Outside daffodils have shot up, waving their crowns; forsythias in their crude and blinding crimps of yellow burst forth, as they did every spring in the yard of my childhood home. I’m not ready.

FaceTime: my mother under a white blanket, white thinning hair pulled back, hollowed eyes, sculpted cheekbones, frail hands. Her face reminds me of a painting I can’t recall, maybe by Rembrandt. My son, Lucas, and husband, David, briefly join the FaceTime. We reminisce. How she stood over me to make sure I meticulously dried every piece of lettuce for the salad for her elaborate holiday dinners. Never bottled condiments on the table. Kept a suitcase of antique toy cars and trucks she collected at flea markets in her house when my toddler son and nephew came for a visit. Lucas, now grown, remembers Laura’s bedroom in our childhood home where she wallpapered in black-and-white posters of Marilyn Monroe, John Kennedy, Herman’s Hermits, The Beatles. A last text from Laura a few hours later. Five p.m., March 29. Mom’s gone.

In Jewish tradition the body must be buried within 24 hours. I fight with myself about whether to travel to Cleveland. David’s judgment is less clouded by emotion. The rabbi calls to express his condolences. In Judaism the period of Nisan is the first month of the Jewish calendar, and since Passover is the spring festival of liberation, it is a special time for our mother to leave us and pass over. Ordinarily, when someone dies, there’s a 30-day mourning period following shiva, but Passover cancels it to commemorate the month of rebirth, the rabbi says. He briefly outlines the plan. No funeral service. Only a grave site burial. Only 10 people permitted. Everyone must stand six feet apart. The ritual of Kriah, the tearing of the cloth, a symbol of pain and grief; throwing dirt on the coffin, a mark of closure. Afterward the seven-day shiva candle.

A pearl-gray morning of howling winds. I dress for the virtual graveside burial in a black flowing blouse my mother would love, put on the sapphire earrings she gave me, lipstick — my mother never left the house without it. David changes from his now-that-we’re-in-lockdown sweats into a crisp blue button-down shirt. A driver in a sedan arrives to pick up Laura. We sisters group-text (and occasionally Laura snaps us a photo) as the car drives through mostly empty roads to Mount Olive Cemetery in the Cleveland suburbs.

We switch from text to FaceTime. Laura shows off her new glasses. We blow kisses. The sedan pulls up the long drive to the cemetery. It is one of the grayest days I remember. At 11 a.m. the service begins. Through the window of my phone a jerky kaleidoscope of cloudy sky, a small blue tent flapping in the wind, underneath a podium where the rabbi presides, a quick flash to the chestnut-colored coffin soon to be lowered into the ground. Hundreds of gravestones like dominoes stand in the background, a few bare trees just beginning to bud. A blue bird skims the weighted sky. I look up from the tiny screen on my phone and out my own window in Long Island at a family of trees in the yard, their crippled, arthritic branches a chorus of joining arms.