Asher Green - A Year of Loss

Saying Kaddish for Asher

2011-11-20T09:08:00.001+02:00

I didn't want to go to synagogue this morning and say kaddish for Asher on the fourth anniversary of his death, but I did go. We lit a candle for him last night, and today we plan to visit his grave.
I didn't want to go, because I have found it very difficult to pray in the past few years, to feel that I am praying to some entity that hears my prayers, cares whether or not I prayer, or has any interest at all in human beings.
I didn't want to go because I almost never attend morning services during the week, and it feels hypocritical to me to attend them only when I have a death to commemorate.
Would Asher want me to say kaddish for him? I guess so. Although I do not believe in the afterlife in any serious way, I can't deny that at certain moments I feel Asher's presence around me.
There is some consolation in prayer with a group of other men, which is what orthodox Jewish prayer is, some of whom are also there because they are in mourning. Bereavement is isolating, and isolation compounds grief.
If I hadn't gone, I would have felt guilty. But, having gone, I don't feel satisfied in any way, just less guilty.
The four years that have gone by have only made Asher more dead, and the pain I feel is less acute, because I am learning to live with it. But sometimes a searing memory suddenly whips me, and I miss him terribly. Often it is at otherwise happy moments, when I wish Asher could share them.

Epilogue

2009-03-18T09:15:00.002+02:00

My son's dog died last Friday morning. He was a large mongrel, mainly German shepherd, and he came to us with the name "Gin," which we changed to "Jimmy." He originally belonged to a neighbor of ours who neglected him so shamefully that you can barely say that he belonged to him. Asher befriended him, and he started frequenting our house, walking with us when we walked our other dog. He used to follow our daughter to school in the morning, braving the rush hour traffic, and when she went downtown with friends to sit in pubs (something she did a lot when she was in high school), he used to follow her and sit outside, waiting for her. Here's a picture of her with Jimmy
We started feeding him - he was emaciated, undernourished. For a long time he accepted food from us, but he wouldn't come into the house. When he overcame that reluctance, we started taking care of him - he was filthy and infested with ticks. We also bought a leash for him. He followed us wherever we went by foot, and we were afraid he'd get run over. He was always a very emotional dog, sensitive and affectionate with us but aggressive against other male dogs in the neighborhood. He got into several pretty serious fights. Even when he was old and lame, there were certain other dogs that he regarded as enemies, and he was ready to fight them, no matter what.
Jimmy lived to a ripe old age for a dog of his size. He was fourteen when he died. He had been failing for over a year. He limped. We had him x-rayed and tried all sorts of treatment, including acupuncture, but nothing helped except steroids. By the end, just walking around the block left him exhausted - but he still loved going out. I used to say that if I ever got as excited about anything I was doing as he did about going out for a walk, I would be a happy man.
For a few months before he died, he groaned almost constantly. He was clearly in serious pain.
On the morning of his death, he didn't have enough energy to go out. First he lay in front of our bedroom door. Then he managed to move a few feet to the front hall, where he lay down quietly. He had no appetite, but he drank some water. About two hours after he taken up his final position, he stood up, and we thought at first that he had recovered enough strength to go out. But then he had a kind of convulsion, lay down again, and in a few minutes he was dead.
He didn't seem to be in unusual pain during the two hours he lay at our doorway, waiting to die with no fear of death, no idea of what was coming. It just happened to him.

Farewell

2008-12-17T16:20:00.002+02:00

We parted from Boaz that afternoon in Arequipa. He was flying back to the US and his job in Washington, DC, and we were about to take the overnight bus to Cuzco. Being with Boaz was wonderful, and parting from him was sad.
While we were planning the trip, Judith was strongly opposed to doing any more than our business in the Colca Canyon area and returning from Peru. She had no interest in Peru and no desire to tour there. Ofer had been to Peru in the early 1990s and fallen in love with the country, so he naturally wanted to take advantage of his presence there to become reacquainted. Hannah had also been in Peru, but not the parts where we were, and she's an enthusiastic traveler, so she also wanted to stay on. I had mixed feelings. Like Judith, I had never had much interest in Latin America in general or in Peru - indeed I had been very apprehensive about the trip, imagining that people would be trying to rob us left and right. On the other hand, since we were laying out so much money to get there, and we had already committed so much of our time, why not do some ordinary tourism and get a little fun out of the trip?
We could always justify it, if there was any reason to justify it, by saying that we were going to see the places that Asher planned to see. We were completing his trip for him.
It's true that everywhere we subsequently went in Peru, Asher's shadow was with us - as his shadow is with me every time I dice an onion. And it's also true that we had a fascinating, enjoyable trip during the following ten days or so.
But I don't intend to write about those experiences here.
It's time to sum up and move on.
Planning and anticipating the trip to Peru was central in our lives during the months preceding the trip, especially in Judith's life, for she did most of the planning and arranging. We had a specific mission, and we completed it successfully - more than successfully. I'm proud of our family, proud of our friends who contributed so generously to our project, pleased to know that their contributions went to worthy people, glad that we were able to express personal gratitude to the people who did so much to help us. I'm also glad that I liked Peru and the Peruvians so much.
However, having completed the mission, I am left with emptiness: what is there to do next? What's worth doing?
Grief is lonely and individual.
Asher's death is many losses to many people, each of whom knew him in a different way, each of whom is in a different stage of life. We are all many things to many people, and when we die, each of the many people loses something different. We have lost a son, a brother, a friend, a student, a patient, a colleague.
"You can't take it with you," as the cliche tells us. But you leave a lot behind, assuming that "you" exist after you are dead, so that "you" are deprived of something or have lost something.
If we assume that "you" stops existing when "you" dies, then "you" leaves nothing behind. But it is we who are left behind, we who have lost, and we who imagine how "you" could have had a longer, fuller, more rewarding life.
Asher would have been twenty-nine last June. He might have gone on living for at least another fifty years, growing, developing, working, creating, gathering friends, lovers, a family, a career - living a full life and enriching the lives of others.
I've said it before. If Mephistopheles had appeared to me and offered me a deal: die instead of Asher, and he'll live for at least the number of years that you've lived so far, I would have taken it. Asher should have been speaking at my funeral a year ago, not I speaking at his.
I've had a decent shot at life. He only got a beginning.
Until Asher died, I was always optimistic, pretty much assuming that things would work out all right. I've lost that.

Winding Up

2008-12-15T18:01:00.002+02:00

While Judith and I were at the lookout and then at Dante's school, and Ofer was trying to get to the place where Asher last was, Hannah and Boaz went where Asher planned to go: the bottom of Colca Canyon, the second deepest canyon in the world, an enormous ravine that widens out into a valley, whose walls, wherever they're not too steep, are terraced for agriculture.

Tourists who have enough time hike down into the canyon, stay over night at the Oasis, a kind of resort, with hot springs, and then go on to visit some of the villages in the canyon, which are accessible only by foot or by mule. You probably feel as if you're in a charmed zone, close to nature, far from noise and pollution, seeing people whose way of life is rooted deep in the past.

But Hannah and Boaz only had a day, so they left at dawn, hiked down, ate lunch at the Oasis, and then hiked up, reaching Cabanaconde again before dark.

Hannah hired a mule to get back up, but Boaz took on the challenge of coming back on his own and met it with flying colors. It's a stiff climb in any event, but at that altitude, it's especially hard.

The High Mountain Rescue Unit took us back to Arequipa the next morning. We left early, so we could reach the condor lookout in time to have a chance of seeing some condors - but there weren't any that day, just about five hundred tourists.

All the way to Cabanaconde from Arequipa, I had been thinking to myself: these are the sights that Asher saw. All the way back, all I could think was that Asher's body had made the same trip, in the same vehicle.

Not Knowing

2008-12-14T15:39:00.001+02:00

The path down to the lookout took us past the kindergarten and a second school building of some kind. As passed it, a woman saw us, rushed out from somewhere, and pounded on the door of the second school building. Out came Dante, our English round-faced speaker. He told us he was going to have some English classes in the adult education school that afternoon and asked us to come by at three. He told us he spent the morning in the school building, to make sure no one broke in and stole the computers. We wondered to ourselves what that meant about the population of the village.
In any event, we agreed readily, and that afternoon, we went back to what was now a very familiar corner of Cabanaconde. As usual, there was a misunderstanding. The English lessons didn't really begin at three, and the students who began learning at some vague time after three were not high school students but elementary school kids, and not many at that. Dante evidently expected us to stay all day, from three on, but we only planned to spend an hour there.
About eight kids gradually gathered, and Judith and I gave them a lively, improvised English lesson. Their performance was pretty impressive, seeing that Dante was hardly a fluent speaker of English himself. They knew a lot of vocabulary, and they were lively and intelligent. It was fun working with them.
I guess any kid who was willing to go back after school for voluntary English lessons either had very pushy parents or high personal motivation.
Dante told us that he had arrived in Cabanaconde a few years ago with some kind of a diploma and one English book, no building, no program, but with some kind of government backing. He gradually built a program, recruited students, obtained a building, and started teaching English as well as tourism, electronics, and computers. Does he really know very much about those four fields? Evidently enough to get people started. If you wait until you have fully qualified teachers in places like Cabanaconde, you'll never have any programs.
Dante needs textbooks, dictionaries, and atlases, as well as other equipment. So now he's on our "Help Cabanaconde" list, too. Dante was a little disappointed when we told him at four that we had to go, but we didn't have a lot of energy, between the high altitude and the high emotions we'd been experiencing.
Meeting his students took our mind off the reason we were in Cabanconde for a while, but when we got back to the hotel, we were reminded sharply. Ofer had returned to the hotel, and he was exhausted and distraught. Instead of coming back from seeing the place where Asher fell with a clear idea of how the accident happened, he came back with more questions than answers, as well as a badly injured knee.
All he could say to us was that if Asher had somehow gotten to the place from which he apparently fell, he must have been a champion mountain climber - which we know he wasn't.
Our only hope of finding anything definite out now lay in the memory chip of his camera. At the time we thought we had it, but when we got back to Israel, Ofer discovered that the chip we had was not the one upon which Asher had recorded his pictures from Peru, and that chip wasn't with the camera or his belongings. It's gone.
That afternoon, Judith and I didn't push Ofer to hear his theory about how Asher had fallen, and we have decided not to since then. If Ofer has worked out a theory by now, it's still only a theory, and even the fullest knowledge can't change the horrible fact that our son is dead.
Asher's death was shrouded in mystery from the start. For nearly two months, before his body was found, he was only "missing," and we hoped that somehow he was still alive. We will never know exactly what series of errors and miscalculations led to his fall. That's frustrating, but what good would fuller knowledge do?

Two Dreams

2008-12-11T09:33:00.002+02:00

A few weeks ago, the body of an Israeli hiker who had fallen into rapids in Peru was discovered, wedged under a rock, not far from where he had fallen, months later, after the water in the river had receded.
The night after reading about that, I dreamed that Asher's body had been recovered similarly. In my dream he had long, black straight hair and a long beard, though in reality Asher had short, light, curly hair, and was clean shaven. The figure in the dream, who was definitely "Asher," looked like a figure of Christ after he has been taken down from the cross.
Even though he had been under water for a long time, we started resuscitation, and he responded. "A medical miracle," someone shouted.
I woke up in fear.

In a dream last night I saw a child of about five, a child of mine.
I had come home from somewhere and found him with a terrible bloody wound on his face, between his eyes. The blood on his face was very bright red.
I hugged him and wanted to rush to the hospital with him, but he spoke calmly and said it had happened earlier, and he had taken care of it.
The "child" was Asher, and when I realized it was he, again I woke up in fear.

How strange it is to see someone in a dream, who doesn't look at all like the person you're dreaming of, but you know it's the same person.

A Message from the Condors

2008-12-09T13:59:00.003+02:00

The next morning, Hannah and Boaz walked down into the canyon, accompanied by one of the mountain rescue men, and Ofer went with Diego and Benito, another mountain rescue man, to see the place where Asher's body was found and the place from which he fell. Judith and I decided to spend a quiet day in Cabanaconde.
The Kunturwassi hotel is on a low hill a short distance away from the main square, which, as usual in Peru, has a church on one side and stores and restaurants on the other three sides. The hotel is a rambling assemblage of bungalows adjacent to the main building, which houses the reception desk and a restaurant on the upper floor, with a view down into the village and out to the mountains on the horizon. A little brook flows out of the rocks under the restaurant past the outdoor stairway leading from the reception desk down to the rooms. You can also climb up a flight of stairs from the restaurant to an observation tower on top of the hotel.
When Judith and I sat down to eat breakfast, the waitress, a motherly woman in her forties, spoke softly to us in simple Spanish that we could understand. Were we Asher's mama and papa? The whole village was worried about him and looking for him. She expressed deep sympathy and suggested that we should have a mass said in Asher's honor, but we explained that we weren't Catholics.
She accepted that news with no comment.
The day before, on our way to the kindergarten, we saw a sign that read "Mirador Achachihua, 500 m," and we decided to see what that was. The path continued onward past the kindergarten, as the village houses thinned out. We reached what looked like a half-constructed, reinforced concrete bull ring. At that point it wasn't clear where the path led, but we clambered over a low stone wall and continued in the direction of the canyon, finally reaching a promontory from which you could see all the way down to the Colca River in the bottom or the canyon, and at the peaks and cliffs in three directions. We were in sight of the place to which Robert had taken us the night before.
A local guide was there with a small group of young tourists, but they left after a while, and Judith and I decided to stay there. We could see down to the place Asher had presumably meant to reach and the general area where he fell. It was a good place to collect our thoughts and be alone with our feelings.
I sat down on a rock to write in my notebook.
The silence was nearly absolute. The sound of the rushing water of the river, more than a kilometer below us, came up to us faintly. Otherwise there were no sounds - no engines running, no human voices, no horns or sirens.
Soon afterward, we began to see large birds flying in the canyon below us: eagles. Then condors appeared, five of them, first soaring and wheeling at eye level over the canyon, then rising higher and circling in the air over our heads. They came so close to us that we could hear the wind rushing through their feathers. We could see their eyes, their beaks, the hugeness of their black, extended wings. They circled and circled, as if inspecting us. We moved so they wouldn't mistake us for carrion. We knew that condors don't attack live animals or people, but we couldn't help be frightened, they were so large and majestic.
I tried to take pictures of them with my point and shoot camera, totally unsuited to that. I only managed to capture a few blurry images.
I don't know how long the condors stayed in the air above us, circling, swooping, disappearing and returning, sometimes in pairs, sometimes alone.
Earlier I had thought - against every skeptical principle in my mind - that our mission in Peru was to free Asher's soul from the Colca Canyon. His body had been brought back and buried, but until people who loved him came to see the place where he fell, his sould would be stuck there.
The visit from the condors had a mystical quality to it, as if they were helping us free Asher's soul from that place. As if they knew why we were there.
As we left, heading back to the village, I began sobbing uncontrollably.

The Official Version

2008-12-08T14:51:00.003+02:00

That evening Robert led us to the point at which, in his opinion, Asher went astray.
We started in daylight along a trail leading from a corner of the main square of Cabanaconde, not the trail that hikers ordinarily take on their way down into the Colca Canyon - but there is no sign in the square, and it would be easy to start off at the wrong corner, in the right general direction, but on the wrong path.
Ever since we found out what happened to Asher, I have been imagining that wrong path, picturing it to myself, running after Asher and telling him he'd made a mistake.
For quite a while the trail was wide and nothing would indicate that it was the wrong one. It wound between low stone walls through small fields newly plowed and planted with corn. A few minutes along that path, we came to a junction, where you could turn off to the right and get onto the correct path down to the canyon. Again there was no clearly visible sign, but on a rock, where no one would notice it, on the near edge of the path, low toward the ground, someone had written "Oasis" - the name of the resort inside the canyon. When we saw that sign, we thought to ourselves: If only someone had written "Oasis" in large letters, with an arrow pointing to the right, on the wall facing the direction of the village, so that someone coming from there would have seen it, Asher might be alive now.
Robert led us past that point, along a path that was still well trodden. Farmers use it to get to their plots of land. We were five members of our family: Judith, Hannah, Boaz, Ofer, and I, accompanied by Robert and Cabezon. We reached the end of that path and walked across a small plot, and, as we looked out over the canyon, Robert presented his conclusions to us - an official police report.
In his opinion, Asher reached that point and then took a steep animal trail downward around prickly bushes that had since been burned off. He came to a series of two waterfalls and managed to negotiate the first. When he got to the foot of that waterfall, instead of continuing to the left, where the trail continued, he stepped back on the narrow ledge to take a picture of the waterfall and then fell backward, plunging about a hundred meters to his death.
The place from which he fell and the place where his body was found were more or less inaccessible from the point to which we'd been taken, and the following morning Ofer was planning to go there by a different, somewhat easier route with Diego and Benito, a member of the rescue unit. Robert strongly discouraged Hannah and Boaz from even considering going there, because the hike would be so demanding and dangerous.
After presenting his theory of how Asher had happened to fall, Robert described how they had recovered his body. The operation was extremely difficult, because the terrain was so steep. They wrapped the body and loaded it onto a kind of sled and pulled it up the cliffs with ropes. All the while rain was threatening, and if it had started to rain, they wouldn't have been able to continue. Robert said they were "praying to Asher" all the time, to keep it from raining, and the rain did hold off until the body was stowed safely on the rescue unit's white pickup truck - the vehicle we'd been riding around on since we'd reached Arequipa.
As I write these words, my eyes well up with tears.
After all the explanations, and after seeing the place, the story still made no sense. True, Asher was not an experienced hiker, but even an inexperienced hiker - or especially an inexperienced hiker - should have known that the path Robert showed us was not a well-worn path taken by hundreds of hikers down to a popular resort. It's hard to imagine that Asher wouldn't have reached that place, taken a look, and said to himself: I must have taken a wrong turn. I'll go back.
On our way back, darkness fell, and we all withdrew into ourselves and thought about what we'd seen.

Diego

2008-12-04T08:56:00.003+02:00

We got to know Diego a little better in the restaurant. Ofer had given him the promised reward of $1500 last January, and now he asked Diego what he had done with the money.
The police had taken $200 from him - not the mountain police, but the regular criminal police. We were outraged, but Diego smiled sweetly and said he'd given it to them willingly.
He'd spent another $500 to send his oldest child, a boy in his late teens, to study cooking in Arequipa. We were very gratified to hear that, because that had been Asher's profession, something Diego couldn't have known. He had spent the remaining $800 on a private operation for his wife, who had a tumor, because if they had waited for an operation through the national health services, it might have been too late to operate at all. She was still sick, he said, and there were going to be more expenses.
Then and there we decided to give him another $500 from the funds that our friends and relatives had contributed in Asher's memory.
Diego, who is in his mid-forties, makes a living, if you could call it that, by gathering cochineal, a red dye made from insects that live on cactuses. He roams through the Colca Canyon looking for cactuses infested with the insects and gathers as many as theee kilograms of the stuff every day - weather permitting.
Diego found Asher because he had been looking for cochineal in an area of the canyon where he usually doesn't go, it was starting to rain, so he took a shortcut home, and on the way caught sight of Asher's hat and backpack.
Ofer asked him how much he's paid for the cochineal (which was selling for between $50 and $80 per kilogram in 2005, according to some Web sites I have recently seen). Diego gets $5 per kilogram for what he gathers. So on a really good day, he makes $15. When it rains, and he can't go out looking, he obviously doesn't earn a penny, and if he's not lucky, he gathers a lot less than three kilograms. The material that he gathers looks like a greyish powder on the surface of the cactus. Gathering three kilograms of it would take a very long time, even if you found it quickly and easily.
Diego's seven-year old daughter, Miriam, was a bright, delightful child, with a charming smile and lots of energy. She had a great time in the restaurant, enjoying her food and the Inca Cola she'd ordered. But she was too bashful to repeat the poem she'd recited at the ceremony in the school yard. Her older brother, who was also with us, was a quiet, twelve-year old, with his father's shyness.
What will happen to them? Their mother's health is poor, and how long can Diego keep roaming up and down the canyon looking for cochineal? The older son, who's learning to be a cook, is the family's main hope.
We were lucky that Diego found Asher at all. The rains started soon after the body was discovered, and if his remains hadn't been found then, they might never have been found. Diego was lucky that he found Asher. The prize money saved his wife's life and gave the family hope for the future.
We were glad that the man who benefitted was such a deserving person.

The Second Ceremony in Cabanaconde

2008-12-03T15:50:00.002+02:00

On the way from the kindergarten to the elementary school, we had to climb over ditches and piles of rubble. They were gradually paving the streets of Cabanaconde.
"When we were looking for Asher," Ofer told me, "the whole town was dug up like this. He could have been buried anywhere."
That's what we had been afraid of. Maybe Asher had made the wrong man angry at him, gotten into a fight, and been murdered. The killer could have thrown him over the edge of the canyon or buried him under the rubble in the village streets. No one would have known.
In the two or three weeks between the time that Boaz and Ofer came back empty-handed from Peru to the time when the body was found, we were preparing to hire a team of Israeli specialists to go and look for him. One of the men who would have been on the team said that among the first things they would do would be to check for new and unmarked graves in the cemeteries.
The school building was a simple concrete structure, but large, airy, and attractive. The kids, dressed in uniforms, had gathered in a big courtyard behind the school, and tables had been set up, laden with the books, materials, and equipment we had bought. I was pleased to see piles of world classics in simplified school editions: Cervantes, Moliere, even Moby Dick.
The ceremony at the elementary school was longer and more formal. I spoke in Hebrew, and Ofer translated into Spanish for me. The mayor spoke, saying that Asher wasn't the first person who died accidentally in the Colca Canyon, but we were the first family who ever thought of doing something for the people of Cabanaconde. The Governor spoke, and with my meager Spanish I heard him mention Israel, which was one of the things we had in mind. Then the kids sang a few songs and a five or six of them came up by turns and recited poems in Spanish, with sweeping theatrical movements of their arms and deep bows. One was a patriotic poem about Peru, how they would defend it against all enemies.
Then we gave a notebook, a pencil, and a ballpoint pen to each of the students.
Then, before we left, they gave us presents - Peruvian handicrafts.
Diego, the man who found Asher's body, showed up. His eight-year-old daughter attended the school, and she had been one of the kids who recited poems.
It was two-thirty or so by then. We were all hungry. Ofer invited Diego and his family to meet us in the square, so we could take them out for lunch.
He came with his daughter and his twelve-year old son, but without his wife, who wasn't feeling well, he said.
We headed for a place down the street from the corner of the square, but before we got there we passed a little hotel, which had a restaurant, but whose shutters were drawn. Diego's daughter insisted that she wanted to eat there, saying (I think) that it was her aunt's place. So we knocked, someone rolled up the shutters, and we went in.
Communication with Diego was awkward, since it all went through Ofer, but we could tell he was a kind, very modest person, shy and self-effacing.

