The Blessing of Sorrow Read online

  Again and again, in my own experience and in the study of historical men and women, I hear the echo of the prayer book: “Grief is a great teacher, when it sends us back to serve the living.”

  Reuben’s Challenge

  I once watched a man die over the course of two long and grueling years.

  In the mid-1980s, I began work at a large and historic synagogue in the Midwest, serving as associate rabbi to a distinguished cleric whom I will call Reuben Cohen. We were rather dissimilar in style and personality; Reuben was a prominent theological scholar and retained an almost grim formality. He was an aloof man of erudite habits who kept some distance from others and who himself admitted he was more suited to academia than to spiritual leadership. In fact, his father, an extremely eminent sage and leader of this same congregation, had anointed Reuben as his successor. Reuben simply inherited the position without any professional or contractual lobbying.

  As it turned out, he and I became good working partners and genuinely liked one another. There was a successful symmetry: I enjoyed mixing with people and working with youngsters; Reuben was content to withdraw, read and reflect in his study, have lunch with the wealthy patrons of the temple, and deliver his weekly sermon to a crowd of mostly elderly people.

  I had been in the community about two years. Reuben was fifty-nine, tall and bulky, an exquisitely handsome man with a strong jaw and a Princeton pedigree. He had suffered a severe bout of pneumonia while traveling in South Africa that turned out to be foreboding. As he began to visibly weaken and deteriorate, his face recessed and his strong shoulders sagged. The diagnosis finally became public—he was stricken with a merciless brain lymphoma. I kept thinking how dreadfully ironic that a man of such a superior mind and intellect be afflicted in the brain.

  As I began to fill in more and more for him, my relationship with Reuben and his family also plummeted. After about a year of this situation, and as the synagogue leadership began to accede to the terminal truth about their leader, I came to be viewed as Reuben’s successor. This was not an enviable state of affairs—most especially for Reuben, who fought heroically for two years against the disease before finally succumbing to it.

  He continued to work and to appear at synagogue events until about six months before his demise. He was not always lucid. He sometimes collapsed on the podium. On one occasion, when his cranial issues caused him to completely go blank as he was trying to read from the prayer book in front of a Sabbath congregation, I walked over from my pulpit seat to assist him. He looked at me, his left eye drooping from the cancer, and struck me on the shoulder with his fist.

  I had to covertly shadow him at weddings and funerals at various sites and venues in order to step in when he literally was unable to function and perform. He was as stubborn as he was brave. His refusal to surrender certainly prolonged his much-too-short life. Sadly, some people began to prefer he not appear at their milestone events; some even came to resent his obstinacy because they didn’t want a spectacle interfering with their ceremony or occasion.

  But as time went on, and before Reuben became too unwell to continue appearing in public on any regular basis, there was a discernible change in his personality and behavior. A previously unknown sympathetic strain began to possess him. He noticed the children of our religious school and smiled at them, frequently putting his hands on their heads as they rushed by. He was more warmly present—and woefully congenial—in the room with his congregants. He sought out other staff members for lunch outings or just conversational interludes. He looked forward to being taken out to the movies in the evenings; the senior staff rotated in this tender responsibility.

  As his own grief enveloped him, he allowed himself to be vulnerable. The distance between him and others noticeably lessened. I saw fear and loneliness in the eyes of this once-towering figure who, despite his horrific illness, managed to write a brilliant book (hardly his first) about the origins of scripture that was published posthumously. I noted with awe and admiration that the author picture he had approved for the book jacket was not his long-standing, gleaming photo of the good-looking young man with a thick head of hair, sturdy facial features, and piercing eyes that radiated both hardiness and wisdom; rather, it was the authentic image of Reuben as he looked during his end of days—pale, wracked, lightless eyes, a hurting, lusterless smile, yet a man replete with tenacious dignity.

