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.