But sometimes it feels more like Groundhog DayEditor’s Note: This essay by Jayne Jacova Feld first appeared on her Substack blog, “Jayne Says.”

Morning light filtered through the bedroom window, and for a moment I felt the promise of a new day, something almost within reach. But before I could grab hold, a fault line was tripped.

Yearning, that uncomfortable yet expected guest, flooded in.

Oh, it’s you April third, said the voice in my mind.

It’s just another date on the calendar. Don’t give it more meaning.

It was tempting. She means well, this voice I call my unreliable narrator, so quick to spin a story meant to protect me from myself. For some time now, I’ve been drowning in a flood of conflicting emotions.

Because every day since April 3, 2021 carries the same knowing: Ravi, my firstborn son, the child who opened my heart to love, left his earthly body on that day.

At least the anticipatory dread was over.

Still lying in bed, I hesitated before glancing at my iPhone, holding on just a little longer before the heaviness could weigh me down.

The life we were still livingIt was 8:21 a.m. While there’s no special significance to that time, my mind went searching, needing to attach meaning to it.

What were we doing at 8:21 a.m. on April 3, 2021?

We were still a family of five — two middle-aged parents and three teenage boys — piled into an Odyssey, the minivan that had never failed to carry us toward something worth remembering.

As the Odyssey moved through the Shenandoah Valley toward Montpelier, President James Madison’s plantation home, the morning light stretching across the road. The signs of spring awakening felt like a promise.

And then what happened?

My mind veered dangerously close to capitulating to the dark thoughts.

Was there anything we could have done differently? Anything that might have stopped Ravi from dying seven hours later along the same mountain road?

See, the unreliable narrator says, I told you so. If you just treat April third like any other day, it can’t hurt you like this.

But before I relented, tracing every turn, trying to find some wrinkle in time that could change the past, Moose, our high-energy rescue dog interrupted. In one fell swoop, he leapt onto the bed, onto my chest, and set to work licking my face.

His version of love was as overwhelming as ever, dog tongue inevitably finding my mouth and reaching into my nostrils. It was too much, and what I needed to lift myself out of bed.

Downstairs, the aftermath of Passover was everywhere — dirty dishes stacked, lettuce and parsley wilting on the Seder plate, shells from the traditional egg smash competition scattered across the floor.

Moose trotted past me carrying a small bone, displaying it like a prize.

I stood there for a second, watching him, wondering when and how he’d managed to hoist himself up onto the dining room table. Then I realized what it was:

The Paschal lamb.

The bone on the Seder plate, it represents lamb’s blood the Jewish slaves smeared on their doorposts so the Angel of Death would know to pass over their homes, sparing their firstborn sons from the ultimate, most horrific plague.

The bone serves as God’s promise to protect the Jews during their passage to freedom, a promise returned to each year in the telling.

So why didn’t it spare Ravi? Why didn’t anything?

And just like that, I was back in Egypt, feeling slavery not as something that happened thousands of years ago to someone whose trace DNA shows up in a 23andMe report. Egypt is here and now, in the moments when I’m unable to loosen my grip on what has already happened, a past that cannot be changed.

What it takes to leave EgyptIn my personal version of Egypt, the message of leaving — of stepping out of the fear that so easily drags me down — still requires a kind of faith that’s hard to trust, especially knowing that even with plagues and parted seas, my ancestors still had a hard time figuring out if they should stay or go. They questioned, they hesitated, they complained. They created false gods to worship, but that’s a bit later in the story.

Here I am being asked to leave my Egypt without the benefits of the age of miracles.

Still, for the first time, I can see myself in the story and feel what that must have taken for enslaved people to follow Moses, this outsider raised by the royals who exploited them, with a speech impediment, whose earlier attempts had already unleashed chaos without changing anything.

I picture Moses — not Moose — rousing me from that place I’d slipped into. Moses’ cooler older sister, Miriam, is there too. Her tambourine, partially concealed in a tie-dyed backpack with her Grateful Dead cassette tapes, carries the promise of greener pastures on the other side of the Nile.

They deliver an urgent message: Go quickly. Grab the unleavened bread, put it on your back and don’t look back.

It must have been a tough sell. After so many plagues and false starts, the departing Jews surely realized freedom would not arrive as immediate gratification.

And the siblings’ sales pitch likely didn’t mention 40 years of desert wandering.

What we left behindFive years ago, we my family left home on our spring break trip to Virginia, it was the morning after the first seder, the last holiday we celebrated so completely with Ravi. We left quickly, before everything was put away, before the house was reset.

We had skipped out on the second night Seder, leaving dishes and Passover remnants behind — plastic frogs and wild animals and other toys representing plagues that were scattered in ways that now feel almost too on the nose.

