The Blessing of Sorrow Page 15
When we are struggling with the question of how to grieve, one overriding answer is to immediately establish a relationship with all the realities that come with the grief:
a)This is dreadful and devastating; no amount of sweetening and aromatizing of the situation will offer any long-term results, and will actually skew the pain from eventual release.
b)Recall the departed as they lived; tell and reflect upon their life stories with sensitivity and love but not with embellishment or over-glorification. The dead are best recalled as they were and it keeps our grieving process therapeutic if we more or less stick with the truth.
I remember when my neighbor Bob died. Bob was, like me, the father of two high school girls. Before his illness began to slow him down, we would take many hearty walks under the shady oaks of our suburban Cleveland community. Bob, an African American, had a passionate interest in multicultural relations and social justice. Our children were close, and we all spent a lot of time at each other’s homes. He retained his bravery and dignity while undergoing treatments for a savage kidney cancer. Three days after his death, I attended his funeral at a community church. Reflecting Bob’s strong penchant for inclusiveness, the crowd was diverse in color and creed.
A number of family members and friends got up to speak. It was a small, modest, wooden sanctuary. The people were simple, hardworking folk. However, they said many things about Bob that were pro forma. He was kind, graceful, and good. He loved his faith. He was a perfect father to his children and a devoted husband. The well-intentioned reciters could have been a collective greeting card. We got no authentic histories of Bob: his values, his relationship with family, his professional career, his spiritual life, his flaws, his skills and strengths, his yearnings. Suddenly, a young man, twentyish, fit, stepped up to the lectern. He announced that he was Bob’s nephew. He then proceeded to decry the cookie-cutter nature of the tributes.
“Our family certainly appreciates you all coming and hearing nice things about my uncle. But nobody is really saying anything about Uncle B himself. Even mentioning that he liked to be called Uncle B a lot. Even by his own kids sometimes. Remember that, Eve?” The nephew was pointing to his cousin, Bob’s daughter.
Eve nodded, smiling, glimmering now with tears. “Yes, he just loved all of the kids calling him Uncle B. He liked being everybody’s uncle, which was the way he was. Brought us those cheesy little gifts all the time! Socks and sports caps and all this candy we had to hide from our parents.” A release of group laughter filled the room.
The nephew continued to speak extemporaneously. “Everybody who’s been up here, I know you were just doing the right thing. But nobody really knows what to say. And I keep thinking that the only person, the one person, who’d know what to say is the person missing here today. Bob would have known what to say. About the things he cared about. About how much he loved watching baseball and taking his family to the ballpark. That he was a great scientist and chemical engineer and hated how we are destroying the environment. That he was a diehard patriot. What about how he adored jazz music and even listened to it when he was down or something. Can’t anybody share something that will really help us remember Uncle B?”
Silence now filled the church. People rubbed their foreheads. Some were confused by the audacious orator. Some wiped away tears. Then, after a noticeable bit of rumbling in the back, an older gentleman, elderly, was walking up to the lectern. He was carrying a portable CD player with speakers. As the nephew gave way, the old man carefully set the machine upon the lectern. He cleared his throat and looked at us without any expression—but for love. He said, “I put together some of the music Bob liked. You know, when he git into one of those moods of his. Let me just play a few selections and we can think about old Bob.”
In a moment, we heard a medley of artists, including Jack McDuff, Herb Ellis, and Cassandra Wilson delivering blues, guitar pieces, vocals, saxophone solos, and piano bits. People nodded, swayed, and sang along with the songs. There were intermittent sighs as each person there experienced a resonating moment of visiting with Bob—a certain lyric, a particular stanza, a defined beat, sent each one of us back to a living part of him. I saw Bob walking with me, as we both wiped our brows in the summer humidity, and he waxed intelligently and fervently about the inexcusable damage we humans were doing to the ozone layer. I listened to him describe and chuckle adoringly about his children’s adolescent adventures. I heard his laughter. I relived his plunges into self-loathing. I saw his roundish, welcoming face, wizened by time, defeat, resiliency, and then the illness itself. The music revealed Bob to me and his soul filled the room and a piece of it landed within each one of us. We danced with Bob across the bridge and then let him go as himself.
It turns out that every soul takes its own journey and makes its own harmony. When grieving, listen for the unique melody of the one you miss so much. Honor lost lives by remembering how they sang to you. Pay tribute to them by pronouncing their names out loud and thus never denying them their singular identities in heaven and earth.
Perhaps no one has ever declared publicly what he wanted for his own funeral and what his legacy should be more poignantly than Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Just two months prior to his April 4, 1968, assassination in Memphis, King spoke to his congregation on February 4 at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He was afflicted with a terrible dread of being killed throughout his thirteen years of stewarding the Civil Rights Movement and suffered from intermittent bouts of depression and deep fatigue. He was always apprehensive and fatalistic; he just knew his life would be ended by bullets. He released some of his angst and gave his directives in a sudden turn of subject at the end of his Sunday sermon on February 4.
