More Lessons

Lesson Number One:
The loss of someone you loved, who was part of your life, is not a single event but a constant, prolonged situation.
Asher used to call us once or twice a week and have long conversations with us - no more.
We were involved in his projects, supportive of them, excited and surprised by them - now we can only remember them. We'll never eat again in a restaurant where he's cooking.
We miss him, and missing him is permanent - we will always miss him.
A friend of his has married and just now his wife had a baby girl. Asher will never marry. We will never get to know him as a father, and one of the most rewarding things parents can experience is to see their children function as parents.

Lesson Number Two:
There is absolutely nothing we can do about this to change it. Ordinarily we can solve the problems and overcome the difficulties life places in our path - or at least conceive of a way of overcoming them. If its unnatural to lose a son in the prime of his life, it's also unnatural to be confronted with such an insoluble problem.

Lesson Number Three:
A loss like this makes one ponder "the meaning of life" - perhaps a silly phrase. I have always thought that life is its own meaning, that it doesn't have a meaning beyond itself.
It is certainly presumptuous to pass judgment on another person's life and say that it was or was not meaningful, that it was or was not wasted.
Recently here in Israel a narcotics addict who was arrested while robbing an apartment snatched a policewoman's pistol and kidnapped her in a patrol car. After a dramatic car-chase, the man was shot at close range and killed by another policeman.
It's hard to read a story like that in the paper and not think: what a wasted life! Not only that, the man had two children by two different women - what a shabby legacy for them.
Thank God Asher's life, though it ended in an accident that shouldn't have happened, was in total contrast to that poor addict's life. Just a few days ago two of his friends, who had studied with him during the year he was at Bezalel, the art academy, came to visit us on the the day of their graduation, to share memories of Asher and bring us some pictures that one of them had taken. It was kind of them to come and good for us to know that many other people, including people we don't know at all, have fond memories of our son. It was also sad to think that, had things been different, we might have been attending that ceremony and having the pleasure of seeing Asher receive his diploma.
His was definitely a meaningful life, one that would have been ever more meaningful if he had been privileged to continue living it.
What's been hard for me is to accept that the best way to honor Asher's memory is to try as hard as I can to make my own life meaningful, to think very carefully about what it is that gives my life meaning, for me and to the people I love.
For a long time I found it almost impossible to take lasting pleasure in anything, and I also felt it was wrong to take pleasure in anything, after something so terrible had happened to us. I'm beginning to emerge from that state, and certainly I know (with my mind, not yet with my heart) that enjoying things is far from a betrayal of Asher's memory: he was a young man who knew how to enjoy things to the full.
That was one of the most wonderful things about him.

Reaching out for Assistance

My son and daughter are both seeing psychologists, and they both report that it's been valuable for them, in helping them cope with bereavement, so I decided to check it out. Asher had also been seeing a psychologist, and he expressed much gratitude to her.
Our health fund offers twelve meetings with a psychologist at a discount. We've been paying the insurance premiums for years and (fortunately) barely ever exploiting the benefits, so I had that incentive, too.
I have a few friends who are clinical psychologists, and I could have asked them for a recommendation, but I decided to go through the bureaucratic process: I made an appointment with the intake psychologist. I figured that if she (it was a woman, as it turned out) made a bad impression on me, if she seemed superficial and insensitive, I didn't have to take her advice. I could still go back to our friends.
I spoke with her for about half an hour, and she seemed to know what she was doing. She gave me a list of four people she thought would be right for me, and the next day I called up the one at the head of the list, whose office, at it happens, is virtually around the corner from our house. So, for the first time in my life, I'm in therapy - which goes totally against my general "I can take care of it on my own" approach.
The intake psychologist, who was so soft-spoken I could barely hear her sometimes (unusual among Israelis - indeed I suspect that she's in depression) asked me, "Why now?"
My answer, which I hadn't prepared in advance, came quickly: "Because I'm ready for it now. I've gotten over the initial shock, but I've reached a kind of impasse."
I know I have to start working through things farther than I've been doing with this blog and in conversations with friends. Here I'm trying to write things that might be useful to other people who have had tragic losses - no shortage of them!
An irreparable rift like this in the fabric of your life can cripple you, and it mustn't. All the psychological problems that I had before Asher died remain in place, but his death has left me weaker, less capable of resolving problems - it's such a problem in itself that I don't have strength left over to carry on with my bundle of neuroses on my own.
I need help to come to reconcile the strong conviction that I must live the rest of my life as fully as possible, a sign of resilience in my character, with the almost equally strong feeling that throwing myself into life will be a betrayal of Asher's memory, a denial of grief. I must enjoy everything I do as much as possible, and I mustn't enjoy anything.

