Eulogy Explained (4)

The next thing I said about Asher at his funeral is that he was quite rebellious.
I don't think he was rebellious out of anger (though obviously there has to be a fair amount of anger in any rebellion) so much as out of integrity. He had a strong inner sense of what was right and just, and he would not have that be violated. Because he was also a deeply loving person, his rebelliousness caused him a lot of inner conflict, which he was trying to understand and cope with to the last days of his short, intense life.
Asher's rebelliousness was hard for me to handle as his father, because it often made me furious at him. Yet I always admired him for having the courage and conviction to rebel. I myself never rebelled openly against authority. Being the only child of a mother with a very strong and controlling personality, I shunned confrontation, because I had no chance of emerging victorious. But Asher grew up as the third child of four in a family that gave him a lot of room to be himself. He knew that there would always be a way back, even after an intense crisis.
We were upset and bewildered when Asher dropped out of high school after tenth grade, but since there was the option of studying independently for his matriculation examinations, we realized that he wasn't denying himself options. In any event there was no way we could have forced him to continue. The school, one of the most flexible and liberal schools in Jerusalem, wouldn't take him back, so even if we had insisted, there was nowhere for him to go.
As Asher grew into manhood, his rebelliousness toned down and became independence, determination to find his own way in life, with confidence in his abilities. He remained intensely critical of authority and the abuse of power, though he was also somewhat cynical about political and social action.
Parents ought to learn from their children at every stage of their respective lives, and I am still learning from Asher after his death. Asher's adolescence coincided with a difficult time in my life. My father died when Asher was eleven, and my mother died shortly after his thirteenth birthday. In fact, Asher and I were visiting my mother, following the celebration of his Bar Mitzvah, when she died. Although my parents were both in their eighties, and neither of them died unexpectedly or tragically, it was not easy for me to deal with the change in my status from devoted son to middle-aged orphan. In retrospect - I never thought of this until Asher himself died - having lost my parents at that time must have made it difficult for me to respond with love to the turmoil that Asher was going through in his teens. Asher withdrew into his own life then, avoiding us as much as he could, and he was very precocious. He had a girlfriend a few years older than he, he used to spend a lot of time with her and her friends in Tel Aviv, and we really didn't know what he was doing with himself. Probably because I was coping with my own bereavement, and because I am averse to confrontation, I took the easy way out and let Asher do as he pleased.
Several close friends of our family, who are also professional psychologists, have complimented us on the way we handled that difficult period in Asher's life, for letting him be independent, but I have residual doubts about it.