The Dreadful Fluidity of Time

The first part of what I said was this:

No aspect of our lives is more frustrating and alarming than the fluidity of time. The past disintegrates and becomes distorted in our memories – it's forgotten; it disappears. The present passes faster than the blink of an eye. The future is only an illusion, the product of our imagination. It's impossible to know in advance what will happen or to count on what we expect.

That's why people have an obsessive need to set dates, to sink stakes into the continuum of time. We want to grasp time, control it. For that purpose we determine times and dates – but it's all artificial – it all flows from our need not to get lost in the maelstrom of time.

Judaism specializes particularly in the division of time, in setting times, in sanctifying time. Today is the thirtieth day after the burial of our precious son Asher. We must endow importance to the number of days that have passed, although we know that it's entirely arbitrary.

***

Because I spoke only for a few minutes, I didn't expand much on that idea. I didn't say why I find the fluidity of time so frustrating and alarming, but what needs to be added?

As to why I said, “our lives,” and not “my life,” in part it was because of the communal nature of the event. Asher's tragic death was a blow to everyone who heard about it and knows us even slightly. The evening was so well attended because our friends wanted to express solidarity with us, but they also needed it for themselves, to find some consolation in the sharing of grief, concern, and fear of death.

But I also said “our lives” because my bereavement has opened my heart in a way that I am still baffled by. It has ripped away the defenses I had against compassion. I now know in a way that I never did and never could imagine what it is to lose someone one loves, not in the ordinary way of old age and gradual slipping into death, but in the shocking, unexpected way of losing someone who was “too young” to die.

I'm baffled because it means that I was emotionally stupid before, and I never thought of myself that way. Why did I need such painful and unnecessary shock and loss to learn something so self-evident?

The Thirtieth Day

We held a memorial for Asher in our synagogue on the evening following the thirtieth day after his funeral: the shloshim. That was on February 7. About 150 people attended. Our close friend, the composer Stephen Horenstein, played a piece of his own on tenor saxophone to open the evening. I spoke, my wife read poems out loud that people had sent us or read during the previous month, our surviving son spoke, we screened two short films that Asher had made when he was studying film-making at the Sam Spiegel School, and we served splendid food cooked by Aliza Press, a gourmet caterer who is also a friend of ours and knew Asher well. She told us that the highest compliment she received during the evening was that the food tasted as if Asher had prepared it.

Our son and I decided to speak in Hebrew, even though there were some people there who don't know Hebrew. It seemed right. Asher was very Israeli.

As I did with the eulogy I gave for Asher, I'll post the Hebrew text and then explain what I said gradually.

דברים שאמרתי בטקס לכובד ה"שלושים" של אשר ז"ל

אין הבט של חיינו יותר מתסכל ויותר מבהיל מנזילות הזמן. העבר מתפורר ומסתלף בזיכרונותינו – ונשכח, נעלם. ההווה חולף יותר מהר מחרף עין. העתיד הוא רק אשליה, תוצר של דמיוננו. אי אפשר לדעת מראש מה יקרה או לסמוך על מה שאנחנו מצפים.

לכן יש לבני אדם צורך כפייתי לקבוע מועדים, לתקוע יתדות ברצף הזמן. אנחנו רוצים לאחוז בזמן, לשלוט בו. לצורך זה אנחנו קובעים זמנים ומועדים – אבל הכל מלאכותי – הכל נובע מהצורך שלנו לא ללכת לאיבוד בתוך מערבולת הזמן.

היהדות מתמחה דווקא בחלוקת זמן, בקביעת זמן, בקידוש הזמן. היום הוא ה"שלושים" לקבורתו של בננו היקר אשר. אנחנו חייבים להעניק חשיבות למספר הזה של ימים שעברו, למרות שאנחנו יודעים שזה לגמרי שרירותי.

