The Blessing of Sorrow Read online

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  “Rabbi, I am here to die,” growled Ethan, a forthright statement uncharacteristic of the death-denying American bereavement culture. Betty and Carla smiled. They knew their father’s directness and were grateful for his apparent acceptance of the situation. I thought Ethan’s attitude was commendable, as was the acknowledgment of it on the part of his daughters. They all seemed to understand that ninety-four years of life was quite a gift, even in the twenty-first century.

  “It’s good to hear you declare your readiness to die, Ethan,” I responded. “Now we can talk together straight, particularly with your daughters in the room.”

  “That’s fine,” barked the old man. He looked tenderly at his two grown children and then spoke to me. “They don’t understand how lucky I’ve been. I lost my one brother when he was nineteen. I don’t know why I deserved to live this long. I was doing everything I wanted to until just a few weeks ago. Why do you suppose I’m still around?”

  “I guess God isn’t too angry with you, Ethan. You have been given long life.”

  “Oh stop with the theological clichés,” scolded Ethan. “Living this long isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “What do you mean?” I was curious and wanted to get some insight from someone who had clearly outlived his own bargain with mortality.

  “I mean I did everything I wanted to do and whenever I felt like it. Played golf till just a few months ago. Wow, did I take it all for granted!”

  Betty interrupted, “We got him to give up the car just three months ago. He was still driving!”

  To this, Carla, visibly filled with warmth for her cantankerous dad, added, “I’m not sure he still wouldn’t be behind the wheel of his Buick if he wasn’t hooked up to all these things in here.”

  “Well, whatever,” growled her father. “My point is that since I got to live for so long and do what I wanted, why can’t I just die already like I want?”

  The question hung above the cramped, steam-filled bedroom for a moment. I looked at the two sisters and understood that they supported their father’s wish to die sooner rather than later. They were clearly resigned to his end. What we in general often fail to understand is that some people are truly ready to die. Betty and Carla did not seem to maintain any conspiratorial notions about helping their father to a quicker way out of this world. I concluded this was not a question of euthanasia. It was just the matter of a tired man who had had enough of this life and was simply looking forward to leaving it with dignity.

  “Ethan,” I queried, “how do you wish to be remembered?” The daughters appeared to tense up with the question. The dying man, keenly in touch with his mortality, had set the tone for this encounter. I thought it would be appropriate and supportive for his daughters to hear his testament. Too often, the dying do not take or are not given the opportunity to reveal what they really want said and done at their funeral and beyond.

  “How do I want to be remembered? Ethan mused. “Just for having lived for a real purpose,” he answered, clearing his throat and taking on a softer tone. Breathing laboriously, he turned toward his daughters, who in turn edged closer to him. “This is the purpose,” he declared as tears wetted his eyes. He talked to me while he stared at them.

  Ethan’s hands trembled as he began to do what the dying need to do—he recounted his life and his family history. His grandfather had come from Vienna and peddled goods on the road between Allentown, Pennsylvania, and Toledo, Ohio. Ethan, releasing his soul a bit, remembered many details about his childhood. His father, stern and distracted with making ends meet; his mother, ever-present and dutiful and forever making beds; the beginnings of a prosperous family furniture business; the close-knit neighborhood in Philadelphia; the vagrant uncle who had embarrassed the family with philandering and poor investments; his departed wife, Marisa, who had set such an elegant table at Passover; his comely yet very different daughters.

  Betty was like her mother, he said. She was refined and soft-spoken. Carla was shrewd at business and was independent and outspoken. “You were much more like me, sweetie,” he told his younger daughter, whose tears showered down to moisten her smile of acceptance. “But it was good, Betty, that one of you was like your mother because she made a man out of me that people could stand being around!”

