The Blessing of Sorrow Read online

  On the other hand, I find tremendous discernment in the Fourth Commandment inscribed in the Hebrew Scripture. “Honor thy father and mother.” Brilliant that it doesn’t read, “Love thy father and mother.” Love cannot be commanded or legislated. Nor does every parent who ever lived deserve to be loved. Most parents do well; some do very poorly with damaging, demoralizing effects. They sometimes broke our hearts in the way they treated us, overlooked us, or even emotionally maimed us. Our grief is muddied by the fact that we are ambivalent about our feelings, which often bring on even more guiltiness and uncertainty. But not every person can be revered. Love is an earned condition. However, to honor the fact of someone’s parenthood is a reasonable and edifying requirement. No matter what, when we honor our parents’ memory, we emerge better acquainted with our origins and, as necessary, the liabilities that come with them. If some parents don’t earn love, they nonetheless deserve a legacy. If you have a spot on your arm, it is still your arm with which you reach out to others.

  In the American bereavement culture, we are reticent to just tell the truth when it comes to remembering and eulogizing complicated people. That doesn’t mean we should get up at a funeral and lambast or excoriate a departed person who angered or bedeviled us. There are certain protocols of dignity and restraint that come with the territory. Difficult people must be honored because they were human beings, even if they were flawed. But to heap unqualified praise on a person who really wasn’t entirely praiseworthy is to create a fiction. Fiction and grief are not redeeming partners. It is also not therapeutically supportive to pretend that someone was one way when he or she simply was not. Remember them as they were and respect their existence. And if you can’t love them, honor them. Cherish the good; learn from the bad. They’ve already paid for it with their lives.

  Grief and Relief

  What happens if one feels relief after a good person dies?

  One of the more bewildering challenges people face occurs when they discover such unexpected latent feelings in mourning. People are often very hard on themselves about this natural and appropriate sensation; it is a normal response in certain instances. Sometimes, a person—even a most cherished individual—just needs to go. And you have to let him or her go. Perhaps it’s an impossibly ill or tormented spouse or parent. Maybe even a child of yours—if you feel a certain sense of reprieve when a tortured soul or a diseased body leaves this world, well, that does not mean you did not love that person. It is okay to realize that with death, nothing more can happen to a person you love. It is okay to feel some exoneration when the journey was hard and long.

  I used to observe a strong-limbed elderly couple walking briskly together, hand-in-hand, many evenings in the wooded and verdant Shaker Heights, Ohio. Even a brisk autumn wind did not deter them from their regular constitutional. I knew the long-married man and woman, a physician and professor respectively, had recently lost a son who was in his early forties. The son had not been stricken with any particular physical illness. He simply never learned to adjust to life in this world and, with his various social afflictions and behavioral disorders, had inadvertently caused his family tremendous and unyielding distress. He was in out and of behavioral health institutes, recovery clinics, and, not infrequently, city jail cells.

  As much as he emotionally punished his parents with his demons, that is how much they loved him. But there was simply no resolution for the young man’s malaise—not even medication healed his soul.

  I met them along the path one night. They were congregants of mine, and I knew them well enough to talk about personal things. I inquired about their situation and expressed my concern and condolences. They had not been in touch with the synagogue or me when their son died. They were kindly and gracious that evening yet, at the same time, seemed a bit self-conscious, perhaps due to my position in the community. They were embarrassed because it might have appeared (to them) that they were not properly bewailing their lost son. “Not at all,” I assured them. And then I asked, “What makes you feel that way?”

  They looked at each other. Then the mother spoke, “Charlie was a hard person to help. He was that way from when he was a child. So much anger and suffering in that poor boy. There was never a moment of peace or certainty. We were tired, very tired when he died, Rabbi. We did our best; but it was actually a relief when he finally found peace.”

  I listened and felt admiration for these brave parents. Before I could say anything, the father asked, his voice cracking just a bit, “Are we bad people, Rabbi?”

