When my mother died, the first day of chol ha'moed Sukkot, I was furious at the rabbis, the halacha, our tradition.
What do you mean no eulogies?! How do I begin to say goodbye with silence? (we spoke at the graveside anyway, after the crows performed the ultimate act of chesed and went away. As my mother would have said, with the flick of a hand, "They can go jump!")
What!? No shiva until after chag? But I had to say Kaddish, so I could forget about cloistering myself. A minyan was not going to come to me. Not yet. But I was not going to wave the lulav around in public exclaiming "הודו לה' כי טוב". Not a chance.
But our tradition is wide
and the Rabbis did (even sometimes do) know what they are talking about: Don't
ask a mourner how he is doing. For the
12 months. Let him tell you if he feels
like it.
OK. Maybe you didn't ask, but here's how I am.
For eleven months what
began with silence turned into cascades avalanches waterfalls of words. And
today I said my last. Tonight begins the
last month, and a return to silence. For
eleven months, through the seemingly endless repetition, my Kaddish at times
lost texture. Layers sanded down until
it was something flat and smooth and nearly unrecognizable. But I still had it. Steel myself as I had to nearly every time to
stand up or get up there, I still had it. It was okay to feel like crap. It was okay to sometimes feel like I'm losing
my mind – after all – I'm saying Kaddish, it's only natural. Now I have
silence.
For twelve months the
soul is supposed to rise and fall.
Buoyed and dragged, until ultimately rising away. Our Kaddish, our davening, our learning, our
chesed, is a warm updraft. An extra
lift. But in fine fashion for our
people, we cannot even consider that our loved ones will bounce around for more
than eleven months. So we stop. And so I
did.
But I will have to steel
myself for silence now, just as much as I steeled myself for speech. And in my
silence there will be the echoes of last year crashing against the sound of the
shofar and the coming of the New. And in
my silence there will be the sound of the Kaddish of those who I have come to
think of as partners. And instead of
calling I will answer.
How am I doing? Feeling fragile again.
Ask me again in another
month.
