Friends Respond

Recently two good friends of mine responded to the blog in personal emails.
One of them is a psychotherapist, who spoke of my "struggle to access joy and entitlement, which is always there, but is now further strained by this pain, the extent of which I try to imagine."
She is telling me that I always had to struggle to access joy and entitlement, which I think is true, and that our tragic loss has made that psychological problem much more difficult. However, in the past month or so, I find myself looking forward to doing things.
In general, I think that bereavement or other kinds of loss (severe injury resulting in loss of a limb or of sight or hearing, for example) doesn't erase the problems one had before the loss. The huge new problem might eclipse the older, smaller ones for a while, it might put them in a new perspective, but it doesn't get rid of them or make them easier to solve.
On the other hand, one is also "entitled" to work on the old problems even while trying to cope with bereavement. Indeed, if one doesn't, one could collapse under all that weight.
The therapist's husband asked about the rest of the family, wondering especially how our younger daughter is coping, an insightful question. Each member of the family had his or her own relationship with Asher, and each of us has to resolve that relationship with him now in a one-sided process.
Yesterday we had a moving visit: one of Asher's elementary school teachers, Miriam Dekel, came to visit with a little packet of photographs from the second grade. It happens that we run into Miriam frequently, because we go to a lot of the same movies at the Cinematheque, and she always asks about Asher. She was shocked and distraught when Judith told her what had happened, and we were touched that she had such strong and positive memories of Asher, who was not exactly a model pupil.
The past is not erased when a person dies.
We are enriched when people share their memories of Asher with us.