Sitting Shivah, Singing Gospel... Good Grief.

♪Amen! Amen!♪ A aaaa men ♪ a-men a-men!

We’ve all heard that Negro Spiritual at least once in our lifetime. (Yes, it is called  a Negro Spiritual. History is not always PC.) :-P 

Amen means “So be it.”  “So be it” does not consistently translate to “Hallelujah everything is wonderful”.It’s an agreement, an acceptance to the prayer offered, whether in jubilation or despair. Ancient counterpart to today's ad nauseum, "It is what it is." 

My half-siblings are half way through their required week of Jewish grief in Northern Israel. Sitting shivah in an Orthodox home means covering the mirrors, lighting a single candle, sitting on the floor, no shoes, no showers,  reciting the Kaddish - the mourner's prayer, for a seven-day period of mourning. (No doubt the grieving is exacerbated by the grieving, guilt, and mild gall of my former ‘stepmother’, who may be coming to terms with the journey she shared with a man twenty years her senior, her contribution to his alcoholism, and missed opportunities. She shouldn’t be so hard on herself… we all make Big Mistakes.) 

As utterly miserable as they may be, at least they are together, and there is finality to the passing, and some sort of closure.

I lost a dear friend this summer to something similar… infection, surgery, infection, body succumbing. He was 34 years younger than my dad, and we held his hand at the hospital and told him we loved him…and a week later, sat in church and cried and laughed and cried together. I'll not soon forget the anguished face of his youngest son turning back to look at the casket one last time before recessing out.

There are moments of my day when I have that anguished look, only it’s a dull ache in my chest. I get misty every couple of hours, and at night, I cry for all the stupidity of years lost, stubbornness, stoicisim, and persons who do not allow themselves to publicly mourn, for their own reasons. Ironically, if my dad were here, he’d tell me to “save my tears for something important.” Hmmh.

I wish I had a funeral to go to. 

I wish I could force myself to get dressed formally and drag myself to a church or a synagogue and be put through the torture of facing the loss of a loved one.

Instead I am here, alone in my grief, unable to mourn him with any one whom I have a shared history, since his departure from my family basically perforated it all those years ago and it has never been quite the same.

I used to have dreams of seeing my dad in a random place and just hugging him, and finally after a twenty year absence, I got to do just that, in sort of a random place, an airport terminal. Same place I hugged him good-bye a week later, knowing it would be the only time that would transpire. What a wonder it is that the dream even ever came true at all.

I wish I could have an end date to our mourning...and wish there was someone to mourn his loss with me. My Jonathan told me it tore him up to not be able to rush home, to be here with me. I wept, and then told him 'soldiers have to stay at their posts,' even though I wish he were here, too. 

On Sunday morning, I shared with my fellow choir members that the music we sang would have been cherished by the Daddy I knew back in the 60's...jazzy gospel and classical praise. We grew up listening to the Robert Shaw Chorale, Mahalia Jackson, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Glenn Miller. He would have been tapping his toes at the "Jazz Gloria", and teared up at the Saint-Saens "Oratorio". Through the same stifled anguished ‘look’ I trilled "Praise the Lord, Praise the Lord our God who cometh" on the day my father was buried.  I mentioned tearfully to some that the service we had this was the funeral service I always would have imagined for my father, Christ-centered and full of glorious sound. 

I sat stock-still as the Christmas Toccata was masterfully offered by our Juilliard-trained organist, Kiyo Watanabe. Filled with familiar strains of ancient hymns, it also has a melancholy and dark air woven to the last few measures, and then a resulting gentle finale.

The dynamic of the Toccata IS the dynamic of Christmas. It’s joy and strain and darkness and hope and sorrow and frenzy and peace and beauty, in rapid succession and intermingled with each other.

Sounds a little Hebraic? That’s because it is… but the end of the Story is not mourning at the death of the grown Christ. He came to live among us that we might have hope beyond sitting shivah, beyond no funerals, beyond this finite world.

The ache comes and goes. The hope remains that I will hug my dad again, because I believe what he believed, that the end of the Story is not mourning and gnashing of teeth, but glory in the presence of the Father.

So be it.