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.
Learning
Through Loss ~~~~~~~~~~~ When
We Can't Lay Them Gently Down
