Lilah tov
No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place.
There was a fatal shooting in Jamaica Plain on Friday night, hours after Mayor Marty Walsh and Police Commissioner William Evans launched a new plan to increase positive interactions between the police and the community, an effort designed to address summer violence. Christopher Joyce, who was 23 when he was shot, was about to graduate from Salem State University. Clayborn Blair was 58-- an age I now aspire to reach--when he was shot; he had three children. They died at the Mildred C. Hailey housing complex in Jamaica Plain, and were what we like to call "innocent bystanders." Bystanders to gun violence in America, I suppose you could say. Innocent of what? Of being the criminals. Of being in the gang. Of having a gun on their bodies. So not deserving of being murdered. Otherwise, the headlines would have said gang violence claims two. And the larger community might grieve differently. Not the mothers and fathers, though. No one is a mother to a gang member. Or a mother of a felon in possession of a gun. We are mothers of people with names like Asher, or Christopher. Fathers of people with names like Clayborn, or Zachary.
"This was a kid who was in control of his own path and he did everything right," said vice principal Carrie Wagner, of the private Catholic high school Christoper attended. "So I can't imagine what it must feel for our students and their families, particularly students of color, particularly students who are low income, to know that even when everything has gone right, this could still happen." The dean of math and sciences at the school described Christopher as "super earnest in the way he would kind of just really always be just his most honest self in class, whatever that may be, and he was just the life of whatever room he was in."
It pains me that I couldn't find any details about Clayborn Blair. But of course, they are out there, in the grieving hearts of the people who loved Mr. Blair.
On my way to cancer support group today, I couldn't stop thinking about way the principal described Christopher Joyce as someone in control of his own life--this was no more true for Christopher than it is for anyone, but we know what she meant. Those long, twenty-three years while this child grew, lighting up the room in kindergarten, in fifth grade, in tenth grade When Christopher was 16, he decided to repeat his junior year, in order to improve his GPA. Over here, in white Carlisle, we have shirts that have zen koan inscribed on them, like no snowflake ever falls in the wrong place. Unlike over there in Jamaica Plain, where two people were standing in the wrong place, at the wrong time, when bullets began to fly. Unless that is just one more liberal bullshit thing to say.
No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place doesn't mean everything happens for a reason--you all know how I feel about that sentiment at this point in our friendship. It must mean something more primary about the rightness of the natural world, a world where life and death happen in and out of cycle without tremendous bemoaning about the tragedy of racism in the United States, or gun violence and income inequity, or even, if you will indulge me, about the sadness of cancer taking months and years away from white suburban mothers. Doesn't it have to mean that these questions of right and wrong are only questions for life out of balance with nature, which is all any of us have ever known since, I suppose, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise.
The story goes that God told the first human not to eat of the tree in the center of the garden, "for in the day that you eat it you shall surely die." I spent a semester in college reading Paradise Lost, and was taught to imagine Milton's garden as a lush, gorgeous and essentially boring paradise, at the center of which was this absolutely tempting snake and tree. Having eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve and all of their children (and this includes you, dear reader, no matter how desperately you have tried to ignore the fact that you will one day shrug off these mortal coils) are destined to die. With knowledge, comes death. This seemed like gilding the lily to me. The punishment surely didn't fit the crime.
Death is so hard. When we are little, we are direct. What happens when you die? Every child of mine has asked me this question directly, and I have failed every one of them, if it is the duty of a parent to give children the answers. (Those of you who have spent time with me as your young children marched up to the questions of sex have often instinctively recoiled from my belief in fulsome answers to those questions, including a now infamous lecture on oral sex I gave to my older sons which ended with a plaintive "please, mom." As in please stop talking and leave our room immediately).
I have failed the death question now every time, because I can't tell them that in heaven the lions sleep with lambs, and I will be there to greet them with open arms, full of observations about their lives which I have waited decades to provide, as I watched from my comfortable seat on the clouds (perhaps intervening a couple of times to prevent someone from marrying the wrong fellow, or to find a lost car key, that sort of thing). I hardly knew death as a young child--it was not until my grandmother died when I was in college, that I truly understood death as loss. And of course, like all other children, I imagined myself as invincible in some way. How else can I explain hitchhiking on a dark highway in my late teens, or my confidence that my body would make children when I was ready to bear them? Death teaches us the meaning of time, time teaches us the meaning of death. The aches and pains of our aging bodies may not always signal lung cancer, but they certainly are missives from the future about the reliability of our faithful companion, our body.
