The Blessing of Sorrow Read online

  I smiled through my sorrow and tears and felt the first layer of release. I looked up at the deep blue April sky and saw a formation of puffy clouds and my father’s profile forming in the clean white swirls. It didn’t matter to me whether it was a real, heavenly gesture or simply the product of my bittersweet yearnings. What mattered to me was that I was releasing something—something uninhibited, not accountable to any formula, undistracted by protocols—and I actually visited with my departed dad.

  That was the day I first discovered how to grieve.

  The next day, Uncle Moshe arrived for a three-month stay.

  Moshe was my mother’s older brother and had always been a very close comrade of my father. The entire clan hails from Israel, where I was born. The two men fought side-by-side in Israel’s War of Independence and Moshe, chain-smoking, gravelly voiced, opinionated, and extremely adoring of his entire family circle, looked something like an Israeli version of Tevye the Dairyman. He was no stranger to death, having killed men in war and witnessed many of his childhood friends and fellow soldiers slaughtered. He had little use for religion, but was a pragmatist who believed instead in solid, manual work and keeping an open door for his children and his friends. He was unquestionably the family patriarch.

  On the night my father died, my mother called Moshe in Ashdod, Israel, and asked him to fly over to us in Cincinnati and spend a few weeks with us.

  “I’m on my way,” I heard him say over the telephone receiver, shaken to also hear him sobbing.

  When Moshe arrived after taking his first-ever airplane excursion—he had spent his entire life as an infantryman and then as a bus driver—he found a traumatized family in need of a father figure. My sister was twelve years old and had danced among the nearby tombstones while we put my father into the ground. My brother, sixteen, had particularly idolized our father and emulated his athleticism and was emotionally immobilized. My mother, when she wasn’t holding onto her big brother, regularly went into the kitchen and cried into the sink.

  But I kept wondering, as so many bereaved do: Where is my father now?

  Two or three nights after his arrival, Moshe invited me to take a walk under the stars. He was never a particularly reverential man, but felt things intensely. He did not attempt to disguise his grief; it weaved its way into his weatherworn face, moistened his deep dark eyes, and occasionally caused his normally powerful voice to crack. But there was some kind of peace, walking with just him, on that balmy night of shadows laced with the fragrance of the springtime geraniums. Looking skyward while pacing alongside my uncle, I recalled something I once read in a prayer book: “The stars are there even when you can’t see them in the daytime.”

  “Are you looking at heaven?” Moshe asked me with tenderness.

  “I suppose I am,” I replied, as he put his arm around me. His corduroy jacket emitted the familiar blend of tobacco and street wisdom.

  “Your father and I used to do that many years ago as campfires burnt out during the war. The night stars were soothing to us because we feared death every day. We agreed they were the lights of heaven. I felt closer to that idea out there in the Samarian Mountains than at any of the times I ever went into a synagogue.”

  The exchange, more mystical than usual for Moshe, prompted me to ask the question that plagued me the most since my father’s abrupt death. I asked, “Moshe, where is my father?”

  Moshe stopped walking, thought about it, while wrinkling his brow. A bit of a knowing smile on his face was evident under the starshine.

  “Ben,” he said, very deliberately. “I knew your father. And I can tell you that he’s in a good place.”

  “But how do you know that?” I retorted.

  “Tell me something.” My uncle focused on me, soul to soul. “Your father was very particular and he didn’t have patience for trivialities. So, if it wasn’t a good place, don’t you think he’d come back?”

  This bit of raw theology has helped me over the years. I have shared the moment and the message with others from time to time when they were freshly bereaved and grappling with how to grieve—even with the liturgical rites, the psychotherapeutic sessions, and the consoling input of friends who knew how to just listen. Uncle Moshe’s response and his conviction amounted to a measure of folk formulation; but it really was tender and intuitive. I was calmed by his roundabout way of telling me how much he loved my father. And the notion that my father would simply come back if he was unhappy has continued to give me a measure of comfort and a warm chuckle over the course of time.

  Holding onto that little burst of hope, like my interlude at French Park, assisted me on the path of grief. It helped me to find a tender location in my soul for my dad. Where is your loved one? Safely at home—in your heart.

  Grief Is Personal

  For some forty years I’ve observed and listened carefully to people while working in bereavement situations. I’ve appeared unannounced at people’s homes and informed them that someone they cherished died or committed suicide or was killed. I’ve been present in hospitals and hospices at the moment of death, embraced the family members, and prayed with them. I’ve listened to their wailing and bewilderment and—as standard practice—used an economy of words in response to their questions of “why?”

  I’ve stood by at the side of a swimming pool as a child was pulled out lifeless from drowning. I’ve helped parents cut down their teenagers from the nooses with which they killed themselves in their bedrooms or garages. I’ve closed the eyes of men and women who expired from gunshot wounds as they lay under bloodied sheets in emergency rooms and “urgent care centers.”

