*Thirteen Years | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes Every Friday | January 23, 2026*
In a few days it will be the thirteenth anniversary of my mother’s death. Thirteen years that it has been this way, she and us, there and here. A thin membrane stretched between us like a curtain. Like frosted glass in a bathroom. Separating and not separating.
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Every time a new year begins I move through the days heavily. January was the month of her dying. And since then, every year, it is the month of her dying again. I remember every single day of January 2013, and I live those days year after year after year.
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At the end of January my mother died. But I shared recently that I never really let her die. I said it in a conversation that was held with me, and later became a chapter in a new book that has just been published, called “After All This Desert”. A book made entirely of conversations about crises and how one emerges from them. How we will all emerge from our crisis now. There are chapters there with Ehud Banai, Ari Folman, Haim Yelin, and Eli Amir. All of them overcame different kinds of crises. But with me, they spoke about the crisis of becoming an orphan, because it seems that no matter how much time has passed since your crisis, you spend your whole life overcoming it afterwards. Step by step. The crisis becomes a point of origin that you did not choose. It chose you. Just as I was born from my mother’s womb, so too I was born from her death.
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*"I’m a very practical and usually focused person,"* I say there, in that chapter, *"and I had already lost people close to me before that, and usually I didn’t enter a big haze of emotional confusion. But I had never lost a mother before. So I think it took me two or three years, no less, until I stopped waiting for her. I was really waiting. I understood that people die and that’s it, but with my mother it was as if it would be different. Because death didn’t suit her, it was like a piece of clothing that didn’t fit her. So I just waited and waited for it to end. I literally said, ‘Okay, she needs some time to herself, she used to travel to London sometimes and eventually come back.’ I couldn’t adopt a ‘mature’ position that understands and accepts finality. And at some point I simply said: enough, I’m not going to accept death the way people say it is, I’m going to go with what I feel. Meaning, I didn’t really let her die. I’m trying to think how it sounds when I say that I didn’t let her die, but that’s how it was. I created some place for her where she didn’t die."*
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What did I mean by that? Probably that my mother continues, in her death, to be present in our lives almost as she was when she was alive. She knows which of my daughters refused to bathe. What grades they got . “Grandma is proud of you,” I pass on to the girls. And also, “Grandma says grades are really not interesting at all.” My mother still loves kataifi, the rain, turquoise things, the sea. We say “Grandma” at least once a day, hear what she has to say about the news. About the war. About what’s happening in the family. She is opinionated and funny and sometimes despairs over her own scatterbrained moments. She is completely my mother.
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Recently Iris said to me, “Think about what your mother would tell you to do.” This was when I was hesitating about whether to leave the country for a while. Since we were affected by a missile blast, every security escalation leaves me awake at night. Alert during the day. My mother immediately entered the conversation. She tells me to go, I answered Iris, and that she plans to come with us.
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The next day we traveled.
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In my chapter in the book I tried to explain that all of this is real for me. *"I have a PhD in Hinduism,"* I said there, *"and I believe in the perception that people do not die in a final and absolute way. I believed this even before I lost my mother. For me, people continue to exist in all kinds of bodies, in all kinds of continuations, and there is no real end to anything in the world. Everything changes, materials turn into other materials, and nothing dissipates. So let’s start with the fact that I couldn’t accept the basic assumption that in such a world there is an exception, and the exception is precisely my mother. That she, of all people, disappeared. I remember saying: okay, she didn’t disappear anywhere either, and I was left with the question of where I can find her, what place I allow her, how I make space for her to be."*
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For thirteen years now we have had a grandmother in our home 24/7, who doesn’t sleep, who flies with us around the world, helps us find parking in the city. When my daughters ask for something expensive I tell them, no chance. But wait, Grandma will buy it for you, what is a grandmother for if not for spoiling? And then I buy it in her name. We regret iPhone upgrades she doesn’t get to enjoy, go crazy that she is not available on her mobile, tell her “look at the view” every time we are facing mountains or the sea, and we also receive quite a few words of reassurance from her in extreme moments over these frightening two and a half years.
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I told in the book how in India, after the dead are cremated, it is customary to leave one bone intact, enter the sea, cast it into the depths, and leave without looking back. I didn’t do that with my mother, not even as a metaphor. The opposite. I understood that death is what you make of it, just as life is what you make of it. And from her death, I was born as a poet.
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In the first year I wrote an entire book for her and waited. I thought it would pass. But my mother continued to appear even when I wrote other books, researched feminism, studied Judaism, wrote about antisemitism. She was present in all my books, in interviews, in photographs, in translations. Thirteen years. Maybe this is what the death of mothers is like. It passes, or you pass through it, and then it continues and happens every single day.
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I end with a poem I wrote about my mother when we lived in Canada. It was on a morning when I suddenly understood that I had grown a little out of the rupture. And I dedicate it to all orphans, especially the last two lines:
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*Early Spring in Vancouver . by Maya Tevet Dayan*
It is the hour when hedges
are trimmed in backyards
by women with pruning shears
(they outlive you)
Yellow doors, blue ones,
red o nes open to the morning
( “people live here like in a painting”,
you say)
The sweetness of summer;
tar smoke in the air, the cries of seagulls
overhead (your death
sours the edges of things
like lemon sauce
around the vanilla pancakes you loved)
Every morning
we walk through the neighborhood
(orphanhood means
never walking alone)
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May we all have Sabbat Shalom and quiet days,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*