A New Year

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted. The truth is my soul took a backseat to life for a while. I think this is only natural along the journey. Unfortunately, I have yet to master work/life balance, but instead run quick sprints of both.

It’s the new year. 5775. I can hardly believe it. High Holy Days (HHD) are always transformative for me, but this year took a different direction. Traditionally, I fall into a melancholic slump around HHDs. I take stock of all of these missed opportunities over the last year. This year, my uncle died a week before Rosh Hashanah, and it changed everything.

In teaching a class on HHDs, I learned that there is a tradition of seeing Rosh Hashanah as birth and Yom Kippur as death. It’s funny that I never made that connection in the past. Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world! Yom Kippur, dressed in our simple whites, full of mourning.

It’s crazy to step back and realize that within ten days, Jews experience the life cycle. That’s a lot to process in 10 days. Uncle Joe’s death colored my HHDs, and it did so in this really beautiful and surprising day.

The Reading

The Yitzkor, or memorial service that takes place on Yom Kippur has sort of flowed over me in days past. Truthfully, even though I work with it daily, I’m uncomfortable with death.  This year, a reading that we say every year took my breath away.

It is called “When I Die” written by Merrit Malloy:

When I die
Give what’s left of me away
To children
And old men that wait to die.
And if you need to cry,
Cry for your brother
Walking the street beside you.
And when you need me,
Put your arms
Around anyone
And give them
What you need to give to me.
I want to leave you something,
Something better
Than words
Or sounds.
Look for me
In the people I’ve known
Or loved,
And if you cannot give me away,
At least let me live on your eyes
And not on your mind.
You can love me most
By letting
Hands touch hands,
By letting
Bodies touch bodies,
And by letting go
Of children
That need to be free.
Love doesn’t die,
People do.
So, when all that’s left of me
Is love,
Give me away.

My breath still catches in my chest when I read it.  There are two parts of this poem that resonate within my bones.

The first:

“You can love me most by letting hands touch hands, by letting bodies touch bodies”

That interconnectedness, that human connection, that’s what I hope my life produces.  Of all of the goals and dreams and aspirations I may have, fostering human connection is the root of all of them.  Demolishing loneliness, obliterating shame and self-confinement.  If I could leave one legacy on this earth, it would be for love to be a little more, a little stronger, a little easier because of something I did.

The second:

“Love doesn’t die, people do”

It’s the first time I broke into an audible sob at services.  It comforts me to know that when I’m gone, I can leave behind the streaked, messy, residue of my love on the people around me.  This, more than anything, has brought me comfort when considering the deaths of my loved ones, my patients, myself.

I’ve avoided considering death because I feel like it is this horrible shadow hanging above life.  The impending doom of mortality. You would think, given my staunch beliefs regarding death with dignity and quality of life, I’d be more friendly to mortality, but the truth is I always turn away from it.

On Lawnmowers 

When my Uncle died, I heard a story that my aunt had said in her grief, “I don’t even know how to use the lawnmower.” What at first seems like a completely bizarre and untimely statement makes all the sense in the world to me.  Those little gifts we give one another every day, the banal and unimpressive, that’s life.  More than grand and sweeping gestures, the lives we lead are miraculous in the day to day.  All I could think when I heard that story was “I’m so grateful you got to go so long without working a lawn mower, I wish it were longer.” We all have the lawn mowers in our lives.  Tasks that get done without notice, feelings that come and go so naturally we forget they are impermanent, smells and tastes that come only from our loved ones.  Maybe it’s ok to live with these as certainties.  May we never learn to use the lawnmower before we need to.

Gloried Life

The strangest thing about this preoccupation with death has been that it has much more to do with life. I’m sure many of you by now have seen this video about a 29 year old woman with terminal brain cancer who moved to a  state with dignity in death laws.  There are also slews of videos going around about mothers choosing to deliver babies with unsurvivable birth defects.  As a culture, we are fascinated by people who are confronting death, especially deaths that just shouldn’t happen dammit.

Regardless of your stance on the “rightness” or “wrongness” of these people’s choices, the one thing these videos all share is the celebration of life.  These moments are precious.  Not just the mountain-climbing, book writing, award winning, destination seeing moments.  The coffee sipping, couch sprawling, hand holding moments are life.

Struggle

 We will struggle, and that is OK.  Every moment will not be a story you want to share.  Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who’s five stages of grieving contextualized mourning in ways never understood, has wisdom about the dark times.

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

What we bring with us into suffering is beautiful.  That light within is our true life force.  You don’t have to enjoy suffering, but occasionally we will have to sit in it.  It helps to have a friend. I have a dear friend who, when struggling, describes the need for someone to “meet her” in her grief.  As my therapist would say, that’s good stuff.  By meeting each other in those dark times, our souls shine through to create that connection that life is all about.

Life, Death, and Journey

We are here. We are living right now. It is astonishing to stop and realize that whatever you’re doing right now, scrolling through your phone, sitting outside, clipping your toe-nails…that’s life. And it’s beautiful and tragic and all things in between.  I leave you with one final reading by Rabbi Alvin Fine, also from our Yitzkor Service, titled “Life is a Journey”:

Birth is a beginning and death a destination;
But life is a journey.
A going, a growing from stage to stage:
From childhood to maturity and youth to old age.

From innocence to awareness and ignorance to knowing;
From foolishness to discretion and then perhaps, to wisdom.
From weakness to strength or strength to weakness and often back again.
From health to sickness and back we pray, to health again.

From offense to forgiveness, from loneliness to love,
From joy to gratitude, from pain to compassion.
From grief to understanding, from fear to faith;
From defeat to defeat to defeat, until, looking backward or ahead:

We see that victory lies not at some high place along the way, 
But in having made the journey, stage by stage, a sacred pilgrimage.
Birth is a beginning and death a destination;
But life is a journey, a sacred pilgrimage, 
Made stage by stage…To life everlasting.