The First Ceremony in Cabanaconde

2008-12-02T10:11:00.004+02:00

Before leaving the lookout at Cruz del Condor we ate avocado sandwiches in the triangular rolls typical of this part of Peru, and that was our last food for quite a while that day. We checked into our rather whimsical hotel, the Kunturwassi (which we later learned meant, "Home of the Condor"), without any baggage, at 12:30. We were due to meet the school principals in half an hour. There was no time to eat, so I rested.
At one o'clock we walked down the narrow street from out hotel to the main square of Cabanaconde, past a little house with a Jehova's Witnesses sign on it, and there Mario and Norma were waiting for us.
We were concerned. A ceremony was planned at the two schools, at which we'd display the gifts and distribute things to the children, but the truck was stranded. How could we hold the ceremony?
Just as we reached the square and greeted Mario and Norma, the truck rolled in. The situation was saved.
We followed the truck down a narrow, unpaved road and began to get an impression of Cabanaconde: a grid of narrow unpaved roads lined with adobe houses, mainly roofed with galvanized steel sheets. There were animals in almost all the courtyards. A few hundred yards down the street, the truck stopped in front of a low, white building, identified as "INSTITUCION EDUCATIONAL INICIAL CABANACONDE," and the mountain rescue men started unloading the truck.
Norma ushered us into her kindergarten. About forty little kids were sitting against the walls of the large courtyard, beneath a large brownish yellow mural, with Peace written on it in Hebrew, Spanish, and Arabic. An Israeli, who had signed his name as Lior, had preceded us in Cabanaconde!
While they were unpacking the things we had bought, I went over and sat with the children. Once had I taken a couple of pictures of them and showed them the pictures on the display of my digital camera, I was mobbed - what a pleasure!
Then the ceremony began. Cabezon, the driver, organized the pupils into lines, and they sang some songs for us. The teacher who led them in singing clearly enjoyed what she was doing. The children were all clean and well-behaved. They stood quietly in their lines while we gave each of them a notebook and a couple of pencils.
The mayor of the village and the governor of the district (a man appointed by the central government) were in attendance. In the end, as we were leaving, Norma draped necklaces of dried corncobs around our necks. Then we headed for the elementary school for a more elaborate ceremony.
At the kindergarten we also met Dante, a young man with a smooth, brown face who spoke pretty good English. In fact he told us that he taught it in an adult education program that he had set up. His son was one of the kids in the kindergarten, and he'd been invited to attend the ceremony.

Two Stops on the Way to Cabanaconde

2008-11-30T15:04:00.005+02:00

Early the next morning we piled into and onto the police vehicle, loading it beyond what anyone would think it could take: eight people, suitcases, the school supplies and computers we had bought. The plan was to reach the lookout point, Cruz del Condor, by eight-thirty, so we'd have a chance of spotting the famous Colca Canyon condors.
Along the way we stopped in the village of Yanque, which has a vast central square and a monumental church, with beautiful stonework. We got out and walked around there, but we didn't have time to go into the church.
The unpaved road grew narrower as we drove along the edge of the canyon, seeing terraces that were probably built long before the Spanish arrived in Peru. We were taking the route that Asher took on the last day of his life, seeing the sights he saw, trying to imagine his response the landscape while responding to it ourselves.
Cruz del Condor, despite its remoteness, attracts hundreds of tourists every morning, busloads full of groups from all over the world, tourists hoping to catch a sight of the majestic birds. We got there almost too late to glimpse any condors, but, luckily, three or four of them did show up, as well as a couple of eagles.
Even if the condors don't oblige by soaring into view, the sight from Cruz del Condor into the Colca Canyon is majestic. We spent a lot of time there, just looking down at the river, a kilometer below us, around at the cliff faces and up at the vast sky.
We also looked over the merchandise exhibited by women in local costume, some of their own handicrafts and other thngs evidently provided by suppliers.
The drop is very steep from around Cruz del Condor, and it was possible that Asher might have fallen from there. We were aware that we were drawing closer and closer to the place where he died.
We continued on in the direction of Cabanaconde, the village from which hikers head down into the canyon. The main dirt road into the village was closed, so we had to take an even rougher back road that led behind the village's fields. After a few minutes, the left rear tire of the pickup truck burst, and there was no spare tire.
Why wasn't there any spare tire? I never found out.
Some of Robert's men were already in Cabanaconde. He telephoned them and told them to buy a spare tire. Meanwhile, we started to walk into the village, heading across the fields. All of us were glad of the excercise. The weather was sunny but cool, the setting was idyllic - small plots of land, down with corn and other crops, and even a pair of oxen plowing one of the fields, to make the scene more bucolic.
No one seems to be particularly upset by the flat tire. Robert and another rescue policeman walk with us, and Cabezon, the driver, waits with another man for a new tire to show up. It was only mid-morning. There was plenty of time.

Chivay (3) - Alejandro

2008-11-23T17:54:00.003+02:00

Ofer attended two shamanistic ceremonies while searching for Asher with the High Mountain Rescue Unit. They were both recorded on video, and we''ve seen them. The first was with

a woman, who told them that Asher was still alive, and the second, a few days later, was with a man named Alejandro, who told them that Asher was dead and where to look for his body. He turned out to have been right

both about Asher's fate and also about the approximate location of the body. Alejandro said that he communicated to the spirit world through the condors.

The men of the unit insisted on getting supernatural help in their

search, according to Ofer, and they would not have been motivated to go on looking without that input.

The ceremonies involved burning coca leaves, reciting incantations in the Quechua language, pouring libations, and offering llama fetuses to the gods. They took place very early in the morning, at the edge of the canyon.

Ofer gave Alejandro about

a hundred dollars worth of food in return for his assistance. The men of the rescue unit said that if he gave Alejandro money, he would just drink it up.

Alejandro came to the rescue unit headquarters in Chivay shortly after we had finished with Asher's knapsack. He was a short, slight man, in a huge black felt hat, so drunk that he was incoherent, and he had a black eye. He came with his wife and their eighth child, an infant. His wife was thin and worn, sad-looking. Though she was probably only about forty, she seemed to be closer to sixty.

Ofer had wanted us to get up at four the following morning to take part in a reenaction of Alejandro's ceremony, but none of us saw the point in it. His visit to the headquarters was in place of that ceremony.

Communication with Alejandro was difficult. His Spanish, even if he had been sober, would have been too mixed with Quechua for Ofer to understand, so Robert had to explain to Ofer in ordinary Spanish, and Ofer explained to us in Hebrew.

Judith asked him how he had come by his supernatural powers. He explained that eighteen years ago, he had been struck on the shoulder by a meteorite, which was in the shape of a condor, and since then he had possessed powers. He took the piece of metal out of his pocket and showed it to us.

Alejandro works steadily at his profession of telling people's future, and he is paid pretty well for it. In fact, he was just as glad not to go through the ceremony with us the following morning, because he had been called to another place. However, he told us, his abilities will only last for another four years, after which he'd have to work at something else.

By the time Alejandro showed up, I was suffering terribly from altitude sickness, not to mention the intense emotions that arose when we went through Asher's belongings. My head ached, and I could barely focus on what was happening. Otherwise I'm sure I would have been interested in hearing just what powers Alejandro possesses, whether he is also a medium, for example.

Look how far Asher took us - to the genuine folk religion of the Andes. He would have been fascinated by Alejandro and would have enjoyed him, because there was a kind of sweetness and innocence about Alejandro. He was no charlatan. He believed in his own powers as much as the people of Chivay believed in them.

Part of me is shouting: What good did any of it do? Asher's death is an undeniable, unchangeable, empirical truth. But the fact that we involved so many people, who helped us as much as they could, is a kind of good.

In Chivay (2)

2008-11-20T12:57:00.002+02:00

After lunch came one of the hardest moments of our trip. We assembled at the local headquarters of the High Mountain Rescue Unit, not far from the main square of Chivay, and sat down on low, worn out armchairs around a table. A short, ordinary looking man appeared, wearing civilian clothes. We were told that he worked for the regular police force in Chivay, and he wasthe one responsible for keeping Asher's knapsack.
In early January, when Diego discovered Asher's body at the bottom of a cliff, he saw Asher's hat and his knapsack before he saw the body itself. He rushed up to report to the police, who returned to the scene. The High Mountain Rescue Unit was responsible for recovering the body, but the regular police took the knapsack - ostensibly for investigative purposes. In Ofer's presence an inventory was taken of the contents of the knapsack, but the police wouldn't release it, although the body itself was taken to Arequipa for an autopsy and then released to the Jewish Community of Lima after Ofer identified it.
Although there was no suspicion of foul play, the police retained the knapsack as evidence of some kind, apparently until we, his parents, came to claim it. This is one of those situations where we could get no clear answers from anyone. Was it necessary for us to come all way from Israel to Peru to obtain release of the knapsack, or could we have delegated someone to get it? What did the local police want it for?
Now we were given the choice. We could go with the man from the police department and pick up the knapsack there, or we could wait at the Rescue Unit's headquarters and he would bring it to us. We chose to wait. The man left and came back shortly with the small green canvas knapsack Asher had taken with him on an excursion that was supposed to have been short.
The procedure was formal and bureaucratic. The man from the police department brought with him an official list of the contents of the knapsack, which we had to sign. With a straight face, he told us that four hundred soles (about $130) in paper money, that had been with Asher, had completely disintegrated.

Everything else in the knapsack was in surprisingly good condition, dry and intact. We took items out one by one.

There was his camping gear: a sleeping bag, a silk liner for the sleeping bag, a poncho, a first aid kit, a compass.

There was a transistor radio, a good pocket knife from Granada, Spain, which we had bought there and given him years ago, his excellent digital reflex camera (which was irreparably broken by his fall), and some other personal things.

There were disposable contact lenses, condoms, dirty clothes, a couple of knitted wool hats, and his journal - written in Hebrew.

There were a couple of CDs, a waterlogged Spanish dictionary, and that was about it.

Nothing so valuable that the police had to keep it for a year.

Sorting through his belongings, invading his privacy, really, brought him intensely close and infinitely far away. Every thing that we touched was a reminder that he is really dead.

I haven't read the journal yet. He left another one in his large pack in the hotel in Arequipa, an intensely personal, self-revealing document that Ofer read last year, when they found it, hoping to find some clue about what had happened to Asher. I looked at a few pages of it and saw that the material is privatel, so I set it aside. Were he alive, he would never have shown it to me, and I think it's wrong to invade his inner life. But I can't bring myself to throw it away either. Perhaps some time I will want to know more about him.

According to Ofer, Boaz, and Hannah, who have read it, his travel journal, the one that he had taken in his small pack, is simply an enthusiastic description of where he'd been and what he'd done. His handwriting is hard to read, but within the next month or two I intend to transcribe it and translate it into English. I'll post it here, if it's interesting.

We were hoping that the memory chip that was in his camera would contain more pictures from Peru, aside from the ones he'd emailed to us, and perhaps give us an idea of where he was before he fell. But, there was no chip in the camera, and the one that was in the camera case had no pictures from Peru on it, as we found out when we returned to Israel. The chip that was in the camera has disappeared, along with Asher's banknotes.

In Chivay (1)

2008-11-19T15:43:00.003+02:00

Our second stop on the way to Chivay was at the highest point along the way, where everybody stops for the view. The air was thin and cold. Here, too, women had laid out piles of knitted and woven goods. I bought a brown and white striped alpaca wool jacket to go under the black felt hat I'd bought in the market in Arequipa. I paid fifty soles for it, less than twenty dollars, and I've been wearing it steadily ever since. (The picture was not taken where I bought the jacket, but some time later, at an Inca site near Cuzco).
The last part of the road to Chivay descends steeply. In the last email that he sent us, from Chivay, Asher described the terraces cut into the mountains above the town. He spent the night there, and we never found out where he slept. That was one of the mysteries that haunted us during the time he was missing.
In November, 2007, Boaz mainly stayed in Chivay while Ofer was searching for Asher with the Mountain Police. Boaz and Ofer took a room in a hostel on the town square, and when they left, the owner had refused to accept payment. She had been very involved in the search, anxious not only to help but also to show that no foul play had been involved - for the sake of the town's good name and the tourism business.
Judith bought some Christian souvenirs of Jerusalem for her, but she was out of town, and we couldn't give them to her personally.
She bought similar presents for the owners of a restaurant, relatives of the hostel's owner, who had treated Boaz and Ofer to a couple of free meals while they were there. After we ate lunch, the couple who own the restaurant and their daughter came up to the dining room to meet us. Along with the presents for them, we gave them the gifts we'd brought for the hostel owner.
Ofer translated for us as we gave the gifts and told them we were grateful for their kindness and concern.
They were very pleased with the religious items Judith had bought for them. They explained that they were "charismatic" Catholics and hoped to make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
When it was time to go, I told them, through Ofer, that I very much wanted to pay for the meal we had enjoyed there, and they answered that they very much wanted to treat us to it. I accepted their hospitality.

Getting Closer

2008-11-18T11:33:00.003+02:00

Early on Sunday morning, October 12, 2008, the Rescue Unit pickup truck took us from Arequipa, a city of with with a population of about 750,000 people, to Chivay, with a population of about 5,000. Somehow Robert loaded our suitcases, all the equipment we had bought for the schools, and eight people (six in the cab and two in the back) on the pickup truck, and off we went.

The altitude of Arequipa is 2,380 meters, and that of Chivay is 3,600 meters, and

on the way you go as high as 4,700 meters. Until then I hadn't been feeling the effect of the the altitude, but it got to me that day.

All the way I was thinking that these were among the sights that Asher saw on the second to last day of his life, when he took the morning bus to Chivay.

The distance from Arequipa to Chivay is only about 100 kilometers, but it takes three or four hours to cover it on the narrow, winding, climbing and descending roads. The landscape is barren. The road traverses a vast, arid plateau with jagged mountains on the horizon. Part of the region is a nature preserve, and we saw a lot of vicunas, alpacas, and llamas. We stopped at a way station with a restaurant and stalls where women sold their handicrafts. We drank some coca tea and examined the woven and knitted garments on sale.

Everything was entirely new to me.

The Second Ceremony

2008-11-17T14:45:00.004+02:00

All the time I was with the school principals and Boaz, I knew that Asher had sent us to do these things. His trip to Peru and his death there had brought us to Peru and had given us the mission of helping these people.
We eventually found a computer store and bought two computers for the schools, but by then it was about one o'clock, too late to go back to the school supply shop and buy everything the principals planned to buy, because the High Mountain Rescue Unit had planned a ceremony at their headquarters.
The unit's driver was waiting for us in their pickup truck at the market to take us to the headquarters. He is a short, stocky, powerful, good-humored, patient man, and because of his huge head, he got the nickname "Cabezon." The rescue unit's headquarters was in a half-built, outlying neighborhood, a drive of about twenty minutes.
When we got there, the equipment that Ofer had bought with Robert in Lima was spread out on a table - all kinds of high quality gear for climbing, camping, first aid, and communications. The members of the unit were quietly inspecting the equipment.
Meanwhile I looked at some of the pictures on their bulletin board and got a better idea of the kind of work they do. There were photographs of the men on mountainsides in the snow and on rafts in the river. Aside from Colca Canyon, there is another very deep canyon in the area, the Cotahuasi, where people can also get into trouble. The rescue unit has to be prepared to go where people probably shouldn't have been in the first place.
The ceremonies that Ofer and Robert planned were important, though they weren't attended by anyone beside ourselves. They gave our presence an official quality, which partly defused the emotional tension and made it easier for everyone to express and control feelings. The men knew that we were the parents and siblings of a young man we cared intensely about, and we knew that they had exerted themselves beyond what could be expected of them to find him, when they still thought he might be alive, and to locate and recover his body, when we knew he was dead. They did it because Ofer had bonded with them so closely that they adopted his concern, because he made them realize how important it was for us to bring him home for burial, though in their belief system, it probably would not have been so important.
Though the atmosphere among the men of the rescue unit was ordinarily relaxed and informal, for the ceremony they briefly took on military severity, lining up at attention, saluting, and speaking with stiff formality.
Again we emphasized that the equipment had not been purchased with our own money, but with money that we raised from friends and relatives, who had heard the story and identified with it.
Later we ate at a nearby restaurant called Fresno, which you will not find in guidebooks or on websites, a totally local place that served large quantities of ordinary, well cooked food for very low prices (according to our standards). After our late lunch, we went back into Arequipa and gathered up all the loose ends of the day. We met the school principals again, went back to the school supply store (Robert came with us to expedite things), laid out $950 in US dollars for it, and went back to the hotel to rest up after seeing all the school supplies loaded onto the back of the pickup truck.
I enjoyed the intense bustle of the streets around the market. I was getting used to the look of the people: no one seems to be fully European; you are treated to a huge variety of indigenous countenances.
In his emails, Asher expressed enjoyment at being in a world that wasn't yet entirely corrupted by global mega-capitalism. I can see that, but I can also see thousands of people scrambling to make very small amounts of money. Tiny little Daewoo taxis with 800 cc. motors race about the streets of Arequipa and Lima, and the fare for a short ride is about a dollar. So how much could those drivers be earning in a day? There's such great charm in the air here, that it's hard to avoid romanticizing the poverty.

Purchases Continued

2008-11-16T10:15:00.002+02:00

There were a lot of clerks in the school supply store, most of whom were not doing very much. You'd never see that kind of inefficiency in an Israeli shop (not to mention an American store). Wages are apparently low enough in Peru that employers can afford to hire a lot of people. That's good for the customers, and the store, which was very large and carried a large and varied stock, was also well organized and clean.
Boaz and I waited on the sidelines for a long time, while the two school principals consulted with the salespeople, diligently writing down the prices of every item. Then, without buying anything, they told us they wanted to get the computers first and then come back to purchase the school supplies, when they knew exactly how much money was available. So off we went to buy computers. On the way we were joined by another teacher from Cabanaconde, a short man wearing a well pressed sport shirt, who seemed to know his way around.
Like the visit to the school supply shop, this quest took us to places where most tourists in Peru would never think of going. The first stop, a brisk ten minute walk farther away from the central square than the market, was an electrical appliance shop, which sold televisions, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and a a huge assortment of other appliances, but not computers. As carefully as the principals had done their homework by compiling detailed lists of the supplies they needed, they hadn't found out where computers were sold in Arequipa.
Upon the advice of a salesperson in the appliance store, we then took two tiny taxis a branch of the Saga Falabella chain of department stores, where you definitely don't feel as if you're in a poor, underdeveloped country. We were out of the tourist zone of Arequipa and out of the lower class neighborhoods as well. Saga Falabella doesn't sell to the kind of people who buy in the central market. As composed and self-confident as our school principals seemed, it was pretty clear that they don't patronize Saga Falabella either. Norma, who could probably hike up and down the Colca Canyon without any problem, hesitated before stepping onto the escalator.
There was a small computer department on the lower floor, but no one seemed very interested in selling anything to our group, which would have seemed a bit puzzling to anyone who noticed it: three rural educators, an unsophisticated looking teen-aged girl (Norma's daughter), and two Gringos. Boaz thought that the sales staff might have taken the people from Cabanaconde as a bunch of country bumpkins who had come to gawk but not to buy, but finally someone did pay some courteous attention to us, but, as it happened, they only had one computer in stock, and we wanted to buy two.
Not having been to Cabanaconde yet, I suggested to Norma in my rudimentary Spanish that they might deliver the computer there, and she dismissed the idea out of hand. Now that I've seen how far away it is from Arequipa, and how bad the roads are, I understand why my idea was preposterous.
So off we went in search of another computer store. Time was passing, we weren't making much progress, and Boaz and I were getting a bit antsy.

Purchases

2008-11-10T15:22:00.003+02:00

The market in Arequipa isn't for tourists. They sell the things that local people need there. I bought myself a broad rimmed black felt hat to keep the sun off my face and to make myself feel a little better.
That same afternoon we went to an entirely different kind of market, high-end shops selling expensive goods for tourists - sweaters woven of fine alpaca wool, scarves, and jackets - set in a series of renovated cloisters. While the others were shopping, I listened to a couple of indigenous musicians, who were playing pan pipes and various Andean flutes. I talked to them a little and eventually bought a disk from them.
The next day we did shopping of an entirely different kind. We had decided to give about $3,000 of the money we raised in Asher's honor to the schools in the village of Cabanaconde attended by the children of Diego, the man who found Asher's body. We had given Diego the promised reward of $1,500 last January, and we thought that if his good deed was also seen by the people of the village as benefitting them, he would arouse less envy. We also thought such a gift would be an appropriate gesture of gratitude for the people's concern.
Through Robert, Ofer had asked the principals of the kindergarten and the elementary school to prepare lists of materials and equipment they needed, but we weren't sure whether they had really done that.
At nine-thirty in the morning, a striking group assembled in the lobby of our hotel, not the type of visitors tourists customarily entertain. Robert came with a few of his men, uniformed policemen packing revolvers, and that rather took the desk clerk aback. He also brought the two school principals and the teen-age daughter of one of them, who was studying tourism in Arequipa. Norma Maquesilva, the principal of the kindergarten, which serves about seventy children aged two through five, is a short, sturdy woman of about forty, dark-skinned and indigenous looking. Mario Maque Castelo, the principal of the elementary school, with about 170 pupils from first to eighth grade, is a taller man, also dark-skinned, perhaps a few years older than Norma. Both of them had an air of quiet dignity and seriousness. We immediately saw they had done their homework diligently. They had long and clear lists of everything they wanted to buy for their schools and the children, including two computers.
Boaz and I went shopping with them, while Judith and Hannah tried to find someone to frame the certificates of gratitude we had prepared for all the policemen who helpedus, and Ofer went with Robert and his men to do some more shopping for equipment.
Robert and his driver took us in the police vehicle, a rather old white Nissan pickup truck, to a large school supply store at the outside corner of the market building. Boaz and I tagged along with the two principals, with whom we could hardly talk, since our Spanish is rudimentary, and their English even more rudimentary. But it was a treat to see them in action.
Before buying anything, they priced every item, trying to plan things so they would have enough left over to buy the computers. They stood at the counter, consulted with the salesgirls, and made lists and calculations, working slowly and with infinite patience, betraying no emotion.

