Saying Kaddish for Asher

I didn't want to go to synagogue this morning and say kaddish for Asher on the fourth anniversary of his death, but I did go.  We lit a candle for him last night, and today we plan to visit his grave.
I didn't want to go, because I have found it very difficult to pray in the past few years, to feel that I am praying to some entity that hears my prayers, cares whether or not I prayer, or has any interest at all in human beings.
I didn't want to go  because I almost never attend morning services during the week, and it feels hypocritical to me to attend them only when I have a death to commemorate.
Would Asher want me to say kaddish for him?  I guess so.  Although I do not believe in the afterlife in any serious way, I can't deny that at certain moments I feel Asher's presence around me.
There is some consolation in prayer with a group of other men, which is what orthodox Jewish prayer is, some of whom are also there because they are in mourning.  Bereavement is isolating, and isolation compounds grief.
If I hadn't gone, I would have felt guilty.  But, having gone, I don't feel satisfied in any way, just less guilty.
The four years that have gone by have only made Asher more dead, and the pain I feel is less acute, because I am learning to live with it.  But sometimes a searing memory suddenly whips me, and I miss him terribly.  Often it is at otherwise happy moments, when I wish Asher could share them.

Epilogue

My son's dog died last Friday morning. He was a large mongrel, mainly German shepherd, and he came to us with the name "Gin," which we changed to "Jimmy." He originally belonged to a neighbor of ours who neglected him so shamefully that you can barely say that he belonged to him. Asher befriended him, and he started frequenting our house, walking with us when we walked our other dog. He used to follow our daughter to school in the morning, braving the rush hour traffic, and when she went downtown with friends to sit in pubs (something she did a lot when she was in high school), he used to follow her and sit outside, waiting for her. Here's a picture of her with Jimmy
We started feeding him - he was emaciated, undernourished. For a long time he accepted food from us, but he wouldn't come into the house. When he overcame that reluctance, we started taking care of him - he was filthy and infested with ticks. We also bought a leash for him. He followed us wherever we went by foot, and we were afraid he'd get run over. He was always a very emotional dog, sensitive and affectionate with us but aggressive against other male dogs in the neighborhood. He got into several pretty serious fights. Even when he was old and lame, there were certain other dogs that he regarded as enemies, and he was ready to fight them, no matter what.
Jimmy lived to a ripe old age for a dog of his size. He was fourteen when he died. He had been failing for over a year. He limped. We had him x-rayed and tried all sorts of treatment, including acupuncture, but nothing helped except steroids. By the end, just walking around the block left him exhausted - but he still loved going out. I used to say that if I ever got as excited about anything I was doing as he did about going out for a walk, I would be a happy man.
For a few months before he died, he groaned almost constantly. He was clearly in serious pain.
On the morning of his death, he didn't have enough energy to go out. First he lay in front of our bedroom door. Then he managed to move a few feet to the front hall, where he lay down quietly. He had no appetite, but he drank some water. About two hours after he taken up his final position, he stood up, and we thought at first that he had recovered enough strength to go out. But then he had a kind of convulsion, lay down again, and in a few minutes he was dead.
He didn't seem to be in unusual pain during the two hours he lay at our doorway, waiting to die with no fear of death, no idea of what was coming. It just happened to him.

Farewell

We parted from Boaz that afternoon in Arequipa. He was flying back to the US and his job in Washington, DC, and we were about to take the overnight bus to Cuzco. Being with Boaz was wonderful, and parting from him was sad.
While we were planning the trip, Judith was strongly opposed to doing any more than our business in the Colca Canyon area and returning from Peru. She had no interest in Peru and no desire to tour there. Ofer had been to Peru in the early 1990s and fallen in love with the country, so he naturally wanted to take advantage of his presence there to become reacquainted. Hannah had also been in Peru, but not the parts where we were, and she's an enthusiastic traveler, so she also wanted to stay on. I had mixed feelings. Like Judith, I had never had much interest in Latin America in general or in Peru - indeed I had been very apprehensive about the trip, imagining that people would be trying to rob us left and right. On the other hand, since we were laying out so much money to get there, and we had already committed so much of our time, why not do some ordinary tourism and get a little fun out of the trip?
We could always justify it, if there was any reason to justify it, by saying that we were going to see the places that Asher planned to see. We were completing his trip for him.
It's true that everywhere we subsequently went in Peru, Asher's shadow was with us - as his shadow is with me every time I dice an onion. And it's also true that we had a fascinating, enjoyable trip during the following ten days or so.
But I don't intend to write about those experiences here.
It's time to sum up and move on.
Planning and anticipating the trip to Peru was central in our lives during the months preceding the trip, especially in Judith's life, for she did most of the planning and arranging. We had a specific mission, and we completed it successfully - more than successfully. I'm proud of our family, proud of our friends who contributed so generously to our project, pleased to know that their contributions went to worthy people, glad that we were able to express personal gratitude to the people who did so much to help us. I'm also glad that I liked Peru and the Peruvians so much.
However, having completed the mission, I am left with emptiness: what is there to do next? What's worth doing?
Grief is lonely and individual.
Asher's death is many losses to many people, each of whom knew him in a different way, each of whom is in a different stage of life. We are all many things to many people, and when we die, each of the many people loses something different. We have lost a son, a brother, a friend, a student, a patient, a colleague.
"You can't take it with you," as the cliche tells us. But you leave a lot behind, assuming that "you" exist after you are dead, so that "you" are deprived of something or have lost something.
If we assume that "you" stops existing when "you" dies, then "you" leaves nothing behind. But it is we who are left behind, we who have lost, and we who imagine how "you" could have had a longer, fuller, more rewarding life.
Asher would have been twenty-nine last June. He might have gone on living for at least another fifty years, growing, developing, working, creating, gathering friends, lovers, a family, a career - living a full life and enriching the lives of others.
I've said it before. If Mephistopheles had appeared to me and offered me a deal: die instead of Asher, and he'll live for at least the number of years that you've lived so far, I would have taken it. Asher should have been speaking at my funeral a year ago, not I speaking at his.
I've had a decent shot at life. He only got a beginning.
Until Asher died, I was always optimistic, pretty much assuming that things would work out all right. I've lost that.

