My younger son’s 10th birthday celebration coincides with my father and stepmother’s 20th yahrzeit. We get up early that day and drive to Disneyland. Despite having lived in Los Angeles for most of his life, my younger son has never been to Southern California’s best-known theme park. So I decide to lean in, to spring for express passes and Mickey Mouse-shaped beignets and overpriced souvenirs on “Main Street, U.S.A.”
My son’s friend and his friend’s mom join us for the day.
I don’t sleep well the night before our excursion. Maybe it’s because I know how early I’ll need to get up and how long a day it will be. Maybe it’s because I am anticipating the milestone yahrzeit.
Every year around this time, sometimes even before I clock what day it is, my body picks a fight with me. A panic attack, maybe, or a migraine or insomnia.
Grief researchers call this the “anniversary effect,” in which the pain of a loss may be felt intensely around the time of year it occurred. Symptoms can surface “while you are at work, home or relaxing,” according to the National Center for PTSD. “So, it’s possible you may not even be aware that there is a connection between your distress and the anniversary of your traumatic event.”
To shake off my fatigue, I sip an iced coffee on the hour-long drive from Hollywood to Anaheim. I want to make my son’s first double-digit birthday and his inaugural trip to Disneyland memorable in the best possible way.
When we get there, we check the theme park’s app and decide to start at “It’s a Small World.” Some 15 minutes later (thanks to those express passes), it’s our turn to step gingerly onto a teal ferry boat. Around us, animatronic dolls dressed in costumes from around the world dance as the ride’s famous anthem (written by the late, great Jewish songwriting team known as the Sherman Brothers) plays:
It’s a world of laughter, a world of tears
It’s a world of hopes and a world of fears
There’s so much that we share
That it’s time we’re aware
It’s a small world after all
The ride appears to have changed little since I was a kid. I tell the other mom how, back in the 1980s, my Jewish preschool taught us the theme song in Hebrew. Immune to the nostalgia of it all, my son and his friend emerge eager for something “more fun” — that is, something faster.
We spend the day bouncing between rides and fried food vendors, and mercifully, nobody throws up. My son’s step has a literal skip in it; he’s having so much fun.
Around dusk, as the kids wait in line to ride Space Mountain — I promise to meet them at the exit — I excuse myself and Google the Mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. Of course, I know the Aramaic words by heart after 20 years, but I like to have them in front of me anyway. Then, in a corridor situated between restrooms and a Tomorrowland gift shop, I recite it. No formal minyan, but plenty of people all around.
Yitgadal v’yitkadash sh’mei raba…
Twenty years ago that morning, my dad and stepmother woke up for the last time. I think for a moment about how most of us will do this at some point: wake up not knowing it will be the last time. No tomorrowland.
Blinking tears from my eyes, I walk toward Space Mountain, humming the “Small World” song that has been stuck in my head all day. The lyrics, facile as they are, feel strangely relevant. Laughter, tears, hope, fears, all of it. Joy and grief mingling in a crowded theme park. Marking the saddest thing that ever happened to me at the “happiest place on earth.”
When I reach Space Mountain, the other mother is already there. And when we spot the boys, they insist on getting right back in line to go again. Why not, we say.
It’s dark when they bound out of the ride for a second time. We get ice cream and sit curbside on Main Street, U.S.A. The kids devise a definitive ranking of the day’s rides. “Small World” is near the bottom of their list. We watch the fireworks show and hit the souvenir shops. My son leaves the park with a new lightsaber, a water bottle he’d surely lose and a helium balloon that would attach itself to our living room ceiling and bob around for weeks — a reminder of our day at Disneyland, uncomplicated for my newly minted 10-year-old, more complicated for me.