Arequipa - Day One

2008-11-09T10:42:00.003+02:00

Boaz and Hannah were both confident that we were doing something important and necessary, but I still had my doubts. Boaz had spent a good deal of time in Arequipa during the search for Asher, a period of intense anxiety, uncertainty, and helplessness. Despite their best efforts, no trace of Asher could be found. Returning with us wasn't easy for Boaz. Going there at all wasn't easy for us.
I found myself entertaining the semi-mystical idea that we had removed Asher's body from Peru, but we hadn't freed his soul - not a manner of thinking with which I feel at all comfortable.
We walked a few blocks down the sunny street from our hotel to the Plaza de Armas, the central square, with the cathedral or large church, that lies at the center of every town in Peru. I still wasn't feeling the altitude, though Arequipa is nearly 2,400 meters above sea level. We turned into a little alley with half a dozen restaurants on it, and I got so annoyed at the hawkers outside them, who wouldn't stop waving menus in my face, that I refused to go into any of them. We went on to the main square, only to be assailed by another flock of menu wavers, but we had to eat somewhere, so we had lunch on a balcony overlooking the Plaza de Armas. The food was good, and the view of the plaza was worth the extra price of eating in a tourist restaurant.
I was far from used to being in Peru.
We spent the afternoon exploring Arequipa, so by the end of the day I was feeling more at home there. Ofer led us to the city's main covered market, which covers a large city block, not too far from the central square. The last photographs that Asher sent us by email, including the last picture that we have of him were taken in that market.
Naturally, when we got to the market and saw what Asher had photographed, we were overcome by deep sadness. That was one of the hardest moments of our trip, but, as with many other of the hard moments, it was mingled with the bustle and excitement of the market, with the attraction of the very things that had caught Asher's eye.

Moving on to Arequipa

2008-11-08T20:37:00.001+02:00

I was not attracted by Lima. We had spent a few hours in the center of the city on the day before Yom Kippur, which was a Peruvian national holiday. The Plaza de Armas and many of the huge churches and public buildings were impressive, but the sky is gray, the city sprawls, and the general poverty is fairly evident.

At the small ceremony we held in the synagogue there, we met three members of the High Mountain Rescue Unit: the commander of the entire unit, which functions in three locations in Peru: Arequipa, Cuzco, and Huaraz; Robert Grandez, the commander of the Arequipa unit, who had worked with Ofer in searching for Asher; and one of Robert's men. They wore dark green, impeccably pressed dress uniforms and looked very formal and impressive.

After we reached Arequipa, we got to know Robert and the rest of his men quite well, though we were separated by the barrier of our ignorance of Spanish. If we had arrived in Peru without any contributions for the High Mountain Rescue Unit, simply for the purpose of expressing our gratitude personally, I think their response would have been no less cordial and sympathetic than it was.

Judith, our daughter Hannah, our son Boaz, and I flew to Arequipa, but Ofer took the overnight bus with the policeman. There was no money to spare for air fare for them. In fact, we even had to pay for their bus fare. The unit's budget is extremely limited.

Arequipa, from the moment we landed at its small airport, was a welcome contrast to Lima. True, even from the plane you could see that it was also plagued with poverty: it is surrounded by tin-roofed, adobe houses, more like outlying villages than suburbs, but the sky was perfectly clear, the sun was bright, the air was brisk, and the steep mountains all surrounding the city looked like a painted backdrop, too impressive to be real.

Judith had found a good hotel for us near the center of the city, but not on a noisy street, very close to the Convent of Santa Catalina, one of the major tourist attractions, which we eventually visited.

Though we weren't really there as tourists, along with the knowledge that we were closing in on Asher's memory, there was the constant effort to see and decipher this new and unfamiliar country. Arequipa, with its white stone, Spanish colonial architecture, is very attractive. None of the buildings are taller than two or three stories at most - probably because of the constant threat of earthquakes.

We decided not to go and see the hostel where Asher had stayed. It was enough to know that he had spent the last days of his short life in this city.

A Hard Day for Jews All Over

2008-11-06T20:19:00.002+02:00

One is not exactly expected to enjoy Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, a fast day, but we observed it in the Conservative Synagogue in Lima and enjoyed it even less than we would have, had we attended services in our home synagogue, with our friends, in Jerusalem.

There was a weird mixture of familiarity and strangeness about the congregation: a couple of hundred of well-dressed Ashkenazi Jews very much like the congregations Judith and I knew when we were young - but they were all speaking Spanish.

After even a day or two in Peru, you realize that European-looking people are the distinct minority there. Most of the people you see on the street are what the Peruvians call "indigenous" - dark skinned, black haired, almond-eyed native Americans. There were a couple of indigenous Peruvian converts to Judaism among the others, but most of the people could have been relatives of ours, by their looks. We didn't exactly feel at home, because we are used to Israel by now, but it was a memory of home, and it was impossible to forget even for a moment why we were in a synagogue in Lima and not in Jerusalem.

If we'd been in Jerusalem, we would have had to face a Yom Kippur eve without the beautiful singing of our friend Gerald Cromer, who always used to lead the congregation in the haunting "Kol Nidrei" prayer, and who died rapidly of cancer last March. Sadness there, sadness here.

We took a plane from Lima to Arequipa, Peru's second largest cities, high in the Andes, the day after Yom Kippur.

Our son Boaz, who works as an attorney in Washington DC, flew in and met us in the airport on our way to Arequipa. It was wonderful to see him, especially since we had just seen him in America a couple of weeks ago. Boaz had joined our son-in-law Ofer in the search for Asher last year, and he had gone back to Peru after the body was found to help expedite its transfer to Israel. Understandably, Boaz was not anxious to return. He had no surprises to anticipate, only reminders of the dreadful time he had spent there before.

But it was good for us to have him with us. He has a calm, mature presence

Ceremony at Conservative Synagogue in Lima, Peru, Tues. 7 October, 2008

2008-11-03T15:20:00.000+02:00

No sign or plaque identifies the low, gray buildings that house "La Asociacion de Beneficiencia y Culto de 1870," the Conservative Synagogue in the Miraflores neighborhood of Lima. Before entering you are screened through a one-way mirror, and you must pass through two security doors. Once beyond the barriers, you are in a spacious, attractive facility, well-maintained but not lavish or over-impressive - pleasant and comfortable.

In the early evening, two days before Yom Kippur, we held a small reception in the synagogue auditorium (not the sanctuary), attended by Rabbi Guillermo Bronstein, several other members of his community, the staff of the Israeli Embassy in Lima, and two high officers of the High Mountain Rescue Unit of the Peruvian police force, along with one of the men from the unit in Arequipa. They had never been in a synagogue before and had no idea what the building was.

We held the reception there because the World Council of Conservative Synagogues had helped us handle contributions made in Asher's honor, and we were concerned with emphasizing the Jewish and Israeli aspects of our project.

The Rabbi and I both spoke briefly. I spoke in Hebrew, and the Rabbi translated sentence by sentence into Spanish.

Afterward we showed the film that Ofer and Lael Kline made about the search for Asher and the ultimate discovery of his body, emphasizing the devotion and self-sacrifice of the members of the High Mountain Rescue Unit.

I had just arrived in Peru that morning with our daughter Hannah, and we had spent most of the day arranging to receive the funds that we had transferred to the synagogue. We ultimately received just short of $10,000 in cash, and I was extremely nervous about carrying that much money around me in the streets of a city that I imagined to be full of thieves.

The following day, Ofer was due to go shopping with Robert Grandez, the commander of the rescue unit, for equipment that will help the men do their jobs better. In my short speech, I said that the fact that Asher had died in Peru had created a connection between us and the country, a painful connection, but also one of gratitude. I explained that the contributions were not from us personally, but that many of our relatives and friends had contributed generously to this cause, and we hoped that this equipment would help the rescue unit to do its job better on behalf of all other tourists in Peru.

This was the first step in implementing the plans we had been making in the previous months.

If such a ceremony had been held in the United States or in Israel, someone would have made sure that there was press coverage, but it seemed rather clear that the Jews of Lima are interested more than anything in remaining inconspicuous.

It takes a long time to get from Israel to Peru. Hannah and I left for the airport at eleven in the morning on Monday and arrived in Peru at seven the following morning. As usual, before a trip, I was extremely nervous, reluctant to go in fact, and very apprehensive about Peru, though also curious.

Before the trip I had felt listless and indifferent, as if I'd spent all the momentum that had existed in my life before we lost Asher. We undertook this trip out of a sense of duty, not with enthusiasm, and not with the expectation that we would find that cliche of "closure." Before Asher's body was located, we were in terrible doubt, and going back to Peru revived the memory of that period. Once he was buried, our doubt was gone, but so were our hopes.

It was gratifying for us to have the embassy people attend, people we'd spoken to by telephone time and time again during the searches. In a short conversation with our ambassador, a retired Druze army officer named Walid Mantsur, I told him what I've said to many people on many occasions: I didn't want the people who had done so much to find Asher to think that we wealthy foreigners expect poor Peruvians to risk their lives for us. I wanted to emphasize our personal gratitude, as Asher's parents and siblings, for the humane efforts they made on behalf of a total stranger.

Interruption

2008-10-05T08:26:00.002+02:00

I won't be posting to the blog in the next month or so.
I'm leaving for Peru tomorrow, and I won't be back at my desk until the end of October.
I intend to take notes, for myself but also with an eye to adding to the blog when we return.
It's been important to me to express my feelings in writing and share them with friends and, possibly, strangers. Writing for me is a means of clarification and self-control.
It's forced me to tread a thin line between what's too personal and private to expose to the world and what's too general to be of interest.
The writer's task is to bring news. If you don't learn anything new from what you're reading, you needn't bother reading at all. Unless you are reading to be comforted and to have your sentiments and ideas reinforced.
All writing is a kind of journalism. That's why "journal" is a near synonym for "diary."
The journalist runs out in pursuit of stories.
The diarist records the stories that have become part of his or her life.
The author of fiction makes the stories up, or twists life stories into barely recognizable forms, in a quest for a different kind of news.
The story I've been exploring here is not one that anyone would ever choose to pursue. You might say that I've been writing about it to keep it from pursuing me.
The journalist's task is to invade other people's privacy and expose what they'd rather hide.
I'm trying to invade only my own privacy here, only to expose what might be meaningful or helpful to readers, and to avoid the need for saying the same thing over and over again in individual letters to friends. I'm hiding quite a bit, don't worry.
But here's something personal:
Yesterday, Shabbat, I was at the lowest ebb that I remember since Asher's disappearance. Every bit of energy had seeped out of me. I had the feeling that every decision I had ever made in my life - from the time I was thirteen and chose to remain at my small private high school instead of applying for Music and Art or Bronx Science, to my choice of college, to my choice of a major in college, on and on through my life - was part of a series of stupid errors based on inauthentic values and insufficient self-knowledge.
I am experienced enough to realize that this was only a mood, probably a reflection of physical fatigue as much as anything else. I also realize that my emotions are still unsteady and an unreliable basis for any serious decision - not that I have any serious decision on the horizon to make. But would such a decision be based on authentic values and sufficient self-knowledge now, as I approach my sixty-fourth birthday?
I'm not fully aware of everything that's seething inside me as I prepare for this trip, plan to pack, buy the last minute things, take care of arrangments that have to be made. It's all lurking just out of sight. But I know it's there - otherwise why would I have stayed up till after one last night, watching comedy shorts on Youtube?

The Old Year and its Curses

2008-10-02T14:38:00.002+03:00

On our way from synagogue on Wednesday afternoon, the second day of Rosh Hashana, we happened to meet an old friend of ours, a woman whose son died in an even more pointless way than Asher did.

She and her husband have reached out and offered us support, but we haven't accepted that offer yet - not because we don't like them, but because we've been overextended. There's too much to deal with, and our emotions are exhausting.

Our friend gave Judith a hug and said, "What a shitty holiday this is," which was both deeply honest and a bit surprising from an orthodox Jewish woman, speaking about one of the three most sacred days of the year in the Jewish calendar.

The main theme of the Jewish calendar between the beginning of the month of Elul, the last month of the the year, and the last day of the eight day holiday of Sukkot is repentance, judgment, punishment, and reward. The assumption is that if you've been good, or if you sincerely resolve to be good ("good" here means "keeping God's commandments), you won't die next year. Otherwise, you will die. The logical corollary is that if someone did die last year, God was punishing him for something. This is hardly a comforting thought for people in our position.

Another underlying theme of the High Holiday Liturgy is that, in fact, it is impossible for a human being to be good enough to merit life. If we are alive, it's because God is doing us a big favor, not because we deserve to live.

So along with the hope for renewal, which is a joyous emotion, there is a dark sense of foreboding and fear. There's a promise: you can have a new beginning. But there's also a threat, and the threat is more powerful (and believable) than the promise.

A hymn recited on the eve of Rosh Hashana says: Now there is an end to the year and its curses, now there is a start to a year and its blessings. But we said the same thing last year, and we didn't get blessings! What could possibly make us think that a year from now, we'll look back and say, "Too bad we're saying goodbye to this year and its blessings"? We know from bitter experience that a year from now, we'll be relieved to be rid of the year's curses, yet, somehow, we'll be optimistically looking forward to blessings this time around.

Not that there haven't been blessings for us, even in a year of tragic loss. Perhaps even the people in Burma whose homes were destroyed and families were decimated can think of a blessing or two. In life, as in a gambling casino, you ultimately lose to the house, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you won't have enjoyed a good stretch of the game.

None of this is a particularly new discovery. Before Asher died in an accident, and two of our friends, Angela and Gerald, died of cancer, and our friend's daughter Timora died of cancer as a teenager, and Asher's friend Eric hanged himself, we knew that many people die cruel and untimely deaths, deaths that make the Rosh Hashana liturgy difficult to take. The men who composed the prayers also did not live in an ideal world where good people lived to healthy old age and bad people died of diseases and accidents before reaching their prime. They knew as well as we did that life is often cruelly unfair.

So what did they mean by these prayers, and what can we mean by reciting them?

I have three answers.

One is social: we need the solidarity of participation in communal worship to keep ourselves together.

The second is, perhaps, magical or mystical: we hope that, by the force of our prayers, the world will become a good one, ruled by a merciful God.

Finally, we have deep need to give liturgical form to our fears about the uncertainty of life, in order to deal with them.

Zelig Lider, a wonderful man our age, whom we knew slightly over the years, one of the founders of a Jerusalem congregation, known for the intensity and beauty of its prayers, which meets just once a month and on the holidays, went into a coma just before the holiday and died on the second day, a great loss. The curses of the year have begun already.

The Next Mission

2008-10-01T23:53:00.001+03:00

In a couple of days we will be flying to Peru, the place where Asher fell to his death.

We will be observing Yom Kippur in the Conservative Synagogue in Lima, whose rabbi has been very kind to us in an extended email correspondence, and then we will proceed to Arequipa, to Chivay, to Cabanconde, and to the Colca Canyon.

We are bringing contributions to the High Mountain Rescue Unit, whose men risked their lives while searching for Asher and in recovering his body, and for the school attended by the children of the man who found Asher.

Four of us are going from Israel: my wife and I, our younger daughter, and Ofer, our older daughter's husband. Our other son, Boaz, is going to meet us in Arequipa to be with us there. After we have seen the place where Asher fell and met the men who searched for him, we will go north to Cusco and do some of the sightseeing that Asher planned to do.

A friend asked in an email: why exactly are you going there?

Each of the five of us has his or her own answers to that question, and I can only speak for myself.

Since I've been asked the question more than once, I have ready-made answers - which might be too ready, too pat.

First, I want to go in order to make sure that the money we raised from friends and relatives is spent responsibly, without finding its way into undeserving pockets.

Second, I want to express personal gratitude to the people who helped us. I think it's important to let them know that we aren't simply wealthy gringos who expect poor Indians to risk their lives to help us. We are human beings who underwent a terrible loss, and we are deeply grateful to the people who helped us in our time of trouble. Because of Ofer's personality and devotion, the men of the rescue unit became personally involved in the search. It wasn't just a job for them. And they deserve personal recognition for their effort.

We plan to hold a couple of modest ceremonies to express our gratitude in an official manner.

Third, as an Israeli and a Jew, I think that this gesture of both expressing thanks in person and also bringing real assistance to them will be good for relations between Peruvians, the Jewish community of Peru, and Israel.

Fourth, I think these men, who are already highly motivated, will be even more motivated to help tourists who get lost or are injured in their jurisdiction.

Fifth, it is important to me, in dealing with Asher's death, to see the place, or at least the area where he fell. Maybe it will help me understand what happened a little better.

I realize that I don't know how I'll react when I get there, I don't know what it will be like to meet the men who searched for Asher with Ofer, or the man who found his body. I don't know what to expect. I'm both hoping for surprises and dreading them. But if I knew exactly what I wanted to accomplish and how I would feel after I'd done it, there would be no point in going.

Pomegranates

2008-09-28T16:18:00.001+03:00

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

2008-09-23T11:58:00.003+03:00

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

2008-09-22T11:39:00.004+03:00

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

2008-09-14T16:01:00.003+03:00

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

2008-09-03T08:38:00.002+03:00

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.

The Past Permeates the Present

2008-08-19T08:02:00.003+03:00

At a wedding last month, we met Johnny, the groom's uncle, who lives in London.
We sent Asher to study stage management in London after he finished high school. He was a very young and inexperienced adolescent then, and the school management did little or nothing to help him find his way in that unfamiliar place. We, his parents, hadn't realized how much Asher would have to fend for himself, and I don't think I did enough to help him. But in fact he managed and matured significantly in those two years.
I never even went to London to visit Asher at his school - a sign of the distance there was between us at the time. I must not have felt that he wanted me to come. But at least we were able to put him in touch with Johnny, who was generally nice to Asher and advanced him some money for us - the banking was surprisingly cumbersome, and it was difficult and expensive for us to transfer funds to Asher.
We had never met Johnny, and when we did, at the wedding, my first impulse was to thank him for being there for Asher, but I realized that I couldn't, because then he would have asked, "How is Asher?" and I would have had to tell him what happened.

A Friend's Response

2008-08-07T15:15:00.003+03:00

I am sure I wrote before that one of Asher's high school classmates took his own life about a year before Asher died. Not only were we devastated by that suicide, it also made us fear that Asher might have done the same thing - purposely leaped off the edge of a canyon.
Asher and that friend of his had some kind of adolescent fight in high school and never drew close again, but we have remained friendly with his mother, never thinking that our friendship would include supporting her in her grief and accepting her support for us in ours.
Just today she wrote to me in response to an earlier post of mine:
It means so much to hear people recall specific memories of Eric, even if some of them are not always entirely positive. It is as though they acknowledge that "he was here" and he was special. When people are confused and sometimes silent about our loss because there is such fear about touching it or bringing on our bad feelings, I wish we could just tell them that we are thinking about our loved one all the time. So it is only comforting to know that someone else is thinking about them too. Their avoidance is only alienating and isolating.
It's true that even negative memories of Asher are important to me. He was intense, rebellious, and sometimes extremely rude. I don't want to remember him as a little saint. That's not who he was. I would be glad if Eric were alive and, at Asher's shiva, had told us how nasty Asher was to him - because that, too, would be a living memory.
It's true that we're always thinking about our loved one, and having someone mention him is no sudden reminder of something we'd shifted to the back of our mind so we could ignore it.

Plans of Action

2008-08-07T14:55:00.002+03:00

In September we are going to be in New York to hold a memorial ceremony for Asher, and in October we are going to Peru to oversee the disbursement of money we have raised in his honor. My wife Judith has been planning these trips intensely, and it hasn't been easy for her. A lot of people are involved (Judith and I, our two daughters, our son-in-law, our three grand-children, and our surviving son), and a lot of dates had to be juggled.
In both trips, we are going to have to deal with a lot of painful emotion.
Just accepting the condolences of our American friends and relatives is going to be difficult, and facing a gathering of some sixty people, to memorialize Asher rather than celebrate his engagement or marriage or the opening of his restaurant will be deeply painful - in fact my imagination recoils from grappling with the event.
In Peru (without our married daughter and her three young children) we will see the place where Asher died, meet the men who searched for him and, finally, recovered his body, meet the man who found his body, and see the places that Asher managed to see and some of the places he was planning to get to. We will be coming with generous contributions both to the High Mountain Rescue Unit, whose under-equipped men risked their lives looking for Asher, and to the school in the village where the man who found Asher lives.
I never had much interest in going to Peru, and, seeing how unlucky the place was for Asher, I have even less interest in going there now - but I know that I have to, and I'm speaking for the rest of the family, too. It will take courage, but it will be important to all of us to know that we have that kind of courage.

Reincarnation and Other Comforting (or not) Beliefs

2008-08-07T14:23:00.002+03:00

The late Harriet Mann had a deep influence on our lives. Judith and I met her in Cambridge, Mass. in the early 1970s when we were newly married graduate students, and she was eking out a living by running a small boarding house while trying to write a book about psychological types. Not only did Harriet introduce us to several other people who have remained important to us (and who in fact shaped our lives in ways we could never have predicted then), members of Havurat Shalom, a counter-culture Jewish study commune and spiritual center, she also taught us about ourselves and helped us understand each other better - she was a Jungian clinical psychologist.
We remained in close touch with Harriet. She spent a few years in Israel with her baby daughter, and the two of them were a part of our family. After she returned to the US, where it was easier to earn a living and bring up her daughter, we remained in close touch, and even when a long time went by without any actual communication, we always felt in touch - strong love moving in both directions.
In the last twenty or so years of her life, Harriet became so deeply involved with Tibetan Buddhism that she eventually retired, sold her belongings, took vows, and joined a Buddhist monastery in northern India, where she died during a long retreat.
Harriet strongly believed in reincarnation. She thought that people keep being reborn in each other's company in generation after generation, sometimes as spouses, sometimes as parents and children, sometimes as friends - until they finish their karmic business with one another.
I can't say I believe that, but it does "explain" why it is that some people are drawn to one another, while others aren't, why it is that some people you've known for decades remain simply people you run into now and then while other people immediately become part of your life. Perhaps it even explains love at first sight.
Okay, maybe it doesn't explain that quality of relationships, but it does express their depth in symbolic faction. Harriet may not have been my mother or sister in an earlier incarnation, but the kind of closeness I felt for her is like the kind of closeness I would have felt for someone who had been close to me in another life.
Obviously this is connected with Asher's entry into our lives and his exit from them. He had some karmic function in the life of every person he touched, and he fulfilled that karmic function, in part by dying young and leaving us so bereft and sad.
Perhaps this thought is comforting. In my next life I will be with Asher again. I say "perhaps," because "I" won't know it then any more than I know now about lives that my soul my have lived in the past. The only evidence for such a belief that I am aware of is the strong wish for it to be true.
Ethically speaking, however, the idea is important, because it means that we have to take very seriously the people we encounter in life, because, if you think that way, nothing is casual or meaningless.

