The names of my dead come to me at night. The women are always first: Anna, Corina, Gladys, Miriam C. and Miriam R. Grandmothers, aunts, the closest of friends. They’ve been gone a long time, some of them for decades, yet it feels as if they have vanished suddenly. I hope they have come back as stardust.

Memories of the men begin with Dennis and end with a jolt of Z for Ze’ev. In between are Jacobo, K. Harold, Mac and William. Father, grandfathers, uncle and friend. They band together to tick off the decades of my life. The initial K of my father’s name casts a long cool shadow in my life.

The Yizkor service, the service of remembrance, is a liturgy of names. The impromptu prayer book for Yizkor is a customized booklet of those names that congregants in a given synagogue have memorialized. These are the names of people who were loved or feared or even hated in their lifetimes.

Every year I read each of the names in the booklet, my lips moving slowly, deliberately, as if I’m praying. I did the equivalent in the wake of 9/11 when I read every victim’s short biography in the newspaper. Every life deserves intense concentration. On the first anniversary of 9/11 the names of all the dead were read out loud where the towers stood. It took hours, but was that enough to grieve for them?

In some ways, the Yizkor service is the ultimate one-size-fits-all ceremony. There are options in that service in the form of many fill-in-the-blanks. Check off if you’re mourning a mother, a father, a wife, a husband, a partner, a sister, a brother, a daughter, a son, other relatives or a friend. Anchoring that list is a blank space for “others.” So little space for so many people. Who are the “others?” Are they the people who populate our daily lives? Teachers, servers, commuters. Versions of us, versions of our families — people we might eventually notice were missing from the fabric of our days.

At its core, Yizkor means to remember. My dead walk out of my darkest dreams into the clarity of day. These spirits are the honor guard of my life. The first time I encountered Yizkor, it was an accident. My grandmother clamped down on my shoulder and told me to leave immediately. At that point, I had not known anyone who died. My grandmother’s superstition meant to protect me from death. Years later her spirit perches on my shoulder. She knows that I’ve been staying for the Yizkor service for over two decades.

Towards the end of Yizkor, mourners are asked to make room in their hearts to remember the martyrs and the six million. The heart is asked to expand again to remember all the dead. That’s when the service gets noisy. So many names to gather in the heart, so many names to whisper in ad hoc prayer. “Each of us has a name given by the stars and given by our neighbors,” writes the Israeli poet Zelda. When my father was dying, I indulged in the magical thinking of the rabbis and changed his Hebrew name. I did it so that my dad was hiding in plain sight from the angel of death. It’s not a physical image like blood on the door indicating that the angel “passes over” the household. Altering his name was a quiet game of hide-and-seek — a game the angel eventually won.

The Mourner’s Kaddish is the capstone of the Yizkor service. It’s a prayer for the dead that does not say a single word about death. Instead, God’s name is magnified and sanctified and exalted. All of God’s traditional names: Father, King, Master of the Universe, Divine Spirit (that one is feminine) indicate what I suspected all along: God is gender non-conforming.

This is the time of year that names that were cremated, names that were murdered, names that were buried at sea, names that were buried under a thwack of dirt are directly acknowledged. Some of the names I weep for, some of them I no longer remember — names that went with faces I tangentially recognized. The swirl of names dances and jumps off the tip of my tongue. “So many names,” writes the poet Billy Collins, “there is barely room on the walls of the heart.”

Yet there is always room for one more name.

Since this is the season of confession, I want to admit to two things. For many years, I have been jealous of people who can not only pray but also get into the groove of prayer. And I’m terrified of the High Holidays. Rosh Hashana is an odd time of the year for me. My father died two days before the holiday after a long illness and was buried on the eve of the Jewish New Year. Somewhere in the midst of his sickness, I lost my will to pray.

It did not help that my shiva was truncated to just a few hours and then the needs of the community took over—that is, the power of coming together as a community was first and foremost. And so I stood up in front of hundreds of people and publicly said the Mourner’s Kaddish for the first time in my life. I was hardly comforted. Instead, I felt raw and even more grief-stricken. Here I was when immersion into prayer is at its most intense, and I could barely utter a word to, or toward, God. But I continued to say the Kaddish for my father throughout the year. Mostly I did it to reconnect with him posthumously. “Do the deed and the feelings will follow,” said a wise friend. I waited.

The story of Hannah https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/hannah-bible, for whom spontaneous prayer—praying from the heart—was said to have originated, has some significance for me. Hannah’s grief generated an outpouring of supplication to God for a long-awaited child. She spoke directly to God, summoning God’s presence for a deep conversation.

I took my concerns about my inability to pray to my rabbi, and she said Rabbi Nachman of Breslov had the same apprehensions about prayer. He would walk in the woods and speak out loud to God. She said I should not think of talking to God as a one-way conversation, but to think of God as a sounding board. I tried it. As my rabbi predicted, it felt awkward. And then it turned into something I decidedly did not want to happen: it became a litany of complaints. It turns out I was angry with God. And so praying to God was still a non-starter for me.

Although I am mostly unable to pray, I frequently attend synagogue on Saturday mornings. I let the words, which have been with me since my day school days, wash over me. I once stood with others and recited the Amidah or the standing prayer with kavana—intention. Now I glance at the 18 blessings that comprise this longish prayer. Many phrases jump out at me, but I don’t utter them in a coherent pattern. As for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, another learned friend told me that if a machzor or High Holiday prayer book is doing its job, I could turn my attention to the margins and read the commentaries—modern and ancient—to engage with the holiday. That sort of worked, until it didn’t.

