The second night of my mother’s shiva falls on New Year’s Eve, and we prepare for a sad party. I text my brother before he arrives: maybe we should call it Rockin’ Shiva Eve. And: Dick Clark can get the minyan together from the beyond. He texts back immediately: for the ‘Olam Ha Ball’ drop. I laugh so hard that those around me might have mistaken my howling for weeping. This is what is hard to explain: we are all so sad, but in these early days of grief, we will also hear laughter.
Most people arrive on the early side, hoping to get the service over in time to grab a cookie and get on with their parties and countdowns. I cannot eat, and there is so much food, so I tell the…guests – attendees? not to leave without taking a whole babka, a plate of corned beef, a half a dozen bagels. I am chided (me! the bereaved!) for offering them leftovers. They don’t want to take food from a house of mourning, a cousin whispers. Bad death energy, she implies through a half-smile. She doesn’t know that my mother would have organized a line of people to pack up leftovers to distribute on their way home. Or that when my mother’s friends offered to feed us that night, I told them it would be nice to feed everyone. How they winced, and how I felt I was asking for too much. How my mother would have done it, without a second thought, and how now that all this food surrounds me, I am regretting its presence and want it to disappear. How none of this should be my actual job tonight. How I should be sitting on a low stool with a tear in my blouse while someone brings me cup after cup of water so that I don’t die myself. I go up the stairs to cry.
When the last guest has left, my father comes up with a plan: let’s go to see the Rose Parade floats gather on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena. Never mind that your mother just died. Never mind that we are stuffed to the gills with all of that deli. Never mind that it is 9PM on New Year’s Eve. Mom loved to go, and so we go.
I close my eyes and try to remember anything about my mother on New Year’s Eve. It is still hard to see past the last five and a half weeks of illness, past her aging body, back to when she would smell of her signature perfume and dress in black chiffon to accompany my father to one or another party. My mother was not a big drinker, but on New Year’s Eve, she would return rosy-cheeked to relieve the babysitter and tuck me in. The smell of champagne would mix with her fading perfume as her mascara etched itself onto her lower eyelids. I wanted to wipe it off, to transform my mother back into my mother. It made me uncomfortable, this version of her, with her own experiences, distinct from mothering us – something that did not generate the same sparkle as these evenings out did.
We drive to Pasadena, east on the 10 as it barrels toward downtown. The palm trees and houses of the Westside give way to the industrial buildings and billboards outside of downtown. To our left we can make out the Hollywood sign, and I think: if we skip the Rose Parade altogether and keep driving east, we could be in Palm Springs by midnight. Everyone is going somewhere tonight, and possibility radiates in the air around their Priuses. We are also going somewhere! I want to shout. We are having some kind of grief-fueled adventure to Pasadena! Look at us!
My father drives these highways expertly, the landscape of this side of Los Angeles etched into his mind like an old map. He knows which exit will take us to Langer’s, and to the promise of hot pastrami. He knows which one-way street will wrap us around to the towering triangle atop City Hall, and how to maneuver around Grand Park in afternoon traffic. He knows the exact route to his own mother’s grave in the concrete cemetery in East L.A., and the best shop on the corner to find flowers before a visit. Once, he showed us the duplex in Boyle Heights where he lived before his mother died. I squinted past the dry grass and chipped paint to imagine him there as a little boy. But tonight, we will pass this version of downtown completely as we turn onto the 110 north and keep driving.
He parks near Orange Grove Boulevard, close to the courthouse, and we get out to stretch our legs. It is a scene from a movie: one where we are walking up a hill, under the hazy lights of the city, past the row of port-a-potties along the grey of the chain-link on the overpass, past the football fans camping on the sidewalks, past their space heaters and sleeping bags and lawn chairs and coats and beanies. Someone is heating water on a camping stove. Someone else is trying to find the right radio station. These are the true parade enthusiasts, the ones who want to be as close as they can be to the action in the morning.
Crowds gather at intersections to await the floats. My father explains the detailed process of lining them up. First, floats begin to populate the outer streets. They can’t all line up at once on Colorado, so they have to gather along these secondary streets like the tributaries en route to a bigger river – one or two here, a few there. We have joined a secret society of Angelenos who find the best intersections to catch the first glimpse of entirely natural works of art on wheels.
We imagine hearing my mother’s commentary the next morning instead of the usual newspeople. How she will talk about the precise number of anthuriums and fern leaves that cover this float, or the carnations, walnut shells, and roses on another. She will read descriptions about how long it took to construct them, and which sponsors are attached. She will talk over tubas and snare drums to describe which high school marching band is coming next, and how far it travelled to be here. People will wake, bleary-eyed from the night before, to turn their televisions to Channel 5 and see the floats in their full glory. But tonight, this sneak-peek rehearsal, in this darkness, feels like something being born.
It is getting late, and we are so very tired. But we stay past when we might have gone to bed. We do not want to go home. We stay for my dad, or for his grief, or because no one wants to shut their eyes and attempt to sleep, or because where else would we be tonight that is not black-black-black with grief. Perhaps we are still in shock, grasping for anything that reminds us of her as we slip farther and farther from the last moment she was alive five days ago. We continue to search for her in the side streets, hoping to find her among the flower petals. Because once midnight comes, and the calendar page turns, we will enter next year while she remains firmly in this one.
Mina Bressler writes about grief, myth, and ecological trauma. Her short piece “Laughing Through the Pain” appeared as a Tiny Love Letter in The New York Times’ Modern Love section in 2024. Born in Los Angeles, she now lives in San Mateo, California, with her husband, two daughters, and two cats. She still roots for the Dodgers.