Language of Loss

It started with a spark—just a few words scratched in the margins of Maari’s journal. Ancient phrases she’d been practicing in the late hours when the house was finally quiet.

Hebrew. Aramaic. Old tongues that hummed through her dreams.

Elira noticed.

“What’s this?” she asked, flipping Maari’s open notebook on the kitchen table.

Maari hesitated. “It’s… a root study. I’ve been working with some tutors. Just online sessions. They’ve been helping me dig into meanings the English misses.”

Elira’s eyes lit up. “You didn’t tell me you were doing this. Why would you keep something so powerful from me?”

Maari smiled gently. “Didn’t feel like something to broadcast. But I can introduce you, if you want.”

And she did. She opened her world, her sacred circle, to the woman she was still trying to believe in.

Later that week, after a particularly moving session, Maari transferred the last ten dollars in her account to one of the tutors—just a quiet thank-you, her widow’s mite.

“I know it’s not much,” she told Elira that evening, “but I felt led.”

Elira’s reaction was instant and venomous.

“You what?” she snapped. “That money isn’t yours to give. Duke and I make sure you have what you need because you’re a widow, Maari. You don’t get to pretend you’re some patron of the arts.”

Maari blinked. “It was just ten dollars.”

“It was principle. You’re poor. Stop trying to act like a queen.”

The next day, Elira reached out to the tutors herself.

Within a week, she had sent thousands—gifts, honorariums, handwritten letters. She and Duke were praised in group chats Maari was no longer part of.

No one mentioned Maari again.

No thank-you.

No follow-up.

Just silence.

And then stories. Oh, the stories. Elira at brunch with the tutors. Elira in Zoom recordings. Elira offering “deep insights” Maari knew were echoes of her own notes.

She never said Maari’s name.