  On one early afternoon, he had invited me to lunch at a plush downtown restaurant. There was precariousness between us. Reuben was cogent that day, in between the daunting and draining chemotherapy and radiation treatments, the relentless indignity of his cruel malady, the undeniable fright that surely filled him every waking moment. He spoke to me quietly and with poise. He was uncharacteristically forthright and humble.

  “Look, we probably should talk. I don’t know how much life I have left.”

  “I am deeply concerned about you, Reuben,” I replied. “And I just want to be helpful.” It was clear to me that he was struggling very hard to come to terms with his own woe and fears.

  He spoke up again. “It took me so damn long to even walk through this restaurant. I’m an old man.” He was only sixty, and still had a measure of the hulk that had carried him on the Princeton football team.

  “No, you’re not an old man,” I said. “Old men quit.” Reuben smiled and thanked me. He seemed touched—maybe even lifted—by the remark. He dug into his plate and we continued to eat for a few moments. I finally said, “What do you wish to talk about, Reuben?”

  “I don’t really know,” he said, without edginess. But then suddenly, his face turned stormy and his tone shifted. He stared at me intensely and blared out, “You know, you’re just like the rest of them. The rest of you young rabbis. You came here to upgrade from your previous position. You’ll move on after a while and advance to your own congregation, using what you did here as your laurels. You’re all the same.”

  I understood he was sick, but I had too much respect for him not to take up his challenge. “Wait a minute, Reuben. You can’t talk to me like that. You never applied for a job in your life like I had to apply and earn the position I hold. You got the job because your father passed it along to you. I had to earn it from you while going up against a bunch of other candidates. You’ve never even had to draw up a résumé. How can you come at me for just doing what I had to do like everyone else?”

  My boss looked at me while slowly chewing on his sea bass. He nodded his head and issued a barely audible “Hmm.” He didn’t say much of anything else until we walked out of the restaurant together, exchanging pleasantries. But I know that he did not feel like a dying person for that interlude. He just felt like a person. He walked away, smiling.

  Money or Memories?

  On May 1, 2015, forty-seven-year-old David Goldberg died suddenly and unexpectedly. He collapsed off an exercise machine and split his head open on the floor. It was later determined that he had suffered a cardiac arrhythmia, which led to the devastating fall. Goldberg was the husband of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, mentioned earlier. Sandberg, who had led a relatively gilded life up to this tragedy, was overwhelmed and, in her own words, engulfed by “the deep loneliness of my loss.”35 As one journalist expressed, “Grief nearly crushed her, and she wasn’t afraid to say that out loud.”36

  It’s important to remember that, at the core, Sheryl Sandberg, a talented and skilled corporate groundbreaker, is nonetheless a young mother who was mercilessly widowed. Individuals with the kind of power and affluence she enjoys sometimes have difficulty with problems and challenges they can’t buy out. Sadly, over the years, I have often observed people of privilege who never really had any major personal issues to contend with become completely unhinged when struck by a serious illness or a tragic event in their lives. They lash out in frustrated terror and fail to achieve an outlet for their vexations.

  No portfolio, no level of clout or prominence, changes the core being of a mother and wife—most grievously when she is widowe
d. And especially when she is young and with small children. Sheryl Sandberg found herself walking a grim, unfamiliar, and unwanted road; her celebrity was no veil for her anguish. She has described the brutality of watching her children collapse at their father’s grave, “I didn’t know what to do. It was one of the worst moments of my life. I wasn’t rational. I wanted to help. I wanted to comfort.”

