Pomegranates

I don't know who planted the two old pomegranate trees that flourish in our garden. Perhaps the Arabs who lived in the house before 1948 planted it, along with the vine and the fig tree, or it could be that it was the Kurdish Jews who lived there from the late 1940s until we bought the house from them in 1983. The trees give very sour fruit of varying size. Very few of them ripen into bright red globes like the plump, uniform fruit you can buy in a store.

This year they produced a huge crop. I have picked about 100 kg., and that doesn't count the ones that rotted on the tree after insects beat me to them. In the past week I have spent hours and hours picking them, squeezing juice from them with an orange juice squeezer, straining the juice, and trying to figure out where to store it. I froze a gallon or more of it, and our refrigerator is loaded with it.
As I did this physical labor and food preparation, I kept thinking about a story by William Saroyan that I read years and years ago, about an uncle of his, who planted pomegranate trees in California and lost his shirt. I also thought about Asher, who spent hundred and hundreds of working hours preparing food. He loved the contact with the materials and tools, the processes, the smells and tastes, the attention you have to give to what you're doing.
Sometimes I try to get into his head when I do things that he did or might have done, especially when it's something a bit uncharacteristic of me, like messing with dozens and dozens of pomegranates.
I tried to appreciate it all: the stickiness of the juice, the scratches on my arms from reaching through the branches to get an elusive piece of fruit, the repetitive cutting and squeezing, and the trips to the garbage cans with heavy sacks full of rotten fruit and crushed halves of the fruit that had been intact. I especially relished the intense purplish red of the juice.
It doesn't make me sad when I do things that remind me of Asher. I'm sad anyway. Rather it makes the things I do more meaningful, a way of communing with him.

Keeping the Fabric Together

We held a ceremony to honor Asher's memory in my cousin's apartment on 81st Street in Manhattan on September 14. It was attended by about sixty people, and it left us with a strong feeling of satisfaction: we saw a lot of people for whom we feel great affection, and we met some people we didn't know at all, who felt affection for Asher.
At the ceremony Judith and I both spoke. We showed a short film that Asher had made during the year he was in film school, about Miriam, a contemporary of his, whom he had known all his life, a young woman with cerebral palsy. The film demonstrates Asher's strong rapport with Miriam, his ability to look at her condition without averting his eyes and to relate to her with warmth. The first time we saw that short film, which we also screened at the ceremony we held to mark the thirtieth day after his funeral, we were shocked, because, though he is off screen, his voice is a constant presence in the film.
Then Judith surprised all of us by screening part of a video of Asher's final presentation in the restaurant management course that he took before leaving for Peru. There was Asher, vital and enthusiastic, a person who never should have died. As painful as it is to see him as we will never see him again in life, this record is precious for us.
Then we screened a rather long film made by Ofer, our son-in-law, and Lael Kline, a video professional, about the search for Asher in Peru, a film that is incomplete, because we are going to Peru soon, and we will have much to add to it.
Although it was extremely hot and stuffy in the room where we screened the films, people paid complete attention - I know because I was watching their faces, not the movie, which I had already seen two or three times.
I had planned to speak after the screening, but, although we had spent a few hours the day before preparing everything, for some reason the projector didn't work at first, so I decided to speak while my cousin was trying to solve the technical problem.
I said that anyone's death makes a huge hole in the lives of those who loved, knew, or simply knew about the person who died. Jewish mourning ceremonies are all centered on bringing bereaved people back into the community. It is a religious duty to attend funerals and to visit the homes of the bereaved during the first week after it: the shiva. The mourner is supposed to attend services and recite the mourner's kaddish every day. He or she is with a community of worshipers. Then a ceremony is held on the thirtieth day after the funeral, the shloshim - again attended by relatives and friends.
Everything forces the bereaved people to be with others. Otherwise, because of the huge hole that has been torn in our lives, we might withdraw into our grief and isolate ourselves.
I didn't add that Asher's death made me feel rather indifferent the prospect of my own death - not suicidal, just apathetic. Only one's feeling of connection with others keeps one from slipping into the abyss in the wake of the person who has died. If I weren't important to my wife, my other children, my grandchildren, and my friends, it wouldn't matter very much to me if I knew I was dying.
What I did say was that ceremonies like the ones I mentioned before and like the one we were holding just then cannot close up the hole that has been torn in the fabric of our lives, but they can keep the rift from spreading.

His Posessions

We gathered Asher's belongings during our visit to New York. 

Before he flew to Peru, he had organized and stored all the things he wanted to keep, mainly clothing and the tools of his trade: knives, serving pieces, and other kitchen tools. We didn't know how much there was, exactly where it all was, or whether we would want to bring it all back to Israel with us, if we could manage it.  In the end, we bought a couple of extra suitcases and managed to get everything back on the plane with us, without even paying for overweight.

