An Interesting Approach to Developing Resilience

A few days ago, I received an intriguing offer, one that's quite relevant to this blog's central subject – resilience in its differing forms. It's for a bestselling book by Dr. Judith Orloff called Emotional Freedom.

Resilience comes in many flavors. What helps one person go on to a fulfilling life despite grief or tragedy may not necessarily work for another. One bereaved parent may find solace in religion and spirituality, while another process her loss by creating art, composing music, or writing stories, a novel, or a memoir. One person who’s experienced trauma such as a terror attack or a violent crime may turn to philosophy to try and make meaning from the horror; another may embrace social action. I’ve been examining here what works for me – including writing this blog! – and I’m also very interested in what works for others.

In my psychotherapy practice, I treat people who are facing difficulties such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, using cognitive-behavioral (CBT) and mindfulness-based therapies. The two approaches are quite different, but complement each other. CBT helps people to break unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaving, and to develop more realistic and helpful ones, while mindfulness teaches people to accept their inner experiences – whether these be thoughts, emotions, or physical sensations – in a curious, non-judgmental way. Some of what these approaches have in common is that both teach their adherents not to dwell on negative thinking, and to pay attention to the positive aspects of their lives. I’ve seen the results over and over – and, in fact, both kinds of therapy have been supported by empirical research – as client after client has developed what might be called their “resilience muscles.”

Dr. Orloff, a well-known psychiatrist who teaches at UCLA, has created her own unique method for developing resilience based on a synthesis of conventional medicine, energy medicine, and spirituality. Although its sounds very different from what I practice, some of its elements are quite similar to those of CBT (such as naming and facing what one fears) and of mindfulness (such as learning to be in the moment).

If such an approach interests you, you can get a taste from several videos that have been posted on YouTube. Here are a few:

Overcoming Negativity – Parts 1 and 3 of 3

Four Questions to Transform Fear

What is Your Emotional Type?

How to Stop Absorbing Others’ Energy

Emotional Freedom lays out Dr. Orloff's method in accessible and clear form and language, and has received very positive reviews in magazines such as Publisher’s Weekly. It’s now coming out in paperback; books may be purchased together with the special offer I received, which I’m reproducing verbatim:

EMOTIONAL FREEDOM: LIBERATE YOURSELF FROM NEGATIVE EMOTIONS AND TRANSFORM YOUR LIFE

UPLIFTING NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER BY Judith Orloff MD (in paperback now!)

Judith Orloff MD, a UCLA psychiatrist, presents her unique approach for viewing emotions as a path to spiritual and intuitive awakening. You'll learn how to stop absorbing other people's negativity and how to stay calm instead of reacting when your buttons get . Synthesizing neuroscience and intuitive/energy medicine, this book liberates you from fear—and the emotional vampires who suck you dry.

Purchase book plus get your "Embrace Joy" gift collection at http://www.drjudithorloff.com/emotional-freedom-paperback/

Full disclosure: I haven’t yet read the book, but I have seen the videos, and Dr. Orloff’s approach does look very interesting. So I’m sharing with you the opportunity to check it out.

Poems of Disappointed Love, in English Translation

I've noticed that many readers have been interested in my post about the poems Timora wrote in 1997, when she was in remission from leukemia and fell in love for the first and only time. Sadly, her love turned out to be unrequited.

I posted the original Hebrew poems here; these are the poems as I translated them into English in my memoir:

May 31
It’s easy to say: “He’s found another?
It’s nothing, I’ll just move on,
I’ll not think about him any longer,
It’s not really so bad that he’s gone.”
It’s easy to say: “This is truly silly,
There are plenty of others around,
And he and I in any event
Wouldn’t find any real common ground.”
It’s easy to say, it’s easy to speak,
If there’s one thing I have it’s my words.
So why, when it’s time to put them to use,
Do I cry, though I know it’s absurd?

August 24
I don’t push
Don’t stand out
Don’t stand on my rights,
Don’t invent witty comebacks
Only stand
And suffer
And absorb
And miss out
Afraid to be a bother
Afraid to be judged
Self-confidence – about zero
Hopeless
Lost,
Slowly disappearing
Melding into the wall.
Trapped.
If I only had the courage
Just for a tiny moment
To raise my head
To look straight ahead
And say:
“I’m here”…

October 26
True,
She hasn’t loved him
For some time,
True,
Nothing remains from that old
Story,
And the fire has been quenched,
And the flame is dead,
And with it hope,
They’re all gone.
And with them
The glittering, blinding light saved
For the knight on the white horse.
But every time they meet each other
By chance, on the street,
Her heart fills with pain,
As if pierced
By a white-hot arrow.

Resilient as she was, Timora dealt with her disappointment by throwing herself into
a whirl of normal-life pursuits. But she never did get the chance to "find another" and experience the joy of a real, mutual romantic relationship. Somehow, this is one of the most wrenching of my many losses as a bereaved parent.

Love Poems and Life-Force

I’ve been writing a great deal about resilience. So far I’ve reflected on what has contributed toward my own and other peoples’ ability to go on living full and even happy lives in spite of tragedy or overwhelming hardship; I haven’t yet touched here on Timora’s amazing resilience, although there's a great deal about it in my memoir.