Friends Respond

2008-07-30T09:19:00.002+03:00

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.

Picking up the Pieces and Reassembling Them

2008-07-23T07:54:00.003+03:00

Many people undergo shattering losses like ours, events that divide their lives into Before and After, events that change them from people who thought of themselves as fortunate to people who may continue to fortunate in many respects, but who have lost someone precious and important to them.
The challenge is to go on, not as before, certainly, but not to collapse and give up on life. We gradually pick up the pieces and put them back together. But what we reconstruct can't possibly be the same as what we were before - unless we live in denial, the other side of collapse.
The loss leaves the problems and difficulties one had before the loss intact. If I was neurotic with conflicted emotions about aspects of my life - and who is not? - that's unchanged, perhaps exacerbated by bereavement. Except that maybe one gains a certain perspective: how can I worry about being a few kilos overweight when my son has fallen to his death in Peru?
The imperative is three-fold: (1) dealing with the grief, which means (2) being kind to oneself (though I don't know how I would handle that if I had been responsible for Asher's death through negligence), and (3) reconstructing oneself and one's life.
The moral imperative, if one chooses to recognize it and is capable of responding to it, connected with any life experience is to use it to become a better person. Can it make me a more loving, compassionate person? The other direction is to become selfish: such a terrible thing happened to me, that I'm allowed to do anything! Being "kind" to oneself with a vengeance.
Something in me rebels against using the terrible thing that happened to Asher to improve myself, to benefit by it in any way. However, I realize that's a silly response. Any possible gain is totally offset by the loss, if one can quantify this sort of thing.
Those of us who have lost loved ones - and by a certain age, that category becomes universal - live on, as it were, with a constant undertone of sadness. But one needn't wear it on one's sleeve like a black armband.
I've decided to maintain a separate blog for things unconnected with the topic of our loss, the way I relate to people who don't know about it - but is anything really unconnected?

Ups and Downs

2008-07-11T09:20:00.003+03:00

On some days, for no discernible reason, I am oppressed with grief, constantly aware that we have lost a vital and exciting presence in our family, a delightful, annoying, exciting, frustrating, loving, belligerent, generous, impulsive, sensitive person, and on other days I feel rather normal, though the underlying sadness never goes away.
Fortunately, I manage to be enthusiastic about some of the things I do. I'm reading Vikram Seth's monster novel, A Suitable Boy, 1,400 pages about India in the early 1950s, and I'm fully involved in the lives of his brilliantly conceived characters. For some time now I hadn't been able to enjoy fiction, one of the mainstays of my life as long as I can remember myself, so A Suitable Boy is a welcome intrusion into my life.
Part of the reason for my aversion to fiction is connected to our loss - either it seems shallow, or else it is painfully connected to what we're feeling - and part of it may be connected to my age and experience. I've already read a great many novels, and the new ones that I read don't surprise or edify me all that much. But for me reading a book (or series of books) has always been a kind of project, and finishing a book has always given me a feeling of accomplishment, so not being involved in a reading project was another emptiness in my life, an echo of the big emptiness.
Music still involves me, as does my new passion: pottery.
I'm finally bringing some finished pieces home, including one clumsy, misshapen, heavy little cup with a poorly formed, poorly proportioned handle, and I've begun drinking from it, with great love for it.
I also can get involved in movies, which is fortunate, because the Jerusalem Film Festival just opened last night. Earlier in the week, Judith and I saw a DVD of Lust, Caution, the Ang Lee thriller set in Japanese occupied Shanghai during World War II - nearly three hours of slow-moving drama, punctuated by scenes of intense lust, which I found difficult to watch, because they fascinated me, aroused me, and repelled me.
The sexual partners are a sadistic police minister, a convincingly evil man, a collaborator with the Japanese, and the young woman who has infiltrated his life in order to arrange his assassination. Her sexual enslavement to him is as real as her political and moral enmity. His sexual bondage to her, which began with an ugly, brutal rape but turned into an obsession, also functions in an area of his life separate from the rest of it, deeply contradictory to it in some ways.
The next morning I looked for reviews of the film on the web and saw that US reviewers hated it, but British reviewers liked it, and I went with the Brits.
For me the lesson of the film is partly the way the pieces of our lives - emotional, political, intellectual - can be separate from one another. People are or can be inconsistent and illogical: two or more contradictory positions can be true at the same time in our psyches.
The movie I went to see on the opening night of the film festival was a perfect exemplar of the movie-festival genre: a Swedish movie - set in a freezing landscape - about an overweight adolescent whose only interest in life is ping pong. Who would go to see such a film except during a film festival?
On my way home, as I started walking up a steep street, I heard the motor of a car running around the corner, and I saw headlights. I moved to the side of the street, to keep out of the way, and as I turned the corner, I saw a tall young man with long hair get into the passenger seat of a non-descript, oldish white car, and it drove off, coming uncomfortably close to me.
Five steps later I saw what the two young men had been up to: the window of an old Renault Cleo had been smashed. By the time I realized that I'd happened on a getaway, the white car was well out of sight, and I had no chance of seeing its license number. I called the police on my cell phone to report the crime, and the woman on duty asked me to stay there until a patrol car came, which I did.
It wasn't until I was home, after the police came and called out the owner of the car, that I realized how lucky I had been. If I had come up the street half a minute earlier, I would have caught the young men in the act, and who knows that they would have done to me? I might have been run over, knifed, shot, or beaten up and robbed.
The one thought that keeps going through my mind, about Asher, is how his accidental death was an example of terribly bad luck. So many things could have prevented it. The fortunate timing that saved me from possible violence could have saved Asher from the fall that ended his life.

You Never Know what will Trigger a Strong Reaction

2008-06-27T09:03:00.002+03:00

Yesterday afternoon the residents of our Jerusalem neighborhood were given a "last chance" to return the gas masks that were distributed, I think, when the US invaded Iraq. Fortunately the gas masks were never needed. They probably should never have been given out in the first place, but Israel always seems to find funds to address worst case scenarios, ignoring the ordinary needs of the country's citizens to a shocking degree.
Early in the morning I found four of them in our basement bomb shelter - another example of "worst case" thinking: our daughter's, our son's (the one who has been living in America for the past 10 years), my wife's, and mine. Each box was clearly labeled with our names and identity numbers. Wouldn't you know that Asher's was missing!
Three young men were hanging around the parking area of an apartment building down the street from our house, lazily collecting the cardboard cartons with the gas masks and issuing receipts. It was a hot day, and their job could hardly have been more boring.
When I put down the four boxes that I'd found, one of the guys entered my identity number on a hand held computer and noticed that one of the masks associated with my identify number was missing. I explained that Asher wasn't alive, and that I couldn't find his mask - an explanation I had been dreading all day long.
Without responding in any way to what I'd said to him, the boy said something like, "Well, he's still listed," and started making out a form for the missing mask. He told me I should call a certain number. I refused to take the form from him and said, "They can go to the cemetery and collect the kit."
I walked away.
Even if Asher were alive, I don't see how his gas mask would have been my responsibility. He was 28 years old, and if they wanted to run after him and levy a fine or whatever, that would be between him and the authorities. But it isn't as if I could call him up and ask him where he left the mask.
At first, when I got back home, shaken, and told Judith what I'd said to the guy collecting the masks, I added, "That wasn't very nice of me." It's true. It wasn't nice to hit him over the head with my tragedy. After all, he's just a young guy trying to make a little money doing tedious work with no future in it. On the other hand, it wasn't nice of him not even to say, "I'm sorry to hear it," when I told him that Asher wasn't alive, and it certainly wasn't nice of him to persist in the bureaucratic procedures after hearing it.
In a much more pleasant bureaucratic encounter yesterday, I gave my address to a secretary who was issuing receipts for contributions that were made in Asher's memory, and she noticed that I live near the school that her daughter had attended, a school for retarded children. I asked her how her daughter is doing now and talked a little about the school, saying that I see the kids playing outside sometimes when I pass by, and they seem to be happy. She agreed, the school had been good with her daughter. I asked whether her daughter would be able to support herself and live alone, and she shook her head sadly. On top of the retardation, her daughter suffers from severe epilepsy.
I don't think I'd pursue the matter if it turned out that her daughter's gas mask had been misplaced.

Theodicy - Why isn't the World Perfect?

2008-06-12T08:04:00.002+03:00

The theme of Shavuot (Pentacost) is revelation, which is a hard issue for anyone who's read and been convinced by Hume.
One woman who spoke in our synagogue tried to make the point that the Holocaust makes it very difficult to believe in God. I don't think it was any easier before the Holocaust, if the issue blocking belief is the suffering of innocent people, or the persecution of people who regard themselves as God's chosen. This sort of thing has been going on since time immemorial.
Many of us manage to maintain a belief that the world is pretty well-ordered because we haven't suffered ourselves very much. I strongly recommend a recent article in the New Yorker by James Wood for a very cerebral but elegant treatment of the topic. Wood mentions some of the recent natural disasters in Asia - the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China - as examples of human suffering that it's pretty hard to justify theologically. As he points out, all you have to do is open your daily newspaper to find abundant demonstrations of the world's cruel imperfections.
You might say that our family's bereavement is deluxe. We didn't lose our homes and all our possessions, along with the son who died. We are surrounded by thoughtful friends. We were able to hold a funeral for Asher and work through the mourning process. But of course we weep. And if we weep, for a loss that did not destroy everything we had in the world, can we begin to imagine the grief of a woman whose house was destroyed, with all her loved ones, the grief of the people of Darfur and Zimbabwe, or Gaza and Sderot, or any of the other countries where violence strikes fiercely and blindly every day?
The sorrow we bear in our heart now is more the rule than the exception.
As for belief in God, I think it's more a matter of one's personal and social identity than anything else, more about who I am than about what the world is really like.
The main Jewish prayer begins with a passage that includes these words: "The great, powerful, awesome, supreme God, who provides good rewards, who owns everything, who remembers the good deeds of the fathers and brings a redeemer to their children's children, for the sake of His name, with love."
It's a wonderful set of ideas. Maybe prayer is an expression of the wish they were true.

Unhappy Birthday

2008-06-11T15:14:00.001+03:00

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.

Bright Eyes Again?

2008-06-02T14:35:00.000+03:00

Last Saturday morning, in synagogue, Danny Kahan, a friend and, incidentally, a psychologist, said to me: "The light has gone back on in your eyes."

"You're a very perceptive person, so maybe you're right," I answered.

It's true, which doesn't mean that I'm not overwhelmed by sadness about Asher a few times every day.

Why?

I've found a new passion: pottery. It came on so suddenly, that I'm puzzled by it. What am I to make of this new infatuation?

About two months ago, without any conscious premeditation or planning, I did a search for "Ceramics Classes" on the internet, found a studio that sounded flexible and receptive, within walking distance from my home, called up, went over to see the place, signed up, and since then I've gone for around eight two-and-a-half hour sessions.

I started off working on the wheel right away, and, despite the frustrating difficulty of centering lumps of clay on the spinning wheel, I loved it. I knew this was the beginning of a new phase in my life.

I was talking about it with Marcel Chetrit, the man who has been giving me massages for several years, first shiatsu, now tui-na, a Chinese technique. He said that clay is one of the 5 elements in Chinese medicine: air, fire, water, metal, and earth. By working in clay, I am reconnecting with my earth roots, from which Asher's death detached me. My uncharacteristically impulsive decision to begin doing pottery came from my unconscious understanding of what I need.

By the way, this kind of impulsive decision may be uncharacteristic of me, but it would have been highly characteristic of Asher. The moment he knew what he should do, he did it. Which is not to say that he didn't mull over hard decisions, such as quitting one job and taking another, or that he didn't prepare himself for a new course of action.

So I see my new involvement in pottery as being connected to Asher in several important ways:

The curative way, as a form of occupational therapy, or as a way of connecting with my earth roots (if you want to buy into the Chinese medicine shtick). I see it as restorative in a different way. I have never been a very athletic person, though there were times in my life when I swam regularly and jogged pretty seriously, but I am nevertheless a very physical person. My work is all about words, farther and farther away from anything more physical than the tapping of a keyboard. Now pottery is giving me a physical outlet for expression, more physical than making music on a wind instrument, which is in fact quite a physical activity, involving your whole body.

Losing Asher was a blow to the wholeness of my sense of self. Turning to the intensely physical experience of molding clay with my hands, including the task of centering the clay on the wheel, is a way back toward some kind of wholeness, around the hollow his death has left.

The creative way. Asher was a very creative person, always involved with materials of various kinds (but not clay, as far as I remember), so he would have approved of my taking up ceramics and identified with it. Also, Asher played the creative role in our family dynamic. Now that he isn't around to do that, we all have to pick up the torch and do some of the things we'd delegated to Asher.

The dynamic and innovative way. Asher was always onto something new, with enthusiasm. That's his legacy, which we must honor by doing it, too.

More Lessons

2008-05-30T18:00:00.000+03:00

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.

Reaching out for Assistance

2008-05-18T11:06:00.000+03:00

My son and daughter are both seeing psychologists, and they both report that it's been valuable for them, in helping them cope with bereavement, so I decided to check it out. Asher had also been seeing a psychologist, and he expressed much gratitude to her.
Our health fund offers twelve meetings with a psychologist at a discount. We've been paying the insurance premiums for years and (fortunately) barely ever exploiting the benefits, so I had that incentive, too.
I have a few friends who are clinical psychologists, and I could have asked them for a recommendation, but I decided to go through the bureaucratic process: I made an appointment with the intake psychologist. I figured that if she (it was a woman, as it turned out) made a bad impression on me, if she seemed superficial and insensitive, I didn't have to take her advice. I could still go back to our friends.
I spoke with her for about half an hour, and she seemed to know what she was doing. She gave me a list of four people she thought would be right for me, and the next day I called up the one at the head of the list, whose office, at it happens, is virtually around the corner from our house. So, for the first time in my life, I'm in therapy - which goes totally against my general "I can take care of it on my own" approach.
The intake psychologist, who was so soft-spoken I could barely hear her sometimes (unusual among Israelis - indeed I suspect that she's in depression) asked me, "Why now?"
My answer, which I hadn't prepared in advance, came quickly: "Because I'm ready for it now. I've gotten over the initial shock, but I've reached a kind of impasse."
I know I have to start working through things farther than I've been doing with this blog and in conversations with friends. Here I'm trying to write things that might be useful to other people who have had tragic losses - no shortage of them!
An irreparable rift like this in the fabric of your life can cripple you, and it mustn't. All the psychological problems that I had before Asher died remain in place, but his death has left me weaker, less capable of resolving problems - it's such a problem in itself that I don't have strength left over to carry on with my bundle of neuroses on my own.
I need help to come to reconcile the strong conviction that I must live the rest of my life as fully as possible, a sign of resilience in my character, with the almost equally strong feeling that throwing myself into life will be a betrayal of Asher's memory, a denial of grief. I must enjoy everything I do as much as possible, and I mustn't enjoy anything.

Laughing while Grieving

2008-05-13T08:26:00.000+03:00

A friend, whose wife, a young and dynamic woman, died a couple of years ago, wrote in response to what I've been writing here:

"During my first few months of mourning, I noticed something odd and unexpected: from time to time my sense of humor would kick in and something would strike me as funny, or I would make a joke about something. I suppose I could have condemned myself for indulging in humor at such an awful time. But I never did, because it was clear to me that there was no frivolity or light-headedness in it. I was not making light of the tragedy; I am incapable of making light of it. No, it was some autonomous part of me that had produced humor in the past and was going to continue producing humor in the future. I recognized it as a healthy trend, almost as a friend that had come to help me find a way of coping when I could not find a way alone."

I have been very touched by some of my friends' responses to my writing here, and they have both encouraged me and helped me, sometimes by correcting errors, more often by bringing a useful perspective to the task of coping with this loss. What my friend wrote just now, about an autonomous part of his psyche that kept on producing humor, even while his soul was afflicted by bitter grief, is useful to all of us, a reminder that we are not of a piece, and we shouldn't expect ourselves to be.
True, when something very moving happens to us - good or bad - it sweeps almost everything along with it, but pieces of our selves go on with their own business: a month after Asher's funeral I resumed my musical activities. Obviously sadness colored my playing, but the playing also colored my sadness.
My grieving self wanted to scold my musical self: how can you enjoy making music as part of a big band when your wonderful son has died? You're betraying him! But if our task, ultimately, is to continue living a full and active life, even though we have lost someone very precious to us, we shouldn't scold the parts of our selves that manage to carry on. We should let them help us.

Memorial Day

2008-05-12T12:04:00.000+03:00

Growing up in America, I never paid much attention to "Memorial Day." I don't even think I knew what it memorialized until I was a teen-ager. Here in Israel, Memorial Day is observed with intense dignity. Places of entertainment are closed, and the media are full of articles about soldiers recently killed and about those who died two generations ago.
Naturally, although Asher did not die as a soldier, I felt much more empathy this year for bereaved parents than I ever felt before.
I don't know whether it's easier to lose a son in military action than it is to lose a son in an accident (How could such a thing be measured?). Each person's death is an individual event. Some young soldiers die heroically, others died because of carelessness, stupidity, or simple bad luck - just as with civilians.
Military deaths are institutionalized, public. The victims are buried in special cemeteries with flags and honor guards and speeches by officers. Civilian deaths are normally private.
If Asher had to die, I'm just as glad that his funeral was family business and not official.
Would I have been proud of him, if he'd died heroically in his country's service? I don't think the pain would have been any less. The pride would have been bitter.
What I understood more than ever this year (and I even think about this when I see fictional
killings in a film or on television) is the effect that these deaths have on all the people who knew and loved the victims: every soldier who died in action had parents, probably siblings, a partner or spouse, even children.
When I say that I understood it more this year, that isn't to say that I never thought about it in the past. One of my young friends lost his father in an army accident when he was an infant, and I've often thought of how hard it was for him and his mother. My daughter's sister-in-law lost her husband in the first Lebanon War, leaving her with a two-year-old boy and pregnant with a girl never even seen by her father.
Where does one take all these heavy emotions and thoughts?
We'll never have a world where people don't die untimely deaths, of accidents, disease, or violence. Perhaps we can have a world where people are kinder to themselves and to others - the bereaved and the not yet bereaved.

Gaining Wisdom the Hard Way

2008-05-11T11:14:00.000+03:00

A few weeks ago we saw "Up the Yantze," a documentary by Yung Chang, a Canadian film-maker, about the poor people who will be displaced by huge "Three Gorges" dam soon to be completed. It begins with the following epigraph:
By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.
It is vaguely attributed to "Confucius," but when I paged through the Analects looking for it, I couldn't find it, and, although it appears all over the Web, no one says exactly where it comes from. I consulted my old college friend, the Sinologist Professor Andrew Plaks of Princeton, who confirmed my suspicion that this is one of myriad gems of wisdom attributed to "Confucius," though they appear nowhere in his writing. (Shades of Charlie Chan.)
Obviously, however, the notion that obtaining wisdom through experience is the bitterest way to do it seemed closely applicable to the wisdom I am gradually gaining by living with bereavement. I have said over and over again that Asher's death has opened my heart in a way that shows me how relatively shallow I have been all my life, and I would agree a million times over to a deal that would leave me shallow and leave Asher alive.
One Web site where I found the "Confucius" quote accompanied it by another, similar one, attributed equally vaguely:
In seeking wisdom, the first step is silence, the second listening, the third remembering, the fourth practicing, the fifth -- teaching others. -Ibn Gabirol, poet and philosopher (c. 1022-1058)
I'd like to see the original Hebrew of that.
Now I am becoming experienced in mourning, and I can compare notes with other bereaved people.
One thing I have become aware of is the disparity between different kinds of knowledge about what happened. Yesterday emotional knowledge came to me (spontaneously, as far as I can tell) of what I had known intellectually from the start: nothing I can do can bring Asher back to life; it's irreversible.
You have no idea how hard it was for me to write those words.

Telling People

2008-05-09T09:39:00.000+03:00

Our friend, whose daughter died of cancer several years ago, once told us that she never knows how to answer people when they ask her how many children she has.
Yesterday while I was on a hike in the Judean Hills on the outskirts of Jerusalem, one of my hiking companions asked me how many children we have.
About a month ago I went to a John Zorn concert with a friend in Tel Aviv, and I ran into a young man I hadn't seen for a couple of years, a sweet guy in his twenties whom I met when I took a few years of musicology courses at the Hebrew University. The young man asked me how I was.
Do I tell my hiking companion: we had four children, but one of them died in a hiking accident in Peru last November?
Do I tell my young fellow student that I lost a son?
It's a heavy thing to drop onto someone in what is essentially a casual conversation.
I did tell the hiking companion, and I did tell the young man, but I often choose not to tell people.
Sometimes I don't want to go through the whole story again.
Sometimes I don't want my acquaintanceship to rise to that level of intimacy.
Sometimes I don't think the person I'm talking with will be able to deal with the information.

A Difficult Stretch

2008-05-01T17:53:00.000+03:00

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.

