end of memorial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.