His belongings are emotionally charged for us.  The knapsack he took with him to Peru is still sitting in my cluttered office, encumbering it even more.  About six months ago, I opened it, went through it, and took a few things out of it - such as a pair of rubber shoes that I've been wearing, to connect myself to him.  Then I put everything back.  I can't bear the thought of deciding what's good enough to give away, what we should throw away, what we can use, and what we should save to remember him by.  

When I opened the knapsack, I found some Peruvian textiles, gifts for Judith, and some hats he had bought for his nephews and niece.  Judith and I just looked at the gifts and wept.

Now we have a lot more of his stuff.

What are we supposed to do with it?

There were some shoes among his belongings, and at first we didn't even want to throw those out, but we realized there was no point in keeping them.  Who would have worn them?

I imagine we'll go through his things and cry about every item.

Perhaps we'll know better who he was after we see what he owned and kept.

He also left a journal, of which I have only read a few lines.  

When he was missing, and we thought (hoped?) that he might have  decided to disappear intentionally, we considered showing the journal to a psychologist, to get an insight into his state of mind and guide searches for him.  But his body was discovered, and in fact there was nothing mysterious about his disappearance, so there was no reason to show the journal to anyone.

I don't plan to read the journal.  It would be wrong to invade his privacy.  So should I destroy it?  I can't bring myself to do it.

Emotional Overload

So here we are, in NYC, a few hours before the ceremony we've been planning in honor of Asher.  We've had an intense time.  We came to America with our married daughter, her husband, and their three young children, and with our youngest daughter (a young woman nearly 25 years old).  We spent the first 5 days in Washington, DC, and stayed with my first cousin, a vigorous woman of eighty-two, filling her home with the commotion of small children.  In NY we've been split up between friends and relatives.

Even without the underlying reason for the visit - we would never have come to the US now were it not for the memorial ceremony - the logistics of this trip have been exhausting.  Just keeping track of three young children in the commotion of museums and shops was a daunting task, not to mention all the planning that went into it.

It was important to us to share our grief with our American relatives and friends, to give ourselves and them an opportunity of communicating face to face, not just via emails, letters, and telephone calls.

On Friday night we hosted a dinner for eighteen in an Italian restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue for friends who have come from out of town to attend the memorial today.  The guests are all special people to us - relatives and old friends.  It was comforting to see them.  No one really had to say anything direct or explicit about condolences.  That had all been said already.

Before the dinner, we attended Friday night services at Bnei Jeshrun, a trendy synagogue on the Upper West Side, where the services are accompanied by accomplished musicians, and the emphasis is on spirituality and social concern.  Judith and I both found ourselves on the verge of tears during the services.  The time that has passed has not diminished our sense of loss.  It has only taught us that we must continue living with it. 

On our Way

Tomorrow morning we are leaving Israel for the United States for two weeks. The main purpose of our trip is to hold a memorial gathering for Asher at my cousin's apartment on Manhattan. I'm not exactly looking forward to the trip, though I expect it to have many pleasant moments. We will be seeing people who have affection for us and for Asher, and the memorial gathering should be a way to help all of us set our emotions in order.
Asher's death is like a huge black ink blot on the landscape of our lives, an ink blot that constantly spreads and colors everything else, and that darkness will never leave us. In the months since his disappearance and the discovery that he was dead I have learned that many other people carry on in their lives with a similar dark film over everything. Until you experience it yourself, you can't imagine what it is like.
Still, the setting of one's emotions in order is necessary so that one can carry on in life.
Last week (August 25-29) I went to the hottest part of Israel, the Arava and the southern Negev, to attend the international Red Sea Jazz Festival in Eilat. I went with a friend whose son, an aspiring drummer, had taken part in some workshops preceding the festival, and we spent a lot of time with that young man. On the way back, my friend said to me, "I hope you don't mind that we were with my son so much. I hope you're not envious."
Envious?
The thought never crossed my mind or arose in my heart. Being with his son did make me long for Asher, imagining that I might have gone to the jazz festival with him, but I drew pleasure and consolation from seeing the warm affection between father and son.
The friend with whom I went said several times that this was a new departure for him, that he's unaccustomed to treating himself to vacations like that. It was less of a departure for me. I've attended meditation retreats and a jazz school in France on my own. But, as with almost every pleasure that I take in life, I wonder on and off whether I have a right to it. Maybe I should withdraw completely from the pleasures of the world in response to my son's death.
It did me good to hear all that music, though it didn't do me good to have my sleep schedule completely disrupted - there wasn't a night that we went to bed before two in the morning, and most nights it was a lot later.
If there was any envy in me in Eilat, it was envy of the wonderful musicians.
But, in fact, envy is the wrong word. I know how hard it is to improvise creatively and interestingly, how hard it is to keep an audience's attention, what a challenge it is to keep developing as an artist, and when I hear people who are doing it, I can appreciate their skill.
Even more than their skill, I appreciate their willingness to take the risk of living their lives as artists. Asher had that willingness to take risks. If he'd been a more cautious person, he'd probably still be alive, but he wouldn't have been Asher.