon – not a professional photographer, but a family friend with a simple camera. All the photos were kind of dark and grainy, but you could see the grim expressions on the faces of all my friends. Everyone was bored, and no one was having a good time. My 13th year was a harbinger of the dark clouds that hovered over me from that moment through the rest of my life.

Forty-three years later, my niece, Olivia (my brother’s daughter), was on the Bat Mitzvah lineup. Her event was scheduled for April 21, 2018. The 13-year-old girls and boys at their synagogue in California would lead the entire service, and Olivia would have a much larger role in her ceremony than I did when I was her age. Mom and I had been to the Bar Mitzvahs of my two nephews Ben and Will, and now it would be Olivia’s turn.

My brother and his family lived in northern California, and Mom and I would fly out for a week-long visit, and attend the Bat Mitzvah. It was early February, and I was researching flights.

Mom and I had sold our house in Livingston, and moved the previous year to a rental townhouse in the next town. That winter she had been through a series of health crises: a nearly fatal sinus infection that required months of intravenous antibiotics; and major dental surgery to remove failed dental implants (a side effect of years of chemotherapy.) Her immune system was severely compromised already.

As she recovered from dental surgery, she wasn’t interested in eating. In fact, she just stopped eating altogether. No matter how hard I tried to help her by preparing soft foods, she refused to eat. Was she still in pain? Being obstinate? On a hunger strike? By early February, she was anemic and very weak. Of course, it was more than that, and by Valentine’s Day she was diagnosed with a recurrence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which she’d had twice before in the past decade. She’d been in remission for five years, and now it was back with a vengeance, more aggressive and dire.

Mom thought she could still go to Olivia’s Bat Mitzvah. She’d been through chemo treatments twice before and expected this round of therapy would be the same. She asked her oncologist to schedule her treatment around the Bat Mitzvah date, so she could travel during the recovery weeks. There would be 6 rounds of 3-week treatments (one week of infusions, followed by two weeks off.) I knew we would not be traveling to California, but I nodded as she reasoned with her doctor. I didn’t want to crush her resolve to beat the cancer.

By early March, Mom was in the hospital for what would be the last 49 days of her life, and I was at her bedside each day like my grandmother had done with my grandfather, and my mother had stayed by my father while he was dying nearly 30 years earlier.

I was alone in caring for my mother. Besides my daily phone calls to my brother to report on her condition, and two short visits of his that coincided with business trips, my brother was absent. I pleaded with him to fly east to see Mom, as her doctors exhausted their efforts to save her. He refused to come. He said he was busy with taking his son to visit colleges, and focused on planning the Bat Mitzvah party for Olivia. That seemed a lame excuse, since I know he never planned an event in his life.

The Saturday of Olivia’s Bat Mitzvah, Mom’s kidneys were shutting down; she was in renal failure. The kidneys are one of the last organs to stop functioning. The only family member who reached out to me was my first cousin, Bobby, Mom’s brother Stanley’s son, who lived in Palo Alto, Calif. Bobby was a private airline pilot and he had an east coast trip to fly his client to New Jersey for some business. Bobby would fly to a nearby airport, and come to the hospital to see his Aunt (my mother) for the last time. He spent the day with me – the only other relative who did not attend Olivia’s Bat Mitzvah.

Everyone in California was preoccupied with the Bat Mitzvah ceremony in the morning, and the evening party that was held at an event space in San Jose. The next day, Sunday, there was a brunch for out of town guests, and the whole family was together all day. Except for me, and Mom, who lay dying in a hospital room in New Jersey – 3,000 miles away from her only granddaughter, and her son who continued to ignore her. She died that night. I called my brother and told him Mom was gone. He got on a redeye Sunday night and flew to New Jersey so we could plan the funeral.

Part of me was glad Olivia got to have her Bat Mitzvah uninterrupted by her grandmother’s impending death, but the other part of me was bitter at the abandonment I felt by my brother – my so-called family.

I moved to California a couple of months after my mother died – I didn’t want to be alone in my grief, or live in New Jersey anymore without her, which would only remind me of all I had lost. In retrospect, my motive was foolish, and not thought out. The regret set in over the next few years, and I wished I had never made the move across the country.

I didn’t go to the next family Bar Mitzvah for my brother’s nephew, Evan. I politely declined and said I was busy that day. The truth was, I didn’t want to go to a Bar Mitzvah which would only remind me of why I didn’t go to Olivia’s event.

After 4 years of living on my own in a condo in South San Jose, I ran out of money – despite all my efforts to find work and be able to afford a life in California. It was impossible. My landlord was selling the apartment, and I had to move in with my brother and his family as a last resort. I was living in his house – at times a hostile environment that was difficult and awkward for everyone.

There was one last young child with an upcoming Bat Mitzvah: my sister-in-law’s brother’s daughter, Sophie. Her event would be on Saturday, February 17, 2024 – almost 6 years since Olivia’s Bat Mitzvah when my mother died, and about 50 years after my own Bat Mitzvah when my grandfather died.

I didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t exactly say no, or avoid it, so I replied “yes” to the invitation. It took an enormous amount of effort to get myself ready to attend the two-part event that would take up my entire Saturday – my only weekend day off from work. Everything I owned was locked in a storage unit, and I only had a few dressy items of clothing with me. Nothing fit, since I’d gained weight during the ensuing time I’d been living at the house. My mental health had incinerated. I felt terrible and the last thing I wanted to be doing was attending a Bat Mitzvah for the child of an extended family member. I bought some clothes, spending money I really needed for rent on my storage unit. I set aside money for a gift for the Bat Mitzvah girl. And on a miserable dreary Saturday in the middle of the California rainy season, I went to Sophie’s Bat Mitzvah. The ceremony at the temple took 3 hours, as two girls shared the service and led the congregation in prayer and song. In the evening, everyone drove through the rain and gathered at a popular restaurant space for a lively, loud party that was geared toward the 50 kids in attendance.

I got through it somehow. I saw my mother in the empty chairs. I imagined how she would have kvelled at Sophie reading the Torah, a substitute for missing Olivia’s event. How she would have tried to chat with people above the din of the dance music and emcees leading the teens in passing hula hoops to each other, and attempting a limbo on the dance floor.

I thought about my own Bat Mitzvah day, silent and somber so very long ago, and missed my mother’s smile beaming at my accomplishment.