As I wrote in my last post, Timora was a true writer, so it’s not surprising that the exuberant life-force that enabled her to bounce back from the extreme hardship she experienced in her young life is reflected in her poetry. These are my translations of the poems she wrote when she fell in love for the first, and only, time in her life, in the spring of 1997. She was in remission from her leukemia after two and a half years of intensive treatment and debilitating side effects – several months of concentrated chemotherapy, her first bone marrow transplant, and the Graft-Versus-Host-Disease that resulted from the transplant. She told me, when she came home from the Scouts trip where she met the boy, “I feel like I’ve gotten a glimpse of how life can be when I’m not sick – of the things I’ve been missing until now. Now I know there’s a whole world waiting for me, if I only decide to go out there and join it." And so she did.

The Hebrew originals can be found here.

April 4
Love
Purity of childhood
Innocence of youth
The truest, the best, the rightest
Thing of all
Won’t fit into a rigid frame
Of rules
Soul touching body
Childish, naïve
And so
Real
Angels’ touch
Bringing together thrilled
And amazed souls
Who discover
The truest thing
The most beautiful thing
Love.

April 17
How dark it all was,
Despair, fear, loneliness
Feeling like a third wheel in this world,
How the light came suddenly,
Hand and smile, innocent touch, love-giving
And it all changed,
Love
Can do it all.

April 20
I wake in the morning –
You float into my head.
Go to sleep,
With your name on my lips.
You are everywhere,
Fill me,
Do you also think of me?

Any bereaved parent will tell you that remembering their children through what they left behind is one of the most important - if bittersweet - ways of moving toward healing from their deep grief. I feel especially blessed that by turning her inner life into written words Timora left us so much of herself, and in such a beautiful form.

Writing and Resilience

In one of my first posts since renewing this blog, Grieving and Sharing, I wrote about how reaching out to others who are experiencing (or have experienced) loss or other kinds of hardship has been healing for me. Writing my memoir, of course, is one of the ways I've done this, as is (for that matter) writing this blog.

I find writing to be one of the most effective ways of processing the traumas, surprises, and puzzles life has thrown my way over the years. But writing is more than therapeutic for me - the artistic process of transforming the bare facts of "what happened" into stories that can affect others satisfies a deep creative need. I neglected this need during the long period when I was developing my career(s) and raising my family. But in the past couple of years I've been catching up - participating in writers' workshops as well as one retreat and a year-long course, writing short fiction and creative non-fiction based (so far) on my own life. Part of me is terrified that after And Twice the Marrow of Her Bones there won't be any more - that my creativity has dried up - but I'm determined not to give up. In this, Timora is my role model.

Timora was very gifted in several branches of the arts - notably theater and music - but above all she was a writer. She wrote and wrote, no matter how ill, tired, or discouraged she felt, all the way up to the week before she entered the ICU for the last time. She had an extraordinary ability to take her experience of life and put it down on paper gracefully, beautifully, and movingly. She began to seriously develop her writing - especially her poetry - in ninth grade, when she was still suffering from the side effects of her first bone marrow transplant. The first really serious poem she wrote expressed, passionately but at the same time wistfully, her take on her life at that time:

I might have been now
A tranquil girl, with a smile on her face,
And not perpetually cross.
A serene and confident girl,
Who doesn’t fear every shadow.
I might have been now
A regular schoolgirl,
And a girl who returns home from school
With quick, light steps,
Without arriving panting and in pain.
I might have
Joined all the trips and camps
I missed and will go on missing.
Slept at night, with pleasant dreams,
Made peace with myself – no one’s perfect.
I might have
Had friends
Who come to my home and host me at theirs,
And all could have been self-evident,
And clear, that I truly deserve this.
I might have had something to do with my life,
Accepted love from my sisters
And finally stopped weeping
And have been fourteen and five months.
I might
Have
Been.

(The Hebrew original can be found here.)

I'm sure that Timora's ability to give creative expression to her inner life is part of what made her so resilient. If I find myself only half as able as Timora was to transform the stuff of life - whether it be grief, joy, fear, or wisdom - into art, I'll be eternally grateful.

Hebrew Poems: Timora's Last

I've just posted Timora's last two poems, which she wrote just before her second bone marrow transplant, a bit more than a year before she died. It's hard to believe she wrote them only a week apart, they are so radically different. Although translations of both can be found, each in a different place, on my original blog, I'm reproducing them below, together.

They speak for themselves:

You’ve imprisoned me in a cold dark room
And I can neither stand nor sit
And my lying is uneasy
Hard and restless
And I cry –
Let me out
Or let me stand,
Or rest at least, or take away the cold
And if you can’t,
Please,
Open up a little crack
So I’ll know –
The world still contains a little light.
(November 5, 1999)

And why.
Why live.
Suffer.
Fight, struggle.
Why pull and pull like a wretched, miserable beast –
For what.
In loneliness, in darkness, in the cold.
How much have I asked, and how much will I ask
And I am not the only one
Not only when sorrow blinds the eyes like a veil of tears.
But within me I know
And sometimes, like a flame
The answer blazes before me –
Love.
(November 12, 1999)

Review and Revision

Today I opened a new page that will contain excerpts from and links to reviews of my memoir. So far there have been two reviews, both very positive, and several more will appear in April, including in Lilith Magazine.