Death is the great challenge to our attempt to create a life of meaning, it is the rebuke of the death of Christopher Joyce, a man I did not know, but who I hear could light up a room.
In one midrash, the angel Lailah, which means night, serves as a midwife of souls. While a baby grows in the mother's womb, Lailah places a lighted candle at the head of the unborn child, so the baby can see from one end of the world to the other. What an absolutely beautiful idea.
So too, does the angel teach the child the entire Torah and the history of his or her soul. When it is time for the baby to be born into this world, the angel extinguishes the candle in the womb, and brings forth the child into the world. In the instant when the child emerges, the angel lightly places its finger against the child's lip, as if to murmur shhhh, and thus the child forgets everything he or she learned in the womb. We all carry the indentation of this angel touch on our upper lips, and Lailah watches over us as we live. When it comes time for us to die, Lailah leads us from this world to the next.
This I suppose is the Jewish version of the expulsion from paradise. The womb, where lights lead the way to God, where everything is known, is the place we leave, and we show up here, on the other side, cold, crying, ignorant.
What a gorgeously comforting story this could have been for my children, how lovely the ways of the angel. How did I not know to tell this story to my children when they asked what happened when people died? But it was academic to me--I know this story from reading feminist literary criticism, and I fervently believed I could only tell my children what I absolutely knew to be true, when it came to matters of death. So I said things like, I don't know what happens when we die.
Although that isn't completely true. I have sometimes told the story of the most important, most singular dream I ever had. Bear with me if you have heard this story. The real part. Once, when my sister was about to be married, I was going to be in her wedding, in another state. The wedding was to take place four months after the birth of my fourth child. Today, as I write this, I have still not lost the baby weight, and that child is now 21, so you can imagine what things were like as I looked at those four short months from birth of baby to my appearance as a bridesmaid, wearing the dress which only was made up to a size that I wear on a regular old good day. I minded what I ate (Spanx had not yet been invented but there were some mean controlling undergarments to be had, even then) and I forced myself into that bridesmaid dress, but ah! I am getting ahead of myself. I was feeling sorry for myself because my marriage was not just on the rocks, but the ship had crashed onto the rocks, we were picking our way across the splintered shell of the ship, trying to get to safer shores, and we were going to this wedding and my mother had decided that my brother and his new wife would be staying at her house, and I would be staying in a hotel. Oh, I fretted. The dress. The hotel. The money for the hotel. The fraying marriage. All of it. One long pity party for myself. And then I had the most beautiful dream in the world.
In the dream, I had landed at an airport with my four small children under five (the husband didn't even show up in the dream). I was alone, and frantic about something, perhaps missing luggage, and I walked away from my children to seek help, telling Cameron, my eldest, who was five, to watch the children, and then, as soon as I was steps away, the dream played a trick on me, and I was lengths and lengths away from them, and stricken, as I realized I had left my children absolutely alone in an airport. I started to run back to them, and looked over at one of those moving sidewalks that carry you through airports to your gate and there was my dead grandmother. And people, it was her. It was real. It wasn't a dream at all. And she looked at me and she comforted me. She made me feel loved and at peace and I suddenly knew how silly all my internal kvetching about the unfairness of the dress and the hotel room and all of it was, because what really mattered was love. And I looked forward at my children and suddenly they appeared as they now are, as twenty year olds, and the four of them were gathered at the corner of the airport, talking and laughing. Try as I might, I could not see their faces, because it was my future children, but I could see the girls tossing their long beautiful hair, and more importantly, I could see that they had grown up and were friends. They were a family.
And I looked at my grandmother and she was love, and that was my past. And I looked at my children, and they were love, and that was my future. And I woke, in my present, and I didn't care a whit about where we stayed at my sister's wedding, or whether I looked good in the dress, because my present was also love, and family.
I believe my grandmother came to comfort me. And when my children were old enough to hear about that dream, I told them that is what I know about life after death. That my grandmother came to me to comfort me. That was not my darkest hour, but my grandmother, and my mother, and my children--my family (those who are my relatives as well as my chosen family)--have been the answer to my darkest hours. I don't believe my brain created that dream for me, I believe my grandmother came to see me.