This year I went in search of something that would not exactly replace prayer, but would heavily supplement it for me. I found the “Hebrew College High Holiday Companion” published by the college, and it offered me something I didn’t even know I was searching for: accessibility. Rabbi Daniel Klein, editor of the Companion, confirmed my feeling. In a recent telephone interview, he told me, “The Companion is intended to be an actual companion to the machzor as well as to accompany someone who is yearning through the holidays.”

Yearning. The word resonates. It’s Hannah praying. It’s the subtext of Dr. Judith Kates’ beautiful micro-essay on Hannah and her groundbreaking outpouring to God. Kates writes: “We can be grateful that the rabbis of the Talmud chose to include the story of Hannah, the beginning of the biblical book of Samuel, for us to read as the haftarah for the first day of Rosh Hashana. It plunges us into an experience of heartfelt, individual prayer, which can guide us toward finding our own voices in the midst of community.” With that observation, my small still voice—the voice that shakily said the Kaddish publicly for my father a day after he was buried— had resonance and value.

But there is still the terror of the holidays for me. The drama of “Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die?” makes me anxious. In her essay on U’netaneh Tokef, the prayer that directly asks those dreaded questions and gives us no choice but to face our mortality, Rabbi Suzanne Offit presents words of comfort and redemption in a lyrical prose poem. She asserts, “Perhaps there is a quiet moment amidst all the words we say/ on these days/ When we allow ourselves to come more fully into this awareness./We imagine that the judgment of our lives will be sealed at the/end of Yom Kippur./And in facing death, we face the limits of our own lives./We are beckoned to become our own judge./There is time./And now is the time.”

Klein offers a further observation: “The holidays are like various forms of prayer. For some people reciting all the words of the liturgy on a given morning or afternoon resonates with their souls. Other people are more calibrated for silence.”

Silence. All of my adult life, the inability to pray has been partly about my discomfort with God’s silence. Indeed, prayer can feel like a monologue. But what if it is a dialogue with a strong, silent God? It takes imagination and faith to believe that. This High Holiday season I will reconcile with God and not be afraid of jumpstarting my faith with an out loud conversation with Him/Her/Them. God is listening, and I am too.

My husband Ken has come to Mineral, Washington, to help me bust out of the eponymous Mineral School. I’m a student of sorts here, but now I’m not sure I want to leave the place. I’ve been at the school for two weeks as the Erin Donovan Writing Fellow where I have had precious time to write and think and to write some more. And I’ve been treated like a queen thanks to the magnificent Jane Hodges, Mineral School’s founder, and her incredible team.

This is Jane’s fourth year running the school’s residency program. She bought the building in 2013 expressly for the purpose of transforming it into an artist’s retreat. She’s pretty much a one-woman show who will tell you that the Mineral School works because she has an incredible board by her side. Practically speaking, this means Jane has a cadre of amazing, can-do volunteers. I have to pause here for a moment to tell you that Jane cooked almost all of gourmet-style meals for me and the three other residents who lived and worked in these old-style classrooms.

Yes, you read that correctly. We lived in classrooms with wood floors and several feet of chalkboard. This could have been triggering, but it wasn’t. It was mostly amusing and always cool. These classrooms are their own counties—800 square feet that tempted me to do cartwheels. It’s a shame I don’t know how to do them. I mostly doodled on my blackboard, but the visual artist here used his board efficiently to tape his drawings in progress accompanied with descriptions of the work. Another resident finished her novel and another is almost done compiling her poetry manuscript. And as for me, revision was the watchword during my stay. I’m deep into the next round of edits on my memoir.

I have to point out that the chief feature of my room, and I am including my large bed in this accounting, was the rocking chair. I’ve been self-soothing in rocking chairs for most of my life. As soon as I saw the rocker in my room, I knew everything was going to be fine. That implies that I had my doubts. Not about the Mineral School, but about me roughing it in a sixty-year-old schoolhouse that hadn’t been in use since the early 2000’s. I am not a great traveler—flying across the country by myself was not something to which I was looking forward. Flying to a place that I heard had intermittent Internet and no cell service was downright frightening to me. Never mind that I don’t like to do things like share a bathroom down the hall or have to find it in the middle of the night, something I haven’t done in almost four decades since I went to college. (The Mineral School to the rescue on that one: they provided a flashlight!)

Many of my neuroses fell away the moment I saw Jane. She hugged me and I knew I would be comfortable and productive in this place. All Jane and her volunteer staff wanted were for my fellow residents and me to be our best, creative selves. It turns out this meant something beyond just producing work—it meant reveling in our work. And how I’ve reveled. I read books that fed my soul and stimulated my brain. I have started on revisions that I know will revitalize my book and me, and I have been preternaturally calm. Calmness does not come easily to me. Nor does contentment. But content I have been these past two weeks.

After I received the notice of the Mineral School residency, Ken and I planned to go to Seattle together afterwards. That entailed him coming to the school and rescuing me after two weeks. He arrived this morning, and I could not be happier to see him. But I hardly needed saving. In fact, I wanted a few more days here to keep working on a knot of an essay that I’m just beginning to untangle. I have this big classroom where he can easily stay out of my way and hang out with me when the spirit moves me. I was devising a plan as he and I lay in bed staring at the acoustic tile ceiling and the fluorescent lights. Although he was trying to nap, I asked him if this was the oddest place to which I had ever brought him to stay. “It’s the coolest place,” he said sleepily.

I’m not quite ready to leave for the big city yet—the city being Seattle. But maybe it’s time. I admit that I have a touch of homesickness and I miss my family and friends back home. But the Mineral School has given me incredible gifts: direction and independence. And the Wi-Fi connection; I only told everyone back home it was intermittent so they wouldn’t bother me in my beautiful, spacious classroom.