The Blessing of Sorrow Page 12

  My cousin reported that he had floated above the hospital bed and been drawn to a shining, beckoning beam of light. He told his wife that at the cusp of death, he felt a tremendous lift of air under the wings of his body. It was a wondrous sensation, he exclaimed, filled with rapture and deliverance. He then proceeded to a kind of celestial gateway. He was promptly greeted by our maternal grandfather, Samuel, for whom Uli was nicknamed. Uli described the grandfather, who preceded all of us in death, with details that were precise and familiar to only those who had known the patriarch.

  Uli accurately communicated the grandfather’s features, his gestures, even the timbre of his voice. There was no logical way for my doomed cousin to have known such particulars about our grandfather without having, in some way, visited with him.

  Uli’s heart stopped beating that evening, finally and terminally. But in between the shadows, my gentle cousin left us with a report—aside from our terrible grief—that gave us some hope.

  During his final days, as he was succumbing to esophageal cancer, Marty, my former father-in-law, spoke whimsically (in between moments of delusion and dysfunction) about taking a cross-country jaunt, by train, from Ohio to California. Who could blame the ailing man for dreaming of a journey away from himself and his predicament? We all listened to his yearning with a mixture of understanding and sadness. Then one night, about two weeks after her grandfather’s death, my younger daughter Debra, a focused and reasonable teenager, ran into our house from our backyard. She was quite unsettled as she declared that she had heard a shrill train whistle while making her way toward the house. However, there simply were no railroad tracks anywhere in the vicinity of our neighborhood.

  As we warily opened the back door and peered out, the porch light bulb suddenly exploded above us. We were quite relieved that no one was hit by the hot shattering glass even as we wondered what Marty was so agitated about!

  What the Dead Tell Us

  So, do the dead tell us things? Is there another realm? I say, yes, there is something. But it is nothing if it is all about horror and specters. For me, it can only exist in the category of hope.

  In American culture, there is as much an obsession with phantasms and ghouls as there is a lack of rational thinking about life and its parameters—or possibilities. Movies and video games and sermons about vampires and demons and poltergeists and exorcisms28 abound, all thriving on the fuel of our insecurities and fears about mortality, cemeteries, hell/heaven, and satanic dominions. The organized religions, while servicing parishioners and members with helpful liturgies and familiar rituals when people die, nonetheless tend to drive traditions of terror into our psyches. It usually has to do with issues of good versus evil, with the cycle of divine beneficence or divine retribution, or the cataclysmic tension between God and Satan. It all amounts to a theological abduction of both our therapeutic grieving cycle and the transition of our dead into eternity and some kind of peaceful afterlife.

  I don’t believe in ghosts; I believe in souls. This belief was sealed within me one afternoon when I literally noticed a soul departing the body of an indomitable young lady who had just lost her battle with cystic fibrosis. Sixteen-year-old Marnie Barth had lived pretty much in the children’s ward of the large community hospital for two or three years. She was good-natured, funny, outgoing, and brave. She was beloved and regularly feted by the medical staff. The genetic disease filled and drowned her body with mucus and infections from her pancreas up through to her lungs.

  I visited Marnie frequently, even as her parents and some close family friends spent endless days and nights with her during the hospital stays. The parents were still young and always hopeful, but they knew the disease would ultimately claim their child. There had been a welcome respite for a while—Marnie was spared time in the hospital, and hope grew that the illness might be in remission. But then I got a call from an aunt, “Better get down to the hospital, Rabbi. Marnie’s back in and the situation is grim.”

  There was already a vigil in progress when I arrived. Friends and family members roamed around the ward in quiet dread. People only whispered to or simply embraced one another. Visitation in Marnie’s room was restricted to one person at a time; she lay intermittently between twilight and a coma. Her mother, father, and an uncle took turns sitting with the child. I joined in the rotation so that the parents could get some rest and together time.

  It was about four o’clock in the afternoon, and I happened to be in the room alone with Marnie. The attending nurse had stepped out. I looked at the girl’s sad, sweet face; her long, frizzy hair was like a crown all about her head. The sound of her breathing was almost inaudible as the monitors ticked and chimed quietly and portentously. Marnie’s eyes were closed. I noticed that her feeble inhalation was receding even more as her stomach made fewer and less frequent indentations under the white blanket that covered her.

  Then I knew that Marnie had died. The heart machine had ceased; its screen revealed a straight, lifeless line. I momentarily was unable to swallow. I was numb and didn’t know where to put my hands. Crushed by the moment, I just placed my hands under my jaw and held my head while a burst of heartache and apprehension rolled through my chest. And then at that moment—almost ineffably at first—the room filled with a calming, moist warmth, and an uncannily pleasant scent. It was something of a delicious mixture of lavender and eternity. It was fleeting, but I sensed and absorbed it; the room also briefly took on the smell of morning rain. As I stood up and looked at the peaceful child who lay before me, I saw a faint but discernible ripple underneath the blanket at the point of her abdomen. I then plainly felt and saw Marnie’s soul depart her frame like an invisible little bird flying off to paradise. That is what I perceived. And then the deeply healing flash ended, and it was just Marnie and me in the sterile hospital chamber. Silence. Peace.

