A year ago tomorrow, my long-lost father was laid to rest in Israel.
Two days ago, my heart was broken for families that I will never know.
Today, I'm going to hear a choir perform Handel's "Messiah", in a church sanctuary that slightly resembles a synagogue, HA, which I did on this Sunday last year. My dad loved that glorious work and I grew up hearing it every Christmas.
I take great comfort in the lyric, taken from Scripture, "Behold, I tell you a mystery; We shall not all sleep; but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet."
We shall. We shall be changed...
In the meantime, we mourn for the lost ones in Connecticut, for the lost ones in Hurricane Sandy, for the lost ones in this Crazy Year That Nearly Was. My dad numbers among those.
Today, I pray for the parents of the kindergartners lost to evil, the children and spouses of staff lost to evil, for the first-responders that encountered the aftermath of evil, as I get the house ready for the man who shares my life.
As I pray for those lost, as I pray for us left behind, as I move on into my bright future with Jonathan, I'm putting away some of Daddy's things. His daughter Kfirah, my sister, told me that in Judaism one is taught to mourn for a year and then forget that person. I don't know about that. You can't simply forget someone, especially someone who gave you half your DNA.
I've officially mourned for a year, after unofficially mourning for most of my life. I used to feel bad about that, and be made to feel bad about that.
I recently read a musing from one of my aunts, who lost her first baby, long ago before I was born. "... as this is the 52nd anniversary of our first son's birthday... in defiance of the sadness that still can overwhelm me on this day, if I let it, I wrote to my three kids this morning to tell them how grateful I was for their lives..." If I let it. In defiance of sadness.
"If I let it". We don't want to be permanently paralyzed by grief...yet we don't want to be cold as stone and forget that we loved someone once. She's a good model for that -- remembering the great love she had for her first-born and still pressing forward.
"In defiance of sadness." We can combat grief with said-aloud gratitude for joys in our lives, indeed, while we recognize and embrace our humanity and our tender hearts. My aunt has a tender heart, and I know that her faith in life after death gives her the strength and spunk to use the phrase "in defiance of sadness'.
I could spend this day mourning my father. In a way I am, obviously, and I don't feel bad about it at all. He loved me once, and I him. That's something to celebrate.
I miss him. I always have, and I always will.
However, 'in defiance of sadness', I'm putting away some of his books that I've kept in sight for years. I've kept them about me, like comfortable old shoes. I certainly don't ascribe to the Jewish hardness of forgetting all about the dead, but I think I can let go my grip on my grieving at last.
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I don't know when that will happen for the families in Sandy Hook village.It may be 52 years, it may be 34 years, it may be never, that they will be able to feel defiance against sadness. Along with the Hanukkah candles, and the Advent candles, I'm lighting another one -- just for them. This light is for them, in the sudden darkness that has engulfed them.
May they somehow know the arms of God around their shaking shoulders.