The Tasks of the Living and the Dead

2008-04-17T11:01:00.000+03:00

We delegate roles in life.
I imagine the delegation of roles is even older than the history of the human race. Every social species delegates functions to its individuals. No one can do everything. Perhaps that's why the delegation of roles in society seems natural to most people: men should do certain kinds of work and assume certain functions, and women should do other kinds of work and assume other kinds of functions. Social change is largely about the delegation of roles to different categories of people in society, or recategorizing people.
Some of this delegation of roles is self-evident in our complex world: we have health-care professionals, legal professionals, engineers, politicians, journalists. But a lot of role-assignment is symbolic, phenomena that social psychologists study such as who asserts leadership in a group, who's disruptive, who's the clown, who eases tensions.
There's also role-assignment in the family, and when someone in the family dies, what happens to the role that person was playing?
I know that Asher's sisters and brother are struggling with that issue, and, I am too. Perhaps each of us will gradually take on some of Asher's roles, though no one will ever play them as fully as he did. The family is missing that component now.
I am an only child, and I always thought my children were fortunate in having siblings because it allowed them to specialize more than I could. I had to be everything for my parents, or as much as I could be, and to a degree the obligations I felt - not always articulated, of course - were contradictory, and the inability to negotiate the contradictions disabled me. My parents, especially my mother, wanted me to be a great variety of things, things that I couldn't possibly be at the same time, and the work of trying to be the good son and please them kept me from doing the work of figuring out what I wanted to be.
Perhaps that's why I conceived my goal as a parent as being a facilitator, helping my children be themselves rather than imposing an idea on them of what they ought to be. Regardless of my attitude as a father, in our family, each of the four children naturally had more freedom to be herself or himself, because there were others doing different things in different ways.
Asher was openly rebellious, perhaps his siblings' delegate in rebellion. He always challenged our authority as parents and adults, so the others didn't have to. Asher was also the restless, creative one, the artist, the initiator of projects, so maybe his siblings, who are also talented in the creative arts, conceded that role to him. Now we'll all have to be more creative and enterprising, because we don't have Asher to do it for us.
Recently I started taking a ceramics class. Perhaps Asher's restless spirit pushed me into it. Oddly, seeing how much I enjoy working with clay, I never even considered doing it, even though our two daughters took ceramics and both of them are good at it. My mother also did ceramics on and off for thirty or forty years. It began when I was a kid. She took me to a ceramics class at Greenwich House, a wonderful community center in Greenwich Village, where we lived. To walk back home after leaving me there and then come and pick me up again would have been onerous, so she was persuaded to enroll in an adult ceramics class to pass the time while I was with the kids. I gave it up when I was about twelve: I was the only boy left in the class. But she kept at it, and we have, use, and cherish a lot of her free-spirited, hand-built work.
My mother never worked on the wheel, but I decided to start on it right away. I love it. I wouldn't mind spending all day at it. So it appears that the delegation goes both ways: we assigned roles to Asher - and they weren't always easy for him, and he suffered. Now he and my mother, who had a lot in common, are assigning a role to me: learn to use the potter's wheel. As a tribute to your son, be more like him!

Owning and Grief

2008-04-15T15:52:00.000+03:00

For a long time, before Asher's death, I had been thinking about the strangeness of idea of ownership. I would look at the stone walls of our house and wonder: what does my ownership of this structure mean? Ownership is a legal concept, but I think that's the least interesting aspect of it.
In English we say: I own this. In Hebrew and French one says says: this belongs to me. So is ownership a property of what is owned or of the owner? Depends what language you speak.
People used to be able to own other people routinely, as part of the social order. A slave could purchase himself from his master. Does that mean we own ourselves? Then who are the "we" who are separable from the "selves" that they own? Obviously one does not own one's life, because when one is dead, there is no one there to own the life that is gone. Being alive is one thing, not two: living is not a predicate. Once Asher, or anyone, is dead, he or she no longer owns anything. Can we even say that Asher's body or his grave are his?

When we visited the grave a week or so ago, after our friend's funeral, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that he couldn''t possibly be there. Whoever he was and whatever he was is not connected with the remains under the stone. The corpse has to be dealt with somehow, in a respectful way, but you can't pretend that it's still the person who died.

Next Saturday night is Passover. For years we held a Seder in our house, sometimes with more than twenty guests. This year we knew we couldn't do it. Close friends have invited us to their Seder.
Passover will be especially hard for me, because that was the last time I saw Asher. He came for a week, helped Judith prepare the meal, and fill the house with his spirit and vitality. I had to face another hard moment last week. We went to the wedding of a woman who was with Asher in daycare when they were two or three. We've stayed close to her family all these years. It was wonderful to see her and her husband, to take part in the ceremony, to be inspired by the faith these two young people have placed in one another. Yet, of course, it was sorrowful for us to know that we'll never be attending Asher's wedding. Given the kind of man he was, there might have been more than one wedding over the years!

Long ago, and today still in some cultures, a man's wife was his property - so I've brought this in full circle back to the question of ownership. The theme of the Passover festival is redemption from bondage - but paradoxically, Judaism has made the obeying of strict religious law into the symbol of that redemption. I might say that I'd like to be freed of the bondage of being a bereaved parent. I'd like to resign from that status. The only way out of it is to acknowledge that there's no way out. The challenge is to take the bondage out of the situation. It's too early for that.

Room for Everyone

2008-04-08T17:30:00.000+03:00

Our friend's funeral was well attended.
He was a well-known person, a university professor and active in public life. More importantly, he was a warm, friendly, outgoing man, someone who made friends easily and liked people.
After eulogies were delivered in the presence of his corpse, wrapped in shrouds and a prayer shawl, lying on a stretcher placed on a stone platform, we wiped the tears from our eyes and followed the burial society's minivan to the cemetery itself, the grave site.
His grave was in a rather narrow strip of burial plots, and people began to congregate on the near side of it, blocking the way for others who wanted to get close. An official from the burial society told people to move around and gather on the other side of the grave, calling out, "There's room for everyone!"
That could be the motto of the cemetery.
Our friend's new grave is not far from Asher's, so we visited it. Thoughts about him are never more than one thought away of whatever is on my mind, dark thoughts about death and mortality. I look at groups of people and think to myself that all of us will be dying. I think about our friends: we've been to your weddings, to the circumcisions of your sons, to the namings of your daughters, to their bar and bat-mitzvahs, to their weddings, and sooner or later we'll be going to each other's funerals. Not really to each other's funerals, of course. I won't be going to the funerals of the people who come to mine.
I hold my two-year-old grand-daughter and wonder: will I live to your wedding?

A while ago I realized that I was forgetting how much I love and value my other three children, so I wrote them a kind of love letter. When our friend died, I realized I had taken for granted what a wonderful man he was.
Let's try to appreciate each other more openly while we can still enjoy each other's appreciation!

Afterlife?

2008-04-06T10:18:00.000+03:00

It is comforting to believe that death isn't the end of things, but rather the beginning of something else, and I guess we need all the comfort we can get.
If there is some other realm of being, it wouldn't be surprising that we mainly have contact with it when we're asleep, because in our dreams all the rational defenses of realism are wiped away.

Here are four dreams connected with Asher:
The first was dreamed by an acquaintance of ours, a woman who could be a good friend of ours, but so far we haven't had the opportunity to develop our friendship. She described it to us in an email, which I've edited slightly:

I dreamed this on a Saturday morning last December. I hadn't known that Asher was missing. Actually I didn't know you had a son named Asher, Of your children I was only acquainted with Asher's older brother.

The dream was that a boy named Asher was swinging in a hammock with his Mother, and then I said to her, "you need a break" and urged him to come and play, promising him that there would be toys for boys . He started towards me, but he had to climb a very steep slope, which was rocky and slippery, and then, at the top, climb over a fence As I went to reach for him, he slipped and fell, hitting his head so hard that it made a loud THUNK, a really loud sound that I heard in the dream.
I was very alarmed, because I could tell by the sound that it was a dangerously serious blow to the head, but could see there was no blood or wound on his head. He acknowledged that it was a severe blow but said, "I am not in pain. I feel no pain."

I woke and thought about the dream, especially noting the sensual aspect (I heard the sound). Later I went to have Shabbat lunch with the Danny and Beatrix B., with whom my husband and I used to be friendly when we lived in Jerusalem, and with whom I had not visited in years.

The conversation meandered over many topics, and we talked about the book I have just finished for Sefirat ha-Omer, and I wondered whether the pages might be good for an exhibit at their synagogue.
I mentioned that I would call Judith and speak to her, and at that point Danny and Beatrix asked me if I knew what was happening with your family. They said that your son Asher was missing. I was alarmed to hear the news and bewildered at the synchronicity of having just dreamed about a boy named Asher, although the boy in my dream wasn't an adult, the fact that I even dreamed about someone with that name and then the slippery slope part It was all very strange. I told them about the dream then and they were surprised too. After Shabbat, I called Danny and asked him if he thought I should tell you about the dream then. He suggested not, and I decided to just wait and see. After a while, almost two weeks later, I heard that Asher had been found ... and the nature of his accident.

I was especially surprised when, after I told you the dream the other day, you showed me the picture album with all the pictures of Asher and the hammock.

I believe very firmly, have experienced it actually, that we can have visitations from our departed loved ones. Its not like dreaming about someone. It is as if they are right there.

The second dream is Judith's. She dreamed it even before she shared her worry about Asher with us, before we started looking for him. In her dream, we were at some kind of gathering, and Asher showed up in the form of a marble portrait bust. Judith greeted him, but then she told him that he had to go upstairs, to a kind of roof gallery. That's where you belong, she told him, and he went up.

The third and forth dreams are mine.
In one dream, while we were looking for Asher, I saw him very clearly, walking down a sunlit slope. He saw me, waved to me, smiled broadly, and said he was all right.
I just dreamed my second one recently. I dozed off while I was having a massage and dreamed that the masseur (a good friend of ours, not a stranger) and someone else led me to an opening in a stone wall in some kind of castle and threw me over it. I landed, unhurt, in a bed of flowers, and the masseur walked down some stone stairs to greet me. The whole scene was lit with bright sunlight, and there were flowers. I paid him then for the massage.
When I roused from that dream, I connected it closely to Asher. In fact, I don't ordinarily dream about Asher - at least I don't remember dreaming about him.
The first dream, dreamed by a woman who knows us, but not well, and whose name is also Judith, but who never knew Asher, is absolutely uncanny. I can only "explain" it by thinking that Asher's spirit was looking for someone receptive, and at that point his mother wasn't receptive. Judith's dream about Asher's visit, is almost as uncanny, because of its setting. At the shiva she told it to a young family friend, who recalled that Asher once worked with him when he was building a roof gallery in an apartment, a place very much like the one that Judith saw in her dream. She had completely forgotten that Asher ever had that job.
My dreams are less uncanny, more easily explicable by wishful thinking, but Asher's presence in the first one was extremely vivid.

Stuff Keeps Going On

2008-04-02T12:17:00.000+03:00

I find myself wasting a lot of time and not concentrating well, and sometimes I wonder whether I'm using the bereavement as an excuse to be lazy and unfocused. Whatever I do or feel, I wonder whether it's connected.
As long as I'm so unfocused, I decided to do something useful, so I began cleaning up our basement storage room, which tends to become unbearably cluttered.
Fixing up his physical surroundings was something Asher was good at (in huge contrast to me). He never just moved into a space and left it as it was - just as, when he was a child, he almost never simply played with new toys. He usually broke them, creatively, to make them more interesting. That was part of his energetic character.
The studio apartment that we rent out, originally part of our apartment, was Asher's place for a while. Before he moved in, he persuaded us to enlarge it, and after he moved in he put up shelves and plywood panels on the wall, for his art work. The young couple we've rented the apartment to now are also making a serious nest out of it, removing some of the things Asher put in and some of the furniture he left, including a computer table that Asher designed and had made for himself: a metal frame with a glass top.
Just seeing that table again made Judith weep. So much is associated with Asher.

The state of the cellar was daunting, but I decided to go at it a little at a time. So far I've rearranged some shelves and thrown away about four cartons of old papers, financial records more than a decade old, and volumes and volumes of the journal that I kept, more or less assiduously, for decades.
I lost interest in keeping a journal three or four years ago, because I realized that it was part of my distorted image of myself: I thought I was such an important person that people would study my journals! Only sons think they of huge interest to the world.
My blog is an outgrowth of that habit, but different, I feel. With the journals I wasn't reaching out, trying to establish communication, sharing. I was just filling up pages with longhand and then shoving the notebooks into drawers when they were full. The old journals piled up, and I never had the patience or interest to reread them. Once in a while I would glance through them, and the few sentences that caught my eye always embarrassed me.
Nevertheless, I couldn't bring myself to jettison them.
Now that I've done it, I feel only the slightest regret. If they weren't even of interest to me, how could they possibly be of interest to anyone else?
I found myself shoving the old journals into the recycling bin with violence. I was getting rid of something I should have gotten rid of years ago. Perhaps the violence was directed against the me that couldn't get up the courage to get rid of all that verbiage.
Perhaps the big loss of our son enabled me to let go of them - but the violence of my movements tells me that it wasn't a letting go so much as an expulsion.
I don't think I was being honest with myself in my journals. I was self-conscious without being self-aware. Now I'm more self-aware, at least self-aware enough to get rid of that junk.
Asher's death has ripped open my heart, giving me depth I never asked for, precious though it may be, because the cost was unacceptable. I must neither refuse what I have received nor deceive myself that it compensates in any way for the loss. I'd rather be shallow and have a living son.

As Expected

2008-03-31T11:08:00.000+03:00

Our good friend, a man we've known well since for more than thirty years, a man whose children grew up with ours, a leader in our synagogue, one of the warmest, most generous people I ever knew, a man of great honesty and tolerance, died yesterday of a cancer that was barely detected a month and a half ago. He was, I think, about a month older than I.
We got the news yesterday evening at around six, about a half hour after he died, and about an hour before I was due to travel with other musicians from our big and and appear in a joint concert with a European big band that travels all over the world, bringing the message of (Christian) love and peace through music.
I had twisted my wife's arm, prevailing on her to come to the concert with me, though she really didn't want to. When we heard the news of our friend's death, I untwisted her arm. The last thing she wanted to do was hear big bands. I was ready to skip the concert, too.
The news caught me in the midst of cooking an onion and potato omelet. What could I do? I went on cooking, and Judith and I ate supper together before I left for the concert.
The concert was meant to raise some money for a charity, but the people from the charity didn't make enough of an effort to get an audience, and to say that the concert was sparsely attended would be a severe understatement. The musicians outnumbered the audience. So it was more like an open rehearsal than a performance.
The band with whom we shared the stage calls itself the IHS Orchestra. IHS stands for In Hoc Segno. Though the leader, Lawrence Dahar, refrained from explaining exactly which symbol the orchestra promotes, the Christian evangelical message was ultra clear. Israel is inundated with Christian pilgrims, some of them far more exotic than Lawrence's international band.
Our big band played the first half of the concert, and then the guests took the stage, playing mainly tired old standards like "My Way" and "Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand." But they're good musicians, and they played with a lot of energy. Toward the end of their half of the concert, Lawrence spent a long time telling us Israelis in the audience how much God loves us, which made me squirm.
Before they played the Ellington piece, "I'm Just a Lucky So and So," Lawrence told us that his son, a young man who was confined to a wheelchair all his life and who had played bass trombone with the band when they were in Israel two years ago, had been run over and killed about a year ago.
Another bereaved father.
Then he started telling us how he was sure that his son was in a "better place," doing the things he could never do when he was alive, running around, which was why he was a "lucky so and so." At first I thought, well, if it helps him to believe that... but it's an entirely ridiculous idea.
Why make up the idea of a God who creates a world full of pain and misery, sticks us in it to suffer, and then sends us to a place of bliss after we've been tormented down here? If He could, and, by definition, He could, why wouldn't the Almighty just send us to the place of bliss right away? Why bother with the woe down here?
I'm not prepared to cut religion out of my life. I have some kind of faith. But it sure isn't that childish idea.
After the concert, I went up to Lawrence and told him that I, too, had lost a son, and I could sympathize with him. He wasn't really ready to hear that from anyone. He was still high from the rush of performing. At first he smiled, as if I had said, "You guys really played great!" It took him a moment to realize that I was offering condolences.

Last Night I Realized How Unhappy I Am

2008-03-28T11:33:00.000+03:00

Sounds like a stupid thing to say - Didn't I know?
Last night I went to hear a musician friend of mine, Jean-Claude Jones, a bass player, appearing in a Jerusalem club named D. Grey with his colleague, a child prodigy named Ariel. I like Jean-Claude and his partner, Judith Posner, and I ought to have been glad to join them to hear original music, especially since there were other friends of mine in the audience.
However, Judith and I are linked by a double tragedy. Her son Eric was a classmate of Asher's in school, and Eric died about six months before Asher did. When I attended Eric's funeral, I was devastated, as we all were. How could I ever have imagined that I would be burying my own son in the same year?
"I know what you're thinking," Judith said to me, and she was right.
I did enjoy the music. I did admire Ariel's creativity. It was a pleasure to see Jean-Claude respond to Ariel both as a child and as a fellow musician, with tact and humor, and respect.
But I certainly wasn't happy.
The flashes of pleasure I experience are like the rush from a drug: they appear and fade away.
I woke up in the middle of the night last night and decided I was feeling sorry for myself, which is something I have never felt.
I have been exposed to metta meditation on some retreats I attended. This meditation exercise always begins by invoking compassion for oneself, and that always arouses resistance in me. But we are taught, correctly, that one cannot have compassion for others without first having compassion for oneself.
Which is not the same as feeling sorry for oneself.
Can I transform self-pity into compassion?
A good friend of mine, whom I have known well for more than thirty years and with whom I have shared many joys, is apparently dying of cancer now. Though we all refuse to give up hope for him, objectively speaking, there doesn't seem to be much hope. Just another thing to feel rotten about.

Can we Resume Normal Life?

2008-03-26T13:32:00.000+02:00

Last weekend the State of Israel and the Jewish People celebrated Purim, a carnival-like holiday. Children and some adults wear costumes, and we read the Book of Esther in the synagogue in a particularly raucous manner, making noises to drown out the name of Haman. The consumption of alcohol is sanctioned. The staid Jewish world is stood on its head.
For that very reason Judith and I were rather unenthusiastic as the holiday approached. And let's not forget that it was on Purim that Dr. Baruch Goldstein massacred Muslims while they were at prayer in Hebron, a crime that had dampened out enthusiasm for Purim long before Asher's tragic death.
My wise wife took the initiative and arranged for us to spend three nights in the Turkish resort of Antalya instead of staying in Jerusalem for Purim. We had a relaxing time in a five-star hotel, spent hours in the sauna, did some tourism (the local archaeological and ethnographic museum is rich and fascinating), and took time for ourselves in what Judith called a neutral place.
Before we left, I got a phone call from Ariav, a man whose son died in a rafting accident in Peru. His response was to create an organization to help parents in that situation. He and other people from his organization have been very attentive to us, calling us, coming to the funeral and the shiva. He said that we'd find the holidays to be the hardest times, which is why, though he didn't say so, he called us before Purim. When I told him we were going away, he congratulated me: a great idea.
Our charter flight back and forth from Tel Aviv was full of vacationers of all sorts, including a rather large number of Israeli Arabs, and the hotel had a large and noisy group of German tourists. There was another Israeli couple our age at our hotel, pleasant and interesting people. We talked with them a little, but we didn't exchange names or make an effort to socialize with them. Partly that's always been our pattern when we travel. We're not the kind of people who pick up other travelers and hear all about their lives. But in the case of the pleasant couple from Tel Aviv, the fact that we were taking our grief with us to Turkey was another barrier. I wanted to tell them: I'm not unfriendly, I just can't open up to a stranger now. There's been a tragedy in my family.
Was it right for us to go off and enjoy ourselves in a luxury hotel?
Often, since my superego is on the hyperactive side, it tells me: you should be feeling this; you shouldn't be feeling that; you should be doing this; you should be doing that; you should be sadder; you should be crying more. And when I can't fall asleep at night or wake up before dawn, my superego says: Good boy, you're really grieving!
But I have received excellent personal advice from friends who also happen to be psychologists: don't think that way. Let things happen the way they happen. Don't even try to control them. Just keep in touch with your feelings.
Long ago I learned from the novels of Aharon Appelfeld that the problems and difficulties that one had in life before one was stricken by tragedy remain in place after the tragedy. The tragedy doesn't solve the old problems, though maybe it places them in a new perspective. Some of my misgivings about patronizing a luxury hotel have nothing at all to do with whether it was appropriate for bereaved parents to pamper themselves. I never believed in pampering myself, and I never even enjoyed the idea of luxury hotels (actually the one we were at in Antalya was relaxed and informal, not really a luxury hotel of the old school). So permitting myself to enjoy the decadence of a Turkish bath was as much a victory over my schoolmarmish superego as a way of palliating my general unhappiness.
I don't know what the stages of grief are supposed to be, so I can't tell whether I'm going through them properly. As an adolescent, under the influence of an advanced French literature course in my senior year of high school, I was an Existentialist. I believed that one chose to be what one was. Asher's death proves the falsity of that premise. He certainly didn't choose to die at the age of twenty-eight, and I certainly never asked to take on the role of a bereaved parent. There's no particularly good way to play that role, as far as I can see, except to be a good person if you have it in you - and I didn't have to lose a son to see the need to be good.

Drifting in Time

2008-03-19T12:05:00.000+02:00

Bereavement has affected my sense of time. Before this happened, I was well oriented in time. I usually knew within a quarter of an hour what time of day it is, the day of the week, and the date. Now I float in time. If you asked me whether it's three p.m. or ten a.m., I might have to think twice before I answered. I get ahead of myself or behind in the week, thinking it's Tuesday when it's only Monday, or Thursday when it's already Friday.
I'm surprised when dates sneak up on me. What? The first of the month? I even failed to notice February 29th this year, and I always take pleasure in having that extra day in the shortest month.
I always was very jealous of my time, impatient, hating to waste precious moments. Now I'm patient, because I'm indifferent. I don't care much whether the time passes. Just let's get through the day and go to sleep. I have work to do, and I do it, but I take no pleasure in accomplishing things. I enjoy the work, because it makes the day pass.
How long will this apathy and loss of orientation in time last?