  The grieving process was filling the room because each person was speaking frankly with one another. Ethan chuckled at his own words and we all joined in. Betty and Carla were considerably more at ease now. Their father, though approaching death, was nonetheless himself. Too often, we treat the dying as though they are no longer living, as if the facts of one’s mortality suddenly deny him or her those salient characteristics, attributes, or flaws that defined the person. We sometimes forget the very things that made somebody familiar when he or she is dying. And doing that stifles the grieving process; it goes unchanneled or becomes routinized.

  If a person sparkled with a sense of humor through life, he wants us to notice and enjoy it all the more at the edge of his mortality—and to be remembered for it. If somebody normally tended to anger, she will likely be angry at the end. When somebody is dying, he or she is the same person, only more so. If he was cantankerous, he will be noticeably cranky while dying. If she was a person of refinement, she will likely appear as sophisticated and courtly as she can. We send that person to an even greater loneliness when we act as though he or she is now altered exactly when that person is trying to define him- or herself for our memory. Being our authentic self with the dying—and letting the dying be his or her authentic self—sets the path for a redemptive grieving process.

  I learned a lot from the tenderness and honesty of that moment involving Ethan Forsch, Jr. and his daughters. When he died a few days later, they were aggrieved and in pain, but they were not crippled, because they regarded him in death as the actual person he was in life.

  Natalie

  “Why can’t I live forever?” Natalie demanded of me as I held her hand in the hospital room. This is a question we often hear from those facing the end of life. How we respond is significant and can affect our grief journeys once our loved ones have left this world.

  Natalie, sixty-nine at the time, was still relatively youthful, certainly alert and feisty. “Why do I have to die?” she asked. At least she knew her illness had become terminal; her anger confirmed she’d crossed that crucial threshold of acknowledgment. But Natalie was not quite in the mode of acceptance, and my heart went out to her.

  She truly enjoyed life and had found expression for this delectation in her classroom. She taught American history to thousands of high school students for more than forty years. “I miss those kids,” she lamented. Those kids. She held the phrase on her lips as though reluctant to let loose of it. Natalie Rothschild and her husband, Fred, who had died suddenly several years before, had two adult sons. One was a state tourism official and the other taught English in Morocco. But those kids—her pupils—were the ones Natalie craved now, in her hospital room, where she was being treated for a losing battle with lupus, an unyielding disease.

  “The wolves are coming to get me,” she said one day, bitterly denouncing the association of the carnivorous Canis lupus with her disease. “Look at my face and you’ll see where they have left their marks.” There were, in fact, noticeable lesions on Natalie’s cheeks as well as along her fingertips. The skin along her fingernails was thin and flaky from the malady, which is rarely fatal. Natalie was unlucky; a pervasive rash attacked the flesh around her nose. She was dying.

  Medication and treatment had helped her intermittently over the years. It was clear that what gave Natalie the ability to overcome fatigue, joint pain, and afflicted blood serum was her great will. Poise in life breeds dignity in death. And it teaches us, the survivors, to be dignified and focused as we work through our sorrow.

  Natalie would settle back in her bed, breathe out from pain, and tell me again about Ethan Allen, the Revolutionary War general. “You know,” she’d repeat, “they would come an
d tell him, when he was sick, that the angels were waiting for him. And do you know what he said? He said, ‘They’re waiting, eh? Well, God damn them, let them wait!”’ And again, the hoarse bitter laugh would emerge from the tall but failing woman, shaking the bed frame.

  I asked Natalie, “What about your sons? Do they come to see you?”

  Her face turned dark. “They haven’t come around too often. Granted, the one is in Morocco. But they don’t seem to be in contact.”

  “What did you talk about with your sons when they were here?” I asked.

  “Oh, their careers, their houses, their friends. I think the weather came up and there was a reference or two to NBA basketball.” What an alert, intuitive—if indignant—woman is this Natalie, I thought.

  “What did you want them to talk about?”

  “Well, maybe something about their mother, for God’s sake. I am dying here.”

  “I understand.”

