Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Q: How can you be married to the same person for forty years? A: But I haven’t been.    Paolo Cuelho
 
My wife is a very private person, which creates something of a challenge for this column. I hope I don’t betray her trust.
 
It is not quite fifty years since we met. The week I send this out we will celebrate our 47th anniversary. That is all but a tiny fraction of our adult lives, Occasionally, one or the other of us has been traveling for a week or two, but other than that, it is an unusual month when we are not together virtually every day. You would think she would be sick of me by now.
 
I never grow tired of being in her presence. She is simply so interesting, perhaps because she is so interested in just about everything, except maybe my taste for old sitcoms. But when I stumbled across this q-and-a from Brazilian literary giant Paolo Coelho, it made clear exactly what has made our life the adventure it is.
 
We often remind each other how fortunate we are to be married still. It’s not because we haven’t worked at it as much as we have loved at it. Rather, we got married when we were pretty young. Neither of us had finished growing up to the point where we could say with anything other than a loving guess that we knew what we were doing.
 
For many of our early years together, she mostly put my interests and aspirations ahead of her own. I’d like to think I consulted her (I certainly said the words), but the fact is she never put the brakes on anything I suggested for us. She did not set her aspirations completely aside – she managed to complete an MBA while she was pregnant and a new mom, including driving across the entire State of Connecticut twice a week – with a sprained ankle in a boot – to take the classes she needed. She ran a successful business from our house, and though she made the decision to be at home with our eventual three kids, she also managed to build, from scratch, a highly successful career as a freelance communications expert. While many of her friends were trying to write the great American novel or chase the popular magazine bylines, she immersed herself in the field she studied and, to this day, is both fully employed and the captain of her own work ship. I know better than to write about her clients, but our favorite game when we are driving is to see trucks and billboards and hear her say, “They paid me.”
 
Since I retired, I admit to falling back on my original practice of suggesting the direction of our life together. I love being retired, to be honest. It has to do a lot with how naturally lazy I am and even more to do with a romantic memory of the first days of summer vacation when I was a kid. And without the consideration of being responsible to set an example for members of a synagogue or supporters of an organization, it has dawned on me how directive I must have been for most of those fifty years we have been together. Mostly, I spoke. Rarely, I asked.
 
Not so long ago, I proposed the notion that it was time for her to retire, as I did, because it was so much fun, and it would be more fun together. Maybe – just maybe – I said it lot. Finally, without rancor, she asked me to stop pitching retirement. She loves what she does. It still immerses her in interesting things (like mining in Africa and mass transportation in South America) and draws on her natural and acquired insights. Employers compete for her time. Really important people (I am not making that up) rely on her skill to craft their messages.
 
And, God, she loves me so much. I am constantly astonished, as I learn more and more about my less-than-perfect self, just how much she loves me.
 
I wish this for everyone. Here’s the lesson that can make it happen: that person you decided to build a life with yesterday is not the same person today. They’re better. And with any luck, because of them, so are you. 

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
It is possible to hold more than one big emotion in your heart at the same time.  Ann Moline
 
Just the other day, we received a 16-second video clip of our 10-month-old granddaughter cracking up into hysterical laughter as her father squirted a tiny amount of food from a tube onto a cracker for her. The sound is so joyous you can’t help but laugh along with her, even if the precipitating cause is as mundane as you can imagine.
 
Around the same time, we were discussing the upcoming first birthday of our grandson which he will never celebrate. That day carries with it a reminder of the most devastating personal tragedy our family has ever known.
 
This past year has been a continuous lesson in the wisdom of Ann Moline’s observation. Three babies were born last summer; two of them survived past their fourth month. The loss was unexpected and statistically near impossible. And it occurred in immediate proximity to the beginning of the catastrophe in Israel. Meanwhile, two other babies grew and thrived and filled the lives of those around them. As one of them sprouted flaming red hair and the other managed to climb out of his crib before anyone knew he could pull himself up, we delighted in new teeth, new sounds, new pictures. Each milestone was both celebration and reminder.  
 
I will acknowledge that I worried about how to open my heart completely to both sets of emotions simultaneously. It’s not like our family had separate gathering times for some of us who were happy and some of us who were sad. Its not like we could predict when a wave of grief would wash ashore or when a little one would dissolve into unbridled cackling. It’s not like we could choose among our children in these moments any more than in the decades past.
 
But during one of the many hours that Ann and I sat alone together, absorbed in the challenge of navigating the unfamiliar landscape, she shared this profound truth she had discovered, however tentatively at first. The heart – not the physical muscle, of course, but the space we designate to warm and break and soar and ache – will make room for all of it. A heart awash in joy will not exclude grief. A heart in pieces is yet expansive enough for exhilaration. It is not a contest for real estate, even when the intensity of one seems all-consuming.
 