  “Of course not. You appear to be two very good people who should keep on walking.”

  Jimmy Rosen had been an active and heralded pediatric surgeon for well over fifty years and performed some seventeen thousand operations on infants and youngsters. He saved or extended countless young lives. Tall, burly, and ruggedly handsome at ninety-one years of age, he told me his life story during weekly visits for about a year in 2016 and 2017. He and his wife Joy had shared in the birth of four children, with three of them being success stories and delivering much comfort and elation to both parents. Almost a year into our association, however, Jimmy suddenly opened up about his middle son, Daniel. “Danny was a difficult son to have and he knew how to press my buttons.” I was a bit surprised, having met the other adult children and their families. It was a winning generation of thriving professionals, standouts in the arts, medicine, and social services. Jimmy had done nothing but rave about his children and grandchildren for months. Now we came to a crack in the earth.

  “Danny went to a Quaker college, which I thought was ideal,” Jimmy related. Unfortunately, the school was saturated with drug dealers and users. “He succumbed,” the heavy-shouldered father told me. His son became addicted to “marijuana, cocaine, and God-knows-what.” Slumping a bit, the proud man said, “Joy and I hardly even ever take an aspirin, so to have Danny become a drug addict was a big problem for us.”

  Danny went through several jobs and a number of relationships. His parents held on to the hope that he’d find “a nice young woman” and settle down with some measure of stability and happiness. Instead, Danny died, alone, in a motel room after a massive coronary.

  “Danny was always treated like an outsider,” Jimmy lamented. “In school, if the guys were throwing the ball around, they wouldn’t include him, or they would just throw the ball at his head. Later, the drugs and the self-medication just caught up with him.”

  Jimmy told me that his wife Joy was “broken up, more than I because, through the years, Danny and I had a relationship that was difficult for me. He would be somewhere and he would call me and say he didn’t have any money and I’d send him some money. The other kids would tell me that was the most foolish thing to do because he’s going to use it to buy drugs. The truth is that Danny would always find tasks to do that would make his life easier and mine more difficult. But I went along with it and tried to make things for him as easy as possible.”

  I asked Jimmy what has helped him to maintain his strength after the loss of his son.

  “I must admit,” replied the father, “that I had the attitude at least that’s the end of a problem that had been absolutely plaguing us for all the years Danny was around. I wasn’t happy about my reaction but I thought it was realistic. His mother could not stop crying, and I understand that. But I didn’t quite feel the way she did. Because Danny fought with other family members and he was always cantankerous. He was hard to be with and difficult to care for. Needless to say, we did the best we could. I felt relieved, frankly.”

  Jimmy had no apologies, only sadness. “I tell you I welcomed Danny’s birth as if he was a little messiah. He was the boy I always wanted. But it didn’t turn out that way.” Then Jimmy wiped tears out of his eyes with his thick and weathered fingers and it was clear that he simply had no more words and would not give to his grief any more than it had already taken.

  So what is grief, if not the most painfully informative experience we humans come to know? It is
also a chance to visit with somebody who is gone from this world. We offer the best homage to our dead when we apply the truth to our visits—just as we tried to do when they were on this side.

  29 Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy died in a plane crash in France in 1948.

  30 Thomas Reeves, A Question of Character: A Life of John F. Kennedy (New York: Prima Lifestyles, 1992).

  31 Ben Kamin, Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014).

  32 Harry Belafonte, My Song: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2011) p. 337.

  33 Ben Kamin, Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014), p. 191–92.

  34 “April 4, 1968: How RFK saved Indianapolis,” Indianapolis Star, April 2, 2015.

  35 Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy. Copyright © 2017 by OptionB.Org.

  36 This quote and other information in this section is largely derived from “Can a Super-Rich Jewish Woman from Silicon Valley Help Americans Learn to Grieve?” The article, by Jane Eisner, appeared in the May 19, 2017 edition of the Forward, of which Eisner is editor-in-chief.

