a great and noble life

I sit in the sanctuary. It is Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year on the Jewish calendar. The year when even the least observant Jew can be seen in a synagogue.

I am not the least observant Jew… Not really possible with a husband who is studying to become a rabbi. Not really possible with the amount of Jewish tradition I was raised with. Not really possible with Polish grandparents who survived the Holocaust. Not really possible with the number of Jewish food calories I have consumed in 38 years.

And yet it is still somewhat a surprise to me that I am there, in this synagogue, following along with this kind of service. It is a traditional Reform Jewish service. The prayer book – Gates of Repentance, special for this day of atonement – talks of

God as Lord,

God as male,

God as judging,

God as forgiving.

I can’t quite bring myself to recite along during the call and response. I can’t bring myself to say, God, oh Lord… out loud.

This is not how I relate to God, to Source, to all that is around and within me. This is not how I connect to my divine essence. Not in this language.

My “God” is not separate from me.

My “God” is not in charge, deciding what I will receive and what will be taken away, when I will struggle and when I will overcome.

My “God” does not judge or punish me.

My “God” does not care whether I fast on Yom Kippur, or that my fast today included drinks of water and kombucha, that my day of atonement included a trip to Whole Foods and time sitting on my couch writing in my journal and reading a (non-Jewish) book.

Then I find this in the prayer book during the afternoon service: 

This is the vision of a great and noble life:

To endure ambiguity and to make light shine through it;

To stand fast in uncertainty;

To prove capable of unlimited love and hope.

And it resonates inside.

Hmm… A great and noble life as one that is lived as well as possible in spite of its precariousness, in spite of our fragility. Amid the fuzzy blurred boundaries that keep changing on us without warning, and rugs that are pulled out suddenly from underneath us.

I have proven capable of unlimited love and hope. Each day I surprise myself that I continue to feel it even more. In spite of the uncertainty that comes with knowing that things can completely fall apart and come crashing down again and again.

I never before thought of my ability to bounce back as being a quality of a great and noble life. I never before related to survival that way. Yet survival is what it is, isn’t it? Isn’t that what I’ve been doing? Surviving? 

Or perhaps I have actually… been… thriving…?

***

It is later in the afternoon and the yizkor memorial service has begun. The mood is quiet and solemn and the passage is about our finiteness, words about being on the road towards death from the moment we are born. (I close off some when I hear the words birth and death in the same sentence.) Again I start leafing through the prayer book, unsatisfied with the gloom and doom.

I find this: 

May the pains of past bereavements grow more gentle;

Indeed, let them be transformed into gratitude to our dear ones who have died

And tenderness to those who are still with us.

I was so lost at this time last year. I was so angry… at everything and everyone. I cried through the entire day at our warm and wonderful Renewal congregation in Berkeley, surrounded by friends who were there at every turn to hug me and sit with me or leave me alone outside if I needed that. I didn’t fast. I felt no obligation, no inspiration.

I felt no connection to this day, so soon after Tikva had died. All I could do was picture her spinning in circles in a white dress, dancing to the music, a year later. The two of us together in a parallel universe where she had continued to live.

All I could do was cry an endless stream of angry lost tears.

Now, a year later, the pain has grown more gentle. I think of Tikva with gratitude for the gifts of hope and love she gave me, for the compassion space she cracked open and expanded within me. For asking me to love her in a way I had never before known I could love, for teaching me that hope never completely goes away, even when everything feels lost

Or finite.

And I think of Dahlia, who daily stretches my capacity for patience, who demands my presence, my tenderness like no one else can, who reminds me to laugh in my most frustrated and exhausted moments, and I feel gratitude for both of my daughters, the deepest kind of gratitude for the way things are.

Just as they are. 

***

I surprise myself, that I can feel this lightness, especially today. On this day that for many is solemn and serious, reflective and laden with guilt needing to be cleared and asking for forgiveness. I surprise myself that I feel anything other than rebelliousness about Yom Kippur, this holy day I was determined to mostly blow off this year.

Then I woke up this morning and felt peaceful, held. By an energy that is comforting, serene, gentle. It didn’t matter that I was not spending the day with my community back in California, but instead in my house and at the grocery store and at services that felt mostly foreign.

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t asked anyone’s forgiveness, nor made any big plans for ways I wanted to grow and expand in the coming year.

All that mattered was that when I stepped outside to watch four monarch butterflies and two fat bumblebees holding for dear life to the white flowers as the wind blew them furiously around, 

I felt connected… to all of it.

Connected to the wind, to the smells in the crisp fall air, to the bees and the butterflies, to the light streaming through their gold-orange wings…

Connected to Tikva. 

Connected to my essence, the most pure and true part of me.

Connected to a deep knowing inside me that I can and will continue believing in hope and love.

Perhaps the makings of a great and noble life are that simple.

.::.

And you? How do you connect with the part deep inside that is most entirely you? Is there something bigger that helps you feel connected? How have you stretched and expanded through losing your child? What makes you recoil, contract? What helps you to feel you are thriving? What are the makings of your great and noble life? 

Give Her What She Wants

"Super Phones for Super Moms In Super Colors! (snip) Stay connected while she's at home, at work, or on-the-go!"(Verizon)

(Shakes box, holds it up to ear.) Hello? Hello? Can you Hear me?

