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.