Nonetheless, I wonder that I wasn't able to create from that dream, and from all the books I read, and from other sources, such as the story of the angel Lailah, stories for my children that were rich and comforting about death, and memory, and how we carry the dead in our hearts. How sad and spare my approach has been. Having insufficient tools myself, I worry I have failed to give my children stories by which to die. I seek them now in order to make sense of my own impending death, to find truthful meaning which will stand me in good stead in the long dark nights ahead. I hope that I can find more stories to pass along to my beloved people now, including, eventually, the story of my death. I want to show them what I hope to have, a death that is peaceful and without fear. In many ways, this spiritual journey is the most important journey I have undertaken. I can hardly believe I waited so long to embark, and it terrifies me to think that I could have been taken, on any day in the last fifty-two years, as my neighbors in Jamaica Plain were last Friday, without warning, without time to think.
Tonight, at bedtime, I am going to read a story called Cry, Heart, But Never Break, by Glenn Ringtved, to my children. In the story, death comes to a small, snug house where four children live with their beloved grandmother. The children know that death has come for their grandmother and they try to stave him off with strong coffee, black like the night, but finally he is ready. He tells them the story of two brothers named Sorrow and Grief, who have a heavy, gloomy life until they meet two sisters, Joy and Delight, whose days were full of happiness save for a shadowy sense that something was missing. One day the brothers and the sisters met. Sorrow fell instantly in love with Delight, and she with him. It was the same for Grief and Joy. Each couldn't live without the other.
I think you understand what happens next, just as the four young children, listening to Death, understood too.
When Death leaves their house, he says to them quietly, "Cry, Heart, but never break. Let your tears of grief and sadness help begin new life."
This is a Danish children's book, and you may think it is too dark for boys who will turn six on Thursday. But the Danes are a bit ahead of us on this one, and my children have all now asked me what happens when you die. I owe them an answer, and I want my answer to be one filled with love and poetry.
Lilah tov, good night.
There was a fatal shooting in Jamaica Plain on Friday night, hours after Mayor Marty Walsh and Police Commissioner William Evans launched a new plan to increase positive interactions between the police and the community, an effort designed to address summer violence. Christopher Joyce, who was 23 when he was shot, was about to graduate from Salem State University. Clayborn Blair was 58-- an age I now aspire to reach--when he was shot; he had three children. They died at the Mildred C. Hailey housing complex in Jamaica Plain, and were what we like to call "innocent bystanders." Bystanders to gun violence in America, I suppose you could say. Innocent of what? Of being the criminals. Of being in the gang. Of having a gun on their bodies. So not deserving of being murdered. Otherwise, the headlines would have said gang violence claims two. And the larger community might grieve differently. Not the mothers and fathers, though. No one is a mother to a gang member. Or a mother of a felon in possession of a gun. We are mothers of people with names like Asher, or Christopher. Fathers of people with names like Clayborn, or Zachary.
"This was a kid who was in control of his own path and he did everything right," said vice principal Carrie Wagner, of the private Catholic high school Christoper attended. "So I can't imagine what it must feel for our students and their families, particularly students of color, particularly students who are low income, to know that even when everything has gone right, this could still happen." The dean of math and sciences at the school described Christopher as "super earnest in the way he would kind of just really always be just his most honest self in class, whatever that may be, and he was just the life of whatever room he was in."
It pains me that I couldn't find any details about Clayborn Blair. But of course, they are out there, in the grieving hearts of the people who loved Mr. Blair.
On my way to cancer support group today, I couldn't stop thinking about way the principal described Christopher Joyce as someone in control of his own life--this was no more true for Christopher than it is for anyone, but we know what she meant. Those long, twenty-three years while this child grew, lighting up the room in kindergarten, in fifth grade, in tenth grade When Christopher was 16, he decided to repeat his junior year, in order to improve his GPA. Over here, in white Carlisle, we have shirts that have zen koan inscribed on them, like no snowflake ever falls in the wrong place. Unlike over there in Jamaica Plain, where two people were standing in the wrong place, at the wrong time, when bullets began to fly. Unless that is just one more liberal bullshit thing to say.
No snowflake ever falls in the wrong place doesn't mean everything happens for a reason--you all know how I feel about that sentiment at this point in our friendship. It must mean something more primary about the rightness of the natural world, a world where life and death happen in and out of cycle without tremendous bemoaning about the tragedy of racism in the United States, or gun violence and income inequity, or even, if you will indulge me, about the sadness of cancer taking months and years away from white suburban mothers. Doesn't it have to mean that these questions of right and wrong are only questions for life out of balance with nature, which is all any of us have ever known since, I suppose, the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise.
