Introduction

AND GOD CREATED HOPE FOR ME, TOO

 

            I help people say goodbye. I help them stop carrying their deceased loved ones around in their heads, grieving. I have the gift of walking through the valley of the shadow of death. Not many people are comfortable with that, but I am. Perhaps it’s because death visited my house very early on. My father died in 1959, just two days before my 12th birthday. I didn’t get to say goodbye, and I wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. Neither were my younger brother and sister. As a result, I couldn’t even say the word “Daddy” for 30 years. The problem isn’t really that he died, it’s that, for me, he never lived. He worked all the time and I hardly knew him.
I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. My mother, Rose, was born in Atlanta, but her parents were born in Russia. I really couldn’t tell you what she was like because, although I know she loved me, she never let any of us get close to her. We didn’t have a good relationship and, as I learned later, neither did my parents. My father, Abe, was born in Poland and came to the U.S. just after the turn of the century. He owned a grocery store on what is now third base of Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium. I never saw him much. He left before I got up in the morning and he came back after I went to sleep. He was only home on Sundays. I only have two memories of him: On Sundays, he used to make us pancakes, and although he never went to the synagogue otherwise, on the High Holy Days – Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur – he was there from the beginning to the end, and I would sit with him and snuggle under his big tallis, the Jewish prayer shawl.
My father was never affectionate, and he had a violent temper. The last year of his life, he wasn’t working, he was at home sick. But neither he nor my mother told me or my brother and sister what was going on. The day he went to the hospital for the last time, I hid in the bathroom when the ambulance came to get him. I was afraid of seeing him on a stretcher, or seeing him go to the hospital. I was afraid because I didn’t know what was happening. Not only did my mother never explain anything to us, she gave us the clear impression that we were not allowed to ask her about it either.
We’re still not sure what happened, but as best as we can figure out, his appendix burst, and during surgery the doctor may have clipped an artery. My father bled to death. He was only 47. After he died, my mother still never talked about it and she never spoke about him again. She went to work as a secretary, and also as a volunteer in the synagogue gift shop. My rabbi became my father figure, and I was the son he never had. He saw something in me and nurtured that intellectual spark. Much to my surprise, he offered to put me through school. First, he raised the money to send me to Philadelphia to Akiba Hebrew Academy for my high school education, then to New York for college where I went to Columbia University in a joint program with the Jewish Theological Seminary. There were no strings attached. He didn’t do any of this on the condition that I become a rabbi, and he made that very clear to everyone, including me. His name was Rabbi Harry H. Epstein, and he led the Ahavath Achim congregation in Atlanta for a remarkable 57 years. We always remained close. In the late 1990s, when Rabbi Epstein was about 95, I took my son, Ilan, who was in college at the time, to see him.
“One of the most important things I ever did in my life was to teach your father,” Rabbi Epstein said to my son. We were all overcome by the power of those words. I knew that I might never see Rabbi Epstein again, so I wanted to talk with him alone.
“We don’t hide anything from each other,” I said to him when we were alone. “And I know that we may not see each other again. So, I want to thank you for everything you’ve done for me and everything you’ve been to me.”
We both cried.
Only recently did I realize that with that visit, I had the opportunity to do with him what I hadn’t been given the opportunity to do with my father: I’d said goodbye. As it turned out, that was not our final goodbye. In the spring of 2003, I went to Atlanta to celebrate his 100th birthday at a party given for him by friends. He came to the party in a wheelchair, but was able to enjoy himself. About a month later, in May, the synagogue threw a huge birthday party for him, but he wasn’t well enough to attend. So, they videotaped the party and brought the tape to him at home later that night. He watched the tape and then, peacefully, he died.
For many years, I’ve been intrigued by The Old Testament’s lessons about grief and the hope that can follow. Yet, very little has been written about this for lay people. Such wisdom should be shared beyond the confines of clergy and scholars, shared with people of all denominations (and none at all) who need consolation, understanding, and hope. Humans have always told stories, listened to stories, read stories, and acted out stories in an effort to understand themselves, their world and the other people in it. The themes of early Bible stories – not only the ones chosen for inclusion here that teach us about grief – are just as useful in understanding the human condition today as they were thousands of years ago when they were first told.
Throughout this book, with the help of the wisdom of these bible stories, I hope to teach you how we can complete our relationships with loved ones and others who’ve died, how to “lay them gently down,” and how we can tackle grief’s key issues, so that we may move beyond grief – not merely dwell in it and cope with it – and into a life of hope and fulfillment. In other words, “to go from mourning to morning.”
This book is not an analysis of particular Bible events. Rather, And God Created Hope uses these stories as a jumping off point to learn from the themes they represent on the path through grief recovery. It’s okay to still miss the people we’ve lost. Missing and grieving are two very different things, and throughout our journey, we will learn to tell them apart.