  I edged closer and put my hand to the child’s forehead. It was my own little goodbye to her. It was the gesture of reluctance about leaving the room. As long as I lingered therein, the world of Marnie’s parents remained unbroken. Then I walked out of the room, and when the parents saw me, they just knew.

  I was among many who helped them through the critical stages of grief, and I did not share the experience with Marnie’s parents until a few days after the funeral. Her mother began to weep fresh tears but she nodded several times in a gesture of hope. Her father turned his head and stared into space. I really did not know what they thought, but I had to tell them. I felt they were entitled to know about the little bird.

  It was my duty to eulogize Dr. Joseph Tallisman one morning in the central chamber of an ornate San Diego mausoleum. The spherical, granite room, on the grounds of a tree-laden cemetery, was filled with souls, both seen and unseen. The living sat on folding chairs; the dead lay inside the walls. I spoke from behind the shiny casket at a marble podium.

  I adored Joe Tallisman. He was an earnest physician of the old school. “Forgive me,” he would say, “but I truly believe that a doctor needs to take care of people.” I considered him youthful when he died from a stroke at the age of seventy-one. Mild-mannered and sympathetic, he exhibited a sense of calling about medicine. His smooth face, good nature, and his robust passion for the musical theater had combined to make Joe Tallisman seemingly immune to the aging process. Joe loved all the shows, from Gypsy to Funny Girl to The Sound of Music to—above all—The Music Man, starring Robert Preston.

  The doctor especially liked the beat and tune of that show’s paean to the town of Gary, Indiana. He knew enough about musical measures to even correctly emphasize the number’s phonic accents, carefully enunciating the phrase, “GA-ry, Indi-A-na.”

  The lyrics, compositions, and show tunes of Joe’s life went through my mind as I spoke his eulogy that day in the mausoleum. As the memorial service concluded, the general congregation was momentarily dismissed. Only Joe’s immediate family accompanied the funeral director, the coffin, and me down a sable-colored hallway laden with leaded glass wind
ows. We came to his crypt, where I spoke a few brief words of closure. Joe’s family walked away, tearfully. The funeral director also exited temporarily; there was an unplanned gap in time, and I found myself alone with the casket.

  “Well, goodbye, old crooner,” I said to the box, and turned away to move on to my next responsibility. And then, from behind me, and making its way across the bronze plaques and nameplates of the hallway vaults, came an unmistakable refrain, sung in a muffled, yet familiar voice.

  GA-ry, Indi-A-na,

  GA-ry, Indi-A-na,

  My home sweet home!

  I did not look back. I could not. But even as the ephemeral lyric crawled across my skin and tugged at my breath, I only felt happy and reassured. It was a most agreeable mixture of music and memory that I only hoped was also being conveyed to Dr. Joseph Tallisman’s family.

  A Healing Silence

  There is a great stillness that pervades the cemeteries, mausoleums, and memorial chapels that dot this otherwise noisy, boisterous, mercantile, and digitalized nation. We must grieve, we must process our anguish, and we must proceed with our lives in due time after losing someone because we simply are not going to see them in this life ever again. Yet I do maintain—from both my personal experience and the thoughtful reports of others—that we can hear from the dead.

  It is sometimes hard not to hear from them; they are always part of one’s subconscious and conscious thoughts and reveries. I’ve heard many times from people who tell me that “I heard from my father and he told me what to do”; or, “I didn’t know how to deal with this issue but then I remembered something my mother once told me.” It doesn’t require a “psychic medium” or even an actual visitation. If you lean into your grief and remember your dead with courage and forthrightness, they will reward you with information and insight. Here, on this corporeal side, only a healthy soul that tackles bereavement with vulnerability and openness has a chance to learn something from a soul on the ethereal (other) side.

  Part of the perplexity of our mortality is that regardless of science, beyond skepticism, we have no way to empirically prove there is not another dimension to our lives in this cosmos. And I am not speaking of absurd American sensations such as “Elvis sightings” or the preposterous manipulations of a séance, replete with the prescribed oval table, a specific setting of candles, and the number of people present divisible by three. Remembrance and tribute represent a dignified category of interaction with the dead; contrived trysts with celebrity dead or someone’s own dear ones represent something else altogether and frequently amount to a series of burlesque mummeries. These have nothing to do with genuine, cleansing grief.

  Better that the dead should come to us than that we should pursue them. It is usually more illuminating that way, less forced, and less incendiary. How many crimes have been committed by perpetrators—history is filled with “messiahs”—who rationalized their misdeeds based on messages or directives supposedly coerced from spirits or derived from their own narcissism. When we go after the dead, the living are often hurt. When the dead drift to us—at the cemetery, in church, or in any prayerful moment—the living are sometimes enlightened.

  We can learn something from the dead if we find them in our dreams or discover them through the soft vestibule of our personal spirituality. A quiet visit at someone’s grave or at the site of an urn can also create understanding and healing. There is nothing wrong or misguided about talking with a loved one at the site of his or her memorial marker; there are often important things to bestow and receive.