Laughing while Grieving

A friend, whose wife, a young and dynamic woman, died a couple of years ago, wrote in response to what I've been writing here:

"During my first few months of mourning, I noticed something odd and unexpected: from time to time my sense of humor would kick in and something would strike me as funny, or I would make a joke about something. I suppose I could have condemned myself for indulging in humor at such an awful time. But I never did, because it was clear to me that there was no frivolity or light-headedness in it. I was not making light of the tragedy; I am incapable of making light of it. No, it was some autonomous part of me that had produced humor in the past and was going to continue producing humor in the future. I recognized it as a healthy trend, almost as a friend that had come to help me find a way of coping when I could not find a way alone."

I have been very touched by some of my friends' responses to my writing here, and they have both encouraged me and helped me, sometimes by correcting errors, more often by bringing a useful perspective to the task of coping with this loss. What my friend wrote just now, about an autonomous part of his psyche that kept on producing humor, even while his soul was afflicted by bitter grief, is useful to all of us, a reminder that we are not of a piece, and we shouldn't expect ourselves to be.
True, when something very moving happens to us - good or bad - it sweeps almost everything along with it, but pieces of our selves go on with their own business: a month after Asher's funeral I resumed my musical activities. Obviously sadness colored my playing, but the playing also colored my sadness.
My grieving self wanted to scold my musical self: how can you enjoy making music as part of a big band when your wonderful son has died? You're betraying him! But if our task, ultimately, is to continue living a full and active life, even though we have lost someone very precious to us, we shouldn't scold the parts of our selves that manage to carry on. We should let them help us.

Memorial Day

Growing up in America, I never paid much attention to "Memorial Day." I don't even think I knew what it memorialized until I was a teen-ager. Here in Israel, Memorial Day is observed with intense dignity. Places of entertainment are closed, and the media are full of articles about soldiers recently killed and about those who died two generations ago.
Naturally, although Asher did not die as a soldier, I felt much more empathy this year for bereaved parents than I ever felt before.
I don't know whether it's easier to lose a son in military action than it is to lose a son in an accident (How could such a thing be measured?). Each person's death is an individual event. Some young soldiers die heroically, others died because of carelessness, stupidity, or simple bad luck - just as with civilians.
Military deaths are institutionalized, public. The victims are buried in special cemeteries with flags and honor guards and speeches by officers. Civilian deaths are normally private.
If Asher had to die, I'm just as glad that his funeral was family business and not official.
Would I have been proud of him, if he'd died heroically in his country's service? I don't think the pain would have been any less. The pride would have been bitter.
What I understood more than ever this year (and I even think about this when I see fictional
killings in a film or on television) is the effect that these deaths have on all the people who knew and loved the victims: every soldier who died in action had parents, probably siblings, a partner or spouse, even children.
When I say that I understood it more this year, that isn't to say that I never thought about it in the past. One of my young friends lost his father in an army accident when he was an infant, and I've often thought of how hard it was for him and his mother. My daughter's sister-in-law lost her husband in the first Lebanon War, leaving her with a two-year-old boy and pregnant with a girl never even seen by her father.
Where does one take all these heavy emotions and thoughts?
We'll never have a world where people don't die untimely deaths, of accidents, disease, or violence. Perhaps we can have a world where people are kinder to themselves and to others - the bereaved and the not yet bereaved.

Gaining Wisdom the Hard Way

A few weeks ago we saw "Up the Yantze," a documentary by Yung Chang, a Canadian film-maker, about the poor people who will be displaced by huge "Three Gorges" dam soon to be completed. It begins with the following epigraph:
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
It is vaguely attributed to "Confucius," but when I paged through the Analects looking for it, I couldn't find it, and, although it appears all over the Web, no one says exactly where it comes from. I consulted my old college friend, the Sinologist Professor Andrew Plaks of Princeton, who confirmed my suspicion that this is one of myriad gems of wisdom attributed to "Confucius," though they appear nowhere in his writing. (Shades of Charlie Chan.)
Obviously, however, the notion that obtaining wisdom through experience is the bitterest way to do it seemed closely applicable to the wisdom I am gradually gaining by living with bereavement. I have said over and over again that Asher's death has opened my heart in a way that shows me how relatively shallow I have been all my life, and I would agree a million times over to a deal that would leave me shallow and leave Asher alive.
One Web site where I found the "Confucius" quote accompanied it by another, similar one, attributed equally vaguely:
In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence, the second listening, the third remembering, the fourth practicing, the fifth -- teaching others. -Ibn Gabirol, poet and philosopher (c. 1022-1058)
I'd like to see the original Hebrew of that.
Now I am becoming experienced in mourning, and I can compare notes with other bereaved people.
One thing I have become aware of is the disparity between different kinds of knowledge about what happened. Yesterday emotional knowledge came to me (spontaneously, as far as I can tell) of what I had known intellectually from the start: nothing I can do can bring Asher back to life; it's irreversible.
You have no idea how hard it was for me to write those words.

