Going on Ten Years

Today is my father's birthday. If he were still alive, he'd be 112. Asher's last birthday was June 9. If her were alive he would be 38. It's impossible to imagine what he'd have done in the past ten years, if he hadn't died.
Today is also the Ninth of Ab, a fast day in memory of the destruction of the Temple. I didn't fast, though I did go to synagogue last night to hear the reading of Lamentations.
I have started copying all these blog posts into a file, with the ultimate intention of printing them as a book for our family, in memory of Asher.
It's extremely painful for me to reread this material, and I haven't done so until now. Obviously I'll have to edit it somewhat before I have it printed. That will not be an easy task.
My father died in 1991. Fortunately, as it were, he didn't have to know about Asher's death. But he also missed out on a lot of good family events.
Asher died before his sister Hannah got married and had her children. He wasn't involved in the lives of the two nephews and the niece he did know. The youngest probably doesn't remember him at all. I wonder what the older two remember of him.
Not long after Asher died, Hamutal Bar Yosef visited me to console me. Her son shot himself when he was just a teenager, probably 20 years before that. I expected her to tell me that it still hurt just as much after twenty years as it did at the start. But she said that the pain got less acute. At the time, that seemed to me like a betrayal. But she's right.
But it's always there, in the background. Today, when I hear about the untimely death of a young person, or when I think about the killing that goes on all around us, I know how much pain it leaves.
A couple of years ago, by chance, I met the man who was the principal of the elementary school that Asher attended. Asher was a very disruptive pupil, and Shaya, the principle, was understanding with him and got to know him very well. Naturally Shaya asked me how Asher was, and I had to tell him that Asher had died, and of course I started crying. It was as if he had just died that day.
Moments like that, when the wound is as painful as it was when it was inflicted, are rare. But not a day goes by when I don't think about Asher, when I don't go through the same useless mental exercise of saying to myself, If only, if only, if only.

Soon it will be Five Years

Until now the thought of reading this account of Asher's death has been too painful for me, but perhaps I am reaching the moment when I can go back over what I wrote and live with it.
No day goes by without thoughts about him.
I wear his ring sometimes, to feel close to him.
I wish he could meet his younger sister's husband and their baby.
I wish he could follow the growth of his other two nephews and his niece, whom he loved so much.
I think of how much a dynamic person like Asher might have accomplished in the five years since he died.
And I know that they might have been difficult years for him, not necessarily years of success and fulfillment, but perhaps failure and disappointment.  Most likely a mixture of them all, like most people's lives.
Obviously even failure and disappointment are preferable to oblivion.
We have visited his grave from time to time, and every time I go there, I feel: that couldn't be him!  What's under that stone isn't Asher.
I keep thinking, "If only..."
If he'd had a serious girlfriend, maybe he wouldn't have gone to Peru and gotten himself killed.

I do wish he had had a life companion, although, since he died, perhaps it's better that he didn't leave a bereaved spouse behind.

There are an infinite number of things that didn't happen, that could have happened, and that would have prevented his death.  There's no point thinking that way.
I realize that we are not alone in our bereavement and grief.  The world is full of people whose children, siblings, and spouses have died, and everyone eventually loses their parents, unless they die first.

Saying Kaddish for Asher

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

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

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

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

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?