  Grief is not a uniform experience. Like life, it’s personal. People die in widely dissimilar ways and at all ages. So we must keep in mind that the circumstances of a death impact the manner in which people will react and recover. I have rarely relied on gratuitous theological clichés to rationalize their anguish. People just want to be heard and get their torment out. Again, we goodhearted family and friends often talk too much when confronting the fresh sorrow of others. They are the ones who need to talk or scream and they actually appreciate the eloquence of our more silent empathy.

  The earth has opened at burials and mourners have clutched their hearts over and over again. Some howl in agony; others feel too empty to even shed tears. Sporadically, I’ve noticed a few people bursting out with inexplicable laughter as though their psyche has been completely unhinged by the situation. No one is ever really prepared for it, even if a departed parent had been ill for some time or had simply aged enough that life gave out.

  No matter how old we are when our mother or our father dies, we are still simply their children. A piece of us dies with them. Some psychologists argue that it’s even harder to lose a spouse.6 With parents, a sense of emotional security evaporates. We recall how we depended upon them, how they made us feel safe, and reassured us by their presence that we would never be alone and vulnerable or even responsible for the family narrative. They took care of everything, the money, the places where we lived, the vacations, the bruises we endured physically and psychically from friends, neighbors, and even our schoolteachers. They were the authors of our family histories and they were never supposed to die.

  Granted, they didn’t always measure up, and there were conflicts and discords. We were sometimes disappointed with and fought bitterly with them. Guilt and unresolved anger weave their way into the grieving process like sinister threads of complication and perplexity. But our parents and our other elders simply being there were often like a warm sweater neutralizing the cold winds of our own mortality.

  My experience has also instilled in me that while people leave us, their souls linger somewhere. I call bereavement “a song to creation.” In other words, it is a healing protocol that weaves together the world we know and the world we fear. I am not a mystic. I am a rational, practicing rabbi who believes people must truly grieve in order to endure a death. However, that does not mean this life is all we know
about what endures in the universe. I’ve undergone too many moments of transcendence to deny what no scientist can possibly prove—that life is only what we see before us. Years ago, while alone with the deceased’s closed casket, I heard the strains of his favorite Broadway musical softly emerge. My own father appeared to me just a few nights after his death in a particle of floating lights that filled me with peace.

  This life was something that existed long before we came along with our geological calibrations, our stargazing and marine probes, and our evolutionary studies. It is something that cannot be posted on a technical list of universal components. The human soul does not appear with carbon, nitrogen, uranium, and helium on the chart of natural elements.

  Science is the uneasy partner of theology but remains one of the most urgent quests on earth. The moon hangs and orbits in the sky and this can be explained with astrophysics. Men have landed there and walked on its surface. But the moon will always raise more lyrics from poets and romantics than it will provide evidential data to astronauts and technicians. We humans are drawn to mystery; it both inspires and terrifies us. Science is a series of rational unsympathetic questions waiting to be resolved, and it does not suffer nuances.

  Both spiritualists and scientists agree that every person is born and every person dies. What happens before and what transpires afterward remain the most tantalizing, confounding, and unresolved matters of the human mind, inspiring verse, music, divinity, and a whole lot of anxiety.

  No aspect of my ministry is more significant or edifying to me than my regular interaction with the dying and the dead and my obligations to their survivors. In both pastoral counseling and the actual sequences of death and burial, they have bequeathed me two precious results: I have no fear of my own death, and certain experiences have convinced me that there is some sort of afterlife.

  Too many reasonable and thoughtful individuals—many of them non-religious or atheists—have shared their stories with me of reassuring and enriching visits from their departed loved ones. They didn’t necessarily rhapsodize their recollections or grab my arm or even claim a special ecclesiastic vision. They normally didn’t invoke scriptural references. They just spoke quietly and with serenity and told me things that helped me to affirm that we human beings, even with our vanities and cyber-clout, simply don’t know everything about the path of the soul. So we are given to weeping, praying, hoping, and speculating. We also become emotionally vulnerable; especially in this digital world in which a cellular phone can be utilized to answer or resolve pretty much any inquiry. Except, that is, the finality of death.

  The death of a loved one is a potential assault on one’s mental health. Grief and depression are the darkly disabling partners that torment people who do not properly absorb and distill their sorrow. We have to find remedial and therapeutic ways to grieve when our elders, friends, and even children die, because they are gone from this world as far as we understand and perceive it. They are vanished from our kitchen tables and they are physically absent—and painfully missed—at the baptisms, bar mitzvah ceremonies, confirmations, and weddings that followed their passing. We miss them and, when suddenly replacing our parents as the leaders and role models at Christmas dinner or the Passover Seder, we feel the poignancy of our own advancing mortality and discover a queasy sadness and loneliness that is the bittersweet calendar of our existence. We don’t like the way the deaths of our parents make us grow up.

  We need to be cautious with the declaration that our dead are “in a better place.” I feel this even with the heartening visit from my father. Some therapists believe it’s a quick theological throwaway because people simply want to reallocate death via an old succor they’ve always heard and now mimic. Their concern is that uttering the cliché can create a distraction from the hard facts of a death and impede people from the grieving process.