  Natalie looked at me impatiently. She did not speak, and just closed her eyes. She folded her arms across her chest; I noticed the rash buildup on her palms. Clearly, her sons’ visits had been inconclusive, perhaps painful. Members of a family were not being honest with each other about their mortality. I felt sad for Natalie, her sons, her three rarely mentioned grandchildren, and her departed husband. There might have been an opportunity for closure, forgiveness, or insight squandered here. As I ruminated, Natalie suddenly opened her eyes and burst out laughing.

  “What?” I asked, startled and relieved.

  “My son, Jerry, the one who lives in Morocco, remembered something while he was here that my husband once did. Fred took the boys, Jerry and Todd, to Canada one summer. The boys were in high school. I was teaching a summer school course. Fred wanted to show them Canada just in case they’d eventually have to go up there to avoid the draft. It was during Vietnam. Fred hated that war and wouldn’t tolerate his sons fighting in such a conflict. Well, anyway, he took them up there to go fishing but he also wanted some of those damned Cuban cigars.”

  Natalie paused, smiling a bit, while wiping away a tear. “You know, he was such an idiot! He takes his sons up to Canada so they can learn about avoiding a war against Communists in Asia, but he also sneaks back into the United States with a package of Cuban cigars.” She looked at me for some indication of my reaction.

  “It sounds like he knew what he believed in and what he wanted to smoke.”

  The teacher chuckled and then stared at me. “It’s a good thing you never took one of my classes, Rabbi. I don’t like canned answers.” She continued reliving the moment, now quite animated, as her memories of Fred’s broad personality and the aroma of burning cigars drifted into the septic hospital room. “Anyway, as they approach the border at Fort Erie—you know, across from Buffalo—the boys remind him that the Cuban cigars are illegal. They tell him he’d better think of something because they’re going to be asked what they bought by the guard at the border. Todd, the funny one, tells Fred that if he’s ever going to run away to Canada to avoid serving in Vietnam, he doesn’t want to have a cigar felony on his record already!”

  Natalie took a long breath, drawing comfort from the recollections of her loved ones. Similarly, we who survive the death of a dear person keep his soul afloat by remembering him faithfully as he was. Natalie continued, “God, he was silly, that Fred of mine. I’m sorry you never knew him. We had a great time. My kids at school used to ask me why I always had so much energy. My classroom was a wonderful place. I told them, each time, that I had energy because my life has a purpose. Go find your purpose, I’d say.” Now Natalie stopped, and the tears came. Tears bittersweet with her mortality. She collected herself and said, “But you know what? My purpose . . . was life with Fred.”

  Natalie put her head in her scarred hands and began to cry and heave. I put one hand on hers as her tears dripped down her cheeks. After a few moments passed, I passed a cup of water to her and she sipped it with a straw. No words passed between us for this interlude; none were necessary. Finally, more composed, she spoke again, even offering a faint smile.

  “So meanwhile, Fred has got those cigars in the car that he can’t imagine parting with. Isn’t it strange? I can tell you about the entire history of the United States, but I’m stuck on my husband and his Cuban cigars.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Ha! Thank you for not putting on airs like some of the doctors and a few visitors. Look, I know I am really sick. I know I’m so damn unlucky because lupus doesn’t usually kill people. I’m not stupid. I know my situation. People come in here and act like they’re talking to a dead person. But I’m still alive! While I’m still here, I wish people would not whisper in my presence like I’m some kind of defunct cow.”

  “I understand, Natalie.”

  “So tell me then, Rabbi, why me? Why is this happening to me?”

  “I’m not going to patronize you with some kind of rabbinic passage or a cliché, Natalie. I don’t know why it’s happening to you. But what I do know is that I want to do my part in helping you leave this world with a measure of peace.”

  A long silence. Natalie closed her eyes for a few moments and then opened them.

  “So,” I asked after a decent interval. “What happened with the cigars?”