עברנו תקופות שונות מאז אמצע חודש אוקטובר, כשאשר עזב את העיר ניו-יורק ונסע לפרו:

במשך קרוב לשלושה שבועות קיבלנו דואר אלקטרוני ממנו באופן רציף, תיאורים מלאי התלהבות של חוויותיו, מלווים בצילומים מרתקים ויפים.

אחר-כך עברו כשבועיים כשציפינו לשמוע ממנו ביציאתו מקניון קולקה. ובעצם בזמן זה ככל הנראה הוא כבר היה מת, אבל לא ידענו.

אחר כך התחילה תקופת הדאגה, החיפושים, האי-וודאות, המאמצים האדירים לאתר אותו ולהציל אותו.

אז עבר תקופה של כמעט שבוע מזמן גילוי גופתו עד להבאתו לישראל לקבורה, ימים קשים של סידורים ופעילות נמרצת, ימים של מתח נפשי וחוסר אונים.

אז באה השבעה: זמן מיוחד בו תמכו בנו חברינו המסורים ואין מילים בפי להודות לכל אלה שעזרו, שביקרו, שניחמו. זה היה מרגש וחשוב: הוכחה לנו שלמרות השכול, יש בעולם אהבה רבה.

ועכשיו אנחנו מסמנים את סוף השלושים, כאילו זה הסוף של משהו. אבל אנחנו יודעים שזה אינו הסוף.

אנחנו יודעים שהחור הכאוב שנקרע ברקמת חיינו יישאר לנצח – לנצח לפחות במונחים אנושיים, בקנה מידה של חיי קרוביו המתאבלים של אשר – אני ויהודית, עדן ועופר, בעז וחנה, כל חבריו וחברינו, כל מי שיזכור אותו עד סוף חייהם.

מעכשיו אנו אמורים לחזור לחיינו הרגילים. אני כבר אינני מחויב לומר קדיש, אנחנו יכולים לשמוע מוזיקה ולהשתתף בשמחות. אבל יש בי משהו שאינו רוצה לחזור לחיי הרגילים, יש בי משהו הרוצה להמשיך להתאבל עוד תקופה ארוכה. לכן אולי טוב שמנהגי האבל של היהדות מכריחים אותי לחדול.

יהי זכרו של אשר זאב בן יעקב משה ויהודית ברוך.

The Difference between Sadness and Depression

When I am depressed, I am never depressed about anything specific. I'm depressed about the way the world is, or about the way I am in the world.
It's akin to free-floating anxiety. I'm not worried about whether a certain job that I want will come my way, or whether a performance I'm going to be in will be successful. I'm worried in a general, unfocused way, about everything.
When I'm depressed, I wake up at four or five in the morning and lie there, knowing it's pointless to get up and equally pointless to stay in bed. 'when I'm anxious, I can't fall asleep. Fortunately, I'm rarely both anxious and depressed at the same time. That would leave me about half an hour to sleep.
Now I'm sad. I'm sad about something very specific: my wonderful son died.
When I'm depressed, I know, from experience, that the depression will pass. Fortunately I've never sunk into deep, clinical depression. I think it's a matter of biorhythms for me - if people still believe in biorhythms these days. Or else I've been sick or am about to be sick. Like now. I had the flu last week, and I'm still recovering, left with annoying, hacking cough. That's depressing. The cough will eventually go away, I'll feel better, and I'll forget how sick I was.
But I know that this sadness about Asher won't pass.
There's something stupid about this situation, not about being sad now, but about ever having thought I was completely happy. Only a mindless adult could ever be completely happy. Was I ever mindless? Was I ever completely happy? Neither of the above - but I apparently possessed a high ability to ignore the sadness of life.
On Saturday our daughter was here with her three children, and around two o'clock the sun was bright and warm. I went out for a walk with our two big old dogs and my two grandsons, the seven-year-old and the three-year-old. We walked down the flight of stone stairs at the top of the dead-end street that leads down in the direction of Mount Zion. The seven-year-old raced down the hill with all the recklessness of his age, and I held the hand of the cautious three-year-old as we made our slower way down.
We turned left on Ein Rogel Street, walked to the corner of the Hebron Road, and crossed, waiting patiently for the lights to change. We walked downhill till we came to a short stone stairway leading up to the hill adjacent to the Scottish Church. I had promised the seven-year-old to take him back to some ancient tombs that I had shown him once. All of the Hinnom Valley is honeycombed with ancient burial caves. The ones I had in mind are nestled between the Scottish Church and the new Begin Center. The seven-year-old asked me whether Asher was buried there.
After we visited the burial caves, which were flooded from the recent rains, we climbed up to the top of the grassy hill, which, for some reason, remains undeveloped in the center of an over-developed city. Yellow and red wildflowers were blooming, the dogs roamed about freely, several families with young children were up there enjoying the sun, the view, and the flowers. I looked at the splendid view to the East with my grandson, pointing out the walls of the Old City, Jaffa Gate, Mount Zion, the hotel where his parents were married, the Mount of Olives, the Judean Desert, and the deep valley where the Dead Sea nestles, out of sight.
That was a happy moment: holding the three-year-old boy's hand and watching the seven-year-old climb up every rock and jump off safely onto the soft ground beneath.

