The Long Walk to Moving On

“So, that’s it,” the rabbi says. “You’ll be gone; you won’t be coming back. I already told my wife. I figured you’d move on. I mean, we’ll miss you and Susan on Friday nights, but I told my wife that Efraim is the most easygoing person; he can move on. Sometimes I feel like I should move on too. I don’t blame you. You’ll stay in Great Neck. It’s nice there. Right? There’s space there—why wouldn’t you move on?”

We are at a wedding together, alone in the quiet of the hall where a chuppah will soon take place. The rabbi is dressed in black, his reddish beard turning white, the two of us next-door neighbors of thirty-five years, looking back and looking forward. I had just told him that I was selling the house. I’d received a good offer, unsolicited, to sell the 100-plus-year-old house as is—no hassles, no open houses, no tire kickers or bargainers to contend with. I took a month to think about it, to live with the idea.

The morning after I agreed to sell, I started looking through my drawers for items to discard. The first thing I grabbed was a prescription bottle with fading print: “Klonopin, 30 pills,” dated 03/02/2023, the day before Esther died. That mind-numbing prescription, a daily part of her diet for twenty-five years, stood as a kind of shrine to a long decline, sealed in a plastic bottle.

Even as I tell myself I am moving on, my three adult children want to organize a final Shabbat get-together on Waverly Place. They are surprisingly nostalgic about letting go. “Abba, it makes sense. The house is just going to fall apart if you’re not there to keep an eye on it.”

Oh boy, I feel the tears coming.

“Yes, I think we need to have a last get-together,” my daughter messages from Israel.

That house is their childhood—they call it “the museum of our lives.” Letting the house go feels like letting their mother go. Her voice is still ringing in the walls. My kids tell me they hear her voice at times. “Why don’t you get married, Ely?” But she died before he got married. “Why don’t you have a baby, Manny?” But she died before he had his first baby; now the second is expected soon.

And I have been letting go in stages, even though I am remarried to Susan and have moved on. Still, one scene doesn’t cut to the next like in a movie. One scene fades while another phases in, a gray overlap of love, anguish, loneliness, shared lives and dissolution in a messy mélange of hopes and dreams, battered lives and renewal.

Moving on . . .

[It’s] like I was a guest in somebody else’s dream, waiting for something.

I tell myself that it’s okay to move on. A perimeter of guilt surrounds the decision like an electric fence designed to gently shock the dog into remaining on the property. You can’t see that fence. But a time comes to turn off the electricity and let the dog run wild. The little voice asks me: “What justice is it that Esther lies in the cold ground and you galivant to warm destinations and laugh and share deep conversations because you can and a few years ago you couldn’t?”

I guess you could call it survivor’s guilt. Living with a child of survivors for so long, I absorbed some of the survivors’ malaise.

Time to move on . . .

I think about the four-mile round-trip walk to shul in Great Neck, New York, that I originally said I would never do. But now the walk is the thing I look forward to all week, rain or shine, cold or hot. I leave at 7:15 am, the streets deserted and quiet on Shabbat morning. The first mile takes me into town through Kings Point, landscaped and serene. The second stretches along Middle Neck Road, the commercial drag of little shops and stately apartment buildings, past the white Persian shuls along the way, the kosher French bakery, CVS and all the kosher take-out places closed for Shabbat—Bistro Burger, Elite Pizza, Grill Time Express, Bagel Mentch, La Pizzeria, Amal Catering, Cho-Sen Village, Middle Neck Glatt and 27 Dressings. I cut through the JFK School shortcut across the soccer field, the hypotenuse of a triangle shortening the walk by a minute or two. Sometimes I pause to read the headlines of a New York Times or Wall Street Journal wrapped in plastic on a driveway, but mostly I think about the magic of a new life.

I focus on moving on as a template for my adult children as they approach middle age. Now I feel that they look to me as a role model. Not so much when they were growing up or as young adults.

I’ve been thinking about this idea of “moving on,” internally as well as externally, on my peaceful Shabbat morning walks. As I approach my seventieth birthday next year, I’m aware that despite my best efforts, things eventually fall apart. Will I still be able to do this walk in five years? In ten? Someday, I will look back on this walk fondly. In my old neighborhood of Passaic, New Jersey, the shul is around the corner. For almost thirty years, I made that walk every Shabbat.

When I first moved to Great Neck, I felt like I was in a dream. I pictured Esther’s grave back in Clifton, my sons in Teaneck and Los Angeles, and my daughter in Israel, and I felt I had stepped out of a family photograph and walked away into a picture without a frame on an Island that was Long, into a house that was not really mine, like I was a guest in somebody else’s dream, waiting for something. Waiting.

Until a voice came from somewhere deep within me: Time to move on.

Efraim Jaffe is an independent certified financial planner. He lives in Great Neck, New York.