The Tasks of the Living and the Dead

We delegate roles in life.
I imagine the delegation of roles is even older than the history of the human race. Every social species delegates functions to its individuals. No one can do everything. Perhaps that's why the delegation of roles in society seems natural to most people: men should do certain kinds of work and assume certain functions, and women should do other kinds of work and assume other kinds of functions. Social change is largely about the delegation of roles to different categories of people in society, or recategorizing people.
Some of this delegation of roles is self-evident in our complex world: we have health-care professionals, legal professionals, engineers, politicians, journalists. But a lot of role-assignment is symbolic, phenomena that social psychologists study such as who asserts leadership in a group, who's disruptive, who's the clown, who eases tensions.
There's also role-assignment in the family, and when someone in the family dies, what happens to the role that person was playing?
I know that Asher's sisters and brother are struggling with that issue, and, I am too. Perhaps each of us will gradually take on some of Asher's roles, though no one will ever play them as fully as he did. The family is missing that component now.
I am an only child, and I always thought my children were fortunate in having siblings because it allowed them to specialize more than I could. I had to be everything for my parents, or as much as I could be, and to a degree the obligations I felt - not always articulated, of course - were contradictory, and the inability to negotiate the contradictions disabled me. My parents, especially my mother, wanted me to be a great variety of things, things that I couldn't possibly be at the same time, and the work of trying to be the good son and please them kept me from doing the work of figuring out what I wanted to be.
Perhaps that's why I conceived my goal as a parent as being a facilitator, helping my children be themselves rather than imposing an idea on them of what they ought to be. Regardless of my attitude as a father, in our family, each of the four children naturally had more freedom to be herself or himself, because there were others doing different things in different ways.
Asher was openly rebellious, perhaps his siblings' delegate in rebellion. He always challenged our authority as parents and adults, so the others didn't have to. Asher was also the restless, creative one, the artist, the initiator of projects, so maybe his siblings, who are also talented in the creative arts, conceded that role to him. Now we'll all have to be more creative and enterprising, because we don't have Asher to do it for us.
Recently I started taking a ceramics class. Perhaps Asher's restless spirit pushed me into it. Oddly, seeing how much I enjoy working with clay, I never even considered doing it, even though our two daughters took ceramics and both of them are good at it. My mother also did ceramics on and off for thirty or forty years. It began when I was a kid. She took me to a ceramics class at Greenwich House, a wonderful community center in Greenwich Village, where we lived. To walk back home after leaving me there and then come and pick me up again would have been onerous, so she was persuaded to enroll in an adult ceramics class to pass the time while I was with the kids. I gave it up when I was about twelve: I was the only boy left in the class. But she kept at it, and we have, use, and cherish a lot of her free-spirited, hand-built work.
My mother never worked on the wheel, but I decided to start on it right away. I love it. I wouldn't mind spending all day at it. So it appears that the delegation goes both ways: we assigned roles to Asher - and they weren't always easy for him, and he suffered. Now he and my mother, who had a lot in common, are assigning a role to me: learn to use the potter's wheel. As a tribute to your son, be more like him!

Owning and Grief

For a long time, before Asher's death, I had been thinking about the strangeness of idea of ownership. I would look at the stone walls of our house and wonder: what does my ownership of this structure mean? Ownership is a legal concept, but I think that's the least interesting aspect of it.
In English we say: I own this. In Hebrew and French one says says: this belongs to me. So is ownership a property of what is owned or of the owner? Depends what language you speak.
People used to be able to own other people routinely, as part of the social order. A slave could purchase himself from his master. Does that mean we own ourselves? Then who are the "we" who are separable from the "selves" that they own? Obviously one does not own one's life, because when one is dead, there is no one there to own the life that is gone. Being alive is one thing, not two: living is not a predicate. Once Asher, or anyone, is dead, he or she no longer owns anything. Can we even say that Asher's body or his grave are his?

When we visited the grave a week or so ago, after our friend's funeral, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that he couldn''t possibly be there. Whoever he was and whatever he was is not connected with the remains under the stone. The corpse has to be dealt with somehow, in a respectful way, but you can't pretend that it's still the person who died.

Next Saturday night is Passover. For years we held a Seder in our house, sometimes with more than twenty guests. This year we knew we couldn't do it. Close friends have invited us to their Seder.
Passover will be especially hard for me, because that was the last time I saw Asher. He came for a week, helped Judith prepare the meal, and fill the house with his spirit and vitality. I had to face another hard moment last week. We went to the wedding of a woman who was with Asher in daycare when they were two or three. We've stayed close to her family all these years. It was wonderful to see her and her husband, to take part in the ceremony, to be inspired by the faith these two young people have placed in one another. Yet, of course, it was sorrowful for us to know that we'll never be attending Asher's wedding. Given the kind of man he was, there might have been more than one wedding over the years!

