The Blessing of Sorrow

by Ben Kamin

  I thought about this ritual when I heard from a longtime friend in Cleveland named Mary Anne. She and her husband Joe had once been leading editorial executives at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Mary Anne and Joe enjoyed a beloved friendship as deep as their shared reverence for writing and publishing. Mary Anne has traversed a great deal of loss in her family across the years. Then Joe died more recently, and she has grieved and rebuilt a life for herself gracefully and wisely.

  Mary Anne was having a birthday and, naturally, received many kind messages. She posted the following on social media, which recalled for me the French tradition of worn wood and personal values and how grief is a great teacher, when it sends us back to bless the living:

  I so appreciate all the birthday wishes. So great to hear from friends from all stages of life, and I have certainly been through a lot of stages.

  Kaylie, six, said to me on my birthday, “Grandma, you have a lot of scratches on your (dining) table.” I told her that table has seen a lot of events and dinners through the years. That’s why I treasure that table and see on it a holiday feast, a birthday cake, glasses of wine, cat scratches, parrot bites, family reunions, and toasts to new beginnings and profound losses.

  So I like the scratches, and mine too, all well earned through the years.41

  As for me, I channeled and distilled my long-running grief and emerged from the depression months before this book was completed. Grief brings with it informative distinctions; it has a way of revealing the ones who are actively on your side. My friends and I have all walked through the woods and bent many twigs together. My daughters certainly helped me cross over the bridge to peace. I learned how to be alone yet not to be lonely. I discovered that grief was not my friend but remains my necessary companion. There was no set formula for this; grief does not work well with old standard charts. But it is always defeated by love.

  I remember how as I gazed into the wedding canopy where my younger daughter exchanged marriage vows with her betrothed a few years ago, all my fears floated out of me. The professional dreads, the generational anxieties, the clinging grudges, and the pounding griefs of this existence all vanished. Time and mortality and the insecurities disappeared beneath the river of life.

  The bride was happy; she was no longer a child, and the twigs bent under her feet toward eternity. Nothing cost anything, there were no cloaked resentments in the night air, and people were momentarily at utter peace with another. The only clock we knew had its hands in the stars; the moon knew everything, looked down, and sighed.

  These are the moments when you just know there is a heaven somewhere and the best part is you don’t have to struggle with what that even means. You float in these rare interludes of tender human milestones and you cross, with some of the Zoroastrian mystics, over the Chinvat Bridge into paradise.

  You dance with the Hopi Indians, cotton strands in your hands, making flowers to symbolize the heavens. Your eyes sting with the Buddhist wisdom that those who live in these moments may yet bless this realm again with angelic insight.

  You are at one with everything and your pockets, like the white burial shrouds of the Jews, are empty. Your heart is full and you are not afraid to die. The happiness of a child is the bridge that binds this side to the other, and there you are as you comprehend for a fleeting, delicious moment, why it is good to be born and it is okay to die.

  When my other daughter was born, I felt the stirrings of creation and my own particle of partnership with it. When my father died, inexplicably and impossibly young, and we opened the earth to bury him, my mother cried like a broken vessel under the cold sun. My little sister danced among the nearby headstones and sang happy songs in defiance of the tyranny of time. Every moment like this has poured the peace into me; I know that the wine is sometimes bitter and sometimes sweet.

  My much older mother wept again as I gazed into the canopy that night, smelling the nearby orange groves of central Israel and distant scent of the sea. It was not far from where I was born and it is also not far from where my parents—and all our elders—now sleep in the dust. I hear their voices from time to time, so I know that my children will one day hear mine. I don’t need anybody to tell me who or what heaven is and I’m no longer afraid of death. Experience and birth and sacred promises and exceptional pain have all filled me with quiet compliance. Who can be free near a child’s rapture and not know there is hope?

  May you grieve well enough to honor your dead and then—as they would wish—survive and live on. And may the memories of your departed be for blessings.

  40 From Jewish folklore, dybbuk is a malevolent spirit that enters the body of a living person and directs that person's conduct. It is believed to be the soul of a dead person and can only be exorcised by a religious ceremony.

  41 Reprinted from Facebook with permission by Mary Anne Sharkey.

  Acknowledgments

  I cannot express fully the love and appreciation I carry for my daughters, Sari and Debra, and my twin granddaughters, Anora and Leela. From the lighthouse of life, I see them as shining stars on the horizon.

  I wish to acknowledge my dearest and closest friends, including Professor David Miller, Robin Schulze, Rick Alter, Lynn West, and Debbie Allen, among others, who have supported me in grief and in the most joyous times of celebration.

  I’m grateful for the wisdom and caring of my cousin, Rachel, my touchstone.

  I’m grateful for the memory of my sweet grandmothers with whom I studied scriptural stories while literally gazing at the biblical Samarian Mountains.

  I acknowledge and hail the hard work and cheerful advocacy of my editor, Nancy Schenck of Central Recovery Press, who is as joyous as she is meticulous and so very dedicated.

  I am grateful for the inspiration, day in and day out, of the life and legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., of blessed memory.

  Also by Ben Kamin

  Stones in the Soul: One Day in the Life of an American Rabbi

  Raising a Thoughtful Teenage: A Book of Answers and Values for Parents

  Thinking Passover: Rabbi’s Book of Holiday Values

  The Path of the Soul: Making Peace with Mortality

  Remora: Novel of the Rabbinate

  The Spirit behind the News: On Finding God in Family, Presidents, Baseball, Cell Phones, and Chevy Impalas

  Nothing like Sunshine: A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination

  Room 306: The National Story of the Lorraine Motel

  My Bargain with God: The Story of Holocaust Survivor Lou Dunst

  Dangerous Friendship: Stanley Levison, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Kennedy Brothers

  I Don’t Know What to Believe: Making Spiritual Peace with Your Religion