The Sunrises We'll Never See
Or, "What do Andor and Wakanda have to do with Jewish coming-of-age?"
Last weekend, three-and-a-half things happened.
I caught up on Episode 10 of Andor (“No Way Out”)
My whole family went to see Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
My daughter’s Hebrew school class had a family day about their approaching “B-Mitzvah Year.”
3b. My daughter went to a bookstore with her friend and came home with The Diary of Anne Frank
All of these things are about the future.
(No major spoilers below, unless you don’t know anything at all about Chadwick Boseman).
In Andor, Luthen Rael (played by Stellan Skaarsgaard), an early architect of the rebellion against the Empire, says, “I burn my life to make a sunrise I know I’ll never see.” This is the way of all revolutions, of all progress, really. Change is halting, slow, uncertain. When you watch the end of Star Wars: A New Hope (aka The Original One), you see all of this happy celebration when Luke Skywalker destroys the death star. We came, we sent in some torpedoes, BANG, time for a very High Ritual medal ceremony.
But Andor and Rogue One tell a more compelling story. No one acts alone. Luke benefits from the people who rose before him. No Luthen Rael, no Cassian Andor— no Luke.
Parenting is all about the sunrise you will never see. One hopes to see their child grow up— but in the normal order of things, never knows their ultimate fate. In the best of worlds, we don’t live to see our children through all the way to the end of their journey.
Over in Wakanda, the setting of Black Panther, there was both mourning and joy. I had been both dreading and anticipating the film for two years now. Two years ago, when I opened up my browser and saw that Chadwick Boseman (who played King T’challa, the Black Panther) had died of colon cancer, I froze in fear and shock (like most of the world).
Except for me, it was a bit more personal. In 2018 I was diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer. Against quite a lot of odds, I am still alive. He isn’t. It’s wrong. Survivor’s guilt is always about how little sense the world makes. Reading that the man who played a superhero, not quite two years old than me, had succumbed to the disease, was haunting.
When I was diagnosed, the day I heard the word “cancer,” one of the first thoughts I had—but also couldn’t face having— was what this would mean for my daughter, who was seven at the time. Most parents who receive this kind of diagnosis have a similar reaction. What kind of sunrises for our children will we not get to see at all? Not even the faint light beforehand?
For whatever reason, I fixated on the fear that I would miss her becoming a Bat Mitzvah (Daughter of commandment)— a Jewish coming-of-age ritual at 13 (or sometimes 12, for girls in some Jewish communities). That milestone was almost six years away, back in 2018— outside of the five-year-window in which doctors think about cancer survival rates, particularly for metastatic cancer. Even getting to five years would be a miracle.
I’m not quite there yet. I’m at four-and-a-half years of survival and currently disease free. I have at least two or three more surveillance scans to go before my cancer can maybe be (tfuey tfuey tfuey! if I’m lucky!) considered cured.
Her bat mitzvah is still not until 2024.
But it’s almost 2023, and it takes more than a year to prepare for this ritual. Some of the kids in her sixth-grade cohort really are just a year out.
So there I was, on Sunday, with families we have known for years. Being handed manuals and books and forms. Talking about what the ritual means. Looking forward to a sunrise. Simultaneously excited and scared of how much could still go wrong. Being shocked, not just because my kid is so old—but because I am here.
The latest Black Panther film is—like the first one— all about generations, parents and children, what we pass down, what we inherit. It was stunning and also a painful elegy. I hadn’t told my daughter anything about Boseman’s death (she wasn’t into Marvel back in 2020). I hadn’t been able to find a way to do so this year, as we watched the entire MCU in order. So for her, the (offscreen) death of his character right out of the gate was an enormous surprise. As the credits rolled, she asked me: “Why did they do that? Why is it dedicated to him?”
“He died,” I said, tears streaming down my face (I think most people probably bawled their way through the credits. Thanks a lot, Rihanna! And the mid-credit scene!)
She didn’t ask how he died. I didn’t tell. It’s too hard.
Last night at bedtime I had noticed The Diary of Anne Frank open on our kitchen counter. I knew she had just read Number the Stars in school so I asked if that was where she got the book. “No,” she said. When she was out with her friend and had time to browse the bookstore, she said she decided to go to the religion section “because of Mommy.” (Thankfully, she has no desire to become a religious studies professor, but I’m touched that she is interested in what I do). She had learned of Anne Frank’s existence from various teachers over the years. Now she wanted to read her diary.
“What do you think?” I asked.
She said it was sad—she read the foreword— but that she liked it. She said the most moving part so far was a line where Frank wondered what might happen to her diary in the future, and who might read it. My daughter was moved by the enormity of it— by the fact that Frank couldn’t have known about the millions of people who would read her diary.
As scholars have long discussed, Frank actually did hope her diary would be read, as a record of the war. She began revising it to that end, before being captured and sent to several concentration camps, ultimately dying in Bergen-Belsen. (You can even read the Critical Edition of the diary, with various layers of edits). I explained this to my daughter.
The same year my daughter was born, I finished writing my first book. The fourth chapter is, in part, about Anne Frank. I ended it by reflecting on the pain and uncanniness of seeing Anne Frank’s baby pictures— there’s a stunning one of her mother holding her in the hospital— while holding my own tiny baby. The fragility, the pain of the unknown. The sunrises neither of them would ever get to see.
No one ever knows their future, or their expiration date. In these days of burgeoning climate catastrophe, no one really knows what future sunrises on Earth will look like for anyone.
All we can do is keep trying— keep planting trees— keep writing.
I went from having a baby in my arms as I wrote about Anne Frank, to wondering if I would see that baby grow up beyond elementary school, to that baby being a smart, empathetic middle-schooler who reads the diary.
I got to see four years of sunrises I didn’t think I would see.
Maybe lots of other people will, too.