Praying

2008-03-16T08:54:00.000+02:00

During the Shloshim I was very diligent and prompt about attending morning services in our synagogue, which begin at 6:30 on the days when the Torah is not read, and at 6:20 when it is read (Mondays and Thursdays). I led the prayers except on days when other men had yahrtsait (the anniversary of a family member's death), and I only missed praying with a minyan of at least nine other men on the two days when it snowed in Jerusalem, and a full minyan didn't show up. I was also diligent about praying three times a day, something I hadn't done for quite a while (I went through a long observant period, which has fallen apart in the past few years). I found myself enjoying the fellowship of other worshipers early in the morning and more or less planned to continue.
Do I believe that prayer alleviates the suffering of Asher's soul and raises it up? No. Do I believe that Asher's soul still exists, now that his body is dead - not seriously. Do I believe in a God who will resurrect the dead at the end of days? Not at all. In fact, I barely believe in God. If anything, I believe in the idea of God as an aspiration, a human thought that is an improvement on the real world. So what was I praying for, and whom was I praying to? I was praying as part of my effort to put my world back together after the horrible loss we suffered. I was also praying because it was expected of me by the people of our religious community, and in honor of Asher's memory.
But the continuity was broken, and I stopped attending morning services and more or less stopped praying again.
On the Shabbat after the Shloshim, our daughter was here with her children, and she came down with serious tonsilitis. I drove her home in her car before sundown (violating the Sabbath publicly) and stayed overnight there to help her take care of herself and of the kids. The following evening (Sunday), I was due to have a rehearsal of the big band, the first one I was to participate in since Asher's funeral, so I brought my baritone sax with me and planned to say at least until Monday morning. That meant that I couldn't have gone to services for at least two days. I didn't even take my prayer paraphernalia with me - my prayer book, my prayer shawl, and my tefillin (black leather cubes containing parchments with biblical verses written on them that Jewish men strap onto themselves when they prayer on weekday mornings) - suddenly I didn't want to pray anymore.

Music and Mourning

2008-03-14T08:46:00.000+02:00

Originally I had planned to devote a lot of attention to music in this blog, but Asher's accidental death has made it the direct opposite.
One of the strongest restrictions on mourners imposed by traditional Judaism is the restriction against listening to instrumental music, in contrast to requiem masses in Catholicism and New Orleans funeral parades. Musical instruments are associated with the Temple service. The Jews of Yemen never played musical instruments, because they were constantly mourning the destruction of the Temple. Some segments of the ultra-orthodox community of Jerusalem will not have instrumental music at weddings celebrated there, for the same reason. Because in Judaism, instrumental music (as opposed to singing, which is part of the synagogue service, and in many traditional Jewish homes, on the sabbath, people sing special hymns at the table) is associated with celebrations -- weddings, bar-mitzvahs, and circumcisions. Mourners are also barred from taking part in such celebrations.
This restriction was one that I did not observe during the years of mourning for my parents, and I observed it only partially during the month of mourning for Asher. Paradoxically (to digress for a moment), strict restrictions apply to people who have lost a parent for a full year, whereas for people who have lost a child, they apply only for a month. I don't think this has so much to do with the depth of grief one feels for the lost person so much as with the command to honor one's mother and father, though people have offered me other explanations.
During the month of mourning, I did continue to practice saxophone. I didn't want to lose the skills I have been building up for years. I decided to spend a long time doing things that aren't all that much fun. I played a lot of long tones and harmonics, scales, and other technical exercise. I didn't play much actual music, and what I did play was as mournful as possible: the Mingus song in memory of Lester Young, "Goodbye Porkpie Hat," and Ellington's "Mood Indigo." I started associating the Mingus piece with Asher, playing it in his memory.
After the "shloshim" (the thirty days), I resumed my musical activities. I rejoined the big band and started playing again with the improvisation workshop I attend every week.
Music is serious for me, though it's also a great pleasure. Is the pleasure a violation of the duty I have to mourn for my son?
Why did I use the word "duty" just now?
Cultures do impose duties on mourners, like wearing black armbands or immolating oneself on the funeral pyre of one's husband. With respect to the duties that Judaism imposes on mourners, I'm essentially finished with what I owe to Asher's memory. My mourning for him now is not a duty but a constant state of mind, something I couldn't stop if I wanted to, though occasionally I can get distracted, thank goodness.
Even writing in his memory is, partially, a distraction. Music is also partially a distraction but also an expression of what I feel.
My main mood now is apathy and indifference, the inability to get enthusiastic about anything. How can one be engaged in music and indifferent to it?

end of memorial

2008-03-10T09:21:00.000+02:00

My concluding words were:

And now we are marking the end of the thirty days, as if that were the end of something. But we know it's not the end. We know that the painful hole that has been torn in the fabric of our life will remain forever – forever at least in human terms, in the proportions of the lives of those who were close to Asher and mourn him – I and Judith, Eden and Ofer, Boaz and Hannah, all his friends and our friends, everyone who will remember him till the end of their lives.

From now on we're supposed to return to ordinary life. I'm no longer required to recite the kaddish. We can listen to music and take part in celebrations. But there's something within me that doesn't want to return to ordinary life. There's something in me that wants to remain in mourning for a long, long time. So maybe it's good that Jewish mourning customs require me to stop.

Blessed be the memory of Asher Zeev the son of Ya'aqov Moshe and Yehudit.

***

The truth is that I haven't returned to “ordinary” life at all. Yes, I've been working, seeing people, playing music – but it's all with indifference. I don't particularly care what I do. If I'm no longer in mourning, it's only outwardly.

The Shiva

2008-03-09T12:42:00.000+02:00

I'm going on in explaining the things I said at the memorial evening for Asher.

For readers who may not be Jewish or who may be unfamiliar with traditional Jewish mourning customs, the concept of the Shiva is worth explaining. The basic assumption is that a bereaved person needs some time out of his or her regular life, a time to get over the initial shock of the loss. For seven days the mourners stay at home and other people take care of them. They are subject to restrictions that symbolize their bereavement, such as not wearing leather shoes, wearing a torn garment, not looking in the mirror. We say that a person “sits shiva,” because during that time one is not supposed to sit on a comfortable, high chair, but on a low stool or cushion or on the floor.

I have sat shiva before. When my father died in 1991, I stayed with my mother for the shiva period, but we couldn't observe it fully, because my parents didn't live in a strong Jewish community. Family friends and relatives came to visit, but there were no organized prayers, and no one knew that they were supposed to bring food for us. I didn't stay inside all the time. I had to do some shopping.

When my mother died, a year and a half later, we brought her body to Israel for burial, and I sat shiva properly in my home. Because I was the only one sitting shiva at the time, my wife and family could function normally, and we didn't need a lot of outside help. People came, we had prayers in our home, and it was a quiet time of reflection for me. In my late forties, I had become an orphan.

This time we were all sitting shiva, my wife and I and our three other children. The members of our synagogue, our religious community, mobilized to help us, and other friends brought food. People took over our house and our kitchen and would hardly let us do a thing for ourselves. That was hard to get used to.

The love and support that surrounded us during the shiva were overwhelming. Nearly two months have gone by since them, and my gratitude has only grown. From seven in the morning, when we held prayers, until ten at night, when the last visitors left, we were coddled and surprised to find people that we hardly knew took the trouble to come. Sometimes it was too much, and I couldn't respond to people, but that was exceptional.

Two visits left a deep impression on me. A man I have known pretty well for a long time told me that he and his wife lost a child at the age of six months (something I hadn't known), and they've never stopped feeling deeply sad about it. His wife told me that since she lost her daughter, she stopped fearing death. I've been trying to figure that out ever since.

A man I know only slightly, an editor for whom I've done translations, a very British, restrained person, came in, visibly shaken, and told us that he had lost a son twelve years ago in fairly similar circumstances. His son, an experienced mountaineer, was leading a group in Bolivia. It began to snow, and they put up tents. He stepped out of his tent in the middle of the night and fell to his death.

Both of these stories of bereavement taught me that I shouldn't expect to get over this loss. When something similar happens to someone else, I'll be hard hit again.

I got a very upsetting telephone call with the same deep message from a childhood friend in America, whose son died of a brain tumor about four years ago. She was griefstricken again by the news of Asher's death, and I felt that she needed consolation almost more than I did, but I was unable to offer her any, because of my own emotional exhaustion.

There are times when I say to myself: I'm tired of this. I don't want to be a bereaved parent anymore. But it's not something one can stop.

The shiva makes you turn the story of your loved one's death into something routine and rehearsed, that you can tell people over and over again, and that's useful to put things at some emotional distance.

When the shiva's over, and your house empties out, and you're on your own, there's some relief. You're ready to begin dealing with the situation on your own.

Moving Through the Stages from Uncertainty to Unwanted Certainty

2008-03-02T09:22:00.000+02:00

When I added that Judaism specializes in the division of time, in setting times, in sanctifying time, I was only saying something everybody already knows. But I wanted to emphasize the arbitrary aspect of it all, the fact that people are the ones who counted days and gave significance to the passage of time. The meaning comes from us. We projected it on the natural order.

People once believed there was some compelling reality in the division of time into hours, days, weeks, seasons, and years – that God set the whole thing up – but now we know that, if anything, the process went the other way. The laws of astrophysics determine the way the earth spins and circles the sun, and the way the moon circles the earth, and the laws of evolution set biological and physiological clocks in the world in response to those arbitrary motions. If God set it up, why didn't He do it more neatly, so that the lunar months fit perfectly into the solar year, which would be neatly divided by solar days?

Judaism decided that the period of thirty days after a funeral is a particularly intense time of mourning, setting an arbitrary number to a psychological process that must be gradual. Maybe for some people the intense period is two months, or two years, and maybe for others it's only three weeks. But this isn't the kind of thing that should be left to individual choice, because we need guidelines when we're in the uncharted territory of grief.

Nobody's death follows a neat pattern. Some people die suddenly in an accident or of a heart attack, others take years and years to die of lingering illness, and every instance of death poses a terrible challenge to the bereaved. If a person dies suddenly and unexpectedly, you feel cheated of the chance to part with them. If a person dies a long and painful death, you feel your helplessness, the limits of the comfort you could offer.

Asher's death was sudden, but we didn't know about it for nearly two months, two months that aren't defined in the normal rules that Judaism lays down for mourning. We went through a series of periods between mid-October, when he left New York for Peru, and early January, when we buried him. For nearly three weeks we got regular emails from him, excited reports about what he was doing, seeing, and eating. Then he went hiking in the Colca Canyon, and we knew that we couldn't expect to hear from him for a week or more. Two weeks went by, and his mother became actively worried – two weeks when he was already dead, and no one knew it.

Soon we were all worried.

The following six weeks, until a villager happened to discover his body, were weeks of fear, tension, hope, and despair, weeks of intense activity in the effort to find Asher, weeks when those of us who were here in Israel, not looking for him in Peru, also tried to continue doing the things we always did, to fulfill our obligations, to function as if he would somehow be found alive and well. Perhaps there was an element of superstition in our behavior, the belief that if we gave up hope and acknowledged that he was probably dead, we would be depriving him of the chance to be alive.

Nearly another week passed between the discovery of his body and its burial, another week of activity: our son and son-in-law returned to Peru to arrange to have the body recovered and shipped to Israel, to give a reward to the man who discovered the body, to thank the High Mountain Rescue Unit, and we had to arrange the funeral here, to deal with the Burial Society. That was a week of numbness and tension, of urgent and expensive travel arrangements, of getting used to a new and tragic certainty: there was no more hope.

The Dreadful Fluidity of Time

2008-02-27T09:49:00.000+02:00

The first part of what I said was this:

No aspect of our lives is more frustrating and alarming than the fluidity of time. The past disintegrates and becomes distorted in our memories – it's forgotten; it disappears. The present passes faster than the blink of an eye. The future is only an illusion, the product of our imagination. It's impossible to know in advance what will happen or to count on what we expect.

That's why people have an obsessive need to set dates, to sink stakes into the continuum of time. We want to grasp time, control it. For that purpose we determine times and dates – but it's all artificial – it all flows from our need not to get lost in the maelstrom of time.

Judaism specializes particularly in the division of time, in setting times, in sanctifying time. Today is the thirtieth day after the burial of our precious son Asher. We must endow importance to the number of days that have passed, although we know that it's entirely arbitrary.

***

Because I spoke only for a few minutes, I didn't expand much on that idea. I didn't say why I find the fluidity of time so frustrating and alarming, but what needs to be added?

As to why I said, “our lives,” and not “my life,” in part it was because of the communal nature of the event. Asher's tragic death was a blow to everyone who heard about it and knows us even slightly. The evening was so well attended because our friends wanted to express solidarity with us, but they also needed it for themselves, to find some consolation in the sharing of grief, concern, and fear of death.

But I also said “our lives” because my bereavement has opened my heart in a way that I am still baffled by. It has ripped away the defenses I had against compassion. I now know in a way that I never did and never could imagine what it is to lose someone one loves, not in the ordinary way of old age and gradual slipping into death, but in the shocking, unexpected way of losing someone who was “too young” to die.

I'm baffled because it means that I was emotionally stupid before, and I never thought of myself that way. Why did I need such painful and unnecessary shock and loss to learn something so self-evident?

The Thirtieth Day

2008-02-27T08:38:00.000+02:00

We held a memorial for Asher in our synagogue on the evening following the thirtieth day after his funeral: the shloshim. That was on February 7. About 150 people attended. Our close friend, the composer Stephen Horenstein, played a piece of his own on tenor saxophone to open the evening. I spoke, my wife read poems out loud that people had sent us or read during the previous month, our surviving son spoke, we screened two short films that Asher had made when he was studying film-making at the Sam Spiegel School, and we served splendid food cooked by Aliza Press, a gourmet caterer who is also a friend of ours and knew Asher well. She told us that the highest compliment she received during the evening was that the food tasted as if Asher had prepared it.

Our son and I decided to speak in Hebrew, even though there were some people there who don't know Hebrew. It seemed right. Asher was very Israeli.

As I did with the eulogy I gave for Asher, I'll post the Hebrew text and then explain what I said gradually.

דברים שאמרתי בטקס לכובד ה"שלושים" של אשר ז"ל

אין הבט של חיינו יותר מתסכל ויותר מבהיל מנזילות הזמן. העבר מתפורר ומסתלף בזיכרונותינו – ונשכח, נעלם. ההווה חולף יותר מהר מחרף עין. העתיד הוא רק אשליה, תוצר של דמיוננו. אי אפשר לדעת מראש מה יקרה או לסמוך על מה שאנחנו מצפים.

לכן יש לבני אדם צורך כפייתי לקבוע מועדים, לתקוע יתדות ברצף הזמן. אנחנו רוצים לאחוז בזמן, לשלוט בו. לצורך זה אנחנו קובעים זמנים ומועדים – אבל הכל מלאכותי – הכל נובע מהצורך שלנו לא ללכת לאיבוד בתוך מערבולת הזמן.

היהדות מתמחה דווקא בחלוקת זמן, בקביעת זמן, בקידוש הזמן. היום הוא ה"שלושים" לקבורתו של בננו היקר אשר. אנחנו חייבים להעניק חשיבות למספר הזה של ימים שעברו, למרות שאנחנו יודעים שזה לגמרי שרירותי.

עברנו תקופות שונות מאז אמצע חודש אוקטובר, כשאשר עזב את העיר ניו-יורק ונסע לפרו:

במשך קרוב לשלושה שבועות קיבלנו דואר אלקטרוני ממנו באופן רציף, תיאורים מלאי התלהבות של חוויותיו, מלווים בצילומים מרתקים ויפים.

אחר-כך עברו כשבועיים כשציפינו לשמוע ממנו ביציאתו מקניון קולקה. ובעצם בזמן זה ככל הנראה הוא כבר היה מת, אבל לא ידענו.

אחר כך התחילה תקופת הדאגה, החיפושים, האי-וודאות, המאמצים האדירים לאתר אותו ולהציל אותו.

אז עבר תקופה של כמעט שבוע מזמן גילוי גופתו עד להבאתו לישראל לקבורה, ימים קשים של סידורים ופעילות נמרצת, ימים של מתח נפשי וחוסר אונים.

אז באה השבעה: זמן מיוחד בו תמכו בנו חברינו המסורים ואין מילים בפי להודות לכל אלה שעזרו, שביקרו, שניחמו. זה היה מרגש וחשוב: הוכחה לנו שלמרות השכול, יש בעולם אהבה רבה.

ועכשיו אנחנו מסמנים את סוף השלושים, כאילו זה הסוף של משהו. אבל אנחנו יודעים שזה אינו הסוף.

אנחנו יודעים שהחור הכאוב שנקרע ברקמת חיינו יישאר לנצח – לנצח לפחות במונחים אנושיים, בקנה מידה של חיי קרוביו המתאבלים של אשר – אני ויהודית, עדן ועופר, בעז וחנה, כל חבריו וחברינו, כל מי שיזכור אותו עד סוף חייהם.

מעכשיו אנו אמורים לחזור לחיינו הרגילים. אני כבר אינני מחויב לומר קדיש, אנחנו יכולים לשמוע מוזיקה ולהשתתף בשמחות. אבל יש בי משהו שאינו רוצה לחזור לחיי הרגילים, יש בי משהו הרוצה להמשיך להתאבל עוד תקופה ארוכה. לכן אולי טוב שמנהגי האבל של היהדות מכריחים אותי לחדול.

יהי זכרו של אשר זאב בן יעקב משה ויהודית ברוך.

The Difference between Sadness and Depression

2008-02-20T10:53:00.000+02:00

When I am depressed, I am never depressed about anything specific. I'm depressed about the way the world is, or about the way I am in the world.
It's akin to free-floating anxiety. I'm not worried about whether a certain job that I want will come my way, or whether a performance I'm going to be in will be successful. I'm worried in a general, unfocused way, about everything.
When I'm depressed, I wake up at four or five in the morning and lie there, knowing it's pointless to get up and equally pointless to stay in bed. 'when I'm anxious, I can't fall asleep. Fortunately, I'm rarely both anxious and depressed at the same time. That would leave me about half an hour to sleep.
Now I'm sad. I'm sad about something very specific: my wonderful son died.
When I'm depressed, I know, from experience, that the depression will pass. Fortunately I've never sunk into deep, clinical depression. I think it's a matter of biorhythms for me - if people still believe in biorhythms these days. Or else I've been sick or am about to be sick. Like now. I had the flu last week, and I'm still recovering, left with annoying, hacking cough. That's depressing. The cough will eventually go away, I'll feel better, and I'll forget how sick I was.
But I know that this sadness about Asher won't pass.
There's something stupid about this situation, not about being sad now, but about ever having thought I was completely happy. Only a mindless adult could ever be completely happy. Was I ever mindless? Was I ever completely happy? Neither of the above - but I apparently possessed a high ability to ignore the sadness of life.
On Saturday our daughter was here with her three children, and around two o'clock the sun was bright and warm. I went out for a walk with our two big old dogs and my two grandsons, the seven-year-old and the three-year-old. We walked down the flight of stone stairs at the top of the dead-end street that leads down in the direction of Mount Zion. The seven-year-old raced down the hill with all the recklessness of his age, and I held the hand of the cautious three-year-old as we made our slower way down.
We turned left on Ein Rogel Street, walked to the corner of the Hebron Road, and crossed, waiting patiently for the lights to change. We walked downhill till we came to a short stone stairway leading up to the hill adjacent to the Scottish Church. I had promised the seven-year-old to take him back to some ancient tombs that I had shown him once. All of the Hinnom Valley is honeycombed with ancient burial caves. The ones I had in mind are nestled between the Scottish Church and the new Begin Center. The seven-year-old asked me whether Asher was buried there.
After we visited the burial caves, which were flooded from the recent rains, we climbed up to the top of the grassy hill, which, for some reason, remains undeveloped in the center of an over-developed city. Yellow and red wildflowers were blooming, the dogs roamed about freely, several families with young children were up there enjoying the sun, the view, and the flowers. I looked at the splendid view to the East with my grandson, pointing out the walls of the Old City, Jaffa Gate, Mount Zion, the hotel where his parents were married, the Mount of Olives, the Judean Desert, and the deep valley where the Dead Sea nestles, out of sight.
That was a happy moment: holding the three-year-old boy's hand and watching the seven-year-old climb up every rock and jump off safely onto the soft ground beneath.

Asher's Grave

2008-02-04T07:55:00.001+02:00

By now there's a monument on it, with a quotation from the end of Genesis, from Jacob's blessings to his sons: "Out of Asher his bread shall be fat, and he shall yield royal delicacies" - a perfect verse for a young man who had devoted the past three years to cookery.
I still find it nearly impossible to believe that Asher is under that earth, even though we sat with the body (wrapped in a shroud, thank God) before the funeral and smelled the effects of two months of exposure to the elements, even though we saw the body placed in the ground, and the earth piled up on it. There is a difference between knowing something factually and objectively and knowing something emotionally. How can we accept the death of a vigorous young man, a man with energy, plans for the future, enthusiasm for life?
Here in Israel, people are not buried in coffins. They are exposed immediately to the earth. The first time I saw a funeral here, I was appalled. Now it seems normal - as normal as a funeral can ever seem.
Asher was with me, at the age of thirteen, when my mother died in New Jersey. He didn't want to sit in the room with her body, but I did. I looked at her and thought: this body isn't my mother anymore. That's the way I feel about Asher's body.
When we're alive, we are our bodies, and they are us. When our bodies die, they stop being us. The rationalist side of my personality says that it's ridiculous to devote huge plots of lands to cemeteries. If you extrapolate, ultimately the whole world will be a cemetery, and there will be nowhere left for the living. But the emotional side of my personality is glad that at least Asher's body is here, that at least there is a physical monument to the twenty-eight years that he was privileged to live.
To console us, people often say that there is nothing worse than losing a child, nothing as "unnatural." It is certainly terrible, but "unnatural"? Hardly. Even a hundred years ago, child mortality was so high, even in the developed world, that there was probably no family where some child hadn't died. People lived with a lot more grief then than we do today.
Anyway, I think that the level of people's bereavement is impossible to measure. How can you say that one loss is greater than another? Doesn't it depend on who the people are?
We didn't lose a son and brother, we lost a very specific person, Asher Zeev Green, and our loss is the loss of that person, the hole torn in our souls by his being taken away, the rift in our relations with other people because of his absence. For some people, the death of a parent, even an aged parent whose death was expected, can be devastating. Others may be consoled by knowing that their parent lived a long and fruitful life. That is a consolation we will never have as we mourn for Asher.
Long before his death, I had been thinking about my own situation in life, a man in his early sixties: what is the proper aspiration for a person my age? What should I try to do, hope to do, plan to do? Now that Asher is dead, I feel totally devoid of aspirations. I don't want to do anything. I can't imagine what will feel like success at anything.
A close friend of ours lost her daughter to cancer about seven years ago, and she decided to revamp her life completely, to study social work so that she can help other people facing such wrenching bereavement. I admire her for having the vision to use the tragedy that befell her to give her life meaning. I hope that I will think of something equally meaningful and new to do. For the moment, though, I can barely conceive of the future beyond the end of each day.