  I don’t think people should linger on and on with their dead, and I certainly affirm that we must accept mortality as the measure of life’s limits. But I do not disclaim that we can detect some things from the dead, even as I saw a young girl’s soul fly away from her body and heard a mausoleum rendition of a stanza of The Music Man.

  28 The 1973 film, The Exorcist, and its several sequels, had a profound effect on people. I personally witnessed a Catholic college buddy of mine literally crumble in a fearsome collapse of terror after we saw the picture. “That could happen to me!” the poor fellow kept screaming. He was ultimately sedated at a nearby emergency room.

  Chapter Eight

  Moving Forward: How Does Grief Grow Us?

  “The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows.”

  Socrates

  In his book, A Question of Character, Thomas Reeves wrote the following about John F. Kennedy: “Jack took the loss of his favorite sister terribly hard. For the next several years, haunted by Kick’s death29 and fears about his physical condition, Jack spoke often about death. [One close friend] thought him ‘deeply preoccupied by death’ and later recalled a fishing trip in which Jack pondered the best ways to die.”30

  Reeves reported in his book that following his sister’s tragic demise, the future president matured as a human being. His veneer of impossibly good looks and detached political charisma evolved into a more solemn view of life and providence. Reeves wrote: “Some of his male friends thought that Jack’s new view of his mortality made him more companionable and interesting.”

  There is no question about it. An unknown philosopher left us with these words: “Life asked Death, ‘Why do people love me but hate you?’ Death responded, ‘Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth.’” Once we have confronted mortality and grieved, we are endowed with layers of heightened sensitivity, deeper empathy, and bittersweet wisdom. The “painful truth” transforms life from blissful simplicity into informed complexity. When I am in pain, I prefer to talk with somebody who has actually been tested by crisis rather than an unproved speechmaker who speaks gratuitously about matters he or she has not endured. The dead are the silent mentors of life-wisdom. If you or I are going to tell anyone, “I know how you feel,” it cannot be an abstract declaration. It only rings true if it comes from hard-won experience. People who offer platitudes to us when we are in mourning usually mean well. People who speak to us after having actually suffered talk from hard experience.

  “Grief is a teacher, when it sends us back to serve the living.” When we embrace our sorrow and convert the anguish into genuine reflection, we can find out who we are and what values live within us. And then, if we are inspired to righteous deeds, there is a genuine transformation that turns pain into wisdom and mindfulness.

  Such a transformation was realized by Robert F. Kennedy, the brother of President Kennedy. I described his personal change in a previous book called Dangerous Friendship.31 For so long an inflexible, sometimes callous man driven by family ambition and fanatic loyalty to JFK, Bobby Kennedy was profoundly changed by his searing grief after the murder of his brother in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

  After the shocking assassination of the young president, something began to happen within the shattered soul and the slight body of Bobby Kennedy. A number of his intimates have spoken or written about the discernible change in the inconsolable man; grief softened Kennedy’s hard soul and rigid sensibilities. Running a short-lived presidential campaign in 1968 (he was assassinated on June 5, moments after winning the California primary), Kennedy captured the imaginations and hopes of the nation’s poor and underprivileged. He became a passionate advocate for African Americans, many of whom actually saw him as the ethical successor to Martin Luther King Jr., who had been gunned down just two months prior. Kennedy also developed a keen sense of outrage about the historic plight of Native Americans; in short, the calamity of his brother’s death turned him into an unambiguously compassionate person and a visionary champion of human rights in America.

  The iconic singer and civil rights leader Harry Belafonte, who had encouraged Bobby to seek the presidency, wrote that “Bobby had been transformed . . . the days of wondering how we might find access to his moral center were long gone.”32

  From Dangerous Friendship:

  Many historians have expounded upon the deepening of Robert Kenned
y that occurred after he lost his brother. There are innumerable accounts of his midnight jaunts over the fence at Arlington National Cemetery, where he would spend hours in prayer over the president’s grave. The eternal flame would capture the unspeakable woe etched permanently into the gaunt face, tears poured out of his eyes, and even his thick, wavy shock of hair would appear wracked and hopeless. He was known to disappear on solitary walks through Washington at all hours of the day or night; he donned his late brother’s jackets and cufflinks and even transferred his papers into one of John’s favored carry cases.33

  Out of this well of bereavement came a rehabilitated soul. The scion of privilege and power, a patrician who had never really taken a strong interest in matters of social justice and human welfare, Robert F. Kennedy emerged from tragedy as a prophet of righteousness.

  Kennedy did not appear to know how to deal with his grief; rather, it appeared the grief knew how to deal with him. It remade him into an uncommonly sympathetic and sensitive human being. That is why Kennedy was able to stand upon the back of a flatbed truck in Indianapolis on the night of April 4, 1968, and—in an impromptu speech—tell a crowd of primarily African Americans that Martin Luther King Jr. had just been murdered in Memphis. By his words and actions embracing social justice, he had earned the right to tell the stricken crowd:

  For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.34