Unhappy Birthday

This year the Hebrew calendar placed Asher's birthday on the holiday of Shavuot, so a day that should have been happy became one of deep sadness for us. This Saturday will be the anniversary of his Bar-Mitzvah celebration, a day we look back to with joy, joy now darkened by knowing the fate he was to meet. But of course the joy then was absolutely real. What is more joy-inspiring for parents than to see their children mature?
Asher never bought into the religious rituals around which we structured our family life, but he never regretted having attended a religious elementary school, and he did enjoy and cherish some of the Jewish things we did.
He did well on his Bar-Mitzvah. He learned the Torah portion with a wonderful young man, a fine educator named Even-David Lider, and he read it well in the synagogue. We hired a four piece Brazilian band and had the party in our back yard on a beautiful June night. No guest could resist the rhythm!
It's painful to remember these things, but vitally important.
The intensity of the emotions that I still feel, as if his funeral were only yesterday, is exhausting. They wring me out.
A few days ago I had the feeling that my personality had suddenly exploded. The pieces were scattered all over the place, and when I reassembled them, they wouldn't be in the same order.
I don't know why there was any suddenness in it. After all, we've been living with the tension of Asher's disappearance and then the certitude of his death for half a year or more.
I think it has to do with the release of controlling energy.
Just to keep going, holding myself together so that I could function, was a major effort. Maybe now I've gained enough confidence that I can go on, so that I'm not holding myself together so tightly, and things just burst. But they had to burst.
There's been a change in my self-image, my conception of who I ought to be (superego!) and my guilt for not being that person. Being bereaved, I could say to myself: I don't owe anything to anyone now!
My sudden plunge into ceramics is a reversal of my former feeling, that when I was doing something physical, I was wasting my time. I've found new delight in making things with my hands, a delight that Asher always had, one that I never allowed myself to have.
One day last week, when I was struggling to form something at the wheel, I said to myself: I have never been so much myself as I am when I am doing pottery.
Of course that's wrong. I meant, perhaps: Now, at this juncture in my life, working with clay is giving me the feeling that I am fully myself, a feeling that my other activities don't give me now.
I must try to take that feeling and carry it over to the rest of my life. When I'm happily involved in something, I have to go along with that, and when I'm unhappily involved in grief, I have to go along with that, too.
During the short time when I thought I should be seeing a psychologist, I wrote some notes to myself about what I expected, what I wanted from therapy.
The first issue that troubled me was lack of lasting interest or enthusiasm. I enjoy things, but only briefly, the way paper burns when you put it in a fire and then quickly the flame dies down, leaving just a thin sheet of ash. The therapist told me that was rather typical of people in mourning. Okay, at least I was aware and had described the state of mind correctly.
I also felt stalled, unable to plan, act, initiate, even imagine action. Again she told me this was typical of people in mourning.
I also knew that all the other problems I had before Asher's death were still with me, but I am less capable of coping with them, because I'm more fragile, have less energy, feel more vulnerable. But the fact is, before he died, I didn't think I needed psychotherapy.
My major life problem was the inability to take advantage of the real freedom I have in my life, and, because of the bereavement, the inability even to imagine how I might exploit that freedom. Articulating this was useful to me.
Asher's death (as well as my friend Gerald's untimely departure) makes me feel even more strongly that I must live my own life as fully as possible, because I don't know whether I have a week to live or thirty years. In a sense I owe that to Asher's memory, and that isn't a selfish thing to say, because this calls for daring of the kind he had, and that I haven't always been able to access.