After the funeral
In times of grief and anger
We turn to our texts of comfort
For relief from the anguish
And unbearable pain
Her loss
This deep hole in the heart
The pit in the stomach
The uncontrollable tears
There is some comfort in these texts
The ones that arise..
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
You struggled to the end
Every breath so hard
You refused to let go
Resisting the grim reaper
Every muscle in your frail chest
Pulling in unison
Starving for oxygen
Pulling it in
The struggle
Never easy
Nothing came easy to her
From childhood
Up at 5am
The violin
Initially an instrument of conditional love
Later the vehicle that transported her over the seas
To play before Vaughn Williams
And finally an instrument of shame
As she realized the loss of her prowess when picking up the fiddle
Not having practised
My last vision of her holding it.
It defined her and the love of her life fell for her
Because of it
And in the last few years we would sit and watch
Videos of the masters Heifetz, Menuhin, Kreisler, Zuckerman, Perlman.
She drew such satisfaction watching their mastery.
Nothing came easy to her
Her work she brought home
Knew no boundaries
(of course we suffered)
And that conditional love was taken to new heights
As she pushed us to excellence without compromise
And we suffered
As we fulfilled her dreams.
Nothing came easy
As those who critiqued her disciplinary style challenged her in public
At times demeaning her
At times insulting her professionalism
Yet she kept her silence
Never stooping to respond.
Her faith kept her going “God help me through this!” She remembers thinking.
Nothing came easy
As she followed Dad to the Holy Land
The language the people the rudeness the foreignness
Of it all.
But her fierce zionism that came over her in 1967
After the Six Day War, watching it on British TV
Was uncompromising and surprising
She was always the musician and apolitical.
Nothing came easy
As she succumbed to the infections that followed her failing white cells.
The hospital visits and pokes and proddings
The infusions and intesntivie specialists.
Never once did she complain
Never once did she wince
Never once did she cry.
Her aristocratic bearing did not allow
Self indulgence.
This does not come easy for us
In the end we are left with this absence
The absence of her life and her iron will
Her loving presence and her blessings
Her calling everyone “darling”
Her devotion to her grandchildren and the little ones of the new generation
A matriarch in the truest sense
Beloved by all
Her siblings surviving her
Held her in the highest esteem
The loss is too much.
So those texts come to me
to comfort me..
Those Rabbis its imaginative souls
Pondering the catastrophe
After the funeral
And the utter anguish
Of the destruction
And the fire
Who conceal their innermost thoughts
In the radical fictional narratives of the parable
And the unacceptable anthropomorphism of divine pathos.
On Summoning the dirge singers of Jeremiah
The Rabbis produce this dialogue between a divine
Bereft of the temple
Now seeking solace by mimicking the mourning rituals of the Torah.
Never having experienced loss before
The Holy One Blessed be He
Asks the prophet how to alleviate His divine infinite sorrow
Well, the reply comes, we sit on the ground
and let our hair become disheveled
And so the Divine mimics our sitting shiva.
(citing a verse that puns on the practice in true
midrasnhic style)
What else does he do?
Well, he puts sackcloth and ashes
And the Lord does the same.
This rabbinic projection of the Divine response to catastrophe
Calms me
It allows for the pain and anguish to be expressed without shame
The tears flow easily
In between the black letters
Leaking into the ink
Just like their emotions and pain leaked into the dry legal tomes
That would become medieval halachic Judaism.
As I mourn her loss
The unbearable pain
The deep aching
Etched in my face
I take comfort in the memory of life
Her life as a text
As a parable of a bat melech
A biography of an aristocrat
A SARGON princess.
