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!
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You write about what is easy to understand, relate to, appreciate. And in so doing, you help me remember and learn much. and to feel sad, happy, everything. I'll write you a love letter here.
You are smart, handsome, funny, unpretentious, An adventurer who is fiercely passionate about what matters to you, and much does. You are blessed with health, an astounding wife (an eshet chayyil the likes of whom I meet maybe three times in a decade, and who will get a love letter from me, too), and children (each unique and devoted in lovely sibling ways).
I admire your decision to devote resources (time, time, time, chief among them) to your music, to your community, to your work, to your blog, to your dogs, to your neighbors (yes, those neighbors, too and sometimes, especially). I feel that I could call you in the middle of the night for help and that would you answer. And that I can be as direct and as honest as I dare with you.
And I thank you (and your family) for sharing with us, your community (ever expanding) the missing, the searching, the finding, the bringing home, and the burying, then mourning of our precious, our precious Asher. Jeff, I love you!
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