There have been so many deaths on the Island in the past few years. Kids are reeling, adults are weeping, and many of us dread opening the paper knowing there will be another tourist who died on a motorbike, or a neighbor’s kid who got killed in a car accident.
When I was 15, my father died in front of me. One minute he was pulling the rope on the lawn mower and joking, and the next minute he was dead. Alive then dead. In less than 60 seconds.
I’m 84, and when I think about my loss so many years ago, it blows my mind that there was no grief counselor, no therapist, no bastion of aunties who came and fed me and held me and talked to me, no books on grief, no rabbi visits. There was the traditional shiva, eight days of mourning where a minyan (10 men) sat on hard stools and prayed. People brought food, but because it was Passover, you couldn’t eat anything with leavening, so the food was … well, in a word, horrible.
I have two memories. I remember thinking, “What a bunch of bad luck that this couldn’t have landed on a regular day so there could have been maybe a lemon meringue pie or a platter of double chocolate brownies, or even garlic bread and pizza.” Instead, nothing with yeast. Nothing that rises. (There’s a metaphor there somewhere.) Matzoh has been described as crispy cardboard.
The other memory is of picking out the suit my father would be buried in, arguing with my sister about which photograph of the four of us we would put in his breast pocket. She won. It was the one where she looked good and I looked gawky. (There actually wasn’t a picture in captivity where I didn’t look gawky, so I don’t know what I was arguing over.)
I went to school that Monday, and it was business as usual except the teachers knew and they were very nice to me, and the kids knew and they were also especially nice to me. No one mentioned it. In the ’50s (and maybe still today), death and sex and money were all taboo topics. You would never say to a kid who’d lost a parent, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
As a culture, we certainly have made progress in dealing with grief.
It’s still a conundrum in many families and communities, but our precious Island acts quickly and with so much compassion. When people not from the Island ask what it’s like to live here full-time, I say our social life takes place at the Post Office, or when someone has cancer everyone rallies. There’s either a fundraiser or a GoFundMe. And when someone young dies, the grief counselors go into overdrive.
I’m lucky that I was able to cry, and still do, when I see fathers and daughters. I’m lucky I’ve gotten to share the story, write the words, and feel the pain that I wasn’t able to feel then.
These days, between so many wars internationally and the environment dying and losing Island icons like Patricia Bergeron and Roy Scheffer and Nathaniel (“Natty”) Schneider and John Forté and Gus Ben David and Bob Moore and Ron Rappaport and so many young ones, we are feeling a collective sorrow in a way deeper than ever.
So let’s hold each other tighter than usual, greet each other with more warmth than ever, and reach out to someone whom we’ve maybe lost touch with or had a falling-out with.
You don’t have to wait till Yom Kippur or making amends to say “I’m sorry,” and you don’t have to wait till Valentine’s Day to say “I love you.” And you don’t have to wait for the next tragedy in your town to send a loving message.
My teacher, Ram Dass, said it best: We have to figure out a way to keep our hearts open in hell. And if your heart is open in hell, it becomes a natural grief counselor 24/7.