It's interesting to notice which aspects of the book different reviewers pick up on. The Jewish Press review, which appeared today, for example, emphasized themes connected with Judaism, and my struggle with my faith in light of life's cruelties. Perhaps not surprisingly for a publication with an almost exclusively observant readership, it portrays my views and feelings connected with this very difficult subject as more Orthodox than they are - one might say the review "revises" my attitudes just a bit - which only goes to show just how complex and highly charged these questions are.

I invite you to visit the new page, and the reviews it lists.

R&B and Resilence

I first met Angela Bofill in seventh grade, when we both sang soprano in Hunter College High School’s Junior Chorus. “Both” is actually a funny word to use, because there was never really any comparing us. Angela was a wunderkind of a singer. When the chorus performed a few songs from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado,” Angela belted out Yum-Yum’s signature solo, “The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze,” in a pure, rich voice it was almost impossible to believe originated in a twelve-year-old body.

I continued to dabble in music throughout high school – singing and playing the flute, doing well in my music classes and at the Third Street Music School – but in fits and starts, never mustering the self-discipline to make of myself anything other than a talented amateur. During those same years, Angela was moving full steam ahead into what was clear to everyone would be a successful singing career. In school, she started and starred in a group she called the “Puerto Rican Supremes;” outside school she became increasingly involved first in semiprofessional, then professional performance.

In twelfth grade, I had a let’s-get-serious-about music period and began bringing my flute to school every day. Angela noticed, and invited me into an instrumental improvisation group she was forming, together with Elaine Yoneoka (guitar) and Jane Levy (recorder). She was the group’s soul, providing both the ideas (I remember best playing a piece by the French impressionist composer Erik Satie that morphed, as we improvised, into jazz) and a solid body for our music as she played her heart out on the piano.

I lost track of Angela right after high school, but the advent of Google enabled me to check out her career trajectory. As we’d all expected, she became a professional singer, and amassed a fiercely loyal following. She recorded several albums, and was one of the first Latina singers to succeed in the Rhythm-and-Blues world; one of her songs made it to the top ten on the R&B charts. Her career peaked in the 1980s, but she continued to perform, record, and tour the United States as well as Europe in multi-artist jazz concerts. She even branched out into theater, appearing in several plays – including the intriguingly titled God Don’t Like Ugly.

Disaster struck in 2006, when Angela suffered a stroke that paralyzed her left side. To make matters worse, she didn’t have health insurance at the time. Her fans, friends, family, and fellow musicians stepped up and contributed, though, and celebrities held benefit concerts to pay her medical bills. She began physical and speech therapy and seemed on her way to recovering when, a year and a half later, a second massive stroke cut her down once again, and she lost whatever ability she’d regained to speak – and, of course, to sing.

When I read this news, I tried to imagine what it would be like to be Angela. To have spent most of my life singing, performing, doing the only thing I’d ever wanted to do, only to have my voice taken from me – and twice, at that. Many times, as I sang in my talented-but-amateur way for my own or others’ pleasure, I thought how hard it would be for me to lose that relatively small source of joy, and suspected that in Angela’s place I’d have sunk into depression and despondency, perhaps even lost my will to live.

I was wrong. Not necessarily about myself – thank God, there’s been no occasion for me to find out how I’d react to that kind of disaster (though Timora’s death has shown me that I can ultimately stand up to devastating loss). But about Angela, who's proved to be almost unbelievably resilient.

As it turns out, she did become seriously depressed after the first stroke hit, and after the second seemed to have given up on music. But with the encouragement of her manager and colleagues, she’s pulled herself out of the depths and begun performing again – without her voice.

She’s now appearing in a series of sold-out shows called the Angela Bofill Experience. The band – including the legendary flutist Dave Valentin – accompanies the young singer Maysa as she performs Angela’s hits. Angela sits on stage and tells stories in the broken speech that she’s once again, with hard work and determination, recovered. Most amazingly, she laughs. Two weeks ago, she told the Washington Post’s DeNeen Brown that in early 2006 her career was faltering. “I asked God: ‘Give me break.’ … That’s when stroke hit. Next time, God, maybe another break.” She joked about her hobbled syntax: “Me, Tarzan. You Jane.” And even about the stroke itself: “Only good thing I lose weight. A stroke diet. It works!” She calls herself a “sitting-down comic.”

I’m in awe of Angela. Not just for her talent, as I was forty years ago when she was already a serious musician and I was just playing at music, but for her courage and fortitude. She's another example of the kind of person I wrote about in my earlier post, Humor and Resilience, and gives me additional reason to believe that these two priceless qualities are inextricably entwined. Add to her playful humor a real passion for her art, and the love and support of those she cares for and who care for her, and you've got a good start on a recipe for resilience. I wish her health, strength, and the continued love of those around her. May she always be able to laugh in the face of potentially devastating loss.

Who are you?

The stats for this blog show me that I have readers in countries where I don't know anyone personally - places like Russia Brazil, Canada, and most of Europe.

I would love to hear from readers I don't know personally. I invite you to leave a comment telling me where you're from and how you came to read my blog.

And, as I've told my readers who are also friends and family, I'd love to read any comment you may have on the blog's content. Part of my reason for writing it is to reach out, so please feel free to stretch your own hand out in return.

(Friends and family, I'd still love to hear from you, of course.)

Two More Hebrew Poems: Cautious Hope

I've added two more of Timora's poems in the original Hebrew, written a little more than half a year before she died. Each poem, in its own way, is cautiously hopeful. The first describes a night spent praying; the very fact that she was still pouring her heart out to God tells me that she still believed it was possible He would grant her wish. She wrote the second soon after performing in her theater class's last production, when her life seemed to be taking a turn for the better.

