In The End… (Yizkor 5775, October 4, 2014)
Last spring, Rafi Laufer recommended a wonderful little book to me called, The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds, published in 2000 by Jonathan Rosen (no relation). I was able to get it in hardcover for a few dollars from my beloved Amazon.
Separate from the message implied by the title, the book begins with Rosen’s personal story of the dying and death of his 95-year-old grandmother, the grandmother he grew up with and knew well. As she was dying, Rosen kept a journal of his thoughts and feelings of her dying experience, and his, on his computer.
Most people I know don’t chronicle “the dying” of a loved one in the same way many young parents and first time grandparents, myself included, tend to record the moments of wonder and words of wisdom that come from a first child. Few people, if any, have the time or strength to chronicle the second, or third, or fourth child.
As a writer, Rosen recounts,
“I was recording not only my feelings, but also the concrete details of her death. How the tiny monitor taped to her index finger made it glow pink. How mist from the oxygen collar whispered through her hair. How her skin grew swollen and wrinkled, like the skin of a baked apple, yet remained astonishingly soft to the touch. Her favorite songs – “Embraceable You” and “Our Love is Here to Stay” –that she could no longer hear, but that we sang to her anyway. The great gasps in her breathing.”
Many of us have been there. “In the end…” – at the end, we become fixated with the details of the dying, endlessly slow or tragically fast. In the end… we have a host of memories associated with the sights, sounds, and smells of final moments – for some beautiful and poignant, and for others medical and morphined, not magical by any means, but, painfully memorable.
And then, Rosen’s story becomes so very familiar. His computer crashes not long after his grandmother dies and he loses the journal he had kept of his impressions of his grandmother’s final days. I remember losing a High Holy Day sermon, years ago, the same way. In year 2000 language, he rebukes himself for having “diskette copies” (remember diskettes?!) of everything else on his computer—his novels, reviews and essays, but he hadn’t backed up or printed a hard copy of the diary he kept as his maternal grandmother was dying. All those feelings and memories were gone; gone like his grandmother. I can only imagine that it was like losing her all over again.
Fourteen years later, technology has improved. As an Apple person I save every sermon on my Time Machine, in Dropbox, and email it to myself, just in case. Many of you save to the Cloud, as well. Isn’t it amazing how eternal and spiritual today’s computer language is? Would that we were really able to save a life in a Time Machine, or have access to the Cloud of Eternity. In the end…, the computer created by God, our brains, does run a sort program to determine which stories and memories will end up in a eulogy, and which will be shared at shiva, and which ones will ultimately summarize the life we so desperately want to hold on to and remember in the end.
Even in the year 2000, Rosen was reassured that nothing is truly lost on computers. With time, expertise, and for a price, that which was stored could be retrieved. So his saga continues (p. 16):
“A few weeks after my computer crashed, I gave in and sent it to a fancy place in Virginia where – for more money than the original cost of the machine – technicians were in fact able to lift off my hard drive the ghostly impression of everything I had ever written on my computer during seven years of use… As it turns out, I’d written in my journal only six or seven times in the course of my grandmother’s two-month illness. Somehow I’d imagined myself chronicling the whole ordeal in the minutest recoverable detail. Instead, I was astonished at how paltry, how sparse my entries really were. Where were the long hours of holding her hand? The one-way conversations – what had I said? The slow, dreamlike afternoons with the rest of my family, eating and talking in the waiting area? Where, most of all, was my grandmother? I was glad to have my journal back, of course, and I’d have paid to recover it again in a second. But, it was only when I had my own scant words before me at last that I realized how much I’d lost.”
It reminds me of that old Joni Mitchell song lyric, “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til its gone.” I have quite a few ‘Mommy journals’ and gratitude journals with wonderful entries at the beginning and too many empty pages at the end. I envy the people who keep up the writing and faithfully scrapbook or Shutterfly every moment. I am better now in the computer age with the scrapbooking, but how much I lost when my boys were growing up that I thought I would remember. I treasured every moment in the moment, but with two babies, 15 months apart, and this new baby congregation, I didn’t stop to write it all down as I was living through it.