  Making good use of her considerable means and connections, Sandberg called upon a number of grief scholars and therapists to help her analyze—and share—her bereavement and recovery. The result was her book and seminar series called Option B. As she applied herself, the grief grew Sandberg from helplessness to helpfulness. The book drew from a profoundly raw and tender Facebook post about her mourning that immediately “went viral.” As journalist Jane Eisner wrote in 2017, “It became a remarkable social phenomenon, shared more than 400,000 times and positioning Sandberg as unusually vulnerable and as honest, helpful, and kind.” Eisner added, with words that reflect some of the themes I discussed earlier:

  She was already writing that optimistic bromides don’t help someone whose world has been shattered, that mourners don’t need to be told life will get better when they can’t believe it will, that instead they need their pain to be acknowledged and the uncertainty in their future legitimated. Ask not, “How are you?” Ask instead, “How are you today?”37

  Sandberg focused on this issue, with notable empathy for the freshly grieved, in her book:

  Many people who had not experienced loss, even some very close friends, didn’t know what to say to me or my kids. Their discomfort was palpable, especially in contrast to our previous ease. As the elephant in the room went unacknowledged, it started acting up, trampling over my relationships . . . Friends were asking, “How are you?” but I took this as more of a standard greeting than a genuine question. I wanted to scream back, “My husband just died, how do you think I am?” I didn’t know how to respond to pleasantries. Aside from that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?38

  To her credit, Sandberg forcefully converted her anguish into wisdom and with much-needed direction for millions of her readers and followers. As already intimated here, this isn’t always the case when advantaged people endure grief or terminal illness. This is hardly their fault or intent. Exactly because life hasn’t tested them before, they are sometimes unable to deal with a problem of such overwhelming gravity and consequence.

  I once visited the billionaire owner of an insurance conglomerate who was hospitalized with an incurable ailment. Surrounded by dutiful assistants and a host of entertainment gadgets and infused with pain medications, he dismissed his entourage when I arrived. I thought we were about to have an evocative discussion about his situation. He looked at me and impatiently blurted, “Rabbi, do you know how to operate a goddam VCR? I’ve got this movie I want to see and it just won’t go in!”

  I spent the next twenty minutes fiddling with the tape, trying to jam it into the machine until it finally caught. Meanwhile, he was placing irritable phone calls to colleagues and subordinates while I, on my knees in my suit, struggled with his valuable copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. I got up and announced to him, “Okay, it’s fixed.” He responded, “Okay, thanks for stopping by, Rabbi.” And then he dismissed me with a nod of his head.

  I thought about that hollow moment—and the lost opportunity—when I conducted his burial four months later. He had died restlessly and with tremendous anger. I so wished to have helped him with more than an adjustment of his VCR unit. Alas, he did not grow from his grief. He just died and left behind a lot of money for his family but not many memories.

  Grief and Its Legacy

  My own mother certainly didn’t grow from the grief of losing my father. Granted, it was sudden and shocking, and my parents were only in their forties at the time. The thing I recall most vividly in the days following the calamity was my mother regularly scurrying into the kitchen and, regardless of who was nearby, flailing herself against the sink and then vomiting into it. It was hard to watch, and we did try with all our might to comfort her. And even though I was twenty-three, my younger brother and sister and me were nonetheless just newly fatherless children and were fraught with our own terrors.

  My mom and dad had been grade school sweethearts and—in spite of their frequent outbursts of yelling and contending—she had worshipped him. They had traveled a long road together as immigrants to the United States. Both were young war veterans from another land; together they negotiated many social, professional, and financial uncertainties and ethnic pressures. I recall with pride that they bore with dignity and resilience the steady flow of xenophobic ugliness that accrued for them in the new and bewildering provinces of Colorado and Ohio in the 1950s and 1960s. My grief for them does not preclude my admiration and respect for the cultural hardships with which they contended; on the contrary, there is a kinship with them that is stirred through my sorrow.

  Like many people, they were haunted by unfulfilled dreams. Both had struggled in their respective fields (he was a scientific engineer; she was a schoolteacher). There were setbacks and even humiliations for both of them, jobwise. Both were headstrong, sometimes shrill, and they didn’t consult clinical therapists.

