I Still Mourn

by Mat Wilson

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I don’t know exactly when my mobility changed, it wasn’t a single moment but has progressed over several years. But I do have a photo from the day it all started. A photo of a kitchen table, my kitchen table, sitting in the middle of my mostly empty new apartment on December 31, 2022.

I had just assembled it. It came from IKEA and was delivered a few days earlier. It’s a good table, a great table: big enough to spread out a heavy board game (which I love), and with two leaves that extend it even further. It seats six comfortably without being expanded. A friend once had this same table, and I remember thinking, “when I move into a more “adult” apartment, this will be the one I get”. Just the right size for Shabbat dinner, a holiday meal, or a long evening of games and laughter.

The thing is, I live alone. And I’ve always been physically strong and fiercely independent (probably a byproduct of being an only child). So even though the instructions clearly said it required two people to lift once the legs were attached, I brazenly did it myself. The assembly was fine until the last step: flipping it upright.

It’s a really heavy table. Lifting it put significant strain on my lower back. The injury wasn’t sudden or dramatic, just a pressure that tipped my fragile spine over the edge. Having lived with lower back trouble for more than a decade, I assumed, as always, that some stretching, ice, and physical therapy would set me right. I’d bounce back, because I always had.

But this time was different. I didn’t bounce back. Things continued to steadily worsen over the next several years. 

The Torah portion the week I built that table was Vayechi. I don’t remember what I noticed then, but I’ve returned to it as I reflect on how my body and my life began to change. In Vayechi, Jacob, aged and nearly blind, senses his death approaching. He gathers strength and blesses Joseph’s sons. Then he dies. His children mourn him deeply. They carry him to be buried in Canaan. And then, they return to Egypt. They return to life, changed. The story does not end with death. It continues with what comes after.

My life didn’t end on that December day in 2022. But something shifted. The changes since then have been slow and progressive. There are things I can no longer do. Pain and exhaustion accompany me in ways I never knew before. And even if my life didn’t end, I had to leave parts of it behind.

There has been mourning in that. I have had to grieve for what I used to be able to do. Not because I am giving up, but because I cannot move forward without naming the loss. Disability often doesn’t come with clean breaks or tidy endings. It comes as a slow unraveling. Adjustments. Recalibrations. “New normals.” A thousand quiet moments for ordinary things, like standing through the Amidah, carrying groceries without a plan, or traveling independently. Each small loss nearly invisible, but together undeniable.

And here is the irony: I bought this table to make room for community. I imagined board games scattered across it, friends passing glasses and challah, the hum of conversation filling the room. What I never imagined was how this table would also mark the beginning of my needing community in an entirely different way. I thought I was building independence. Instead, I was ushered into interdependence.

Yes, there have been game nights and holiday meals around this table. But there has also been the rally of community when I moved last summer, friends showing up to unpack boxes, to spread cloth and napkins across the table, to bless the new space with their presence. The table I lifted alone has become the table others have lifted for me. It was supposed to be a tool for hosting. Instead, it has become a witness to my being held.

This, too, is part of Vayechi. Jacob’s children carried his body, but they also carried his blessing. What gets carried forward isn’t only the body as it once was, it is the bond, the relationship, the life that continues.

In Jewish tradition, grief is marked with ritual: shiva, shloshim, yahrzeit, Yizkor. We set aside time to name loss, to let memory pierce the ordinary. Sometimes I wish for a similar practice in disability grief, because so often our losses come without ceremony. They arrive in increments, with no witnesses. Yet maybe that is the point of Jewish mourning rituals: grief is not a single moment but a rhythm. It lingers, reshapes itself, weaves into the fabric of life. Loss remains, and still, we continue.

I didn’t lose everything that day, not even close.
But I did lose the illusion of a body that would always recover.
And so I mourned. I still mourn.

Mat Wilson enjoys board and video games, road trips big and small, and any opportunity to be in water. He discovered a love for Torah study through the art of source sheet creation, and is now using writing as a way to explore his lived experiences with disability. Outside of his free time, Mat is a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and is pursuing a Master’s in Nonprofit Leadership at the University of Pennsylvania.