That’s the question my nephew Aharon has carried with him his entire life.

He never met his father—my brother Aharon—who was killed during the first week of the Lebanon War in 1982. He never heard his voice. Never felt his embrace. And yet, every year on Yom Hazikaron, and on his father’s yahrzeit, he stands at his grave. He mourns a man he never knew—a man whose name he carries, whose face he mirrors, whose stories he grew up hearing.

I’ve wanted to write this for a long time. But in light of the devastation of Oct. 7 and what followed—when so many children in Israel were suddenly left without fathers, and many babies were born after their fathers were already gone—I feel I must tell Aharon’s story now. Because his story may help us understand theirs.

Three years ago, I traveled to Israel to participate in my brother Aharon’s 40th yahrzeit. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just his personal yahrzeit. It was also the 40th anniversary of the war itself, and many who fell in battle that year were being remembered in public ceremonies at Har Herzl in Jerusalem—Israel’s national military cemetery.

One building in particular left a lasting imprint on my soul: the National Memorial Hall for Israel’s Fallen. Carved into the rocky slopes of Mount Herzl, the memorial spirals inward, leading visitors down a winding ramp lined with over 23,000 engraved stone bricks—one for each fallen soldier, marked only with a name and the date of death. There are no ranks, no photos, no distinctions. Just quiet dignity and endless grief, etched into stone.

In the heart of the hall, a circular opening in the ceiling—an oculus—allows natural light to pour in. As I looked upward, I felt something shift. It was as if the souls of the fallen were hovering there, suspended between heaven and earth. Though their bodies rest in the ground, their presence lingers. They are not gone. Not entirely. In that sacred space, you feel them. I felt him—my brother Aharon.

That Shabbat, I stayed with my nephew Aharon—the son who was born after his father fell. My brother had been just 26 years old when he was killed. At the time, he and his wife, Henia, had a 6-month-old baby girl, Efrat, and Henia was three months pregnant. Six months after the funeral, she gave birth to a son—and named him Aharon, after the father he would never meet.

That Friday night, after the Shabbat meal, once his wife and children had gone to bed, Aharon and I stayed up talking—until nearly 4 in the morning. He asked me to tell him more stories about his father. We spoke about what the name Aharon means—to him, to me, to our family.

He looks so much like his father. Even his handwriting is the same—sloppy and illegible. We always laugh about that. The power of genes, the echoes of someone gone too soon.

After my brother was killed, his best friend, Gershon—who had served in the military alongside Aharon and Henia—stepped in. Three years later, he married Henia and adopted the children as his own. He did so with remarkable clarity: Abba Aharon would always remain in the picture, literally and figuratively. In Efrat’s and Aharon’s bedrooms hung a large portrait of their Abba Aharon. And in daily life, there was Abba Gershon—in the flesh, loving them, raising them, supporting them.

They grew up with two fathers: one who held them in memory, and one who held them each day.

As children, Efrat and Aharon used to argue over whom Abba Aharon loved more.

“He was alive when I was born,” Efrat would say. “He held me, kissed me, took me to the park. I’ve seen the pictures.”

What could Aharon possibly say in return? He had no memories. No photos. No arms that had ever held him.

Henia tried to comfort him. She told him that Abba Aharon kissed him through her stomach, that he had loved him just as much. But for Aharon, that kind of love was hard to believe in. Hard to feel. Hard to prove.

That night, sitting across from me, he finally shared something he had never told anyone—not even his mother.

He took a deep breath and said: “How do you mourn someone you never met? I ask myself that all the time. I go to the cemetery on Yom Hazikaron, and on his yahrzeit. I stand by his grave. But what am I really mourning?”

He looked down for a moment, then up again.

“I never heard his voice. Not once. I don’t know what his laugh sounded like, or how he walked. I know he was a genius in math—and so am I. I know I look like him. I even write like him. But who is he?

“Is he me? Am I him?”

He looked at me—not with resentment, but with longing. A quiet ache.

“I never met him,” he said, “but I wish I had. I’ve heard so many amazing things about Abba Aharon—his warm smile, his laugh, how brilliant he was, how he loved to help people. Everyone says he was full of life. That he was fun. That he had a good heart.”

He paused, eyes shining.

“I just hope I’m walking in his shoes … even if they’re very big ones.

“On this 40th yahrzeit,” he continued, “I felt something opened inside me — something I hadn’t touched since I was a child.

“When I was 6 and a half years old, on Chag HaShavuot, my father Gershon took me to shul. When it came time for Yizkor, he stood up and quietly left the room—like all those who still have both parents do. But he didn’t take me with him. He looked at me and said, ‘You stay. You need to say Yizkor for your Abba Aharon who died.’

“I was the only child there—surrounded by older people, softly crying.

“What is Yizkor? I wondered. What am I supposed to say? Why did he leave me here? Where is my father? Is he coming back?

“It was terrifying. I started to shake. And then I burst into tears. I felt so alone and helpless.

“A man I didn’t know turned to look, then came over and knelt beside me. He didn’t say much. He just gave me a lollipop and gently rubbed my back. I don’t remember what color or shape it was. What I remember is the feeling: confusion, fear, abandonment.

“Eventually my father returned. He hadn’t meant to hurt me. In his mind, he was giving me a place of belonging—among the mourners. But I was just a little child. I didn’t understand. All I knew was that one of my fathers had died—and that meant I had to stand alone, in a room full of sorrow I couldn’t yet name.

“That memory stayed with me for years — not in sharp detail, but in feeling. It became part of how I understood grief: not just as absence, but as something silent and shapeless that children are expected to carry without knowing how.”

So when Aharon leaned in that Friday night and whispered his truth, I understood.

Grief is not always tied to memory. Sometimes, it’s tied to the absence of memory—the empty spaces a loved one should have filled. Aharon’s loss was not just of a father, but of a relationship that never had a chance to begin. And yet, his mourning is no less real. In fact, it may be more complicated.

Psychologists speak of ambiguous loss—a kind of grief where the person is physically gone but psychologically present, or present but emotionally out of reach. In Aharon’s case, his father exists vividly in stories, in photographs, in his own face—and yet remains forever just beyond reach. The mind can’t reconcile this contradiction, and so the heart carries it instead.

Children who grow up without a parent often inherit not just the legacy of that parent, but the sorrow left behind. They absorb the silence, the longing, the “what-ifs”—even when no one speaks them aloud. Over time, that absence becomes part of their identity. They learn to live with a shadow.

And still, Aharon chose to step toward that shadow—to ask the questions, to hold space for a man he never met but somehow still knows. Every year, he stands by his father’s grave. He doesn’t have memories to mourn, so he mourns the missing ones. He honors a life that shaped his own, even from a distance.

How do you mourn someone you never met?

Maybe you do it by searching for them—not in the past, but in yourself.

Maybe you do it by choosing to remember what was never yours to forget.

Rachel Sarna, MSW, PhD, is a psychotherapist in Teaneck, working with individuals, couples and families. She is a seventh-generation sabra and scion of the illustrious Luria rabbinic family in Israel, and her clinical work is rooted in memory, family, and resilience—drawing on her spiritual heritage and deep knowledge of Jewish sources. This is her first piece in this publication.