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.