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.

Eulogy

January 6, 2001
Timora passed away peacefully about an hour before candle-lighting on Friday.

The funeral will take place on Sunday, January 7, at 14:00 at the Beit Hesped* of the Giv'at Shaul cemetery. The shiv'a** will be at our apartment.

Thank you all for your kindness and love.

With love,
Sara

*Beit Hesped – funeral chapel.
**Shiv'a - the seven days of mourning prescribed by Jewish tradition.

January 7, 2006

Eulogy for Our Daughter Timora
Timora, many, many people had the privilege of loving you. We, your immediate family, your extended family, your friends, your teachers. You were a warm and loving daughter, sister, granddaughter, niece, cousin and friend to us. We have no words to describe our deep feelings, now that you have been taken from us and this world.

We have no words – and yet at the same time, we have only words, and we hope with all of our hearts that you hear us from your new world, which truly may not be described.

Timora, we not only loved you, we admired you.

We admired your independence – your independent and intelligent opinions, and your desire and success in being and remaining yourself and only yourself, at every age and in every period of your life.

We admired your principles, and especially your sense of justice, which guided your opinions and your deeds.

We admired your merciful nature, and the respect that you gave to every human being as a human being, and to all creatures; you were unable to kill even an insect, for you would say, “We can't know that it doesn't have feelings like ours.”

We admired your bravery, when you would stand up for justice, as you saw it, even when your stand went against the mainstream, and even against people who were in a position of authority and power over you.

And we admired your strong and deep intellect, your never-ending creativity, and the sense of humor that did not desert you up to the end.

Timora, you could have been almost anything.

You could have been a doctor,
You could have been a poet,
You could have been a singer or a pianist or a composer,
You could have been a psychologist,
You could have been an actress, playwright or director,
You could have been a spiritual healer –

The list is endless. Timora, it hurts us very, very much to know that these things will have to remain in the world of the “could have been.”

What will we do with this thing –
You, who were so independent, were in the end so helpless;
You, who so loved justice, received from life such an unjust portion;
You, who were unable to take the life of any living creature, had your life taken from you so cruelly.

Timora, we have no words for our sorrow.
We are sorrowful that you had to use all of your courage in order to live with your so very bitter fate;
We are sorrowful that you were not given the chance to express even a small part of your intellectual ability and your vast creativity;
And we are sorrowful that in the end, you had to serve as an inspiration to us through your struggle, instead of inspiring us through the endless areas that belong, for you, to the world of the “could have been.”

Timora, we were privileged to love you, and we will continue to love the Timora who was full of life, who has remained in the heart of each and every one of us, and may whose memory be blessed.

I will read to you, in conclusion, a poem that your youngest sister, Ayala, wrote about you and for you.

Everyone Loved Her
Everyone loved her, everyone cared about her,
Her family, the girls to whom she was a counselor, and her friends, who still admire her.
Yes, this is Timora, in whose company we always wanted to be,
A rose petal that flew away, a flower that was plucked.
Timora, I will say only six words: if only you would return tomorrow.
But the Blessed True Judge has placed you by his seat,
So that when you get to heaven,
It will be better for you than if you were here.

I will never forget you:
Your little sister, Ayala.

(Translated from the Hebrew)

Sara Avitzour
Written and delivered at Timora's funeral
January 7, 2001

Release

January 5, 2001
The contents of this message may be irrelevant by the time some of you get it; it is difficult to write an update under these circumstances, when things could change radically at any time.

Timora's blood pressure is extremely low, and her kidneys have failed. There is no longer any hope for her recovery, but we don't know how long she will go on living - it could end today, it could take a few more days. The state of being neither here nor there is very difficult for our family, but we are trying to go on with life as best we can. I still go once a day during the week to the hospital, and the other members of the family visit her when they can. She is now very heavily sedated - thank God, she is not suffering, and indeed suffering is over for her - and so chances are she doesn't know we're there, but still I believe that her soul can still feel a loving presence, and we want her to take that with her when she finally goes.

I feel now that death will be a release for Timora, and believe very strongly that when released, she will enter a mode of being that will be far happier for her than the life that she will have left behind.

Shabbat Shalom.

Love,
Sara

January 5, 2006

1. The Corridor

On one of Timora’s last days in this world, Edna, her Reiki teacher, came to the hospital to lay healing hands on her one more time. As Edna touched Timora and the energy flowed between them, Edna felt, through her fingertips and deep inside herself, that part of Timora’s soul was already on the way to the next world. But another part of Timora's spirit was lingering behind - hesitating to leave us because she was worried about us, did not want to cause us pain - but at the same time longing to be released.

As the energy between them intensified, Edna experienced herself as being together with Timora, in a corridor suffused with light unlike any she had ever seen or sensed. The corridor led toward an even stronger, more beautiful light, which could not then, and can not now, be depicted in words, but seemed to be the source, expression and richness of everything that is Good.

When Edna removed her hands and said her last farewell to Timora’s earthly form, she was left with a feeling that she can only describe as a kind of completeness, a fullness. This feeling, she says, has not entirely left her to this day, five years later. Timora gave her an incomparable gift: having experienced those few minutes of light together with Timora’s spirit, Edna now knows in the deepest sense possible that she has nothing to fear from the other side.

After her release (Edna tells me) Timora's spirit did not stay away for long, and soon returned to became a kind of spiritual guide and teacher for Edna. Every so often, she comes to Edna during Reiki sessions; Edna even sometimes asks her for help and guidance. When Timora comes to Edna, she adds her own spiritual energy to the currents of Reiki moving through Edna’s hands, making them that much more powerful agents of healing.