If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school.
I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others . . .
But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that’s all I want to say.39
We all can’t be so declarative about our memorial wishes. Not everyone has the loins to discuss such a subject while still here on this earth. Nor do most people have access to a podium that allows them to ventilate and release some elegiac murmurs in a safe and comforting place, surrounded by followers and disciples.
But what can we do to emulate Dr. King’s clarity of mind and his wish to gently guide his parish family for what he knew was inevitable? First, note King’s humility: “I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long.” Note his ethical teaching: “I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others.” King died with a modest estate, yet has he not endowed the world with an enormously precious moral treasury?
Then “bookmark” his precept that “all of the other shallow things will not matter.” So if you are near the end of life and are still able to, then tell your family to skip over “the shallow things.” If you are grieving, cherish the ideas and principles your loved one shared with you and taught you. I always ask people I serve in bereavement: “What did your father, mother, or other dear one teach you?” What people leave us monetarily does not distill our grief. It’s what they gave us spiritually and emotionally that helps us to grieve with gratitude and purpose. Or find a way to honor their existences if they were harder than others to praise. Every soul takes its own journey. Nobody should be judging when we are grieving. We should be remembering.
39 The King Papers Encyclopedia of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, Dr. Clayborne Carson, director. https://k
inginstitute.stanford.edu.
Afterword
When Grief Became My Necessary Companion
“How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”
A. A. Milne
When one day, panicking from the loneliness and grief, I donned a bathing suit, t-shirt, and flip-flops, grabbed a towel and walked down to the swimming pool of my complex, I knew I had hit rock bottom. It was a grayish yet hot day and I was frantic to be around people. Anyone. It didn’t matter if I knew them or not. I wanted to hear the sounds of voices, the sight of children around the water, splashing and laughing, the cheerful good spirits of friendly strangers—anything. I wanted an opportunity to just engage folks in repartee. I was so desperately lonely and so trapped in the box of deferred sorrow that it physically hurt my gut.
I reached the pool area, blinking in the heat. Emptiness: there wasn’t a single person there. The chlorinated water laughed at me with ghoulish refrain. The empty chairs sneered at me. I almost fell to my knees in sadness and fright. My heart was pounding with stress and isolation. I dragged myself back up the hill to my apartment, the burden of unfulfilled grief piercing me with hopelessness and downheartedness. I felt like I had fallen off the edge of the earth.
This was not an easy book to write. I began working on it during a clinical recovery period for myself—recovery from grief, both specific and accumulated. I traveled through it while recuperating from what was diagnosed as depression. A then-recent divorce and the sudden, complete separation from a familiar family and a cherished dog had done more psychological harm to me than I could have possibly realized. But this was just the immediate layer of a long list of losses, rejections, and dismissals I had buried within me and hadn't properly lamented and processed.
I did not realize how traumatizing all this was for me. The loneliness felt cosmic. For better or worse, I had always dwelled among family. I took walks, watched television, ate meals, went to ball games, and shared milestone moments with kinfolk. I have spent my entire professional life deeply tethered to congregational communities, lively social groups, and many diverse circles of persons. I have planted flowers in many gardens and set down stones in many cemeteries.
There were times when I simply could not work on this project. It was too much—I’ve seen a great deal of the death culture now for some forty years. The freshly dug graves, the shiny caskets, the embalming rooms, the family alcoves in the funeral chapels where people in black garb sit in suffering dismay. Like many others my age or younger, I have buried my parents, many warm and intimate friends, and perhaps a thousand other people across this continent. Some of these individuals were very precious to me; they were wise and giving and grew into parental figures. I miss them terribly. They put up with my mistakes and they encouraged me and they allowed me the privilege of leading them in prayer. We wept and laughed together. One by one, they have been dropping out of sight. While my own bereavement for them is hardly comparable to what their families have endured, I have had a personal and tender stake in their journeys. I had to be professional in those crises when my insides were reeling and I would have rather been free to cry my eyes out.
My depression was the grim harvest of accumulative grief that got stuck in my soul when my father died over forty years ago. And I have experienced a series of losses and disruptions, including a very public removal from a long-standing senior position in the rabbinate, ruptured marriages, along with some deep family conflicts. I’m like you or anybody else in these categories; it’s just that what I do for a living has everything to do with life and death. Grief, whether it’s triggered by someone’s departure or by an unresolved breakdown between a mother and a son, is the painful adhesion of human finitude.
The book was intermittently an albatross for me; it triggered dybbuks40 and demons some days and through many nights. There were bad dreams derived from the embers of old memories working with the dying, the dead, and the survivors. I feel for my service colleagues—the doctors and the nurses, the police officers, and the firefighters. And the funeral managers. For all those who look through the window of human frailty. A remarkable emergency room nurse once told me, “I look for God in all the bandages, nebulizers, and stomach pumps. When I go home, I have trouble muffling the shouts and screams that pound against my ears for hours at a time. But it’s what we do.”
