It is 7:00 am Monday morning. I am sitting in my mother’s dining room on the chair on which I sat as a child to my father’s left, always next to my grandmother, across from my brother and mother. I am waiting for movers to come and give me quotes for moving assorted pieces of my mother’s furniture to St. Louis and Silver Spring. I came up yesterday for one final trip to finish packing up my mother’s house. And now I find myself sitting for the very last time at the table where our family celebrated Shabbos and Yom Tov, eat the Purim Seudah and conducted the Seder, enjoyed many a homemade birthday cake, where I studied Gemorrah and played chess with my dad; the table which was a central focal point in our house and in our family life.

Though I never lived in this house in Teaneck, my mother having moved here long after Marilyn and I were married, it nonetheless was my mother’s house. And your mother’s house is always your mother’s house. There is an eerie silence in the house; the sounds of life are nowhere to be found; just the symbols of an end. A sad, very final end. From this day forward the central repository of my childhood and my parents will be no longer. All that will be left will be reminders and memories; but that central location where it once thrived and all came together will be no longer. Death once again. A different form of death. But death nonetheless.