Grief and Gratitude

Grief and gratitude? Bereavement and thankfulness? Aren’t those contradictions in terms? I don’t think there’s a simple answer to that question. But I do believe that being able to be grateful for the good in life – even in the face of overwhelming loss – is a great part of what makes a person resilient.

Just about everyone enjoys having a reason to be thankful, whether for some kind of material well-being or for an emotional or spiritual comfort. I am certainly no exception; a difficult childhood taught me that I should never take what I have for granted. And I have so much. A good marriage, wonderful children, the incredible bonus of grandchildren, a close relationship with my sister and her son – it goes without saying that I thank God every day for my family. Friendship, attractive clothes, plentiful and nourishing food, comfortable shelter – even living in a small enough place to be able to enjoy the beauty and quiet of Nature whenever I have the time and the inclination – all these are incredible gifts.

Beyond the things I count as blessings, I’ve always loved the feeling of thankfulness – the visceral warmth that fills me when I reflect on the good in my life. I’ve found it to be an impressive antidote to the frustration, care, and worry. When I was the mother of five young children who populated an age range of just seven years, I sometimes – OK, I’ll admit it, often – felt as if my strength was giving out. Two of the girls, say, would be fighting, while a third was wandering through our three small rooms scattering a mixture of different puzzle pieces, a fourth climbing up the kitchen counter in order to get at the fruit I was saving for after dinner, and the fifth urgently needing to have her diaper changed. At times like this, taking a breath and remembering (for example) that I was lucky to conceive and bear children as easily as I could, would give me strength to go on, at least until the next crisis.

Even while our family was dealing with the myriad challenges posed by Timora’s leukemia, I was able to find reasons to be grateful. Timora’s doctor was outstanding, both professionally and as a human being. We belonged to a community that showered us with concern, emotional support, and any material help we needed. I even appreciated the fact that having a daughter with cancer simplified my priorities – if it was my day to take her to the hospital, it was clear that that was what I was doing that day, whatever other tasks awaited me at home or at work.

So you can imagine what a shock it was when my capacity for thankfulness seemed to disappear after Timora died. I couldn’t say “thank you” for anything. Grief and gratitude simply could not co-exist.

As I moved toward healing, my ability to be grateful returned – and expanded to embrace aspects of my life that I’d never thought of as candidates for conscious appreciation. Having had my existence turned upside down for so many years, I began to savor the small routines that, without thinking about it, I’d taken for granted before Timora became ill, and which were shattered after she died. As I wrote more than six years ago in the journal that makes up the second part of my memoir :

“In the past few weeks, I’ve finally started feeling that the rhythm of our family’s life is starting to return to normal, and that I’m in synch with that rhythm. The children are now busy with their own lives – school and friends and after-school activities. Don has his own career and interests. And on a day like today, I can go to work and be fully engaged in what I do there. I can come home and take a nap, and feel good about doing something for myself. I can sit and read and feel that I’m not wasting time – I’m just spending it pleasantly. And I can be with whichever members of my family are at home or on the other end of the phone line, and just enjoy them. Now, that is something to be truly thankful for.”

My capacity for gratitude has continued to grow, and recently has entered a new phase. Now, I spend some time almost every day actively seeking things to appreciate. I do this when some part of my life seems not to be working out as I’d like it to – something hurts, for example, or I feel I’m not making enough progress with a client, or there’s no train service to Tel Aviv just when I wanted to visit my grandchildren – and it gives me a sense of proportion, reminds me what’s really important. But sometimes I spend time cultivating thankfulness for its own sake, just for the fun of it.

If you think about it, there’s no end of things to be grateful for. I sometimes scan my body, going through every one of its limbs and organs – even each bone – and thank God they’re all whole and working properly; and that I have access to excellent health care when they're not. I can sit and savor my relationships with family, friends, and colleagues. I have my mental health – I’m not depressed, bipolar, or psychotic, and I don’t suffer from OCD, panic, or any other anxiety disorder (I count each one separately), or an eating disorder, or anything else in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual. I have the strength to walk and close friends to walk with regularly. I work at a job I love. I live in a democracy, and enjoy a high degree of personal security. My marriage wasn’t arranged for me, and being a woman has not in the least limited my freedom or opportunities. I can go even further – no one is forcing me to work in a blood-diamond mine, I wasn’t sold into sex slavery at the age of six, or ten, or sixteen….

You get the picture.

In the end, I believe, my grief has actually sharpened my sense of gratitude. Losing Timora has made me intensely aware of life’s fragility – together with that of just about everything that gives it meaning and brings me pleasure. I could easily go through my days fearing further loss. But instead, I deeply appreciate the blessings that remain with me.

And I thank God for that.

Three More Hebrew Poems: Relapse

I've just posted three more poems that Timora wrote in the first months after being diagnosed with relapsed leukemia. Translating them for my memoir was - like the poems themselves - difficult, but very meaningful to me.

Hebrew Poems: Last of the Remission

I've added two more of Timora's poems to the page of original Hebrew poems that I translated for my memoir. She wrote them in the last months of her remission, when she'd discovered that re-entering the "healthy" world was much more complicated than she'd hoped and fantasized while she was in treatment.

