My “coming of age” moment was the day I stood in front of several thousand people, most of whom had known me since infancy, and gave a speech about why I was raising money for cancer.
As I faced the crowd of people, I felt a startling sense of déjà vu. I had stood on this stage for my bat mitzvah. I had watched as my dad made this stage into his instrument, standing and allowing himself to seep into every corner of the carpeted platform until he had absorbed the space and with it, the congregation.
People often talk about floods of memories, but for me, it was more of a gentle trickle or a flickering television. Vague feelings, fragmented memories, and faded impressions seeped through the microphone into my voice. As I spoke, I could hear the remembered years seeping into the words and saturating them with an eerie kind of link between the past and the present. I was a child, terrified by my parent’s mortality and reliving with every mild recollection the intense horror that accompanied the words “cancer” and “chemo.” But, I was also an adult, looking through a pair of backwards binoculars so that everything looked smaller and insignificant, as though it was happening in a world unrelated to me. The end of the speech finally bridged the gap. I finished and looked into my parents’ eyes. They knew both parts of me: the frightened child and the bewildered teenager trying to make sense of tumultuous years of chaos and illness.
For me, coming of age was not about dismissing childhood and embracing adulthood. It was about melding the two with grace and understanding. While I am still learning how to do that, I felt this moment was symbolic, if not of coming of age, then of a reconciliation of age.