And you know what happens—you have all been there. Everyone remembers the same events through their own subjective lens. I have fond memories of two toddlers on matching tricycles riding in circles around my white living room couch, but my sons regularly share stories of the white living room couch being in a room that was off limits in their minds; not how I remember it at all. I cleaned many a little handprint off those white couches, and savor those memories with a smile now that they only seem to reside in my “I-Cloud.”
According to Rosen’s account, the rabbis discuss in the Talmud how God spends His day. God arranges marriages, sits and judges human beings, wears a tallit and tefillin and prays each day, and studies Talmud three hours a day.
As much as I would love to study Talmud three hours a day, my tombstone will read, “She sat with people…” I am not sure if it will end with the words, “one at a time.” But, I sit with people. That is what I have chosen to do. So many one-on-one meetings, and sometimes there are two or three people, or a support group filled with people, each one sitting with me to share their story and find comfort, caring, and community – one at a time. I’ve chosen to do that instead of Talmud study, just as I have chosen to write about 50 sermons or more each year, instead of writing a book. No regrets. Life choices.
When I taught “A Good Dying” at HUC (our Reform seminary) in Los Angeles this past year, which I was honored to do, one of the rabbinic students said to me, “This all sounds great, but it is so time consuming. I want to have a life.” After I recovered from shock, I told him that done well, “dying” would be his life. Almost every day of my life is touched by death — someone in the process or stages of dying, or trying hard to recover from an illness that threatens life, or someone trying to recover from living through someone else’s dying.
Death is daily. And “in the end…” we realize how very precious every moment really was. And there are regrets as we look back. How many times did you miss a chance to talk, or visit, or play? Where did the time go? Yes, there are regrets of times we said “maybe later” and should have said “maybe now.” How often we squander life’s moments with the squabbles and distractions that fill our days and relationships.
There are those people who are blessed with perfect endings, Hollywood worthy, but they are few and far between. Some are able to be there for the last breath, while most leave the room for just a moment or a cup of coffee, and miss the final moment, in the end. I believe it is because the soul is unable to leave with them there.
And in the end…we have the memories of the end, which flood our thoughts and all too often fill us with questions and misgivings. Then, over time, the recovery of memories, like recovering a hard drive when it is lost, replaces those final moments of dying with those our mental hard drive is holding onto for…dear life. Rosen says (p. 26), “ I actually thought my meager diary entries would have some special power to restore my grandmother.”
And then he comes to realize what we grief specialists know only too well: All of our grief is cumulative. With each loss, we relive every loss of our lives. So in the midst of mourning his 95-year-old grandmother, he also revisits the grandmother who haunts him, the one he never met. There is only one photo of her taken in Vienna in 1935. His father was thirteen at the time, being photographed with his three older sisters and his parents, Rosen’s grandparents. Shortly after the photo was taken, that grandmother was shot after being transported East, in Poland during the Holocaust.
In the beginning, we have loved ones, and in the end, all we have left are their pictures, their stories, our memories and if we are lucky, the final words we hang onto, even when they aren’t exactly the ones we wish we had to remember.
As we spend the coming year of our Adult Education program, which we ironically call L.I.F.E. (Learning Is For Everyone), on the topic of Food for Thought, I leave you with the story from Rosen’s book that was the beginning for this sermon about the end. Before his grandmother’s last surgery, which was to be a brief procedure to remove a blockage, Rosen’s wife, a rabbi and hospital chaplain, asked his grandmother what she was thinking.
“I’m hungry,” my grandmother said.
“For anything in particular?” my wife asked.
Without hesitation my grandmother who had not been able to eat solid food for several weeks, said, “A pastrami sandwich.”
“On rye?” my wife asked.
“Of course,” my grandmother said.
“With mustard?” my wife asked.
“What else?” my grandmother said.
Those words, “a pastrami sandwich” (forgive me!) and a very Jewish “what else?” were his grandmother’s last words.
In the end… sometimes the last words are what we wanted or needed to hear, but so often they are not. Too often, people are haunted by final words, or murmers, as they struggle to hold on to the last moments, last sounds, and last words, after a lifetime of words.
In the end… what I hope people will be able to remember are the “I love you’s,” and the nicknames, and the things that make you smile. In the end… it isn’t a computer or a Cloud that holds on to our memories. In the end… our memories forever reside in our minds and our hearts.