Humor and Resilience

Today I’d like to share with you a wonderful example of resilience that I recently encountered.

Last week I sat in the crowded waiting room of Hadassah’s surgical crowded daycare unit while Daniel underwent a minor knee operation (it went fine, and he’s recovering well). A sea of sound surrounded me: Arabic spoken softly into phones and between other patiently seated relatives; a Hebrew conversation a bit further away; alternating chatter and music from the television fixed above and to the right of my head; and erratic bursts of “gunfire” from a computer game a child was playing on the other side of the room. Cellular ring tones and announcements over the intercom occasionally punctuated the loud but strangely lulling hum. The words of the newspaper article I was reading were beginning to swim, and my eyes were starting to close of their own accord, when a sudden commotion shook me awake and made me look up. Two women had run into the waiting room after a young man of indeterminable age.” Walking with jerky steps, and loudly articulating seemingly meaningless syllables, the young man rounded the bend, dropped down to the floor a few feet in front of me, and started spinning around. “We’re not at home, Simcha,” the younger woman said as she took firm hold of his arms and guided him into a seat.

I got a closer look as the three sat down. The older woman, whom I’ll call Malka, looked to be in her fifties. Her open, good-humored face was well-tanned, and her moderate décolletage, good-quality jeans, and longish, blond-streaked hair placed her in the comfortable working class. Yaffa, her thirty-something companion, was somewhat more formally dressed, with silver hoop earrings emerging from her short dark curls. Both wore tasteful makeup. No family resemblance was apparent between the women, but despite his distored eyes, cheekbones, and mouth I could see that Simcha’s face was a copy of Malka’s. A look at the sticks that were his legs and his tiny feet made me wonder how he managed to get around on his own.

As soon as they were seated, Malka’s phone rang. She handed Simcha the phone. “It’s Eliezer,” she said, smiling. “Say hello.”

“A-oh,” Simcha said, grinning at the phone.

“Tell him you’re in the hospital.”

“Ah-in oh-i-al!”

“Tell him to bring you balloons,” Malka went on, and paused for a second before adding, “Tell him to bring balloons for five hundred shekels!”

All three burst into uproarious laughter. “I-uhn-e-el!” Simcha gasped into the phone, before succumbing to another giggling fit.

After Malka closed the phone, sighing and wiping her eyes, Simcha went on shouting partial words, which his mother completed for him before responding, interspersed with hoots and howls. He also barked occasionally. As he spoke, he gesticulated in a sign language that both women seemed to understand fully.

From time to time he sang. “Ta-too-ta,” he trilled, “ta-too-ta.” At one point he stood up in the middle of the room and gave a full performance, complete with coordinated claps, steps, and arm movements. Malka and Yaffa clapped along and smiled at him encouragingly – and proudly. I later learned that he’d sung “The Honey and the Sting,” a popular Israeli song asking God to preserve each aspect of our lives, whether bitter or sweet.

After he’d finished, he went back to his frenetic activity. Every few seconds he’d touch his mother’s face or arms, and every couple of minutes he’d jump up again and wander about or out of the room, occasionally throwing himself to the floor. Once or twice he crumpled a piece of paper, threw it across the room, and began to stamp his foot rhythmically. Each time, Yaffa or Malka retrieved him gently but firmly, always with a smile and often with a laugh. When got overexcited, Malka distracted and calmed him. Once, when he started pulling her hair too hard, she took him by the shoulders and said, “Here, let’s talk about ta-too-ta.” He happily took up the refrain.

The room’s other occupants – even the man sitting cheek to jowl with Simcha, absorbing an occasional poke – took him in their stride. Most ignored him, but many smiled sympathetically. As for me, it exhausted me just to watch Malka jump up every couple of minutes to make sure her son didn’t get into any trouble, and spend all the time in between amusing him as they sat together. Where did she get the physical and emotional strength? It seemed almost superhuman. What really struck me, though, was that from her face and manner it was clear that she thoroughly enjoyed her son.

After a while I went over to speak with her. She motioned to the seat next to her, which Yaffa had vacated when she took Simcha to the bathroom. I expressed my admiration for her upbeat attitude, and she replied, “Well, it’s hard, but we do what we can.” At my question, she explained that Simcha suffers from an extremely rare genetic condition resulting from a duplication of the twenty-second chromosome. “It’s so rare that no one can tell us what will be with him – how long he’ll live, what medical conditions he might come down with, how he’ll develop….” She smiled. “He’s still developing, you know.”

We spoke about her sense of humor. “That’s what our family’s like,” she said. “Whatever there is to laugh about, we find it. Simcha, too,” she added as he and Yaffa made their way back. He was singing again, giggling between lyrics that only he – and the select few – could understand. “I can see that,” I said quietly as I got up to give them their places back.

I spent the rest of the time until the nurse called me to the recovery room thinking about Timora, and how things would strike her as funny that others wouldn’t dare smile at. I write in my memoir, for example, that a classmate once warned her against eating a popsicle containing bright yellow food coloring. “What will happen?” her friend later told me she said. “I’ll get cancer?” Timora didn’t develop her sense of the absurd in a vacuum; our family, like Malka’s, places a high value on a good laugh, especially, I might add, as an alternative – and antidote – to despair.

I think that one “secret” that resilient people know is that laughing really is a lot more fun than crying – and healing to boot. If we can laugh at the sting together with the honey, at the bitter with the sweet – well, we can enjoy our own small lives, whatever Life (with a capital L) throws at us.