As if pushed by an advancing tornado of stored reminiscences, I relived scores of tragic events that I was a part of during the completion of this book.
I would revisit that sixteen-year-old girl who passed away before me from cystic fibrosis when I climbed up the dimly lit steps up to my apartment at night. That same night I saw a little boy named Michael, who had just become a bar mitzvah by me in the morning atop Israel’s Mount Masada, dying in the pool of a nearby kibbutz from a congenital cardiac malfunction and me having to control his shrieking parents. I saw my father’s lifeless figure in every bedside of those I visited with heart disease. I heard the singing of the departed Dr. Tallisman of Cleveland (he who loved The Music Man) coming from his casket in the mausoleum. I heard it while I showered in my apartment and grasped the curtain in sadness. I’d play my radio at top volume while I showered or even shaved because I overheard the dead while in the bathroom or saw their faces when I woke up suddenly at night.
My dreams of my mother and father darkened and wore me out—he who disappeared too early and who left no footprints, and she who lived to a ripe age but pressed too long upon the souls of her children. In my dreams, she was hostile and did not hold out her hand. He was sad and held his head in his hands. Where I slept became a bed of pain. I’d have probing nightmares about the job I lost so many years ago. I’d be back in that city, trying to regain the position, constantly being shoved out the door again. All the pounding griefs of my otherwise fascinating life (for which I am extremely grateful) were ghoulishly released by what I secretly called my “Pandora’s Book.”
A therapist asked me, “What do you actually feel in this depression?”
“Loneliness,” I replied immediately.
Certainly, the therapies helped, the acupuncture sessions, and the unconditional emotional assistance and unfettered availability of a few dear and trusted friends. My daughters hurt for me; they had no idea how the very lilts of their voices would bring me a surge in spirits. Surprisingly, a number of friends told me, “I’ve been where you are.” I discovered that many people grapple with depression, particularly in the aftermath of unrealized or unresolved grief, such as grief following the death of a loved one, an ended relationship, an embroilment with a child, or losing a job.
So I was surrounded by support and freely shared of my anguish. People knew how to listen. But they couldn’t move in with me or indulge my raging need for company. Nor could they fight the depression on my behalf. I resolved to bring myself back to life. Knowing that creativity is an antidote for loneliness, I sought out and accepted volunteer opportunities in the community. I became active at the local YMCA, mixing with people, taking on service projects, breathing in the life-giving laughter of day camp children as I worked out harder than ever on the treadmill. I began to regularly visit with the residents of an area nursing home. I paid attention as Holocaust survivors told me stories of their frightful and life-redeeming journeys. I heard the anguished narratives of older folks whose children had abandoned them or whose siblings did not speak to them over some petty insult or, more often, over an indignity caused by money.
I got up from the self-absorption and realized how much I learned about limits, wounded memories, and our need as mortals to lean into our grief. It became a treasury of bittersweet wisdom—about how we can’t control the things that happen, but we don’t have to give them control, either; about how my daughters and granddaughters and my students and friends and congregants make all the crooked spaces straight for me; about how they all fill the holes in my heart put there by my own narrative; and how they assure me that my life has not been lived for an
ything more important than to thank them for showing up.
This gift was on my mind when, post-depression, I went to visit an elderly lady, who had just relocated to an assisted-living facility. One of her children had phoned me and asked me to stop by. Mrs. Gordon was not adjusting well. She was dignified and alert. “I don’t feel right about having other people take care of my personal needs. Imagine, not even being able to go to the bathroom by myself? My husband is gone, my mobility is gone, I haven’t got so many things anymore. What do you think, is it worth it for me to continue living?”
Something or someone tapped me on the shoulder. Was it Charlotte Banda, the old spirit who occasionally sends me gleams of hope? Was it my father, awakening from his melancholy and transmitting me some light? I looked at Mrs. Gordon and asked, “But what do you have?” She thought a moment and looked out the window. There happened to be a stunning vista of Southern California mountains in the distance against a bold blue sky. “I will think about that,” she answered. “Certainly I have my kids and my grandchildren and a great-grandchild on the way. I guess I should stick around and be present as long as I’m still here.”
Near the beginning of this book, I described an old custom that once prevailed among certain French Jews. You may recall that the men in some communities were guided by tradition to construct the family eating table from suitable lumber. A man would do so knowing that his coffin would one day be built from the wood of that table. In most every culture, the kitchen table has always been the epicenter of family interaction, conversations, disagreements, drama, and laughter. The true character of a man—or a woman—is revealed as relatives and guests sit with them at their table. Will he nourish them or, through inattentiveness and self-absorption, leave them spiritually hungry? What will people remember and think one day, at his funeral, when they look upon his coffin drawn, literally, from the wood of that table? What kinds of marks were left on that wood?