I think I made it two days into vacation without eating bread before I got sloppy and then gave it up.

At the time, it felt reasonable although I carried some Jewish guilt. In those waning days of Covid, we were just excited to pull off a vacation combining what we loved as a family nature and American history. This after so many months living with the uncertainty of sickness and social isolation.

And still, my mind keeps returning to that moment of leaving, as if there’s something in it I didn’t fully understand then.

Ravi, on one of our last family hikes with him, in Virginia in 2021.When leaving Egypt felt like a typoIn the past, that central idea in our Haggadah — the book we read from at the seder to tell the story of leaving Egypt — and, really, in Judaism itself — always fell flat for me.

“And you shall explain to your child on that day, it is because of what God did for me when I, myself, went out of Egypt.”

That’s the line that’s meant to make it personal, the rationale for eating the bitter herb, (in our case it’s horse radish) to taste the bitterness of slavery as if it were our own.

As a kid, following our lifeless Maxwell House Haggadahs, the line confused me. Reciting it was like it was a school assignment. I remember focusing on reading the words right, trying to prove I was a better reader than my older brother Abe.

The idea that eating a disgusting vegetable was supposed to awaken something in me never crossed my mind. Maybe it was a biblical-times typo.

Also, the part about the four children — the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and the one who doesn’t know how to ask — rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t think there was a lane for me.

A middle child, I most identified with the wicked one who rejected the story as something that happened long ago to ancient people so different than me. And yet… I spent a lot of time wondering why the so-called People of the Book would fall for that.

I suppose my curiosity kept the door open to discovering my inner wise child. So maybe that’s why now, fueld by Ravi’s love, my desire to personally leave Egypt feels so urgent. This time around, with Passover overlapping with an anniversary that is anything but ordinary, I do feel the weight of what those words are asking of me.

You can tell Moose was already eyeing the Pascal lamb on the Seder plate.The Groundhog Day of GriefPassover is starting to feel less like a single exodus and more like the movie Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray’s character relives the same day. over and over again, until he finally stops living it the same way.

In that sense, the Exodus isn’t something that happened once — it’s every day. It’s every moment I’m faced with a choice: Stay in the story sounds solid but is a lie, or recognize the ways my mind can twist even my growth into something to fear.

My unreliable narrator is a pro at spin. She can take the ways I’ve actually broken free over the past five years — leaving my full-time magazine job, writing about my grief, teaching about self-love — and recast them as failure, instability, something reckless instead of something more true to who I am becoming.

The signs of the narrator’s sway are obvious if I’m willing to see them. I’ve stopped Substacking regularly. I’m still collecting thoughts, turning them over, but not committing them to the page.

And I talk a good game about letting go of the past without actually getting past it.

This feels like a lot, too much, for a mother to take on on the fifth anniversary of her son’s death. And yet I know there is no other choice.

I want out of Egypt.

What I wanted most out of April 3 is what I want of every day — to fully feel the love that Ravi awakened in me, to remind myself what I know is true —that this love cannot be created or destroyed. I want to let it wash over me and then release it back into a world so in need of that kind of love, as I am so in need of it. But I can only feel it when I let go of grip of the past.

Not Once. Every Day.So once I came downstairs, led by Moose but also Moses and Miriam, I decided not to wait for the matzah to rise. I asked Craig to start the day with me in our hottub.

When he admitted he too was fighting the same impulse — not to give the day more weight than it already carried, not to tip it toward darkness — it came as a relief.

We sat there, watching birds move between the young maple planted in Ravi’s memory, the feeder, and the older trees beyond. Meeting in the moment felt like a real step out of Egypt, or at least a break in the Groundhog Day loop.

Too many times, we forget to do this. We buy into the lie that talking about Ravi — the accident, the ways we’ve tried and failed to meet each other in grief over the last five years — will only cause more pain.

Later, we met up with extended family to hike in the Wissahickon Valley. Immersed in the beauty of these ancient woods reminiscent of the last hikes we took with Ravi during Passover give years ago, I let that memory move through me. First the sadness. And then, because I stayed with it, something else had room to arrive — the beauty of how fully Ravi loved our family hikes, the way his presence and joy infused everything, how much of him still moves through all of us when we’re together, including him in our time together.

It was a good day. It really was.

And then the next day came. And fog returned, along with a new appreciation how that comes wth the terrority of being human.

Hello Egypt. Hello Groundhog’s Day.

And again, I was asked to choose.

And I remembered in that moment to reach for the love.

Me and my niece Evie on our Wissahickon hike.The post Five years after losing Ravi, I’m still leaving Egypt appeared first on Jewish Sacred Aging.