Three More Hebrew Poems: Disappointed Love

I've just posted three more of Timora's original Hebrew poems, which express a real, and normal, adolescent experience - unrequited love. But as I write in my memoir:

"All teens take disappointment in love, especially their first, to heart. But in some ways the experience was harder for Timora than most. This brief relationship, whatever it had been in real life, had represented so much more for her than first love. Her glimpse of what life could be like was turning out to be a glimpse and no more."

As sad as they are, though, I love reading these poems. They are part of her legacy which, like all bereaved parents, I'm very, very grateful she left behind.

Hebrew Poems: Timora in Love

Many Hebrew speakers who've read my memoir have asked to see the poems that I translated for And Twice the Marrow of Her Bones, in the original Hebrew. So I've just started a new page, on which I'll post the original poems. I've put up the first three - with more to come. You're welcome to take a look.

Timora wrote the first four of these poems during her remission from leukemia, when she fell in love for the first, and only, time of her life.

Grieving and Sharing

In my first post, Grief and Resilience, I described how I wrote my memoir, and what writing it did for me. Today I’d like to talk about sharing my story of love and loss, and what that sharing means to me.

In both my original blog and in And Twice the Marrow of Her Bones, I wrote about the dilemma I find myself in when I come across parents whose children are being (or were in the past) treated for cancer. While Timora was ill, I was always hungry to share with anyone who knew what our family was going through. To this day, when I meet such parents I want to tell them I’m one of them, to speak and listen to them from a place of profound identification. But I can no longer do this, because they’d inevitably ask how Timora is doing. My answer would be the last thing they need to hear; my story is their worst nightmare.

I have no such problem when I meet bereaved parents; our worst nightmares have already come true.

When I meet someone who’s lost a child, our eyes instantly tell each other, Yes, I know. And so do you. All it takes is that mutual glance for us to feel as if we’ve known each other for years. There is no need for explanation, for words. But, paradoxically, because we silently know what we know, when we do speak our words bring us together, bridge the chasm that we sometimes feel separate ourselves from the rest of the human race.

My deepest sharing outside my family is with friends who’ve lost children; I’m sorry to say that I have more than one such friend. But I feel a connection with any bereaved parent, and am always ready to speak about what we have in common. A few times I’ve even reached out over cyberspace and corresponded with parents I’ve never met.

I wrote my book partly in order to reach out in this way to people in my position, to let them know they are not alone in the seemingly endless tunnel their lives so often feels like. I hope very much to show them that it is possible to pass through that tunnel and emerge into the light of a life that will never be the same, but a real one nonetheless.

I’ve recently begun sharing my story in another way as well. Twice now I’ve spoken to classes of social work students about my own experience and about my book, from my standpoint as both a parent and a professional. Each time, the students told their teachers that my talk gave them insights which will help them work more effectively with bereaved families. And each time a student approached me after class to share her story with me. The first, a young Jewish woman who had lost her husband (also to cancer), was very eager to let me know me she identified with almost everything I’d said. “No one in the class knows about this,” she said. “It’s a relief to be able to tell you about it.” The other, a young Arab woman whose lovely and gentle face was framed by a soft pink hidjab, told me that many years ago she’d lost a two-year-old brother. “Now I realize that I never understood what my mother went through when he died,” she told me, her eyes shining. “Your talk has made me understand.”

I can’t really say I’m glad to be reaching out in this way; I wish I didn’t have the occasion to do so, both for myself and for the other members of the “club no one wants to join.” But there’s no running away from the fact that I am a bereaved mother. So, as long as there are other parents out there grieving for their lost child, I see it as a privilege to be able to lighten their burden, if only a tiny bit, by telling them - in person, by correspondence, or through my book - Yes, I know. And so do you.

There's No Comparing Pain

One phrase bereaved parents often hear is that we’ve suffered “the worst loss.” There is no denying, of course, that the loss of a child is one of life’s greatest tragedies. But although words such as these felt validating in the early years of my grief for Timora, I’m no longer sure what, exactly, they mean.

When my friend Jeff Green spoke at his son Asher's memorial service last Thursday, he touched on people's tendency to rate difficult and traumatic experiences in a hierarchy, as if A is always worse than B, which is always easier than C. There are even one or more official studies out there somewhere assigning each experience of grief a kind of trauma-rank – how bad is this variety of bereavement, compared to that kind? Some maintain that bereaved parents suffer the most; others declare that bereaved spouses and life-partners "outrank" parents – as if it were a competition of some kind. (There are also sub-ranks within categories; for example, parents who've lost an adult son or daughter supposedly suffer more than those who've lost babies or young children.)

Jeff said he believes there's no point in comparing between different kinds of pain. I completely agree with him.

I would be the last person to claim that all traumatic experiences hurt to the same degree. And Twice the Marrow of Her Bones chronicles my process of healing from the emotional agony that my daughter’s death caused me; nothing in my life had prepared me for such pain – even my father's sudden death when I was only fourteen. But I can weigh my inner experiences against each other, because I know what goes on in my own head, my own heart, and my own body. In contrast, another person might try to explain to me what she is experiencing, but all the words in the world won't put me in her place. So how can I presume to “compete” with others over whose losses are more devastating?