  37 From the previously footnoted Forward article by Jane Eisner.

  38 From Option B, by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant.

  Chapter Nine

  Faith and Hope: Because Every Soul Takes Its Own Journey

  “Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.”

  Saint Augustine

  Grief is as personal a bridge crossing as it is a necessary passage. This was especially evident to me one day when I visited two different people in the hospital within an hour of each other.

  The first patient, Mr. Englander, was a normally hardy gentleman, exceptionally fit, in his mid-seventies. Though I had never grown close to Mr. Englander, who was given to brusqueness, I admired his vitality and feistiness. In business, he got things done; on the golf course, he reveled.

  Today, however, Mr. Englander was not reveling. He was grieving, though not for someone who had died. He was grieving for himself. He was in a well-appointed hospital room, laid up with an ankle he’d broken on the fairway. He had lost his footing on what should have been a pristine surface, interrupting his game, his mood, and evidently his entire existence. Mr. Englander was in mournful, heated spirits.

  “Are you going to tell me that this is what God wants?” he growled. “Is this something I am supposed to learn from?” He would have no part in accepting his predicament or putting it into perspective.

  “I just wanted to say hello,” I offered, wondering how a man with an adoring and healthy wife, three successful children, several grandchildren, three imported luxury cars, two homes, and several sets of personalized golf clubs could turn a broken ankle into a theological stalemate. Mr. Englander flinched a bit and I did recognize that he was in some pain. He said, “Well, that’s fine. Thank you for coming. But look, this is just unfair. It is just plain cruel. What am I supposed to do now?”

  He railed about the injustice of the situation. Why was God testing him in this way? He would probably be unable to play in the upcoming tournament at his Florida condominium complex. While the man was in genuine physical discomfort, his anger about this inconvenience to his social and business calendars was beyond repair. He was inconsolable, in spite of the many gifts of his life.

  Now his wife entered the room, along with two of his grandchildren. They smiled shyly at him, getting a tad more warmth in return than I had received, but not much. Clearly his family had long ago learned to submit to Mr. Englander’s dominant acidity and sense of entitlement. The entire circle was ill-equipped to deal with the notion of limitations and this, sadly, would hamper their ability to grieve in the near future.

  I excused myself and left the Englander family. I then went to visit an elderly woman who lay alone in her room, several floors below and in much more modest quarters. Following the peevish Mr. Englander, I dreaded what I might encounter from Mrs. Dworkin, a woman with real problems.

  Mrs. Dworkin had been immobilized and bedridden for four months. A deterioration of her spinal cord had effectively ended her active life. I understood there was no hope for her to ever walk or even stand up again. As I entered the room, she raised her eyes at me and smiled. I recall thinking that I had never seen such a beneficent face. She smiled and absolutely reached out to me with her countenance. Though she was completely still, I felt as though she had wrapped her arms around me.

  The woman then proceeded to tell me about her great and good fortune. “Do you know how lucky I am, Rabbi?” She repeatedly asked me this startling question. And she exclaimed, “I have my children who love me and my beautiful grandchildren who sing to me and write me lovely poems. The doctors are marvelous here and the care is so good. I have a wonderful life. I know I can’t move, but I am lucky to be alive and to know the people who make my life worth living.”

  It goes without saying that I benefited from visiting this remarkable grandmother who was in the closing stages of her life but was not closing her heart. I was inspired by her, and remain so to this day. Mrs. Dworkin did not query me about why God or the fates had done this to her. She said that she had her faith to fall back upon. “It gives me strength and encouragement.” Mrs. Dworkin was then quiet for a moment. I saw in her face that she was struggling with a lot of distress yet remaining in a good place about her situation.

  “What are you thinking about?” I asked her.

  “I just prayed a little. I prayed that my family will be okay when I die from all of this. I don’t want my family to feel bad for me. Of course, I want to be missed by them. But I’m okay with dying. I’ve been given the time now to realize how much there’s been to my life.”