Winding Up

While Judith and I were at the lookout and then at Dante's school, and Ofer was trying to get to the place where Asher last was, Hannah and Boaz went where Asher planned to go: the bottom of Colca Canyon, the second deepest canyon in the world, an enormous ravine that widens out into a valley, whose walls, wherever they're not too steep, are terraced for agriculture.  

Tourists who have enough time hike down into the canyon, stay over night at the Oasis, a kind of resort, with hot springs, and then go on to visit some of the villages in the canyon, which are accessible only by foot or by mule.  You probably feel as if you're in a charmed zone, close to nature, far from noise and pollution, seeing people whose way of life is rooted deep in the past.

But Hannah and Boaz only had a day, so they left at dawn, hiked down, ate lunch at the Oasis, and then hiked up, reaching Cabanaconde again before dark.  

Hannah hired a mule to get back up, but Boaz took on the challenge of coming back on his own and met it with flying colors.  It's a stiff climb in any event, but at that altitude, it's especially hard.

The High Mountain Rescue Unit took us back to Arequipa the next morning.  We left early, so we could reach the condor lookout in time to have a chance of seeing some condors - but there weren't any that day, just about five hundred tourists.

All the way to Cabanaconde from Arequipa, I had been thinking to myself: these are the sights that Asher saw.  All the way back, all I could think was that Asher's body had made the same trip, in the same vehicle.

Not Knowing

The path down to the lookout took us past the kindergarten and a second school building of some kind. As passed it, a woman saw us, rushed out from somewhere, and pounded on the door of the second school building. Out came Dante, our English round-faced speaker. He told us he was going to have some English classes in the adult education school that afternoon and asked us to come by at three. He told us he spent the morning in the school building, to make sure no one broke in and stole the computers. We wondered to ourselves what that meant about the population of the village.
In any event, we agreed readily, and that afternoon, we went back to what was now a very familiar corner of Cabanaconde. As usual, there was a misunderstanding. The English lessons didn't really begin at three, and the students who began learning at some vague time after three were not high school students but elementary school kids, and not many at that. Dante evidently expected us to stay all day, from three on, but we only planned to spend an hour there.
About eight kids gradually gathered, and Judith and I gave them a lively, improvised English lesson. Their performance was pretty impressive, seeing that Dante was hardly a fluent speaker of English himself. They knew a lot of vocabulary, and they were lively and intelligent. It was fun working with them.
I guess any kid who was willing to go back after school for voluntary English lessons either had very pushy parents or high personal motivation.
Dante told us that he had arrived in Cabanaconde a few years ago with some kind of a diploma and one English book, no building, no program, but with some kind of government backing. He gradually built a program, recruited students, obtained a building, and started teaching English as well as tourism, electronics, and computers. Does he really know very much about those four fields? Evidently enough to get people started. If you wait until you have fully qualified teachers in places like Cabanaconde, you'll never have any programs.
Dante needs textbooks, dictionaries, and atlases, as well as other equipment. So now he's on our "Help Cabanaconde" list, too. Dante was a little disappointed when we told him at four that we had to go, but we didn't have a lot of energy, between the high altitude and the high emotions we'd been experiencing.
Meeting his students took our mind off the reason we were in Cabanconde for a while, but when we got back to the hotel, we were reminded sharply. Ofer had returned to the hotel, and he was exhausted and distraught. Instead of coming back from seeing the place where Asher fell with a clear idea of how the accident happened, he came back with more questions than answers, as well as a badly injured knee.
All he could say to us was that if Asher had somehow gotten to the place from which he apparently fell, he must have been a champion mountain climber - which we know he wasn't.
Our only hope of finding anything definite out now lay in the memory chip of his camera. At the time we thought we had it, but when we got back to Israel, Ofer discovered that the chip we had was not the one upon which Asher had recorded his pictures from Peru, and that chip wasn't with the camera or his belongings. It's gone.
That afternoon, Judith and I didn't push Ofer to hear his theory about how Asher had fallen, and we have decided not to since then. If Ofer has worked out a theory by now, it's still only a theory, and even the fullest knowledge can't change the horrible fact that our son is dead.
Asher's death was shrouded in mystery from the start. For nearly two months, before his body was found, he was only "missing," and we hoped that somehow he was still alive. We will never know exactly what series of errors and miscalculations led to his fall. That's frustrating, but what good would fuller knowledge do?