Telling People

Our friend, whose daughter died of cancer several years ago, once told us that she never knows how to answer people when they ask her how many children she has.
Yesterday while I was on a hike in the Judean Hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem, one of my hiking companions asked me how many children we have.
About a month ago I went to a John Zorn concert with a friend in Tel Aviv, and I ran into a young man I hadn't seen for a couple of years, a sweet guy in his twenties whom I met when I took a few years of musicology courses at the Hebrew University. The young man asked me how I was.
Do I tell my hiking companion: we had four children, but one of them died in a hiking accident in Peru last November?
Do I tell my young fellow student that I lost a son?
It's a heavy thing to drop onto someone in what is essentially a casual conversation.
I did tell the hiking companion, and I did tell the young man, but I often choose not to tell people.
Sometimes I don't want to go through the whole story again.
Sometimes I don't want my acquaintanceship to rise to that level of intimacy.
Sometimes I don't think the person I'm talking with will be able to deal with the information.

A Difficult Stretch

The last time I saw Asher was during Passover last year, when he came to visit, and of course I had no premonition that I would never see him alive again, just as he could have had no idea, even on his very last day of life, that he was about to die.
Almost every year we have held a Passover Seder in our home, but this year we couldn't face it.
During the time that Asher was missing, before we knew for certain that he was dead, I frequently felt grief and anguish for him as physical pain in my chest, as if I had been struck a blow. The expression "a heavy heart" was no cliche for me.
Two or three days before Passover (a coincidence?), I developed a pretty severe toothache. I thought it might go away, but it only go worse, so I went to the dentist like a good grownup. Wouldn't you know: an abscess had formed in the roots of one of my front teeth, and I needed immediate root canal treatment.
On the day that I had the treatment, the Thursday before Passover, after the Novocaine wore off, the pain was the most intense I remember feeling in my life. My whole left cheek, from my upper lip to my eye socket, was burning. The pain and swelling subsided gradually. By Saturday night, when we went to the Seder, it was only mildly sensitive.
While I was experiencing that searing pain, I was granted an insight into the plight of millions of people who suffer from chronic pain. Fortunately for me, the physical pain was transitory. By early in the following week, the ache had gone away, and I completely forgot about it. That's how it is, at least for me, with physical pain. When it subsides, I forget I ever felt it.
But the pain of bereavement will never go away. Some days it's disabling, and other days it's bearable.
Tears come to my eyes, sometimes predictably, sometimes unexpectedly. On Wednesday and Thursday last week, Judith and I participated in a hike to raise money for Ts'ad Kadima (A Step Forward), an organization for children (and now young adults) with cerebral palsy. We slept in a campground in the Ramon Crater in the Negev Desert, and the following morning we went on a 12 kilometer hike through a canyon. The hike itself was bearable, but the heat was not: about forty-three degrees centigrade (multiply by nine, divide by five, and add 32 if that doesn't mean anything to you).
Later in the day, teen-agers and young adults with CP came to the campsite, and we socialized with them for a while and then had dinner together. It's not easy to be with such severely disabled people, but it's not new to me. I went on the Hike for Hope last year, and one of the young people is the daughter of friends of ours, Asher's age. I see her often. I can begin to relate to them naturally and see the person beneath the disability.
As I was talking to Eliran, a young man of twenty-four, I realized that I would rather have Asher alive and in a wheelchair like Eliran than dead and under a tombstone - though I can't answer for Asher on that score. But that realization isn't what brought tears to my eyes. Another couple was there whose son suffers from a genetic disability that makes CP look like a mild cold. He is almost totally unresponsive. I saw how much love and care his parents give that hopeless boy, not to mention the love and care given to all the boys and girls with CP, and I had to go off into a corner and cry. Even now, as I write about it, my eyes are flooding.
As if the torrent of emotions in the past month weren't enough, today is Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel. Last night the father of one of our friends addressed the members of our synagogue and described a bit of what he went through from the time of the Nazi occupation of Warsaw until his liberation. I imagine that every day of his life between September 1939 and May 1945 was full of events so traumatic that they would devastate most of us. So my tears for Asher were mingled with my tears for the Jewish world the Nazis destroyed.