The days and weeks leading up to September 11th are almost always more difficult for me than the day itself. That was definitely true this year. On the 7th I was called for jury duty and, thank goodness, was excused from a serious criminal case that would have had me at the court for two weeks minimum. To be exposed to even the list of charges on a grim, rainy day in Woburn, where the courthouse is in an office park (aptly named, this week, “Trade Center 128”) by the side of the highway (I always think of A Civil Action whenever I go up by there) was a bracing glimpse of daily horrors that surround us.

On the 9th, Friday, I went for the second year in a row to Shabbat services to say Kaddish for Aaron. I guess I feel some attachment to the ritual, and to the act of standing up for his memory in the community. But these have been wrenching experiences, and there was no escaping the 10th-anniversary focus in the synagogue—indeed it would be wrong if there were no special attention to this day, despite the normative pressure of Bar Mitzvahs, NFL games and everything else, which fall gingerly on this date now and hereafter.

The rabbi chose for his sermon to recall his recent experience of watching the 2002 Frontline documentary “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero,” which as you can imagine I have not seen. In particular he recounted interviews of different people about the most striking image from that day, which for many of them was of a couple who jumped hand in hand from the WTC. I couldn’t really believe I was going to have to sit through his impassioned telling of this couple’s death and of the lessons we were supposed to learn from it about the past and how we have to walk forward. I jammed my fingers in my ears and that was not enough, so I twisted them around until I created a kind of false heartbeat effect that allowed me to dwell just on my own life and my brother’s life, rather than the manner of his ending. Then, standing to name Aaron among those remembered, and mouthing the words of the Kaddish, my jaw actually unmovable from grief and rage.

I should say that I don’t disagree with the rabbi’s thesis—that we need to both look back and to walk forward as a community—or with the value to the community as a whole of having collective acts of remembrance—just that this is not what works best for me and my family. The experience of going to temple these past two years has reconfirmed for me our family’s decision to avoid public memorial gatherings, which of course were all the more prevalent this year, and instead to focus our feelings on Aaron’s life and our many joyful memories of him. This was the guiding spirit of our weekend, which benefited from the happy routines of the girls’ soccer games and playdates, beautiful weather, and the opportunity to be together and look at some pictures of Aaron to recall his life with the girls. It’s a many-year process to get the girls to figure out who he was, why he was important, and how to deal with the living as they negotiate remembering. I was reminded of the Passover siddur’s guidance on how to explain the Passover story to the four types of children—the wise, the wicked, the simple, and the one who does not know how to ask. Scratching wicked from the team, our girls are just about mapped onto those other three children right now, and it is a sweet but painful process of guiding them into knowledge of death, and of how to be with their dad and grandparents in remembrance.