It’s a scene we’ve all encountered in fiction: someone going about their ordinary routine—preparing for bed, driving down an empty road, working at their desk—when suddenly, they receive a visitor from beyond the grave. Usually a recently departed loved one, these apparitions arrive not as mere voices or memories, but as fully formed presences. Though noncorporeal, they occupy real space, initiating conversations that often stretch across multiple visits, each laden with meaning and purpose.
Despite my years as a rabbi, officiating at countless funerals both intimate and grand, I’ve never experienced such a visitation. No departed soul has materialized to engage me in spirited dialogue, though I confess I’ve longed for such encounters. The opportunity to catch up, debate, share laughter or tears with those who’ve passed—what a mind-expanding gift that would be.
Yet this morning, at 5:30 AM, something happened. My grandmother Helen appeared to me—not as a ghostly apparition (to borrow from Ghostbusters terminology), but as a startlingly clear mental image. The timing puzzles me. Perhaps it’s her birthday, or maybe her yahrzeit approaches. I can’t ask my mother; she passed fifteen years ago. My sister Joan, our family’s dedicated historian, might know. But the question remains: why this morning?
We called her Nanny, a name choice that irritated me from age five onward. Why not Grandma or Granny? Even Bubbe seemed preferable to Nanny. My memories of her exist in fragments: her scandalously young marriage, her determination to work full-time after my grandfather’s death, and one particularly vivid incident involving her unorthodox cure for a childhood toothache—chasing me around the house to administer medicinal whiskey, a treatment I strongly resisted.
Though not the type to sprawl on the floor for playtime, her love was constant and clear. Her culinary legacy lives on in my kitchen, where her brisket recipe still perfumes our home every Passover with unmistakable, mouth-watering aromas.
When she moved in with us, leaving behind her lifelong home in Pittsburgh, she was already in her early sixties and battling cancer. I remember her slow, painful walks through our house. At fourteen, I encountered one of the most frightening moments of my young life—seeing her without her wig, her vulnerability brutally exposed. No one had prepared me for the reality that she was dying.
If this morning’s remembrance had followed the dramatic conventions of film and literature, she would have materialized fully, explaining her sudden appearance in my consciousness. We could have caught up on fifty-five years of family history. I would have introduced her to my wife, Liza, shared stories of her great and great-great-grandchildren. I would have begged for her chicken soup recipe and collected precious stories about my mother and uncle. Most intriguingly, I would have sought her perspective on our current tumultuous world.
Among my grandparents—all of whom died prematurely, two from illness and two by their own hands—Helen alone offered me unconditional love and care. She was my anchor to a generation now lost to time.
Unlike the neat resolution of fictional visitations, real-life memories rarely arrive with clear purpose or explanation. I may never understand why Helen chose this particular morning to surface so vividly in my thoughts. Yet I’m grateful for this unexpected reunion, however brief and incorporeal. It has granted me a precious moment to reflect on her influence in my life and the enduring power of her love, which transcends even the finality of death.
In the end, perhaps these quiet morning visitations, these unbidden but welcome remembrances, serve a purpose as profound as any ghostly encounter: they keep our connections to the past alive, allowing us to honor those who shaped us, even as we continue to shape the future they never lived to see.
Before Shabbat 