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Ten years ago, exactly a week after Father's Day, my father left me forever; left this world for the unknown next. On June's third Sunday I sit a coast away from his deathbed, at cardboard-flavored lunch outdoors in Santa Barbara; a town I disremember due to the intense fog, which all but obliterates that wedding-in-law weekend.

A few months earlier my father, Harry, knowing what was to come, had dropped a new bomb in my lap by casually asking, "So what are you going to do at my funeral?" as if it is just another concert program to arrange. I can barely utter my promise to chant Eil Maleh Rachamim , the prayer for the dead, for him. Then my throat closes and I can speak no more. He places the palm of his hand briefly, clumsily against my cheek as if to apologize for being able to do no more than this -- for being unable to live in my life any longer.

Then his fingers find mine and lace through them, and we grip each other's hands tightly. I don't want to hurt him but he squeezes my hand with as much might as he had ever exhibited, so I return strength for strength. I remain mute, frozen between the power of speech and the freedom of tears. I cannot allow myself to rip open a river of relief that would surely cost him more pain than the white-hot agony in his bones that only he and my mother can comprehend. So my soul-beat pulses like tympani as we sit together, alone in the art-filled living-room, and I will him to feel my innermost voice begging him, "After you go -- if you have to go -- come back to me and haunt me; please don't leave me forever."

My father dies at 2 in the morning. I look out the window six hours later on a sunny summer's day and cannot fathom that the world continues to run with him gone.

During shanah, the year following dad's burial, my mother and sister and I desperately snatch at memories; at infamous buzzwords he put into the universe; at found pennies that surely herald his guardianship from afar (what year was engraved on the penny? His birth year, marriage year, death year?). Sunshine on a stranger's hair startles me into momentary false recognition. I immerse my face in his bar mitzvah prayer shawl to inhale the fragrance of old-country wool; try on his tefillin (which he has not worn since before World War II) for weekday morning prayers.

The mirror shocks me every time I behold the face that has always lived there; not for nothing did the hospital nursery nickname me "Harriet." I sneak down the shaving aisles at Walgreen's and CVS to sample aromas of Aqua-Velva, his after-shave of choice. The plaintive words of Beau, a minor character in "Gone with the Wind," paraphrase themselves endlessly in my inner ear: "Where is my daddy going? And why can't I go along, please?" I conceive, then miscarry, a child who would have been born during the week of the first anniversary of his grandfather's death. Like Orpheus, I lose my way. I want to dive down deep after my dad and bring him back with Divine bargaining. And I know, as Beau's surviving parent sighs in response, "It isn't really morning yet."

This hurts like missing teeth -- worse than that. I cannot find my bite on which to chew my days properly. And I'm beyond angry. How unfair is it that he could escape the Nazis, help save his own mother from the death machine, turn around as soon as he reached the states to fight the Axis madness overseas and liberate concentration camp victims, put two children and one granddaughter on the road to greatness, beat cancer at least twice, only to perish by the torture of his own skeleton before he could celebrate his second bar mitzvah? And how on earth is my mother, now twice-widowed, coping; she who at 21 lost her own mother and had to contemplate an even more endless stretch of days and months and years without a rudder?

Then a baby arrives. Literally. A little boy, born half a world away, comes flying into my arms almost faster than the speed of light and sound; or so it seems. In reality, we have spent 14-and-a-half months in this latest, best quest for parenthood. We don't think about replacing one soul for another. We don't care what our child will look like. We don't even dwell on whether we're actually going to end up with a child this time, because we know for a certainty we must.

But it happens that, exactly one day short of my father's second yahrzeit, we receive The Referral: paperwork and photos of the little person who is going to become our son. We melt over his surprised expression, his parted, honey-drop lips, and his silky, faux-hawked hair that defies us not to drop kisses on its spiky dark insouciance atop a melon-sweet forehead. He won't physically be with us for another two-and-a-half months, but he couldn't be more ours. I haven't been this happy in two years.

Our son's birth name, YeDam, means "comfort" in Korean. We keep this as a middle name. "And Isaac loved Rebekah, and was comforted after the death of his mother" (Genesis 24:67). Our boy's Hebrew name is Yitzhak (laughter) after that of his grandfather, but to this we added Menachem: Comfort.

Jacqueline Shuchat-Marx has served Temple Emanu-El of Edison as its cantor since July 2009.