It was counterintuitive at the time, of course. Every smile felt like a betrayal of mourning, every tear felt like a repudiation of joy. When we surrendered to delight, were we forgetting the tragedy? When we were awash with tears, were we dismissing the laughter? I do not refer here to being appropriately behaved in any given moment. This challenge is, to use a pretentious word, existential. Without this insight, we would have been resigned to a life of guilt.
 
Inadvertently, I came across what some of my clergy friends call Scriptural support for this lesson. The memorial service conducted in synagogue on designated holidays often begins with a verse from Psalm 8: God, what is a human being that you take heed, a mere mortal yet you take note? (Apologies for an awkward translation – it is VERY gender bound in Hebrew.)  It is a peculiar choice, given its context. Psalm 8 is a celebration of life; this verse is preceded by the power of a baby’s voice to attest to creation and followed by a Disney-like fluttering and scampering of woodland creatures. Anyone who encounters this verse in its Biblical context finds it celebratory. Anyone who encounters it in its liturgical context finds it miserable. Yet, there it is, like the heart, holding more than one big emotion at the same time.
 
My illustration of this bit of wisdom is, I expect, sympathetic. Not every big emotion is worth embracing. But I hope it is clear that when one of those other emotions leads to despair, depression, or God forbid, hatred, the heart is big enough to make room for plenty of love.

 
Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Grief is shared; the journey is personal.    Ann Moline
 
The people I love have had more than their share of grief this year. Looking at the concentric circles of family, friends, and acquaintances, I am stunned by just how crowded the road of bereavement has become. I have shared before that our sweet baby grandson Oliver succumbed to complications of necessary surgery just hours before the murderous atrocities that befell Israelis at home and on holiday, which in turn preceded the deaths of other civilians cynically used as human shields to protect the terrorist perpetrators.
 
(Please don’t argue my terminology. Frame it as you choose or choose to stop reading.)
 
Of course, death and other kinds of loss are part and parcel of living, so each of us must find a way to travel that road from devastation to recovery. The circumstances of any death resonate differently for each survivor. For some it is profound sadness, for others, white-hot anger. The “stages of grief” include denial and bargaining and guilt and even some level of acceptance and rationalization. All of them flow from a common point: any death reminds us that we are not in control of our world. And, wow, do we want to be.
 
It has been ten years since I retired from the day-to-day responsibilities of serving a synagogue as the rabbi, and during the thirty-five years preceding I walked the path of bereavement with hundreds, maybe thousands of individuals. The very first funeral for which I was individually responsible was for a twenty-one-year-old son of strangers who became immediate confidants. I was clueless about guiding them, filled with book-learning and a ritual checklist. They had lost their golden child. I wasn’t much older myself, yet they relied on me to show them how to continue on the path their child would never again travel. They were not people of faith when their son got sick, and though they fervently prayed for his recovery, they had little belief that they could cajole God into a miracle. The parts of their souls that were bound up with his were filled with the magnitude of their loss; they joined my synagogue (the first to which they ever belonged) because they felt I represented the continuation of their son’s legacy. When my career took me to another city, they retreated to the loneliness of his empty bedroom.
 
Many years later, I shepherded another stranger through the decline and death of her beloved father who had lived in my community for his entire adult life, more than sixty years. By then, I was more familiar with the nuance of individual grief. But I was unprepared when she informed me the day before the funeral that the burial would be in a different city, and I was unable to officiate. Her fury was uncontained; she had been abandoned twice in two days. My attentions and sympathies were irrelevant. I never heard from her again – though the leadership of the synagogue did, at volume.
 
I have navigated my own losses along with others’ whom I have accompanied. The more times I have done so, the fewer pieces of advice I offer, even when asked. For all the fellow travelers on the journey through grief, it is only the grief we share. I have tried not to make the mistake of persuading myself – let alone them – that I know how they feel.
 
This past fall that road was more crowded than I ever recall. Other tragedies have produced multiple casualties and other casualties have been just as close to me. But somehow the personal nature of the grief for those around me has generated an intensity that has demanded amplification rather than empathy. We are all grieving, but the grief is not enough this time. We are looking for validation for our reactions, as if the sadness is not sad enough or the anger is not angry enough without the tears and shouts of those around us. And sometimes, God help us, we want others to suffer as we are, as if it will bring some measure of comfort and satisfaction.
 
Here’s the truth: grief is shared, but the journey is personal. And by personal, I mean lonely. We gain nothing by pretending otherwise, and when we do, we squander the opportunity for comfort, however small, that sharing our grief provides.