Asher's Grave

By now there's a monument on it, with a quotation from the end of Genesis, from Jacob's blessings to his sons: "Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal delicacies" - a perfect verse for a young man who had devoted the past three years to cookery.
I still find it nearly impossible to believe that Asher is under that earth, even though we sat with the body (wrapped in a shroud, thank God) before the funeral and smelled the effects of two months of exposure to the elements, even though we saw the body placed in the ground, and the earth piled up on it. There is a difference between knowing something factually and objectively and knowing something emotionally. How can we accept the death of a vigorous young man, a man with energy, plans for the future, enthusiasm for life?
Here in Israel, people are not buried in coffins. They are exposed immediately to the earth. The first time I saw a funeral here, I was appalled. Now it seems normal - as normal as a funeral can ever seem.
Asher was with me, at the age of thirteen, when my mother died in New Jersey. He didn't want to sit in the room with her body, but I did. I looked at her and thought: this body isn't my mother anymore. That's the way I feel about Asher's body.
When we're alive, we are our bodies, and they are us. When our bodies die, they stop being us. The rationalist side of my personality says that it's ridiculous to devote huge plots of lands to cemeteries. If you extrapolate, ultimately the whole world will be a cemetery, and there will be nowhere left for the living. But the emotional side of my personality is glad that at least Asher's body is here, that at least there is a physical monument to the twenty-eight years that he was privileged to live.
To console us, people often say that there is nothing worse than losing a child, nothing as "unnatural." It is certainly terrible, but "unnatural"? Hardly. Even a hundred years ago, child mortality was so high, even in the developed world, that there was probably no family where some child hadn't died. People lived with a lot more grief then than we do today.
Anyway, I think that the level of people's bereavement is impossible to measure. How can you say that one loss is greater than another? Doesn't it depend on who the people are?
We didn't lose a son and brother, we lost a very specific person, Asher Zeev Green, and our loss is the loss of that person, the hole torn in our souls by his being taken away, the rift in our relations with other people because of his absence. For some people, the death of a parent, even an aged parent whose death was expected, can be devastating. Others may be consoled by knowing that their parent lived a long and fruitful life. That is a consolation we will never have as we mourn for Asher.
Long before his death, I had been thinking about my own situation in life, a man in his early sixties: what is the proper aspiration for a person my age? What should I try to do, hope to do, plan to do? Now that Asher is dead, I feel totally devoid of aspirations. I don't want to do anything. I can't imagine what will feel like success at anything.
A close friend of ours lost her daughter to cancer about seven years ago, and she decided to revamp her life completely, to study social work so that she can help other people facing such wrenching bereavement. I admire her for having the vision to use the tragedy that befell her to give her life meaning. I hope that I will think of something equally meaningful and new to do. For the moment, though, I can barely conceive of the future beyond the end of each day.