2. The Release

Six Wings*
With two you covered your face,
Which had bloated, then lost its flesh, then swelled again,
With a pencil you covered the eyebrows that had fallen with all your hair
Which grew back another color each time.
With a wig you covered the dent in your skull that was beautiful
To a small child.
And sometimes you didn’t know which was the real you,
Who had changed a thousand faces, her hair five times

And twice the marrow of her bones.
And with two you covered your legs,
Fragile from without and pressed ever more from within.
At night your legs moved of their own will and you found them no resting-place,
And in daytime they could no longer bear you.
In their place you grew wheels,
On which I wheeled and wheeled you, to the end
Of the universe, and up and down the hospital elevators, whistling and dancing,
Crazy Daddy. But to the end of terror

You rolled alone.
And with two you flew and collided, fell and flew again,
Bound with long and tangled tubes,
Embracing and withdrawing
Welcoming and chasing away
Cursing and blessing
Sinking
And ascending, now without legs, and without a face,
And with one pair of wings.

(Translated from the Hebrew)

Daniel ("Don") Avitzour
Written for the second anniversary of Timora’s passing
10th of Tevet 5763

*See Isaiah 6:2.

Light

December 22, 2000
Timmi's condition unfortunately worsened over the past week. On Sunday when I was there she was close enough to consciousness to nod/shake her head three times in answer to my questions. She immediately went back to hyperventilating, however, and so the staff increased her sedation somewhat.

On Monday morning, her lungs looked worse in the x-ray, seeming to indicate respiratory distress. Because she seemed to be struggling so much with the various kinds of light anesthesia that had been tried, and because there was no question of taking the tubes out with her lungs in worse condition, she was put into deep sedation with morphine. Then, later that day, the stuff hit the fan and she went into septic shock. Her body temperature, pulse and blood pressure all declined rapidly, and she was returned to fully machine-assisted respiration, sedated yet more deeply and again given a drip of a medicine to stabilize her blood pressure. In addition, she was started again on a wide range of antibiotics to combat the sepsis. Her condition was defined as somewhere between serious and critical.

Tuesday and Wednesday she was stable, with no improvement and no deterioration. Today (Thursday) there was a slight improvement, with her x-ray looking a little bit better, and with a lower dose of the blood pressure medicine. In addition, some of her breathing is again spontaneous, although that may be because she is breathing faster than the machine's pace. Still, even a small improvement is movement in the right direction.

We sure need a lot of patience. Thank you all for your prayers and love.

Shabbat Shalom to all, and may this Chanukah bring all of us a much-needed measure of light.

December 28, 2000
There is no change in Timmi's condition, nor has there been for a long time. Her lungs are not improving.

At this point it seems that what may be done for her, has already been done.

At this point, what happens is up to God.

Shabbat Shalom to all.

Love,
Sara

December 31, 2005: Seventh Night of Chanukah
Chanukah is called the “Festival of Lights.” The story of its miracle is well-known: More than 2,000 years ago, the Jews returned to their Temple, which the soldiers of Antioch’s Hellenistic empire had defiled during their war with the tiny Jewish nation’s freedom fighters. Seeking to relight the Menorah,* the priests found a small quantity of oil - enough to last only one day. But seven days would be needed to purify the additional oil that would keep the flame burning. Nevertheless, the priests lit the Menorah as soon as they found the oil. Perhaps in response to this act of deep faith, God caused that small jar of oil to burn miraculously for eight days, so that the Menorah’s perpetual flame did not go out again until the Romans destroyed the Temple two centuries later.

The Torah teaches us that light was God’s first creation. And light is indeed one of our universe's main foundations. The speed of light defines the relationship between the building blocks of the physical world, matter and energy. It is the sun’s light that makes life on Earth possible. And when we look up into the heavens, we see the billions and billions of stars that fill the universe, whose light reaches us over unimaginable stretches of time and space, and whose distance from our own world we measure in light-years.

Light also figures large in the language we use to speak of the spiritual realm. Jewish mystics, for example, have described the physical world as hiding “sparks” that broke away from the Divine unity during that first act of Creation. These sparks are now scattered throughout the material universe, but long to return to their original unity; a Jew’s purpose in life is to “repair" our shattered reality by restoring the sparks to their Source through mitzvot and Torah study. And people of all religions who have “returned” to life after a few seconds of clinical death universally describe their experience as being drawn toward a great light.

How can I even try to speak of these things - of the relationship between God and our souls, in this world and the next? Human language can never be equal to the task of describing the world of the spirit, and words can give us no more than a hint of the truths they seek to reveal. But as I said in my very first post, words are all I have to help me try to comprehend things that are really beyond human comprehension. And I feel that I must at least do my best to understand; so as poor as my language is, I'll try:

In my own private metaphor, God did not stop at creating the light that marked the beginning of time and space. Every time He fashions a human soul, He endows it with a new and unique spark. This tiny bit of light makes us who we are, and enables us to connect with our Creator during our journey through this life. And when we leave the material world, the sparks of our souls are reunited with the Divine light that emanates from God, expanding and intensifying that light as it beckons the human spirit to itself.

When parents bring a baby into the world, we become God’s partners in His renewed Creation. By giving us a child, He charges us with the duty and the incredible privilege of nurturing this new being and its own matchless spark of light. But we are not given to know when our child’s soul will be called back to its Source. That is entirely up to God. And so giving birth to a child, raising her, and loving her demands of us the same depth of faith that it took to light that day’s worth of oil in the Temple, that first Chanukah so many years ago.

Timmi’s flame lit up our lives not for eight days, eight months, or eight years only. God allowed it to shine on us for eighteen years, three months and two days.

May He grant me and my family the courage and strength to continue our own journey through this life with faith and with love, until our own sparks are joined with Timmi’s in their final reunion with the Divine Light.

*Menorah – the seven-branched candelabra that is meant to burn perpetually in the Temple.