As a psychotherapist, and generally as someone who takes a keen interest in other people's lives, I hear a great many painful stories. What is one to make, for example, of this? A forty-four-year-old woman who finally found her life partner just a couple of years ago, is now pregnant – miraculously, to her – after having longed for a child for the better part of her life. But recently she’s learned that her unborn baby may suffer from a serious birth defect. The tests are inconclusive; still, her doctors have recommended that she terminate the pregnancy. She must now decide whether to follow their advice without ever knowing whether her baby would have been born healthy – and thus give up what might be her last chance to be a biological mother. If she decides not to have the baby, will her loss be easier for her than mine is for me? I, after all, have six wonderful children and two incredible grandchildren. Am I better or worse off than someone like her?

Closer to home, my sister Ruth’s wonderful, wonderful husband Jerry died of cancer almost eight years ago. She’s sometimes said to me that it would have been worse to lose her son. But Daniel and I have gone together through our mourning; Ruth, by definition, has had no one to share her bereavement. Can anyone say that one of our losses is harder than the other’s?

I believe that going through our own inferno should help us better understand the private hell of others; it can even bring us closer to them. When we begin comparing and contrasting, we only increase our alienation.

In my original blog, as well as in my memoir, I described a support group I attended for people who lost loved ones to cancer. I started off thinking I’d be able to connect only with the group’s other bereaved parents. Only they would be able to understand me, I thought, because our loss was so much worse than anyone else’s. Twelve meetings later, I came away having received an incredible gift – the discovery that I’d been wrong. As I wrote then, “however unnatural it is to lose a child as opposed to a wife, a parent or a sister, I can [now] give support to – and receive support from – people who aren’t in exactly the same position that I am. It may sound like an exaggeration, but I am completely sincere when I say that, at least in this small way, I feel as if I’m rejoining the human race.”

I found an almost unbelievable example of this empathic gift in my friend Charlotte’s mother, whom I had the privilege of meeting a couple of years ago just before Charlotte got married. Iboya (“Ibi” to the many who know and love her), who is now ninety, survived the concentration camps; no more need be said, I think, about the intensity of her personal traumas. Despite her many serious physical challenges, she vigorously encouraged her daughter to move to Israel in order to marry (she herself has perforce remained in Canada, where Charlotte travels to be with her every few months). I connected immediately with this open, loving and caring woman.

During the course of our conversation, she elicited from me the fact that I’d lost a daughter. Her already gentle face and manner softened even more as she said, “Oh, my dear. That’s the worst thing that could happen to a person.”

I drew back, stunned. “How can you say that?” I stammered. “You…but you were in Auschwitz!”

“Yes,” she said, waving one hand dismissively, as if shooing away the thought, “but that doesn’t take away even a little bit from what you’ve been through.”

I believe that Ibi’s capacity to truly see others is a central component of her resilience; it has played a great part in enabling her build a life full of strength and love despite the truly incomparable horrors she went through.

When we, like Ibi, can leave contrast, comparison, and competition aside, and relate to every individual’s bereavement, trauma, or tragedy purely on its own terms, we are one step closer to healing from our own.

Tapas and Tribute

One thing all bereaved parents have in common is a need to memorialize the child we've lost. In both my original blog and my memoir, I tried to commemorate the Timora who lived for eighteen short but full years, and who left so much of herself behind. This past Thursday evening I had the opportunity, together with many others, to join my close friends Judith and Jeff Green in doing this for their son Asher, who was killed three years ago in a tragic hiking accident in Peru, at the age of twenty-eight. I found the evening a deeply meaningful way to celebrate Asher’s life while at the same time mourning his passing.

Asher was an extremely lively, inventive, and curious young man with an artist’s soul and more than his share of talent. He painted and drew, spent time in film school, and earned a certificate in theater design before settling on culinary arts as his calling. Like Timora, he left – in addition to memories of his unique self – an artistic and creative legacy.

The evening started with one of the gastronomic delights that Asher most enjoyed, a tapas bar – a wide assortment of light foods – which the guests sampled while circulating and socializing. (It was, I believe, no accident that Asher was attracted to tapas; the dishes’ variety reflects the multiplicity of his own interests and gifts.) The Greens served dishes Asher loved to make, in the warm and friendly atmosphere he'd dreamed of creating in the restaurant he hoped to open.

After we filled up on the twenty or so different offerings, we retired to the living room, where we watched several clips and short films relating to Asher, including a television interview in which he participated when he was sixteen; a film he made about Miriam Render, a friend of his who hasn’t let cerebral palsy prevent her from living a full and creative life; and his chef school presentation of his planned restaurant. We enjoyed his sharp intelligence, wit, and self-assurance, which made us laugh at more than one point during the viewing.

Our mood turned somber, though, as we watched the evening’s last film, which was made by Asher’s brother-in-law Ofer. It documented the several days that he and Asher’s brother Boaz spent searching for him, to no avail, together with a team from the Peruvian police’s high-mountain rescue unit (a villager later found Asher’s body, several weeks after he’d disappeared). One of the ways the Greens later memorialized their son was by returning to the village to present the rescue unit, whose members had risked their lives to retrieve Asher’s body, with modern climbing equipment. They also thanked the villagers, who'd been open, caring, and forthcoming with whatever assistance they could provide, by purchasing equipment for the village children’s schools. Like the evening itself, the Greens’ generous gifts were a singularly appropriate tribute to their openhearted son.

