That’s Life.

 Almost two years ago next week, my dad passed away suddenly.

I, prophetically, wrote this days before his death.  I hope it can provide some comfort to those in mourning.

A necessary part of living is dying.  The longer our teeth, the shorter the days.  

No one is immune from the grim reaper’s scythe as he selects his next prey, but if you own the right ammunition, that scythe turns into an embrace where you are instantly whisked to a place you didn’t believe existed.  Home.  Where there is no pain, only love, and more love.  If you are in touch with your spiritual body, you understand that it is eternal.  When people joke “you can’t take it with you”, it is a fallacy.  You can.  You take all the love, kindness, and dedicated philanthropy you achieve in this lifetime.  Your legacy stays on earth while your true consciousness is dancing with your Aunt Deborah who looks like the wedding picture that was caddy cornered between the end table and the wall in her living room; the one that was cluttered with yellowed pieces of paper and a half-finished New York Times Crossword puzzle. The faded image was taken in 1955 before you were born.  Though you only knew her when her hands were spotted with age, you instantly recognize her. She is your soul family.

Life. Death.

None of us are immune.  

One sultry summer day in Miami Beach, we received one of those phone calls.  The one that instantly shifts your reality.  Your legs buckle underneath you as your mind struggles to catch up with your visceral emotions. There’s a disconnect between your body and your mind while you struggle to hold on to your sanity during a seismic catastrophe that registers a 10 on the Richter Scale. Someone is either dying or dead. On this August day over 25 years ago, my father-in-law, who was the only one of his rabbinical family to survive the Holocaust, had a cerebral hemorrhage while walking the streets of the Upper West Side and was transformed from a vibrant and active man who was known to wax philosophically on any given subject, to a silent supine shell hooked up to a machine at Mt. Sinai Hospital.  His brain was inactive, and he would never recover.  Before we could exhale, we were on a flight back to NYC, praying that he would hold on until we saw him and say our goodbyes.  He held on, but it got more frightening with the decision of either prolonging his semblance of life or issuing a DNR and allowing him to return to his maker, without further life-saving measures.  I had never seen my husband cry or show much emotion.  In an instant, he collapsed.  He didn’t want to let his father go.  During this heart-wrenching moment, I received a call from one of my siblings informing me that my grandfather had just arrived at the same hospital.  The atmosphere was as dissimilar as possible. My grandfather had been through the revolving doors of that medical establishment for over ten years.  The hospital was his second home.  We expected him to serve his time and be discharged.  Instead, he passed, at the exact same time as my father-in-law, in the same hospital on different floors.  What a macabre coincidence.  My husband and father would be sitting shiva at the exact same time.

When someone passes away, there is a phantom limb that demands attention, every minute of every day.  You pick up the phone to call them (this was way before texting); you wait for their signature knock on the door.  Their presence is so necessary for your existence; that years later, you still miss the arm, leg, finger, or even toe that was tragically amputated from your body.  You search for those pieces everywhere you go and would give your other arm to retrieve them because at least YOU made the choice.  Death gruesomely displays our lack of control; it is the ultimate middle finger. 

(Pardon all the appendage analogies or profanity, but I’m making a point.)

Everything must die to be reborn.  It is part of nature and the cycles and circle of life.  If we didn’t die, we wouldn’t know how to live.  If this life was not so precious, we wouldn’t learn how to love.  It’s wrong to state that grief subsides.  It doesn’t.  You appreciate the happy times more in the bittersweetness and chaotic mess we call life.  The joyous occasions cause the grief to become callouses on our souls.  The sharp pain dulls just a bit with the birth of a baby, a marriage, and a child named after the loved one you lost in this realm because they are always there in your heart.  The irony is that they are closer to you than they were before because they live inside of you.  They visit you in your dreams and you wake up with tears streaming down your face, but there is joy, because you know that they are ok, even if you aren’t.

As a religious and G-d fearing human, I understand that we are all food for worms.  If we remember this, we can refrain from a lot of unnecessary pain and conflict.  The good part is that we are all connected through our collective and universal soul by our creator and by the internet.  What I do affects you and vice versa.  Our souls are eternal.  I know this connection to be true, because when they opened my father-in-law’s briefcase; the one that he carried with him daily, they found one picture in it.  It was a picture of my grandfather and my father-in-law shaking hands and smiling at my engagement party, where they discovered they had been in the same Russian gulag during the war, at the same time.

There are no coincidences in Life nor Death.