Two Dreams

A few weeks ago, the body of an Israeli hiker who had fallen into rapids in Peru was discovered, wedged under a rock, not far from where he had fallen, months later, after the water in the river had receded.
The night after reading about that, I dreamed that Asher's body had been recovered similarly. In my dream he had long, black straight hair and a long beard, though in reality Asher had short, light, curly hair, and was clean shaven. The figure in the dream, who was definitely "Asher," looked like a figure of Christ after he has been taken down from the cross.
Even though he had been under water for a long time, we started resuscitation, and he responded. "A medical miracle," someone shouted.
I woke up in fear.

In a dream last night I saw a child of about five, a child of mine.
I had come home from somewhere and found him with a terrible bloody wound on his face, between his eyes. The blood on his face was very bright red.
I hugged him and wanted to rush to the hospital with him, but he spoke calmly and said it had happened earlier, and he had taken care of it.
The "child" was Asher, and when I realized it was he, again I woke up in fear.

How strange it is to see someone in a dream, who doesn't look at all like the person you're dreaming of, but you know it's the same person.

A Message from the Condors

The next morning, Hannah and Boaz walked down into the canyon, accompanied by one of the mountain rescue men, and Ofer went with Diego and Benito, another mountain rescue man, to see the place where Asher's body was found and the place from which he fell. Judith and I decided to spend a quiet day in Cabanaconde.
The Kunturwassi hotel is on a low hill a short distance away from the main square, which, as usual in Peru, has a church on one side and stores and restaurants on the other three sides. The hotel is a rambling assemblage of bungalows adjacent to the main building, which houses the reception desk and a restaurant on the upper floor, with a view down into the village and out to the mountains on the horizon. A little brook flows out of the rocks under the restaurant past the outdoor stairway leading from the reception desk down to the rooms. You can also climb up a flight of stairs from the restaurant to an observation tower on top of the hotel.
When Judith and I sat down to eat breakfast, the waitress, a motherly woman in her forties, spoke softly to us in simple Spanish that we could understand. Were we Asher's mama and papa? The whole village was worried about him and looking for him. She expressed deep sympathy and suggested that we should have a mass said in Asher's honor, but we explained that we weren't Catholics.
She accepted that news with no comment.
The day before, on our way to the kindergarten, we saw a sign that read "Mirador Achachihua, 500 m," and we decided to see what that was. The path continued onward past the kindergarten, as the village houses thinned out. We reached what looked like a half-constructed, reinforced concrete bull ring. At that point it wasn't clear where the path led, but we clambered over a low stone wall and continued in the direction of the canyon, finally reaching a promontory from which you could see all the way down to the Colca River in the bottom or the canyon, and at the peaks and cliffs in three directions. We were in sight of the place to which Robert had taken us the night before.
A local guide was there with a small group of young tourists, but they left after a while, and Judith and I decided to stay there. We could see down to the place Asher had presumably meant to reach and the general area where he fell. It was a good place to collect our thoughts and be alone with our feelings.
I sat down on a rock to write in my notebook.
The silence was nearly absolute. The sound of the rushing water of the river, more than a kilometer below us, came up to us faintly. Otherwise there were no sounds - no engines running, no human voices, no horns or sirens.
Soon afterward, we began to see large birds flying in the canyon below us: eagles. Then condors appeared, five of them, first soaring and wheeling at eye level over the canyon, then rising higher and circling in the air over our heads. They came so close to us that we could hear the wind rushing through their feathers. We could see their eyes, their beaks, the hugeness of their black, extended wings. They circled and circled, as if inspecting us. We moved so they wouldn't mistake us for carrion. We knew that condors don't attack live animals or people, but we couldn't help be frightened, they were so large and majestic.
I tried to take pictures of them with my point and shoot camera, totally unsuited to that. I only managed to capture a few blurry images.
I don't know how long the condors stayed in the air above us, circling, swooping, disappearing and returning, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone.
Earlier I had thought - against every skeptical principle in my mind - that our mission in Peru was to free Asher's soul from the Colca Canyon. His body had been brought back and buried, but until people who loved him came to see the place where he fell, his sould would be stuck there.
The visit from the condors had a mystical quality to it, as if they were helping us free Asher's soul from that place. As if they knew why we were there.
As we left, heading back to the village, I began sobbing uncontrollably.