When We Can’t Lay Them Gently Down
Death is never a welcome visitor.
As much as we’d like to wish it away, it comes, relentless and uninvited. And death never seems to come at just the right time. Sometimes it comes too early, sometimes too late.
Is there ever a right time for death’s visit?
Sometimes death is not an enemy. Death can bring a merciful end to a life that has been racked by pain or physical or mental incapacity. But even then, we are left with heavy hearts and troubled souls. We loved those we lost so much that we want to keep them close to us, in our hearts forever. Saying goodbye is so difficult for us, letting them go is so painful. And, sometimes, it’s easier if we just let them stay with us, and hold on to them for dear life. We want them to be part of our lives in the future just as they were in the past. How can we possibly go on without them, our love for them, and their love for us? With them, we had life. Without them, we feel empty inside.
But must we feel so empty? Is clinging to them always such a good idea? Won’t clinging to them slow down our continuing growth as men and women who deserve love, passion, and contentment?
It’s the way of the world for people to die and for us to live on (and love on) after they’ve gone. We have a hard time saying goodbye to our loved ones who’ve died, and because of this, we often have a hard time getting on with our lives. We all know people whose loved ones died more than a decade ago, but who still have problems today grieving and moving on. Nothing has changed for them since that sad day when death came to visit. It’s as if their loved ones are still there, living and breathing. In these situations, the living can’t let go and they can’t move on. They’re stuck. And as long as they can’t get unstuck, the dead for whom they grieve are still alive, while the grievers who still live and breathe are deadened to life, unable to live fully.
Something is wrong here, upside down, and the grievers know it and feel it. The dead are alive, and the living are dead. This is not what was supposed to happen. The dead were supposed to die, and the living were supposed to adjust to their new lives. What we hope for is life with vitality, but what we too often get is continuing pain and broken hearts.
It’s as simple as this: If the dead aren’t allowed to die, the living won’t be allowed to live.
As hard as it is to let go, that is precisely what we must do.
We are most challenged when we have to give back something that was dear to us. Our world teaches us well how to acquire things, but not how to return them. We’re like children who don’t want to share – our toys, our possessions, our loved ones. We want to keep them with us forever, but we can’t.
This story helps us understand how often, and in how many diverse ways, we can carry around with us what we should let go.
Even we rabbis like to share a Zen story now and then, and this one has become one of my favorites:
Two monks set out on a long journey. After a while, they came to the shore of a river, where they saw a beautiful young woman who needed to get to the other side. One of the monks picked her up and carried her through the deep water, to the other side of the river, then he put her down on the shore. He said goodbye, and the two monks continued on their way.
Twenty minutes later, the second monk chastised the first, “Brother, you did a terrible thing back there. You know we are not supposed to touch a woman.”
The first monk turned peacefully to his friend and said, “Brother, I put her down twenty minutes ago. Why are you still carrying her?”
That seems to be our problem, as well. We continue to carry those who have left us. We miss them so much that we don’t want to put them down. We continue to carry them around with us, hoping that somehow that means they’re still alive. But, alas, all is for naught. They have died, but we’ve not yet truly said goodbye to them.
They are dead, yet still alive. We are still physically alive, yet spiritually dead. Something is terribly wrong when we live like this, and we feel it every single day of our lives.
We must learn to “lay them gently down.”


Learning Through Loss
Throughout my years studying, teaching, lecturing, writing, and counseling in the areas of dying, death, and the grieving process, not only as a rabbi, but in the inter-faith community and as a certified Grief Recovery Specialist, I have come to this one startlingly simple conclusion that I call Glazer’s Only Law of Life: We only learn from how we respond to loss.
Grief, therefore, can be a dynamic opportunity to learn and to grow.
Throughout our loss-related learning experiences, we always ask: How do we recover from our losses? Not forget them, but recover from them?
The answer lies in how we respond to loss. Are we beaten by it, or do we grow from it and learn to transcend it?
Every person grieves differently. And one person can grieve different losses differently, depending upon an almost infinite number of variables that stem from a few basic circumstances: what they lost, whom they lost and how it happened.
The loss of relationship is what we really cry about. We mourn not just the past, but also a future that will no longer include the person we mourn.
Let the healing begin.
Each chapter of this book begins with the Old Testament story that illustrates that chapter’s theme.
In the rest of Part One’s chapters, we’ll look at core grief topics that help you understand loss and healing:
· Bargaining & Prayer (Jonah)
· Death is Part of Life (Ecclesiastes)
· Tragedy (Lamentations)
· Grief Without Death (The Song of Songs)
In Part Two’s chapters, we’ll look at the common themes that people encounter on their healing Journey through grief:
· Shock & Anger (Leviticus)
· Ritual (Second Chronicles)
· Fear (Exodus)
· Wandering & Healing (Numbers)
· Faith & Strength (Job)
· Forgiveness (Genesis)
These are presented in the order we typically experience them, though, of course, we can also deal with these themes not only out of order, but simultaneously. Nothing about the grieving and healing process is written in stone.
In Part Three’s chapters, we move “from mourning to morning” on our grief recovery path:
· Joy (Proverbs)
· Growth & Wisdom (Psalms)
· Legacy (Deuteronomy)
· The Future: Creating New Relationships & Creating a New Family (Ruth)
And in the Epilogue, we reflect on a surprising twist we often encounter even when we think we’ve got everything all figured out.
Although experts have documented the process with official stages of grief, everyone who grieves knows that it’s often just a free-for-all. Taking all of this into account, we can safely say that there are only four major steps in the grieving process, as ridiculously simple as they may appear:
1) Grief
2) Coping with Grief
3) False Grief Recovery Actions (When we think we’ve let go, but we haven’t.)
4) Letting Go of Grief
How do you know you’ve completed this four-step process, that you’re okay?
When you’ve created a “new normal.”
When life is no longer upside down: when you no longer feel that the dead are alive and you’re dead.
When you finally let go and lay them gently down, knowing that God created everything…And God created hope.