I was left thinking how the evening reflected the two faces of mourning. We keenly felt Asher’s absence even as we enjoyed the tapas that he so loved to make and serve. And, later, sadness overcame us when Ofer’s film showed us the wrapped bundle that had been Asher, as the rescue team pulled it up the mountainside. But at the same time, we took comfort in feeling the echo of his full-to-brimming vitality in his art, his films, his food, and – most of all – the love of his family and friends.

To me, Jeff and Judith’s ability to create such an evening expresses our human capacity for resilience even in the face of unfathomable grief. Without denying the emotional devastation that the death of their child has brought them, they have chosen to embrace his life. I believe that in doing so, they are also embracing their own.

Dedicated to Asher Green: May His Memory Be a Blessing

Grief and Resilience

It’s hard to believe, but Timora died ten years ago today. My bereavement is ten years old. Ten years. How can I wrap my head around that number?

So much has happened in that decade that it feels like a lifetime. I’ve gone through and come out of the depression that gripped me for more than a year after my daughter died. I’ve turned my professional life around a hundred-and-eighty degrees by going back to school for a Master’s degree in clinical social work; I’m now officially an ex-attorney (I like to call myself a lapsed lawyer) with a flourishing career as a psychotherapist. Four of my daughters – all my children of marriageable age – are now married. My baby boy is now doing his compulsory military service (as a sergeant, no less). My second daughter has just presented Daniel and me with our second grandchild – a girl named Arielle, who’s joined her cousin Imri in his previously solo role as family darling. And I myself have produced – not another child, that’s no longer possible, but my first book, a memoir. And Twice the Marrow of Her Bones will become available online and in U.S. bookstores in mid-March 2011.

As far in the past as Timora’s death may feel, her life is so fresh in my mind that it also seems, if you’ll forgive the cliché, like yesterday. I’m sure this is partly because I spent six years writing about her. I started out with this blog, which I kept for a year and a half and ended on the fifth anniversary of her death. (The blog was then called “Five Years Later,” so it’s serendipitously appropriate that I’m taking up my virtual pen again today, almost exactly five years after publishing what I thought of at the time as my final post.) Writing my blog helped me process my grief in all kinds of ways. It gave me occasion to sit down and spend time remembering my daughter; to let the world know who she was; to look inside myself and face what I found there; to reflect on how what happened to Timora and to our family has colored the way I see the world; and to share my insights.

“Five Years Later,” baring as it did so much of my soul, became the first foundation of my memoir. As I wrote, though, I found myself turning from my own story to Timora’s, having realized that there was no way I could write what it was like to lose her without relating who she was, and what she went through. So as hard as it was to go back to that time so intensively, I made myself sit down and write, from start to finish and in chronological order, the narrative of her life as she struggled with her illness. In order to get it as right as I could, I read her diary, which I’d been unable to touch since she died. Like the survivors of battle, terror attacks, and terrible accidents whom I sometimes treat in my practice, I was avoiding fully confronting those long, wrong years. Reading the diary forced me to finally face Timora’s suffering, squarely and without illusion. And as it so often does for those trauma survivors, that confrontation opened me to further healing, but at a price – I had to allow myself to touch some of my deepest pain.

Yet my daughter’s diary also revealed something wonderful, in the literal sense of the word – just how amazingly resilient she was. One day she’d be in pain, depressed, lonely, and bored. Then – often the very next day – she’d write how a friend called, or one of her sisters invited her to a movie, or we began planning a family trip, and how wonderful life could be. This optimism, this ability to take even the smallest drop of hope and allow it to expand, to fill her whole being, floored me. A girl whose entire adolescence was devoured by cancer; a girl who underwent endless courses of chemo, a lifetime’s worth of radiation, and two bone marrow transplants; a girl whose body betrayed her in every possible way – that girl was able to find joy wherever she could, all the way to the end of her brief, brief life.

That resilience became the theme of Twice the Marrow, which combines Timora’s narrative with a journal based on my blog, painting a fifteen-year picture of our lives from Timora’s first symptoms up to the ninth anniversary of her death. The story I’ve written is not as much about the hardship she suffered, or about what life did to her, as about her determination to take what she could from life despite that hardship. And it depicts not only our family’s bereavement, but also – even more so – how we loved her, how we lost her, and how we’ve gone on living.

And so it is with this, my renewed journal. I hope to share here what I’ve learned about resilience – that stubborn refusal to let adversity get the best of us – both from Timora herself and from my own and my family’s experience mourning her. From my perspective now, beginning ten years after losing my child, I hope to reach out to other bereaved parents and families, to people who are facing the other, myriad challenges and trials that life inevitably throws at us all, and to anyone else who cares to share my continued journey.

Love

Tenth of Tevet, 5766
January 10, 2006

This was the last of Timora's poems, with which she ended "Principally Poems," the collection of her poetry that she edited and arranged during the last year of her life:

And why.
Why live.
Suffer.
Fight, struggle.
Why pull and pull like a wretched, miserable beast -
For what.
In loneliness, in darkness, in the cold.
How much have I asked, and how much will I ask
And I am not the only one
Not only when sorrow blinds the eyes like a veil of tears.
But within me I know
And sometimes, like a flame
The answer blazes before me -
Love.

Timora Avitzour
16 Tishrei 5742 - 10 Tevet 5761
October 3, 1982 - January 5, 2001

May Her Memory Be A Blessing.