Mourning and Meaning: Friends

Grief is not exclusively “family property;” losing a friend whom we've loved is also a kind of bereavement. Although it’s not the same as the loss of a child or a sibling, a friend’s death presents us with similar questions: What does it mean that a person who was once very much present in our lives has left her own life? What does this say about our own mortality? And when our friend has died before her time, how can we draw meaning from that which seem so senseless?

Nehama Grenimann Bauch was Timora’s first friend; they first started playing when both were less than a year old. Our families live in the same neighborhood and belong to the same religious community, Kehillat Yedidya, and they were in the same class through eighth grade. Although they attended different high schools and drifted apart in adolescence, they became closer again during Timora’s last year. During Timora’s shiva, the first seven intensive days of family mourning, Nehama came and sat with us almost every day, some days for several hours. And not just to comfort us; she felt so bereft that she felt she needed to sit shiva herself.

Different people make meaning from traumatic loss in different ways. How we choose to do this depends, of course, on who we are, but also on the loved ones we've lost - who they were, and the special character of our connection. Nehama and Timora shared many things, prominent among them a creative and artistic nature. Timora was drawn mainly to writing, theater, and music, whereas Nehama excelled – and continues to excel – in the plastic arts, principally painting and sculpture. Both girls also inherited from their families a zeal for tikkun olam – the imperative to make the world a better place.

So it shouldn’t surprise that Nehama chose to process her friend’s death by combining these two passions – by initiating, organizing, and carrying out a project that has produced art that is both esthetically beautiful and practically useful. Faraway Places has brought together ten artists – Judith Margolis, Sharon Binder, Chana Cromer, Ruth Cohn, Anat Yefet, Galina Blaikh, Julia Lagus, Mallory Serebrin, Zoe Pawlak and Yulia Polyakov – who painted and contributed works that now grace the walls of Hadassah Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit. As I’ve written in my memoir, “patients who awaken [are] greeted not only by sterile white walls and ceilings, metallic IV stands, and cold machines, but also by warm, colorful scenes into which they can escape, in their minds at least, from the harsh reality of the ICU.” The staff has told Nehama that the art is making a tremendous difference both to them and to the patients and their families.

Nehama spent months and months dealing with and mediating among the artists, the hospital bureaucracy, the ICU staff, and the Young Hadassah branch of Hadassah International (through whom she organized the project) in order to get the paintings planned, finished, and onto the ICU walls. As if that weren’t enough, she spent many additional months working on the Young Hadassah Ball, which took place here in Jerusalem a week ago. Every year, the Ball brings hundreds of the organization’s members and supporters together for dinner and dancing, to raise funds for different departments in the hospital. This year – by chance but very fittingly – the money raised will be used to renovate and expand the Pediatric Department.

At the small ceremony that was held right before the finished paintings were hung in the ICU, Nehama spoke at some length about Timora. She said that she chose this way to perpetuate Timora’s memory not because she’s no longer alive, but because of who and what she was for Nehama during her life – an intensely creative soul who actively encouraged her friend (from the time they were four years old!) to become an artist.

Timora would have been very proud indeed to have her name attached to the lovely works that these generous artists have created, and to a project that is directly benefiting the two Hadassah departments in which she was cared for so long, so professionally, and with such dedication. And even prouder to be Nehama's friend than she already was when the two were together in this life.

When I think about it, though, perhaps I can say that she is proud, as she follows her friend's fortunes from wherever her spirit has finally come to rest.

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.

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.

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.

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.