Irreparable Loss

Since the last time I added writing to this blog, my family and I have gone through a time of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and hope. In mid-October, our twenty-eight year old son Asher went on a trip to Peru. On November 3 he sent us an email from the town of Chivay, telling us he was planning to hike in the Colca Canyon for a week and reassuring us that he wasn't planning to do anything dangerous or out of the ordinary, so we expected to hear from him around November 10. After another week went by, we began to worry. We alerted authorities, began to make telephone calls, and then our son-in-law took it upon himself to go to Peru and look for Asher. He was joined by Asher's older brother. They spent two weeks searching intensely for him with the mountain police force of Arequipa, Peru, and failed to find him. We feared all along that Asher had fallen to his death, but we imagined all sorts of other possibilities that would somehow leave him alive. We had absolutely no concrete information about his whereabouts after the evening of November 3, when he sent the email to us. No one remembered seeing Asher, and there was no record of his staying in any of the hostels in the town. His disappearance was a complete mystery.
Yesterday we were informed that his body was found. The most likely thing is exactly what did happen: he fell to his death while on the hike. We still don't know exactly where he fell, and we will probably never know why he fell, but we know that he did fall. Our sadness and grief is now complete. Before his body was found, I had allowed hope to keep me from grieving. There were days when I was painfully sure was dead, and days when I was sure he would be found alive.
This terrible turn of events makes all the other things that I had thought of writing about seem trivial, though I might get back to them, since the human ability to be distracted is, mercifully, infinite. Music was really the only thing that kept me going during this time of tension, music and the enormous stores of love within our immediate family, my wife and our other three children, and the messages of support and encouragement we received.
Many of the people who offered us deep sympathy are people who themselves have undergone tragic loss, or who are facing horrible situations: an educator in his fifties who is waiting to die of cancer, a musician whose wife has multiple sclerosis, a woman whose twelve-year old son hanged himself, two men whose wives died of ovarian cancer, the mother of one of Asher's high school friends, who committed suicide, a woman whose daughter died of leukemia. I could go on. When you look around you, if you know something about the people you see, you realize that you are not alone in having suffered great loss. Life is full of pain.
People have complimented my wife and me for our courage in facing Asher's disappearance, before we knew that he was dead, and they have admired the solidarity and hard work that our family put into the task of locating him. But, as I have heard from friends, to whom I have offered similar compliments, when there's no choice, you do what you have to.
All along I have felt that, no matter what the outcome was, this experience would mark and change our lives in ways that we cannot know. I feel that I can't and shouldn't resist what's going on in my heart now. Asher's name in Hebrew is related to the word for happiness. I doubt that we will ever be completely happy again.