  Mrs. Dworkin was unknowingly giving me life lessons that are useful partners to the process of grief. Hearing her celebrate her inner strength and her accord with mortality, I actually felt ashamed for all the times I lumped small nuisances, petty annoyances, and minor distractions all together as “the problems of life.” Why do we get stuck on minor things that matter so little on the journey? Why do we bristle and even yell at salespeople when we are miffed about a purchase? People come into a mobile phone store and go ballistic over this or that app on their device. It’s just a phone, for goodness’ sake! Why do we get entangled in all these silly rivalries over wealth and position and status? Why do we Americans so heavily evaluate one another over the kind of cars we drive?

  Why does all this kind of stuff even matter when life is so fleeting and brief? Grief hits hard but it hits even harder if one hasn’t learned to grieve from confronting all limitations and conclusions. Divorce is grief; being fired is mourning; coping with disease is bereavement; discovering that one’s child is addicted to opioids is suffering. Enduring these difficulties along life’s path is so hard yet these moments can spiritually mentor us for the ultimate woe of someone’s death—or even for our own.

  Grief, a dark angel of renewal, comes to distill all the banalities. Though she was already an astute person before contracting a spinal malady, Mrs. Dworkin recognized what’s most important at the most dangerous time in her life. As I lingered with her, I suddenly felt a wave of heavy sympathy for the prickly Mr. Englander, who fidgeted impatiently in his bed a few flights up. While I’d never have wanted him to suffer, I did wish that he had somehow garnered the therapy of suffering. I wish he had been tested in ways that grew and softened him.

  When Mr. Englander became terminally ill a year later with lymphoma, he was completely unequipped for the situation. Lashing out at his family and his employees, he refused to relinquish control of his business affairs. He doggedly maintained his lifelong secretiveness about personal matters. Live alone; die alone.

  His children were left with a significant lack of input with respect to the family enterprise
. It’s not that Mr. Englander did not know what to tell his children; it’s that he would not tell them. Clouding the atmosphere, complicating the grief, restricting the closure, Mr. Englander’s unwillingness to acknowledge life’s limits made his final few months on earth a desolate passage from material wealth into spiritual oblivion. His oldest son came to me and said, “I don’t know how to grieve for my father.” I just listened, but thought to myself, Your father didn’t know how to live for his children.

  I sat by Mr. Englander’s side during the final weeks of his illness. He was not talkative. I watched as he used his right hand to press on the bedside device that delivered morphine into his bloodstream. What a lonely hand, I thought. So many palms pressed in elaborate deals yet so few occasions when the hand had actually touched anybody. I should have offered Mr. Englander a firm homily on priorities a year earlier when the grumpy retailer lay in bed with only his broken ankle and a missed golf outing. And yet, who was I to presume his way of dealing with things? Every soul takes its own journey. Our duty is to grieve for them, not to judge them.

  I went over to the nursing home where Mrs. Dworkin had since transferred. She was making a little progress with her spine and was now able to turn her head a bit. I told her about Mr. Englander, that his situation was grave, and maybe I should have been more of a support for him when he was still healthy. She smiled with understanding and asked me:

  “Did he learn anything when he broke his ankle playing golf?”

  “No, not really,” I answered.

  “So what could he learn from cancer?”

  Through my work over the years, and certainly in writing this book, I have been asking myself why we Americans are so reticent about lamenting our dead. Why do we permit the media and retail cultures to desensitize us to the necessary therapy of authentic, personal grief? Why do we sometimes defer the hard sorrow required to channel our loss in favor of banalities and theatrics at funeral services? Why do well-meaning people and hyperactive clergy sometimes avoid talking directly about the real person who died (substituting hollow anecdotes or tiresome preachments that invoke gods more than people) when we want to visit with, think about, and recall the human being who is now so missed? So many of us don’t know how to grieve because American social mores make us think we are supposed to entertain, feed, and reassure others exactly when we are in our own worst pain ever.