Yet More from the Eulogy

2008-01-31T15:41:00.001+02:00

I've been using the words I spoke in the presence of Asher's body at the funeral to organize my thoughts. In the meanwhile, of course, we are approaching the thirtieth day after his burial, and we have been through a lot: the seven day mourning period, when we were at home and friends came and visited us and took care of us; the subsequent period, during which we have been fortunate to have our other son with us - on leave without pay from his job with a law firm in Washington DC. I've been attending morning prayers every day, indeed leading them, as the person in the heaviest period of mourning is expected to do, and reciting the kaddish: May His great name be magnified and sanctified...
During the six weeks of tension between the time when we realized that Asher was missing and the time when we learned that his body had been found, I was more or less unable to pray - in fact during the past few years I had been growing more and more distant from prayer and religious ritual. But since his funeral, I have felt that it's right and fitting to pray - not for the "elevation of his soul" as the tradition has it, but in an effort to put together what his death has shattered.
The next thing I said in the eulogy was: I learned a great deal during that limbo period, when Asher was merely missing, not necessarily dead.
The first thing I learned was the amazing power of the imagination, something which, as a student of literature, ought not to have been surprising to me. We knew next to nothing about what had happened to Asher. We had received an email from him, sent from the little town of Chivay the day before he left on the hike, telling us not to worry, that he wasn't planning to do anything dangerous. There was no record of his staying in any hotel or hostel in Chivay. No one remembered him. For all we know he had been murdered or abducted that evening, before he even got to Colca Canyon.
The most probable thing was exactly what did happen, that he had fallen to his death. But even after weeks of intense searches, his body had not been found, suggesting that something else had happened to him. We hoped that he was sick or injured, lying in someone's home, hospitalized somewhere, that he had run away with a local woman, that he had decided to go off and learn how to be a shaman with a mountain wizard ... any scenario that might leave him alive. With virtually no concrete information, the imagination can do wonders.
That period was one of great fear, great tension, great sadness, and great confusion. We continued trying to live our ordinary lives, and at the same time we, as a family, devoted enormous efforts to finding Asher. There were days when I was hopeful and days when I was pessimistic, with no concrete reason for either feeling.
We were fearful that we might never know what had happened to Asher, that he might be missing forever. I can't say with a whole heart that I wouldn't have preferred that to knowing that he is dead. Wouldn't it have been better to have him be missing for even a year or two and then show up? But I'm not sure we could have lived with the tension.
I didn't tell everyone what I was going through. There wasn't any point. What was I going to say, "Oh, by the way, our twenty-eight year old son disappeared in Peru"? So a lot of people were taken by surprise when the news of his death came out. I play in a big band. During the time he was missing, I went to rehearsals and performed twice. Now, during the thirty days since his funeral, I haven't been going to rehearsals. People in mourning aren't supposed to enjoy music, according to the Jewish tradition.
Living with the grief is not easy, but grief is an emotion we share with other people. Too many other people. Life is full of sadness now, and all our future joy will be colored by it.
That's what I said afterward in the eulogy: Asher's death has torn a huge hole in our lives, in the lives of his immediate family, in the lives of our community here in Israel, and in the lives of a huge network of friends and relatives abroad. A few people came to visit us during the shiva who had suffered similar losses, and they told us never to expect the wound to heal. In fact, I would think of myself as unfeeling and shallow if the wound ever did heal. I don't want to stop feeling sad about the loss of my wonderful son.
I concluded the eulogy with mention of a prayer that observant Jews recite every morning, one in a series of morning benedictions, beginning, "Blessed are You, O Lord, Our God, Who gives the cock intelligence to distinguish between day and night."
I had stopped reciting those blessings for a long time, but before the funeral, I said them again, and I got to the one that says: "Blessed are You, O Lord, Our God, Who prepares a man's steps," and I thought that, in Asher's case, it didn't work. Asher's steps led him to his premature death. What is one to think? That sometimes God watches your steps, and sometimes He doesn't? That He watches some people's steps and not others? That He meant Asher to fall? Or that it would be great if He did watch out steps for us?
I have religious friends who lost children and spouses to cancer, and the prayers say that God heals the sick. Not easy to say for a person whose loved one wasn't healed.
Strangely, I'm not angry. I'm not angry at God, whatever that might mean, for letting Asher fall, and I'm not angry at Asher for taking the wrong trail and not turning back when he got to a tricky place. While we were in doubt, I sometimes looked angrily at someone Asher's age and said to myself, "Why aren't you missing, instead of Asher?" But I don't want anyone to be missing. I don't want anyone to die young. I don't want to deepen the sadness of the world.

So, I've reached the end of the eulogy. In a week we'll reach the end of the thirty days of deep mourning dictated by the Jewish tradition, but we haven't reached the end of anything.

More from the Eulogy

2008-01-29T20:26:00.000+02:00

Toward the end of the eulogy, I said that I learned a lot from Asher, and that possibly the most important thing I learned was that when a person doesn't fit into frameworks, maybe the frameworks are wrong, not the person.
Every child teaches his or her parents how to be a parent for that specific child. There is no such thing as "father" and "mother" and "son" in the abstract sense. There are a couple of billion individual fathers, mothers, and sons, and each of them is unique. It took me a long time to learn how to be Asher's father - I'm not sure that I ever truly learned, but even though he's no longer alive, I can keep trying to learn.
I always adapted well to frameworks, until I finished university and had to step out of academic frameworks into real life. At that point I discovered that I couldn't cope with bureaucracies, which is why I've been self-employed for more than twenty-five years. It was difficult for me to have a son who never fit into schools. I wasn't brought up to question institutions, and I didn't go off to battle them on Asher's behalf when he got in trouble. Perhaps I should have. I always thought he should have been more adaptable, that he should have behaved better. Perhaps he should have.
But looking back on things, I wouldn't have wanted to have Asher any other way. If the schools couldn't accommodate a bright, talented, creative person like him, there was something deeply wrong with the schools. If his teachers were threatened by his originality and intensity, that shows their inadequacy as teachers.
We received a wonderful letter from a remarkable woman who was the principal of his school for a year, who remembered Asher's intense honesty and integrity with respect, even gratitude. If he had had more teachers like that, he would have fit in better.

More of the Eulogy

2008-01-27T13:42:00.000+02:00

The next two lines of the eulogy read:

Asher was a complex person
Asher had an extreme personality

The first statement might have been superfluous. He was intelligent, sensitive, multi-talented, and rebellious - so how could he have failed to be complex?

The complexity of Asher's personality was directly related to its extremeness. He threw himself into projects, conversations, encounters, and experiences with enthusiasm - but he sometimes withdrew and withheld himself, becoming unreachable for a while. He occasionally flew into white hot rages (less and less frequently as he matured), and he often bought extravagant gifts for his friends.

Asher was confused by his own personality and devoted significant effort to self-understanding, especially when he understood that he had done something destructive and wasn't sure why.

I have long had the sense that certain people have chosen to play more demanding roles in life than others, and Asher was definitely someone what like that, a bundle of contradictions. He was intelligent, a retentive, critical, and omnivorous reader, but the last thing he wanted to be thought of was an "intellectual." He enjoyed the courses in art history and other fields, to which he was exposed in film school and art school, and he did well in them, but he had no interest in finishing a BA. He was artistically talented, but he never wanted to call himself an artist. He enjoyed business and was good at getting jobs and making money, but he didn't care about money at all. His political opinions verged on anarchism, which may explain why he was not drawn to political activism.

I went on to say that he had a commanding presence. When you went to a restaurant with Asher, he knew how to get the waiters' attention. He was lively with an infectious laugh. For about half a year he was the manager of the tapas bar where he had started as the chef. He stayed in the front room and made sure everyone who entered was greeted and seated, made sure the food was served promptly, made sure the patrons liked what they ordered, gave people the feeling they were welcome and valued. He also had the task of hiring waiters and barmen, and he handled it with maturity and responsibility, interviewing dozens of candidates confidently and conscientiously.

Ofer Israeli's Second Report

2008-01-25T09:07:00.000+02:00

After Asher's funeral, Ofer wrote his second and final report, which I have also translated into English:

Greetings,

On Tuesday, January 8, 2008, the funeral of Asher Zeev Green of blessed memory, my wife's brother, was held in Jerusalem. As you know, Asher disappeared about two months ago in Peru in the area of the Colca Canyon. During this time, the family set in motion an enormous effort, spanning continents, to find him alive and well. To our great grief, the hoped for result of finding him alive, safe and sound, was not achieved. Asher was found dead. However, some consolation may be found in that we brought him back to Israel for burial.

After my return from Peru about a month ago, after two intense weeks during which I oversaw the searches for him on the ground, several groups remained in place and continued working. The most significant of these was that of the High Mountain Police of Peru, with whom I had worked during my presence there. Fifteen members of the group, under the command of Robert, continued to look for Asher every day without cease, including their holidays. The searches were concentrated at that time in isolated canyons and gorges, inaccessible by foot, where we had not managed to search while I was there; these places require the use of ropes and special means for rappelling and climbing cliffs; our comrades progressed slowly, because it is possible to survey only from one to three hundred meters along the cliff every day – but they persisted. The work was done according to a plan that I had prepared with Robert, the commander of the unit, before I left Peru; after my return to Israel, every evening, Israel time, I spoke with the office of the unit in the city of Chivay, and I brought the maps in my possession up to date. After analyzing the data, I would decide, with the full cooperation of Robert, the commander of the unit, on the way in which the searches on the ground should continue, taking the weather conditions into account as well as the number of men available for the searches and many other factors.

About two months after his disappearance, a forty-three-year-old resident of the village of Cabanaconde named Diego found Asher. Diego, who earns his living by collecting herbs for the cosmetic industry, happened to be walking along a trail, which is inaccessible in Western terms, having taken a shortcut home because rain began to fall, and he came upon Asher's pack. Afterward he discovered his body. A two hours hike—which would take more than six hours for other people—brought Diego back to the local police station in the village of Cabanaconde. This picturesque village is the point of departure for most of the treks in the canyon and apparently was also Asher's point of departure.

Because the rainy season had begun, it was not possible to recover Asher's body immediately, and the operation was postponed for two more days. Finally, the members of the High Mountain Police set out for the place where Asher had been found at three a.m. on Thursday morning, January 3, 2008. After about three hours of descent, using mountaineering techniques, they reached Asher. After another two hours, they began his removal to the village of Cabanaconde. This difficult trail, which does not serve as a conventional hiking path but is mainly used by wild animals, presented enormous challenges to the rescue team. Moreover, a few hours after the beginning of the recovery, steady rain began to fall, increasing the great danger facing the rescuers. Finally, after approximately another twelve hours from the beginning of the recovery (it began around seven in the morning and ended only toward seven in the evening) the rescue team reached the village of Cabanaconde on the top of the cliff.

At the same time, Boaz, Asher's brother, and I left for Peru. The goals of our trip were to assure the swift and proper transfer of Asher's remains to Israel, in accordance with Jewish law, to present the reward that we had promised to anyone who found Asher, and more than anything else to thank the members of the High Mountain Police, who worked tirelessly during the past two months and were those who ultimately removed him from the canyon.

After I landed in Lima, the capital of Peru, on Friday night, we went to identify Asher. The process was long and shocking for me, and at this time it is very hard for me to estimate its long-range influence on me. Immediately afterward, at four a.m. on Saturday, I took a flight to the city of Arequipa. From there I traveled another four hours to the town of Chivay, from which I had made the searches on my previous visit to Peru a month earlier. It took me another three hours to reach the village of Cabanaconde. After examining the contents of the pack that Asher had carried with him, mainly the travel journal that he had written, I was required to leave it in the police station. Immediately afterward I went out with the members of the High Mountain Police to the nearest point to the place where Asher had been found. Because of the weather conditions, it was not possible to enter the canyon safely and reach the exact point where he had been found. When I reached the place, I received a detailed description of the process of recovery from the members of the unit, and especially from their commander Robert. Later, I held short a personal and religious ceremony where I read Psalms 91. I choose to quote verse 12 to you: "Lest your foot stumble." It is astonishing how appropriate those words are to what ultimately happened to Asher.

Later at night I performed a ceremony in which I gave Diego, the man who located Asher, the sum of fifteen hundred dollars. This was done as had been promised in a poster that we had published before leaving Peru. During the ceremony it became clear to me that Diego and his family are desperately poor, and his work, which unbearably hard, does not permit him to live a decent life. I found great consolation in knowing that the prize was finally given to a family that needed it desperately and not to someone affluent.

Even later I met with Alejandro, a local "wizard," who had walked with the High Mountain Police during the entire period. This amazing man was not willing to accept payment for his work, and I compensated him by buying him basic foodstuffs (rice, flour, sugar, oil, and so on). Such a gesture was one that Alejandro could not refuse. During the time of searching, quite a few mediums were in contact with us: Alejandro and some Western psychics. In the end I found that of them all, Alejandro was the closest with respect to the description of the event—both with regard to the circumstances and also with to the location where we found Asher. I leave it to you whether this is significant.

The following morning, Sunday, January 6, 2008, I spent with the fifteen members of the High Mountain Police, who had worked for almost two months in searching for Asher. During that time, the members of the unit had truly risked their lives more than once. My personal debt to them and that of the whole family is enormous, impossible to estimate. This sense of obligation led me to try to compensate them in every way possible. However, the honor that characterizes mountain people was revealed here in its full power: the entire group, headed by their commander, refused adamantly to take money from me. This, I must point out, is in absolute contrast to other official bodies in Peru.

Finally I found the appropriate formula: after a long discussion with their commander, Robert, I managed to make him agree that accepting equipment was not a blow to their honor, because it would improve their ability to locate and rescue people in the future, both Peruvians and tourists, who might encounter danger in the region. In the light of this agreement, I took a number of actions:

First, I paid to have their vehicle fixed, for it was not in condition to be driven according to the lowest Western standards.

Second, I bought them a large quantity of cold food such canned goods for use when they went out into the field. It is important to point out that during the entire period from the time I left Peru until Asher was found, the members of the unit performed searches without eating during their time in the field, because the police only buys them unprocessed food such as rice and flour, and not products that can be carried when they go out into the field.

Third, I bought uniforms for them, because these friends had to purchase their official police uniforms with their own money.

Fourth, I bought them other professional equipment such as high quality ropes. This was because their ropes had been worn out during their searches for Asher.

In addition, I performed a kind of group therapy: I sat in a circle with them for more than an hour, and I let them pour out what was on their hearts in front of me and in front of their comrades, in my presence. After they saw me weep profusely more than once, they could overcome the macho inhibitions typical of the local culture and share the difficulties they underwent during the time of searches and mainly during the long and significant recovery of Asher's body in the village of Cabanaconde with me and with the others.

At five p.m. on Sunday I flew back to Lima. At midnight I took another flight to New York, and on Tuesday morning, January 8, I returned to Israel.

After my return to Israel and before the funeral, I made a deep investigation of the photographs and videos that my friends, the members of the High Mountain Police, and I filmed during the time of locating Asher and recovering the body. After summing up matters, I can conclude the following with quite high certainty:

Most probably Asher took the wrong path immediately after leaving the village of Cabanaconde, and he entered a gully that is not frequented by tourists and hikers. This is apparently the reason why we did not locate even a single person who had met him.
After entering this challenging path, he apparently continued his descent, since he did not assess correctly the degree of danger he was facing.
Asher slipped down to his death at a waterfall of forty to eighty meters in height, and he was found beneath it.
The fall gave him no chance of survival, and he ended his life immediately. This conclusion completely negates the dreadful possibility that he might have been lying on the ground, waiting for rescue.
He was found by chance. Indeed, the path he was walking on is not used as a hiking trail, and Diego passed by only by chance.
According to the plan of operations that I laid out, the men of the High Mountain Police would have reached the point where Asher was found about ten days after he was actually found.
However, it is very probable that if Diego had not found Asher, we would never have succeeded in locating him. This is because we are now at the beginning of the rainy season. This season is characterized by many days, sometimes entire weeks, during which heavy rains fall, and they do not allow entry to the canyon and certainly not complex and dangerous search operations. Dry days, in contrast, are very rare. Furthermore, Asher was lying beneath a high waterfall that is now flowing moderately. The heavy and frequent rains greatly increase the flow of water, and this would apparently have led to his being swept down into the Colca River, which is about two hundred meters below, and it flows on to the mighty Amazon, and from there to the Atlantic Ocean.

A full summary of this intense period after such a short time is apparently impossible. Nevertheless, I will lay out certain conclusions:

First, the greatest aspiration of all, to bring Asher home to Israel safe and sound was not achieved. For Asher fell to his death. However, we can find great consolation in that we brought him to Israel for burial.

Second, after penetrating deeply into Asher's thoughts and fantasies by a detailed reading of his journals the letters he wrote, as well as from the emails that he sent to friends and members of his family during his time in Peru, I can state almost with certainty that Asher was having the happiest time ever. He was in the midst of a process of self-knowledge and self-formation. He got to know many people in his time in Peru and they liked him, and he returned their affection.

Third, Asher did not suffer for a moment. His fell from such a height left him no chance. This conclusion was perhaps the most significant one for me. During the first weeks, I was never abandoned by the horrible thought that he was wounded on the ground and waiting for his "soul brother"—indeed that is what we called each other—to come and rescue him. Evidence of that kind, had it been discovered, would probably never have left me in peace.

Fourth, Asher loved that marvelous continent and the people he met in Peru. These people returned his love during his stay there. I state this on the basis of specific words that he wrote in his journal. Indeed, even after his death, so many local people devoted a very significant portion of their lives, more than two months, to find him. This was with real danger to their lives. This point is no less significant for me. For my great love of this continent, especially the Andes region of Peru and Bolivia, made me fear greatly that Asher had fallen victim to some act of violence on the part of the local people. The elimination of that possibility greatly strengthened my love for the place.

In conclusion, my "soul brother," Asher, in the past two months we were all in a terrible circle of expectation of the worst possible outcome. We did everything possible to bring you back to Israel safe and sound, but in the end, the result was horrible from our point of view. I myself have lost a soul brother. However, I found fifteen new blood brothers. These are the members of the High Mountain Police who risked their lives to find you. I, you, and all the members of the family owe a great deal to them.

I firmly hope that in this message, I have reported the main points as precisely as possible. I also hope that I have transmitted my great appreciation for the help you gave to Eden and our three wonderful children during the past time.

With friendship, Ofer.

Ofer Israeli's First Report

2008-01-25T09:01:00.000+02:00

Our son-in-law, Ofer Israeli, dropped everything in the last week of November and went to Peru to look for Asher. Upon his return, he wrote the following report, which I translated into English:

Greetings to all,

As some of you know, three weeks ago I left unexpectedly to supervise the search for Asher, my wife Eden's brother, who disappeared in Peru in the area of the town of Chivay, which is near the city of Arequipa.

After about two weeks had gone by, and we hadn't heard from him, we began an extensive search for him from Israel, including telephone calls to the hotels and hostels, tourist agencies, and the local police. All efforts to reach Asher were fruitless, and in a decision made at the spur of the moment, I decided to go and supervise the searches for him locally. I was joined by Boaz, his brother, and together we stayed there for about two weeks.

I performed the searches in the area with professional teams from the High Mountain Rescue Squad, whose men specialize in finding and evacuating hikers in the surrounding mountains and canyons. These men worked with me shoulder to shoulder and did an excellent job. The work routine was as follows: I would go out with six men for two days of searches, while the other six rested and gathered strength in Chivay; every two days the teams switched, and I would go out with six fresher men. On the fifth day of searches I would flood the area with twelve men.

The rationale that guided me was to look first on the easier trails and only afterward to expand the search to the more difficult and dangerous routes. This was after I and Asher's sisters, my wife Eden and Hannah, who were in Israel, and his brother Boaz, who was with me in Peru, analyzed Asher's character. We came to the conclusion that Asher would most probably take the easy hiking trail and not risk dangerous or irrational adventures. Nevertheless, after we checked the easy trails, we went out to the harder and more distant ones, which most tourists don't reach.

On the last days of our searches we acted in a more focused way in specific places where an incautious hiker might lose his balance and fall: vertical cliffs over 1,000 meters high that end at the floor of the canyon. Here we descended with ropes over 200 meters long and surveyed at the bottom of the cliff with binoculars.

Additionally, during the days of searching, I frequently made use of a tracking dog to find Asher by means of the used clothing that we took out of his knapsack, which he had left in Arequipa.

During our stay, following the advice of the local people, including the men of the mountain police, we turned to local “wizards.” The locals were absolutely certain that they would be able to help us, and I went along with them and accepted their insistent requests. The experience was unique and even heavenly and greatly increased the assurance of the searchers – I have attached a few photographs that illustrate the rituals that we carried out.

Further searches were made in the vicinity of the town of Chivay and the cliff that surrounds it. This was done in order to eliminate the possibility that he might be found near the town. I finished the last day of searching at 17:00 in the office of the police commander of Arequipa, to whom I made an official report of Asher's disappearance. An hour later I was on a plane to Lima.

The next morning Boaz and I had meetings with several people in Lima. We met with a representative of the Jewish community, who put us in contact with a local private detective agency. After a discussion and consultation with Mr. Yossi Maimon, an Israeli businessman with extensive connections and strong influence in Peru, we decided to hire the detectives. We also met with representatives of the American Embassy to see how they could help us. Pressure was put on the American Embassy by Senator Hillary Clinton by means of influential relatives and members of Boaz' law firm in Washington. We also met with the local Chabad rabbi, Rabbi Hareuveni who promised to help us by turning to local religious leaders.

The situation now is as follows: we left Peru without finding Asher. In the field, four teams are now at work: one is the local mountain police, whose men constantly patrol the area and give me a daily report about the places where they have been, and I bring my map up to date; the local police in Arequipa, who have sent representatives to the place; the private detective agency, mentioned before, has sent two men to the area who are performing an independent investigation (I promised to double their fee if they find Asher, and I hope this is a sufficient incentive for them to search thoroughly); the fourth team in action is a kind of federal police, which sent agents from Lima. My sister Shoshi, who lived in Spain for years, put us in contact with a Spanish billionaire who spoke with the President of Peru, who is now personally involved in the investigation.

Our future expectation is as follows: we all hope that one or more of the four teams that are now in action in the area will manage to find Asher. If not, I will probably go back to perform more searches in the area, possibly next June and July at the end of the semester.