Long ago, and today still in some cultures, a man's wife was his property - so I've brought this in full circle back to the question of ownership. The theme of the Passover festival is redemption from bondage - but paradoxically, Judaism has made the obeying of strict religious law into the symbol of that redemption. I might say that I'd like to be freed of the bondage of being a bereaved parent. I'd like to resign from that status. The only way out of it is to acknowledge that there's no way out. The challenge is to take the bondage out of the situation. It's too early for that.

Room for Everyone

Our friend's funeral was well attended.
He was a well-known person, a university professor and active in public life. More importantly, he was a warm, friendly, outgoing man, someone who made friends easily and liked people.
After eulogies were delivered in the presence of his corpse, wrapped in shrouds and a prayer shawl, lying on a stretcher placed on a stone platform, we wiped the tears from our eyes and followed the burial society's minivan to the cemetery itself, the grave site.
His grave was in a rather narrow strip of burial plots, and people began to congregate on the near side of it, blocking the way for others who wanted to get close. An official from the burial society told people to move around and gather on the other side of the grave, calling out, "There's room for everyone!"
That could be the motto of the cemetery.
Our friend's new grave is not far from Asher's, so we visited it. Thoughts about him are never more than one thought away of whatever is on my mind, dark thoughts about death and mortality. I look at groups of people and think to myself that all of us will be dying. I think about our friends: we've been to your weddings, to the circumcisions of your sons, to the namings of your daughters, to their bar and bat-mitzvahs, to their weddings, and sooner or later we'll be going to each other's funerals. Not really to each other's funerals, of course. I won't be going to the funerals of the people who come to mine.
I hold my two-year-old grand-daughter and wonder: will I live to your wedding?

A while ago I realized that I was forgetting how much I love and value my other three children, so I wrote them a kind of love letter. When our friend died, I realized I had taken for granted what a wonderful man he was.
Let's try to appreciate each other more openly while we can still enjoy each other's appreciation!

Afterlife?

It is comforting to believe that death isn't the end of things, but rather the beginning of something else, and I guess we need all the comfort we can get.
If there is some other realm of being, it wouldn't be surprising that we mainly have contact with it when we're asleep, because in our dreams all the rational defenses of realism are wiped away.

Here are four dreams connected with Asher:
The first was dreamed by an acquaintance of ours, a woman who could be a good friend of ours, but so far we haven't had the opportunity to develop our friendship. She described it to us in an email, which I've edited slightly:

I dreamed this on a Saturday morning last December. I hadn't known that Asher was missing. Actually I didn't know you had a son named Asher, Of your children I was only acquainted with Asher's older brother.

The dream was that a boy named Asher was swinging in a hammock with his Mother, and then I said to her, "you need a break" and urged him to come and play, promising him that there would be toys for boys . He started towards me, but he had to climb a very steep slope, which was rocky and slippery, and then, at the top, climb over a fence As I went to reach for him, he slipped and fell, hitting his head so hard that it made a loud THUNK, a really loud sound that I heard in the dream.
I was very alarmed, because I could tell by the sound that it was a dangerously serious blow to the head, but could see there was no blood or wound on his head. He acknowledged that it was a severe blow but said, "I am not in pain. I feel no pain."

I woke and thought about the dream, especially noting the sensual aspect (I heard the sound). Later I went to have Shabbat lunch with the Danny and Beatrix B., with whom my husband and I used to be friendly when we lived in Jerusalem, and with whom I had not visited in years.

The conversation meandered over many topics, and we talked about the book I have just finished for Sefirat ha-Omer, and I wondered whether the pages might be good for an exhibit at their synagogue.
I mentioned that I would call Judith and speak to her, and at that point Danny and Beatrix asked me if I knew what was happening with your family. They said that your son Asher was missing. I was alarmed to hear the news and bewildered at the synchronicity of having just dreamed about a boy named Asher, although the boy in my dream wasn't an adult, the fact that I even dreamed about someone with that name and then the slippery slope part It was all very strange. I told them about the dream then and they were surprised too. After Shabbat, I called Danny and asked him if he thought I should tell you about the dream then. He suggested not, and I decided to just wait and see. After a while, almost two weeks later, I heard that Asher had been found ... and the nature of his accident.

