Page 4 - Harlem Pesach Companion 2021

Message from JCC Harlem

By Meg Sullivan, Director

Three years ago, I woke up to a series of missed calls from
my dad. My gut seized. Multiple missed calls are never good.
“Meg, we’re in the ER. Your mother was having trouble
lifting her arms above her head to get dressed, and I called her
doctors, who all said to get to the ER immediately. We are
here, they’re running some tests. We don’t know anything yet.
I’m fine. I’ve got something to read, and mom’s in good
spirits.”

“She’s in good spirits” is one of the few responses I have
these days for “how’s your mom doing?” My mom is 70, a force of nature, and about
seven years ago began a cognitive decline that we now call Alzheimer’s. Her particular
case has developed in an untraditional way—it started with word-retrieval challenges and
progressed to a severe form of aphasia, which makes it very hard (these days, pretty
much impossible) for her to speak. Luckily, so luckily, she continues to be effusive as
ever. So to declare her in good spirits is far from sidestepping a painful truth, as many are
when employing the phrase. When we say it, we mean it with all the power those words
are fundamentally due.

That day in the ER was also the first night of Passover, and First Seder is historically a
huge affair in my family. We didn’t really start celebrating Passover until I was in high
school, most likely at my insistence (the way most things in my family go). My mom
comes from a staunchly secular Jewish family that came to New York from Romania at
the turn of the 19th Century, though she grew up in Newark and Maplewood, New
Jersey. My dad, on the other hand, is from a small town called Rome, near the Tennessee
state line in North Georgia—in a district currently represented by the notorious Marjorie
Taylor Greene, a seat my great-great-great Uncle, Gordon Lee, held from 1905-1926. To
say my family of origin has had to invent our own traditions as we go is an
understatement.

Whenever it was that we decided Seder would enter our family canon, it was clear it
would be permanent, and that we’d always do it big. My mom and I would cook for days,
borrow extra chairs from neighbors, bring up the heirloom card table from my parents’
storage locker in the basement, and transform our epically tiny Upper West Side living
room into lordly dining for 18. My mom has always been a famously good host. Like, the
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