  I’ve heard colleagues moan that the phrase about “a better place” is a repudiation of life itself being the preeminent place—even when it tries, hurts, and ultimately grows us. But I do know, as a teacher of human life, and as someone who sees bereavement as a bridge between two worlds, that our dead are someplace, somewhere. Anyone who is in awe of creation (scientifically or doctrinally) cannot logically deem that we humans are created to simply rot away as though we had never existed. I don’t believe in ghosts; I believe in souls. And I myself have seen, heard, and even smelled them coming and going.

  I cannot count how many times I have officiated at funerals over the past forty years. The figure is certainly in the hundreds but the only meaningful number is one. One person, one death with a narrative, a faith or philosophy system, a heart that was alternately elated and broken, a set of talents, a flair for this or that, high hopes and irritating traits, an array of achievements, and a list of indiscretions or even crimes. Some had clean and lovely hands; some were missing fingers, a leg, an internal organ, or bore a physical deformity that affected his or her existence altogether. Some had died slowly of cancer or dementia while others were killed instantly by gunshot wounds or in automobile accidents. Some were ethically noble people, given to kindness and generosity; others were insufferable cranks who tested the patience of their family and friends or even damaged others’ psyches with their own self-absorption or cruelty. When people die, they are still themselves, even with the elegiac window-dressing that attends many funerals. The persona of our departed guides us to the manner in which we grieve. We need to remember them the way they were: someone who was not religious, for example, need not be given a requiem filled with theological rituals. Let the dead be honored as they were.

  Some people knew they were dying and displayed the kind of dignity that sent their bereft loved ones—their friends, protégés, or students—back to serve the living. We will surely meet such people. Some were angry, difficult to help, and understandably frightened. Some turned decidedly mean and ungrateful. We were secretly relieved when they actually took their last breaths. Finally, peace, we thought. That reaction is normal and not some kind of a sin.

  Not everyone is affirmative in life and, sadly, they can become oppressive in the process of dying. There is no filter for their demands, complaints, rage, and resentment—all driven by their understandable fears and already less-than-sunny personalities. Adding an irony to the mix is that we frequently soon come to miss these bad-tempered ones because in spite of their cantankerousness, they were the clockwork of our daily routines and now we feel useless and strangely empty. I have sensed at many funeral services that some of the mourners were feeling newly liberated while the caretakers, professionals, or family members—the ones who had changed the bedpans, administered the towel baths, and suffered the bile of the dying—had a different reaction. These good folks were truly overwhelmed with the discomfiting question: what will I do every day now?

  There is much less to fear than we assume or suffer through. Souls do mingle with us in daily life and they have as much a spiritual presence in our lives as when our bodies were simply housing them while they were with us on this side.

  A Life Remembered

  The American relationship with death and dying could still benefit from maturation, more straight talk, and a lot less posturing. And in my case, how a sudden “nudge” from a soul I love and admire helped me to negotiate the bridge of bereavement.

  I was present at this occasion termed a memorial service since there was no body or casket present. The phrase “memorial service” is often invoked rather than the term “funeral” in the case of a cremation or in an instance, like the one I attended, when the forensic specialists were still investigating the death. No matter. Many Americans are reticent about death and tend to sterilize it, regardless of the services that are selected. So this was one of those requiems we often compassionately declare, or rationalize, as “A Celebration of Life.”

  It is, no doubt, a heartening label, this “Celebration of Life”—sweet, soothing, and hopeful. It is a harvest of tenderness at a moment of dark lines an
d edgy realities, yet not without its weeds of denial. It is the voice of the child in each of us, a throwback to the time before people we knew and loved left us and now we find ourselves not totally equipped to handle the tyranny of mortality. So we compensate with florid speeches and with displays of light and homilies of praise that often avoid the woeful surrender to truth: somebody is dead and some day we will be, too.

  Meanwhile, the life of the young father and husband being fêted was cut short by a dreadful swimming accident while he and his family were enjoying a holiday on a distant island far from their home in Southern California. The exact circumstances of the father’s demise were still not established at the time of this lavish hotel memorial gathering almost three weeks after the calamity. His remains were not released and the island police and coroner were taking their time exploring the circumstances.

  The only thing the numb family knew for sure was that Mitchell, a successful entrepreneur and avid globetrotter, was gone. Now it was time to gather a host of family members and friends and do something to mark the tragedy with a hotel gathering and a carefully choreographed humanistic service. A video biography, underscored with familiar pop ballads, played across two large screens as the well-heeled crowd filled the hall. Alas, death is indifferent to shoes, purses, lipstick, double-breasted suits, and turbo-charged automobiles, I thought to myself.

  I was asked to moderate the occasion because Mitchell was Jewish (his wife and son are not). They were “spiritual, not religious”—an increasingly common designation, which, I think, adds to the inexplicit anxiety of these elaborate assemblages. Grief needs processing. It demands sorrowfulness and consolation. They requested very little Hebrew liturgy and appreciated my practice of making any life-cycle event that I lead inclusive and accessible.