I was especially surprised when, after I told you the dream the other day, you showed me the picture album with all the pictures of Asher and the hammock.

I believe very firmly, have experienced it actually, that we can have visitations from our departed loved ones. Its not like dreaming about someone. It is as if they are right there.

The second dream is Judith's. She dreamed it even before she shared her worry about Asher with us, before we started looking for him. In her dream, we were at some kind of gathering, and Asher showed up in the form of a marble portrait bust. Judith greeted him, but then she told him that he had to go upstairs, to a kind of roof gallery. That's where you belong, she told him, and he went up.

The third and forth dreams are mine.
In one dream, while we were looking for Asher, I saw him very clearly, walking down a sunlit slope. He saw me, waved to me, smiled broadly, and said he was all right.
I just dreamed my second one recently. I dozed off while I was having a massage and dreamed that the masseur (a good friend of ours, not a stranger) and someone else led me to an opening in a stone wall in some kind of castle and threw me over it. I landed, unhurt, in a bed of flowers, and the masseur walked down some stone stairs to greet me. The whole scene was lit with bright sunlight, and there were flowers. I paid him then for the massage.
When I roused from that dream, I connected it closely to Asher. In fact, I don't ordinarily dream about Asher - at least I don't remember dreaming about him.
The first dream, dreamed by a woman who knows us, but not well, and whose name is also Judith, but who never knew Asher, is absolutely uncanny. I can only "explain" it by thinking that Asher's spirit was looking for someone receptive, and at that point his mother wasn't receptive. Judith's dream about Asher's visit, is almost as uncanny, because of its setting. At the shiva she told it to a young family friend, who recalled that Asher once worked with him when he was building a roof gallery in an apartment, a place very much like the one that Judith saw in her dream. She had completely forgotten that Asher ever had that job.
My dreams are less uncanny, more easily explicable by wishful thinking, but Asher's presence in the first one was extremely vivid.

Stuff Keeps Going On

I find myself wasting a lot of time and not concentrating well, and sometimes I wonder whether I'm using the bereavement as an excuse to be lazy and unfocused. Whatever I do or feel, I wonder whether it's connected.
As long as I'm so unfocused, I decided to do something useful, so I began cleaning up our basement storage room, which tends to become unbearably cluttered.
Fixing up his physical surroundings was something Asher was good at (in huge contrast to me). He never just moved into a space and left it as it was - just as, when he was a child, he almost never simply played with new toys. He usually broke them, creatively, to make them more interesting. That was part of his energetic character.
The studio apartment that we rent out, originally part of our apartment, was Asher's place for a while. Before he moved in, he persuaded us to enlarge it, and after he moved in he put up shelves and plywood panels on the wall, for his art work. The young couple we've rented the apartment to now are also making a serious nest out of it, removing some of the things Asher put in and some of the furniture he left, including a computer table that Asher designed and had made for himself: a metal frame with a glass top.
Just seeing that table again made Judith weep. So much is associated with Asher.

The state of the cellar was daunting, but I decided to go at it a little at a time. So far I've rearranged some shelves and thrown away about four cartons of old papers, financial records more than a decade old, and volumes and volumes of the journal that I kept, more or less assiduously, for decades.
I lost interest in keeping a journal three or four years ago, because I realized that it was part of my distorted image of myself: I thought I was such an important person that people would study my journals! Only sons think they of huge interest to the world.
My blog is an outgrowth of that habit, but different, I feel. With the journals I wasn't reaching out, trying to establish communication, sharing. I was just filling up pages with longhand and then shoving the notebooks into drawers when they were full. The old journals piled up, and I never had the patience or interest to reread them. Once in a while I would glance through them, and the few sentences that caught my eye always embarrassed me.
Nevertheless, I couldn't bring myself to jettison them.
Now that I've done it, I feel only the slightest regret. If they weren't even of interest to me, how could they possibly be of interest to anyone else?
I found myself shoving the old journals into the recycling bin with violence. I was getting rid of something I should have gotten rid of years ago. Perhaps the violence was directed against the me that couldn't get up the courage to get rid of all that verbiage.
Perhaps the big loss of our son enabled me to let go of them - but the violence of my movements tells me that it wasn't a letting go so much as an expulsion.
I don't think I was being honest with myself in my journals. I was self-conscious without being self-aware. Now I'm more self-aware, at least self-aware enough to get rid of that junk.
Asher's death has ripped open my heart, giving me depth I never asked for, precious though it may be, because the cost was unacceptable. I must neither refuse what I have received nor deceive myself that it compensates in any way for the loss. I'd rather be shallow and have a living son.