  “Oh, God. The cigars. Well, Fred decides to put them in a brown bag and hide them in a place where the customs official wouldn’t look. He pulls over and tucks them somewhere in the engine. Jerk!” Natalie was giggling now. “The customs guy comes over and starts talking to Fred and the boys. Where have you been? What did you buy? Suddenly the air outside is filling with the definite aroma of cigars. Fred tries to look innocent and the customs guy can only chuckle. The motor is smoking Fred’s illicit Cubans!”

  Natalie was now laughing with relief and affection. “Finally, the officer leans into Fred’s window and says, ‘Sir, I hope they were illegal so I can feel good about the confiscation.’ They were allowed to pass. The car smelled like Havanas for days. I didn’t let Fred off the hook about that one for a long time!”

  Natalie Rothschild died a couple of days later. In a final conversation, I asked her if she wanted to pray with me. She scoffed at the idea, saying, “That’s not for me. I taught history. Everybody I taught about is gone. It’s my turn to make some room. I just hope some of those kids heard me.”

  We mourners went to the cemetery and buried Natalie next to Fred. Their two sons, now totally orphaned, said very little and remained stiff and formal. I was concerned they would not know how to properly grieve because their relationship with their mother had been so starched. I might have known more about the inner life of Natalie Rothschild than they did. We have to be present in someone’s life in order to fully deal with his or her death.

  Nonetheless, the buckeyes swayed in the autumn wind. It was a bit too early for the snows. When we walked away, I thought I smelled a wisp of cigar smoke and could have sworn I heard some familiar laughter.

  7 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy, and Their Own Families. (New York: Macmillan, New York, 1969).

  8 Julie Axelrod, “The Five Stages of Grief and Loss,” accessed January 17, 2018, https://psychcentral.com/lib/the-5-stages-of-loss-and-grief.

  9 Kaufmann Kohler and Isaac Broydé, “Bahya ben Joseph ibn Paḳuda (also known as Beḥay and Baḥie)” JewishEncyclopedia.com, http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/2368-bahya-ben-joseph-ibn-pakuda.

  10 Gates of Repentance: The New Union Prayerbook for the Days of Awe, copyright © 1978, 1996 by the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Used by permission of Central Conference of American Rabbis. All rights reserved.

  Chapter Three

  Honoring a Loved One: What to Do, What to Say at a Time of Grief

  “Can I see another’s woe,

  And not be in sorrow too?

  Can I see another’s grief,

  And not seek for kind relief?”

  William Blak
e

  So often people have called me and asked, “Rabbi, my father [or someone else] has died. What do I do now?”

  This is exactly what a friend of mine, Hayley, asked just hours after her father succumbed to old age and a series of maladies. Like many of us these days, Hayley, a woman in her fifties, was also dealing with the geographic issues associated with living, caretaking, and the death of a loved one from far away. Although she had made frequent trips across the country during her father’s final months—Hayley lives in Southern California and her dad finished his life in Binghamton, New York—the realities were exacerbated by the distance. But it is always hard, even if all the parties are in the same physical place.

  “I Want to Die at Home.”

  If someone dies at home, it can be both a blessing and a challenge. The blessing is in the close proximity of loved ones. This is obviously not always feasible and is sometimes simply a matter of circumstance. No one should feel shame or guilt if he or she were simply unable to be at the bedside when someone drew his or her last breath. But it is good—and therapeutic—if you can attend to the dying as much as possible in their final days. Significant conversations take place, forgiving moments, and even the opportunity to say goodbye is beneficial for both the dying and their loved ones. Closure requires closing interludes. There are remarkable, cleansing exchanges of healing honesty, treasured remembrances, and, in some cases, shared prayer. The dying want to be a part of the conversation as much as possible. Like the earlier-mentioned Ethan Forsch, Jr. and Natalie Rothschild, they wish to be heard. Like Charlotte Banda, they want to be sure they will be remembered. The dying frequently want us to listen to their sensibilities and directives regarding their own funeral. And, generally, few people want to die alone.