  When my father died, my mother felt cheated, abandoned, and angry. Predictably, she did not seek out professional help. Rather, she sought out her three children in order to transfer her rage and the blame for the loss. Her own torment completely untreated and unhandled, she wreaked spiritual havoc on us. She had always been something of a manipulator who routinely played favorites with her kids, generally pitting one against the other. She leaned toward sulkiness. But now, weighed down by an indescribable and unquestionably unfair blow, her behavior became both extreme and histrionic.

  She resented me for being married already and trying to build a new life. She begrudged my younger brother much tenderness simply because he physically resembled our father. She imprisoned our little sister—who was only twelve—with possessiveness, the emotional responsibility for Mom’s healing, with the burden of her tragic secrets, and with inappropriate confidences about men she might date in the aftermath of losing her husband. My mother would often foist the question to my sister about a prospective courter, “What do you think, should I let him stay over?” My little sister was but a preteen at the time. She was essentially robbed of a normal adolescence.

  I did not know what to say to my mother, given her inconsolable heaves and breathtaking mood swings. We butted heads and hearts—though I knew then and I still lament her despondent existence in the prison of herself. Although she was often very funny, a skilled and colorful storyteller, loved to sing, could be extremely charming, and was a gifted and energetic teacher for other people’s children, she unfortunately trafficked in demons in the presence of her own kids.

  Surely, some of her ordeal was fueled by guilt. The night he would die, my father left the house after another screaming bout with my mother and hulked off to the handball court where he would drop dead. They never said goodbye to each other nor even patched the argument. Their final words to each other were inflamed with fury. There can’t be any question that this tore at my mother’s soul for the remainder of her days. Grief, like a dark eagle, swoops in on those kinds of human scraps. My father never knew the serenity of old age; my mother’s face remained a shadow until she finally died from heart ailments, diabetes, and dementia at the age of eighty-one.

  I still wonder: did my mother not see my father’s death coming? Should she not have reached out to him in his own suffering and turmoil? When I attempted to ask her about this later, she rebuffed me, circumvented the subject, and reminded me of how I was too busy with my graduate schoolwork and my marriage to devote her proper attention. Grief was controlling her most detrimentally and I wish now, over forty years later, that I had been more dynamic and directive in getting her to a capable bereavement therapist or at least a support group of some kind. That is what any one of us should do when we see
a person upon whom grief has inflicted such damaging dysfunction. Having failed to intervene more forcefully and positively so long ago has extended and complicated my grief for both my parents beyond any normal limits. We should not concede to death more than it has already taken. Grief needs to have a life of its own but it should also inform our own life. If grief doesn’t teach you anything about living, then all you have from it is the dying.

  As for me, I saw my father’s death coming in my dreams and my daytime reflections. I observed his frequent gloominess, his erratic changes of spirits, and his white-hot explosions of bile. I surreptitiously read in his journals that he actually could see himself lying in a coffin at Cincinnati’s Weil Funeral Home—a dark prophecy fulfilled. I knew something that was like a stone in my soul: my father, given to bursts of sentiment, short on patience, could never find a place to alight.

  Wise friends and colleagues counseled me to embrace these apprehensions. (Of course, I was fortunate enough to have access to such people; not everyone does.) I came to bear his intermittent announcements, “Don’t make me into a grandfather!” I did not enjoy such declarations but grew from understanding that it was a function of his own despairs, a failing marriage, and his developing war with aging. He got his wish about not being a grandfather; I hold my granddaughters now, a generation later and a generation wiser. It is okay if we discover that we learned about how not to do things from departed parents or other elders. They were still our parents and they gave us life. They were usually doing the best they could or were simply trapped in their personalities.

  I fervently reject the Judeo-Christian notion that the sins of the parents are visited upon the children. That is an untenable proposition. Grief is hard enough without laying on the burdens of guilt-by-association or any other religiously bent distractions. That is why I assert in this book that the answer to how we grieve is a therapeutic blend of personal history, applicable rituals that make sense to each of us, and the thoughtful, circumspect support of family and friends.