"Make Mom Proud. Get her Gifts there on Time!" (1-800-flowers)

Proud?! Bella saying "please" and "thank you" makes me proud. To be frank, I'm not sure what if anything about Maddy makes me "proud." Punctuality is really the least of it, though. I think it's ok if children just show up live, frankly.

"Send Your Extraordinary Mother extraordinary flowers!" (Robertson's Flowers)

That would be funny, considering you're rather an extraordinary daughter.

"It's not too late! Get mom an e-gift!" (Mountain Gear)

Oh, it's too late. Believe me.

"What is the best gift you can give to mothers everywhere this Mother’s Day? Healthy, strong and thriving children!" (March of Dimes)

Oh Sweet Jebus, is that ever an understatement. 

:::

Believe me, you can't give me what I really want. That would include time travel and metaphysics and alien life-transformative powers only seen in the worst movies from the cheeziest of magic wands.

What is it though, to want nothing on a day like this?

In my estimation, Mother's Day is one of those truly awkward holidays for everyone involved -- and for the record, I thought this long prior to February 2007. Interestingly, the early proponents of "Mother's Day" in America in the late 19th century, were peace advocates (and the woman who is most credited with advocating for a Mother's Day, Anna Jarvis, actually did so out of a longing to honor her dead mother). Mother's Day was proclaimed a National Holiday by Woodrow Wilson in 1914; an era when women probably heard tales of a generation not far behind that told of mother's losing sons in the Civil War.  Mothers in the early 20th century may have known a loss of their own during WWI. Also interesting was discovering that Jarvis grew distraught at the rampant commercialization of the day she had for so long proposed:

Jarvis became known for scathing letters in which she would berate people who purchased greeting cards, saying they were too lazy to write personal letters.  ----  MSNBC

Anyway, point being: the origins of this holiday, at least in this country, were already tangled with death -- the absence of mothers, the absence of grown children, gone off to serve their country. It was never meant to be a day where you bought diamond baubles or sent a Hallmark.

(Shakes box) If you're listening, I like sapphires better, anyway.

Because Mother's Day has become so ungodly commercial, it must, for it's economic livelihood, focus on the living. You cannot take a dead mother to brunch, buy her a cell phone plan, or send her a card. It puts pressure on daughters of mothers who neglected or abused, and I imagine, makes them wonder what they're missing -- having no one they'd really care to spend hard-earned money on.

Even for a day.

I could take you to breakfast, box, I suppose. You'd fit in my purse.

The flip side of this, of course, is that a dead child cannot purchase -- or, even imaginatively create -- you diamond studs or a necklace of twine, wood beading charms, and "flowers" (read: dandylion weeds). There is no entity there to cry through a meal of stuffed french toast, or hand you a self-picked bouquet of garden treasures (read: onion grass weeds and slightly molded azalea).

And there should be. Because you carried it, you birthed it, you longed for it. You probably longed for this day, the public outing at church, the family gathering where you could finally show your card at the door and receive admission into the club. The day that -- for a few hours -- put you on a pedestal, and gave you freedom to bitch about sleep deprivation and bask in gooey hugs and greetings.

This holiday is so difficult because while "everybody has a mother," the original intent of the matter has been lost: instead of merely thinking of or remembering yours, and contemplating the universal concept that everyone has a mother -- even the dead, we are supposed to buybuybuy and showshowshow. For those who have no mother to hug or greet, the effort seems lost in the application. I am so incredibly sorry if this holiday hurts you for this very reason.

And believe me, I'm also sorry if it hurts you because, although you're a mother, there's no son or daughter there to validate that simple fact.

Hallmark made it easy, Hallmark made it hurt.

:::

Mother's Day '06: We sat in a coffee shop chain, on a rainy day, with a realtor, and put a bid in for our house (which we got). Maddy was conceived sometime over that weekend.

Mother's Day '07: I am still crying at the drop of a hat, and implore everyone I know to please leave me be and ignore it. Bella is too young to even know. I garden in silence. I stupidly think I can play with radioactive material, and leave the card store with my stomach up in my throat, unable to buy my own mother a card.

Mother's Day '08: I like the idea of a day of gardening. I ask for this. Bella makes me something in school. For my mother, I finally settle on a donation to NILMDTS . She seems genuinely touched.

Mother's Day '09: Four years of ignoring this holiday has had the cumulative effect of not even realizing it was approaching. There was no anticpatory anxiety because I completely forgot about it until Bella announced that she was making me a surprise at school, "For Mother's Day. It's a Plate."

"Shhh! Shouldn't it be a surprise?"

"What's on it IS the surprise!"

She made me open it immediately upon arriving at home last Wednesday. That was fine with me.

Today I'm working in the yard. I should be out there right now, sowing seeds in our recession vegetable garden, watching the neighbors walk and drive by, dressed up on their way to brunch, the museum, the mall. We'll all work, we'll grill some burgers. This year, after getting gobsmacked by a series of articles and opinion pieces on women in far away countries who lack adequate medical care during and after labor who then suffer from Fistulas, I made a donation to the Fistula Foundation in my mother's honor. Because I guess now more than ever, I believe motherhood should be more about healthy AND live, mothers AND babies.

(Sets box back up in bowl on the top shelf.) I miss you. I miss you so much.

Call me.

:::

What are your feelings on this day -- or when Mother's Day falls in your country?  What do you do to get through?  Has babyloss changed how this day makes you respond to your own mother (regardless of that relationship)?  Believe me when I say, I'm thinking of you all.