I hope that with this message, in which I have summed up the main points, I have satisfied your curiosity and, most importantly, that I have expressed my personal gratitude as well as that of Eden and our children for the great help that you extended to out family while I was in Peru. I will try to keep you up to date on developments from time to time, hoping that they will be positive.

I am attaching pictures to make things more graphic for you,

With thanks to you all,

Ofer

Eulogy Expanded (2)

2008-01-25T08:42:00.000+02:00

When I came to the next lines of the eulogy, I couldn't go on. When I first wrote them and spoke them, I didn't realize how tragic they were.
Here's the translation of what I said:

Asher was a brave person.

He did not avoid risk.

He was quick to decide and quick to act.

We think that Asher died for those very reasons. He apparently started off on the wrong trail into the Colca Canyon, and when he reached a difficult place, instead of turning back, he decided to try and get past it: he was brave, he did not avoid risk, he decided and acted quickly.

That was not what I had in mind consciously when I wrote those words. I wasn't thinking of physical courage but of the courage he needed to drop out of a secure program in art school, where he was doing well, and to try his luck in the hard and competitive world of New York. I wasn't thinking of danger to his life, but of the risk of trying something new, time after time.

After he finished the cooking course, he got a job at the Core Club, an extremely exclusive private club for the wealthy and well-connected on Manhattan. He worked there for six grueling months, getting up at 4:30 in the morning so he could be at work by six and start cooking breakfast for the members. He stayed on through lunch and then went home and collapsed. The cuisine there was on the highest gourmet level, and at the time Asher was planning to stay on a path that would lead him, eventually, to become a gourmet chef. However, after six months, the club started faltering, he was working fewer hours, and enjoying it less and less, until he finally quit and started out in an entirely different direction by taking over the kitchen of the tapas bar. Once he made up his mind to leave the Core Club, it didn't take him long to do it: quick to decide and quick to act.

If Asher had been more cautious and less impetuous, he would probably be alive now, but he wouldn't have been the Asher we loved, admired, worried about, and treasured.

Time Out

2008-01-23T18:59:00.000+02:00

I've only gotten about half way through the eulogy.
I'll get back to it.
I keep thinking how wrong the whole thing was.
I should have been lying there, wrapped in a shroud, on a stretcher, and Asher should have been saying the eulogy.
I wonder what he would have said.

My sense of time has been confused by bereavement.
Ordinarily I am very jealous of my time. I have a lot to do every day, and I try to use my time, plan my time, control my time, so that I can end the day with the satisfaction of having accomplished something.
Now I look at time as a kind of desert that has to be crossed somehow. I think of my days as huge, barren expanses that have to be filled somehow, because I don't care very much about what I'm doing.
I've been getting up at five to six every morning, so that I can make it to synagogue on time to lead morning prayers and recite the kaddish in honor of Asher.
Despite the strong Jewish prohibition against music during mourning, I have been practicing saxophone or clarinet every day since the end of the shiva, the seven day period of deep mourning. That's another hour or so that I can fill. I've been doing very technical stuff, long tones, scales, intervals, taking advantage of the patience that grief has given me.
I'm working, editing someone's book, but it's hard to concentrate on work.
I can't plan for the future or even imagine the future. Imagining what I might do tomorrow takes a huge effort.
I don't think about Asher all the time, but the thought of Asher is always just one thought away, and I never know what will trigger it.
On February 7 we will mark the thirtieth day after Asher's burial. Until then I'm not supposed to shave or have my hair cut, I'm supposed to recite the kaddish for him ... after that no mourning restrictions apply to parents who have lost a child, although children who have lost parents are supposed to observe mourning restrictions for a year.
I know that we're supposed to go back to living an ordinary life, but I also know that every joy we have will be hollow, and every sorrow that we have will be that much deeper.

Eulogy Expanded

2008-01-21T18:48:00.000+02:00

The next four lines of my eulogy for Asher read as follows:

Asher matured profoundly during his three years in New York.

This makes his death even more painful for me.

He was at a turning point in his life.

He had clarified his values and priorities for himself.

He had been living on his own for a while, first during his two years in England, then, when he came back to Israel, he got a job as a production assistant at an avant garde theater school. He rented a room in a picturesque flat in an old building with high ceilings near the center of Jerusalem, and he stayed there for two or three years. After the director of the school left, and the new director hired someone else, Asher worked and studied in various places. While he was at film school, renting a room seemed like an extravagance to him, so he moved into a studio apartment we had carved out of our home, after three of our four children moved out.
Asher persuaded us to enlarge the studio apartment by cutting an unused room in two - if you haven't seen our house, you won't be able to imagine this very easily. Although the studio apartment gave him privacy and comfort, he didn't like being dependent on us. If he had stayed in art school for another three years, he would have been in his late twenties and still living at home, not on his own, not supporting himself. So a strong motivation behind his decision to move from Visual Communications to Haute Cuisine was to take care of himself, to step away from dependency on his parents.
Within a week of his arrival in New York, he had found an apartment and a job, and from then on he made his own living in New York, took care of himself, lived like a grown up - as a young man in his twenties should. I'm sure he was very pleased with the knowledge that he could take care of himself, that he relished his own self-confidence.
As a parent, nothing has pleased me more than seeing my children grow up and take charge of their own lives: seeing our married daughter become a loving, responsible mother, seeing Asher's older brother complete law school and take on a serious job in a big firm, seeing Asher move forward in his chosen career path, and seeing his younger sister thrive in her university studies (also enjoying her presence in our home for the time being). If a parent has enabled his or her children to become self-sufficient adults, that parent can be called successful.
At first Asher thought he would aim toward becoming a gourmet chef, but after about a year of studying and working in high end restaurants, he took a job managing the kitchen of a tapas bar in the Lower East Side, making good food, but not for wealthy people who think nothing of paying a few hundred dollars for a meal. Later he studied restaurant management and considered opening a restaurant of his own, but after examining the financial risks he decided against it. Rents were too high in the area where he wanted to open the restaurant. Meanwhile he was working in a very successful Malaysian restaurant on Manhattan. Finally, however, he decided to use his skills to benefit people rather than to make as much money as he could, and he was planning to volunteer for a project run by his teacher in the restaurant management course, teaching restaurant skills to street kids in Asia.
Asher had a firm belief in the value of good nutrition, in avoiding factory-processed foods, in fostering local foods and genetic variation. One of his reasons for going to Peru was to visit the home of maize and potatoes, where a lot of the original genetic variety was still preserved. I can imagine that if he had lived, he would have become involved in nutritional education, in spreading the value he found in cooking, serving, and eating real food. He also had a strong commitment to hospitality, not in the cynical, commercial sense of serving customers and getting money out of them, but in the true, deep sense of making people feel welcome and comfortable.
The following line in the eulogy reads: I expected good surprises from Asher.
I was hoping he would put together his skills in design, management, cooking, and human relations into something wonderful and astonishing. He certainly would have done so, had he lived.

Eulogy Explained (4)

2008-01-20T09:06:00.000+02:00

The next thing I said about Asher at his funeral is that he was quite rebellious.
I don't think he was rebellious out of anger (though obviously there has to be a fair amount of anger in any rebellion) so much as out of integrity. He had a strong inner sense of what was right and just, and he would not have that be violated. Because he was also a deeply loving person, his rebelliousness caused him a lot of inner conflict, which he was trying to understand and cope with to the last days of his short, intense life.
Asher's rebelliousness was hard for me to handle as his father, because it often made me furious at him. Yet I always admired him for having the courage and conviction to rebel. I myself never rebelled openly against authority. Being the only child of a mother with a very strong and controlling personality, I shunned confrontation, because I had no chance of emerging victorious. But Asher grew up as the third child of four in a family that gave him a lot of room to be himself. He knew that there would always be a way back, even after an intense crisis.
We were upset and bewildered when Asher dropped out of high school after tenth grade, but since there was the option of studying independently for his matriculation examinations, we realized that he wasn't denying himself options. In any event there was no way we could have forced him to continue. The school, one of the most flexible and liberal schools in Jerusalem, wouldn't take him back, so even if we had insisted, there was nowhere for him to go.
As Asher grew into manhood, his rebelliousness toned down and became independence, determination to find his own way in life, with confidence in his abilities. He remained intensely critical of authority and the abuse of power, though he was also somewhat cynical about political and social action.
Parents ought to learn from their children at every stage of their respective lives, and I am still learning from Asher after his death. Asher's adolescence coincided with a difficult time in my life. My father died when Asher was eleven, and my mother died shortly after his thirteenth birthday. In fact, Asher and I were visiting my mother, following the celebration of his Bar Mitzvah, when she died. Although my parents were both in their eighties, and neither of them died unexpectedly or tragically, it was not easy for me to deal with the change in my status from devoted son to middle-aged orphan. In retrospect - I never thought of this until Asher himself died - having lost my parents at that time must have made it difficult for me to respond with love to the turmoil that Asher was going through in his teens. Asher withdrew into his own life then, avoiding us as much as he could, and he was very precocious. He had a girlfriend a few years older than he, he used to spend a lot of time with her and her friends in Tel Aviv, and we really didn't know what he was doing with himself. Probably because I was coping with my own bereavement, and because I am averse to confrontation, I took the easy way out and let Asher do as he pleased.
Several close friends of our family, who are also professional psychologists, have complimented us on the way we handled that difficult period in Asher's life, for letting him be independent, but I have residual doubts about it.

More about Asher's Talents

2008-01-20T08:41:00.000+02:00

I once reproached Asher for taking things up and dropping them instead of pursuing them until he mastered them, which is what he was on the way to doing at last with cooking. He responded that he had gotten what he needed out of the things that he tried, and that was enough for him.
This leads me into a train of thought. Upon reading in today's paper that Bobby Fischer died, I realized there is a huge difference between talent and obsession. A person who is obsessed with an activity risks becoming unbalanced - his or her achievements in that field may be extraordinary, but they come at the expense of breadth of character, They are enslaved to what they do. Obsession is neither a guarantee of achievement nor a sine qua non for it. Talented people love what they do and engage in the activities they're good at because of that love, as an expression of that love. Asher's talents derived from enthusiasm, from love. If he didn't love what he was doing, he stopped doing it.
Last year a young man his age, who had wrestled with deep depression, hanged himself. Asher had been a close friend of his for a while when they were in high school. Then, for some reason, which he never told us, he became so angry with his former friend that he broke off all contact with him - very rare with Asher, who used to have furious fights with people and then make up and become even closer friends. Later, as Asher understood how deeply distressed his former friend was, he felt compassion for him, though they never became close friends again. The news of that young man's suicide was as shattering for his parents, his parents' friends (including my wife and me), and the whole circle of people who had known him as was the news of Asher's accidental death in Peru. Naturally that suicide aroused fear in me that Asher might do something like that as well. Who c0uld tell what kind of stress he might be facing and hiding from us? But of course, thinking back about who Asher was, I realize that he loved life too much to have killed himself intentionally.

Eulogy Explained (3)

2008-01-17T14:51:00.000+02:00

The third thing I said was that Asher was a very talented person. His major talent was in drawing and painting. During the seven-day mourning period, a friend from elementary school spoke to us about how Asher drew constantly in class. His teachers let him draw, because if he kept busy with that, he wasn't disruptive. School came easily to him, and he was bored by the lessons. He used to sit in the back of the room and draw comic books, which he actually sold to other pupils (typical of Asher, by the way).
Another visitor, a retired art teacher, remembered how Asher stood out in the classes she gave at the Israel Museum. He would come early, stay late, work well and hard, and help out. This is a perfect example of Asher's attitude toward teachers. He didn't take her classes seriously because they were official classes given in the Youth Wing of the museum, or because she had the title of teacher, or because she was his parents' age. He took her classes seriously because she was a good artist and a good teacher. It's a tribute to him that some fifteen years after he studied with her, despite the hundreds of pupils she saw during her career, she still remembered Asher.
When Asher was about three, we took him to an exhibition of colorful paintings by Ruth Tsarfati, a famous illustrator of children's books. He was so delighted by the bright colors and images that he truly danced with joy. I've never seen a child respond so immediately to visual art.
Later on he became interested in movies, and he was a gifted film critic, responding to films with precocious insight and sensitivity. In ninth grade he started studying cinema in the High School of the Arts in Jerusalem, and he was happy during his first year there, when the film program was small.
For a while Asher also played drums. When he was very little, we took him to an ultra-orthodox wedding that we were invited to, where the musical entertainment was limited to a male singer who accompanied himself on a drum set, because some extremely pious Jews avoid playing musical instruments in Jerusalem, a sign of continued mourning for the destruction of the Temple. The next morning, Asher took all the big pots and their lids out of the cupboard and made himself a drum set.
He was also talented with food. During high school he started to work in a hole in the wall cafe, making grilled cheese sandwiches and brewing coffee, and within a short time the owner was letting him manage the place. Later he invested some of the money my parents left him in a coffee shop and set the whole thing up, designing the place, figuring out and designing the menu, hiring the cook, and everything else. The food was delicious, and all our friends ate there and enjoyed it. Asher was studying animation at Bezalel, so he didn't have time to run the place. If he had, it would have been a commercial success, too. But the other owners were kind of feckless, and the place declined and closed. Meanwhile Asher realized that he didn't have the patience to be an animator.
Later Asher attended the Sam Spiegel film school for a year but couldn't take their approach. He worked at various jobs for another year and studied painting and drawing to put together a portfolio to apply to Bezalel, this time in Visual Communication. His work was excellent, and he invested himself in it. He definitely had the ability to become a painter, but he didn't fancy himself an "Artist."
While he was studying at Bezalel, he was working in restaurants, first as a barman in a coffee shop, then in the kitchens of two restaurants. All of his art projects that year were centered on food, including a playground made of cold cuts and a video involving his mother sewing together chicken skins over an illuminated globe, and at the end of the year he realized that he would rather learn to be a gourmet cook than learn to be a commercial artist. So off he went to New York to work in restaurants and study cuisine.
He was as talented at cooking as he was in the visual arts.

Eulogy Explained (2)

2008-01-17T09:08:00.000+02:00

The second thing I said was that in his way of dying, as well, Asher was exceptional.
He probably fell to his death on Sunday, November 4, his first day of hiking in the Colca Canyon in Peru. He apparently took the wrong path from the very start and reached a difficult place, overestimated his ability to cross it, slipped, fell more than forty meters, and died immediately. He was alone, so no one saw him set out, and no one knew he had fallen until his body was found two months later.
Almost everyone who hears about this tragic accident asks, "Was he alone?" Perhaps if he had not been alone, he would not have taken the wrong path. Perhaps if he had not been alone, his partner would have said, "Asher, that's a dangerous place, let's turn back." Certainly, if he had not been alone, unless his partner had also fallen, we would have known of his death within a day.
We can wish that someone had been by his side to tell him to turn back. I fantasize over and over again about being there myself, calling out, "Asher, that's too risky! Turn back!" But nothing can change what happened. We can wish that he had had better judgment or more skill. But fatal accidents happen all them time, and this time it happened to him.
There is a weight on my chest as I write this. During the six weeks between the time that we realized he was missing until his body was found, there were many days when I felt grief for Asher in the most physical way: pain around my heart. I learned how apt the expression, "a heavy heart," truly is. But until his body was located and identified, we imagined scenarios that would leave him alive - kidnapped, perhaps, or injured, sick, on some kind of spiritual journey - anything that would not have ended in a grave in Jerusalem.
Asher did a great deal during his short life, and, had it not been cut short, he would undoubtedly have done many extraordinary things. As sorry as I feel for us, for our loss, I feel even sorrier for him and his loss, for the future he won't have.

Eulogy Explained

2008-01-16T08:25:00.000+02:00

The first thing I said at the funeral, while Asher's body lay wrapped in shrouds on a stone slab in front of me, was: "Frameworks didn't suit Asher." From his first day in elementary school to the day he decided to leave the program in Visual Communication in the Bezalel Art Academy in Jerusalem, Asher had to exercise great self-control in order to accept the demands of educational institutions. A fine woman who served as the principal of his religious elementary school for a year wrote to us with memories of Asher. He didn't want to attend the daily prayers, so instead of forcing him to attend, which would have only made him disruptive, she allowed him to read religious poetry by himself while the other children were attending prayers. If only the other so-called educators who dealt with Asher had been as creative and understanding!
He wasn't purposely rebellious. He was born that way. If he didn't respect a person, he didn't care whether that person held institutional authority, and if he did respect a person, he didn't care whether or not that person held some institutional position. He left high school after the tenth grade and prepared for his matriculation examinations in a private school that had only one purpose: getting kids through the government exams, with no "educational" trimmings. Asher understood that he needed a matriculation certificate, and he was willing to apply himself to the task of passing the examinations, but he couldn't stand it when people pretended to be educators.
He persuaded the army that he was psychologically unsuited for military service, which, indeed, he was. He could have managed in the army as the Chief of Staff, but not as a simple soldier taking orders.
Asher had been working for a production company while he was preparing for his exams, and he did very well with that - he always thrived in work situations, where the structure of authority was related to a real task, and he was never happier than when working hard physically.
His experience with the production company led him to apply to the two-year Stage Management course of LAMDA, an excellent theater school in London, and was accepted. He later admitted to us that during the first year he had his usual problems with authority and institutional frameworks, but in his second year he came around and excelled. While he was struggling during his first year, he never told us how hard he was finding it. Among the many things I regret about my relations with Asher as his father, I'm sorry I didn't provide him more support while he was in London.

Mourning Time

2008-01-10T08:51:00.000+02:00

The funeral took place on Tuesday, January 8, 2007, at 5:30 in the afternoon, at the Giv'at Shaul cemetery in Jerusalem. Ever since we realized that Asher had disappeared, I imagined myself standing in front of a crowd of mourners and speaking to them about Asher. That is, when I wasn't imagining some happy turn of events that would impossibly have left him alive and even well. I was incapable of imagining the difficulty and pain of the actual event.
My wife, his mother spoke, in English, about the way Asher viewed his work as a chef: to serve food with love, with love for the people he was serving and with love for the food he had prepared and was serving. I spoke in Hebrew. Then our eldest daughter's friend spoke on her behalf - our daughter lost her voice that morning. A devoted friend of ours, an artist who had been very close to Asher, also spoke, and then our son-in-law, who had gone to Peru and searched for Asher with the High Mountain Police of Arequipa, spoke briefly about the heroism of the men who were the ones who recovered his body in driving rain, risking their lives to climb down a steep cliff on ropes and bring Asher up.
I'm going to paste in the words that I said about Asher in Hebrew here. Later I will probably translate them.

מסגרות לא התאימו לאשר
גם בצורת המוות שלו הוא חרג מכל מסגרת
אדם כשרוני ביותר
מרדן לא קטן
התבגר מאוד בתקופה ששהה בניו יורק
זה דבר כאוב מאור עבורי
הוא היה בנקודת מפנה בחייו
הוא הבהיר לעצמו את ערכיו ואת סדר העדיפויות
ציפיתי להפתעות טובות ממנו
אדם אמיץ
לא בחל בסיכונים
מהיר החלטה ומהיר פעולה
אדם מסובך
אישיות קיצונית
נוכחות כובשת
למדתי המון מאשר
אולי הלקח החשוב ביותר שלמדתי ממנו הוא שכשאר המסגרות אינן מתאימות לאדם, לעתים קרובות האדם צודק ולא המסגרות
למדתי הרבה גם מן התקופה הקשה בין הרגע שהבנו שהוא נעדר עד לרגע שמצאו את גופתו
פטירתו קרעה חור גדול בחיינו
בחיי המשפחה הקרובה
בחיי הקהילה שלנו
בחיי רשת ענפה של חברים

בברכות השחר אנו קוראים

"המכין מצעדי-גבר"

יהיה לי קשה מאוד לקבל בהכנעה את הברכה הזאת

Irreparable Loss

2008-01-04T09:23:00.000+02:00

Since the last time I added writing to this blog, my family and I have gone through a time of fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and hope. In mid-October, our twenty-eight year old son Asher went on a trip to Peru. On November 3 he sent us an email from the town of Chivay, telling us he was planning to hike in the Colca Canyon for a week and reassuring us that he wasn't planning to do anything dangerous or out of the ordinary, so we expected to hear from him around November 10. After another week went by, we began to worry. We alerted authorities, began to make telephone calls, and then our son-in-law took it upon himself to go to Peru and look for Asher. He was joined by Asher's older brother. They spent two weeks searching intensely for him with the mountain police force of Arequipa, Peru, and failed to find him. We feared all along that Asher had fallen to his death, but we imagined all sorts of other possibilities that would somehow leave him alive. We had absolutely no concrete information about his whereabouts after the evening of November 3, when he sent the email to us. No one remembered seeing Asher, and there was no record of his staying in any of the hostels in the town. His disappearance was a complete mystery.
Yesterday we were informed that his body was found. The most likely thing is exactly what did happen: he fell to his death while on the hike. We still don't know exactly where he fell, and we will probably never know why he fell, but we know that he did fall. Our sadness and grief is now complete. Before his body was found, I had allowed hope to keep me from grieving. There were days when I was painfully sure was dead, and days when I was sure he would be found alive.
This terrible turn of events makes all the other things that I had thought of writing about seem trivial, though I might get back to them, since the human ability to be distracted is, mercifully, infinite. Music was really the only thing that kept me going during this time of tension, music and the enormous stores of love within our immediate family, my wife and our other three children, and the messages of support and encouragement we received.
Many of the people who offered us deep sympathy are people who themselves have undergone tragic loss, or who are facing horrible situations: an educator in his fifties who is waiting to die of cancer, a musician whose wife has multiple sclerosis, a woman whose twelve-year old son hanged himself, two men whose wives died of ovarian cancer, the mother of one of Asher's high school friends, who committed suicide, a woman whose daughter died of leukemia. I could go on. When you look around you, if you know something about the people you see, you realize that you are not alone in having suffered great loss. Life is full of pain.
People have complimented my wife and me for our courage in facing Asher's disappearance, before we knew that he was dead, and they have admired the solidarity and hard work that our family put into the task of locating him. But, as I have heard from friends, to whom I have offered similar compliments, when there's no choice, you do what you have to.
All along I have felt that, no matter what the outcome was, this experience would mark and change our lives in ways that we cannot know. I feel that I can't and shouldn't resist what's going on in my heart now. Asher's name in Hebrew is related to the word for happiness. I doubt that we will ever be completely happy again.