The story goes that God told the first human not to eat of the tree in the center of the garden, "for in the day that you eat it you shall surely die." I spent a semester in college reading Paradise Lost, and was taught to imagine Milton's garden as a lush, gorgeous and essentially boring paradise, at the center of which was this absolutely tempting snake and tree. Having eaten of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, Adam and Eve and all of their children (and this includes you, dear reader, no matter how desperately you have tried to ignore the fact that you will one day shrug off these mortal coils) are destined to die. With knowledge, comes death. This seemed like gilding the lily to me. The punishment surely didn't fit the crime.
Death is so hard. When we are little, we are direct. What happens when you die? Every child of mine has asked me this question directly, and I have failed every one of them, if it is the duty of a parent to give children the answers. (Those of you who have spent time with me as your young children marched up to the questions of sex have often instinctively recoiled from my belief in fulsome answers to those questions, including a now infamous lecture on oral sex I gave to my older sons which ended with a plaintive "please, mom." As in please stop talking and leave our room immediately).
I have failed the death question now every time, because I can't tell them that in heaven the lions sleep with lambs, and I will be there to greet them with open arms, full of observations about their lives which I have waited decades to provide, as I watched from my comfortable seat on the clouds (perhaps intervening a couple of times to prevent someone from marrying the wrong fellow, or to find a lost car key, that sort of thing). I hardly knew death as a young child--it was not until my grandmother died when I was in college, that I truly understood death as loss. And of course, like all other children, I imagined myself as invincible in some way. How else can I explain hitchhiking on a dark highway in my late teens, or my confidence that my body would make children when I was ready to bear them? Death teaches us the meaning of time, time teaches us the meaning of death. The aches and pains of our aging bodies may not always signal lung cancer, but they certainly are missives from the future about the reliability of our faithful companion, our body.
Death is the great challenge to our attempt to create a life of meaning, it is the rebuke of the death of Christopher Joyce, a man I did not know, but who I hear could light up a room.
In one midrash, the angel Lailah, which means night, serves as a midwife of souls. While a baby grows in the mother's womb, Lailah places a lighted candle at the head of the unborn child, so the baby can see from one end of the world to the other. What an absolutely beautiful idea.
So too, does the angel teach the child the entire Torah and the history of his or her soul. When it is time for the baby to be born into this world, the angel extinguishes the candle in the womb, and brings forth the child into the world. In the instant when the child emerges, the angel lightly places its finger against the child's lip, as if to murmur shhhh, and thus the child forgets everything he or she learned in the womb. We all carry the indentation of this angel touch on our upper lips, and Lailah watches over us as we live. When it comes time for us to die, Lailah leads us from this world to the next.
This I suppose is the Jewish version of the expulsion from paradise. The womb, where lights lead the way to God, where everything is known, is the place we leave, and we show up here, on the other side, cold, crying, ignorant.
What a gorgeously comforting story this could have been for my children, how lovely the ways of the angel. How did I not know to tell this story to my children when they asked what happened when people died? But it was academic to me--I know this story from reading feminist literary criticism, and I fervently believed I could only tell my children what I absolutely knew to be true, when it came to matters of death. So I said things like, I don't know what happens when we die.
Although that isn't completely true. I have sometimes told the story of the most important, most singular dream I ever had. Bear with me if you have heard this story. The real part. Once, when my sister was about to be married, I was going to be in her wedding, in another state. The wedding was to take place four months after the birth of my fourth child. Today, as I write this, I have still not lost the baby weight, and that child is now 21, so you can imagine what things were like as I looked at those four short months from birth of baby to my appearance as a bridesmaid, wearing the dress which only was made up to a size that I wear on a regular old good day. I minded what I ate (Spanx had not yet been invented but there were some mean controlling undergarments to be had, even then) and I forced myself into that bridesmaid dress, but ah! I am getting ahead of myself. I was feeling sorry for myself because my marriage was not just on the rocks, but the ship had crashed onto the rocks, we were picking our way across the splintered shell of the ship, trying to get to safer shores, and we were going to this wedding and my mother had decided that my brother and his new wife would be staying at her house, and I would be staying in a hotel. Oh, I fretted. The dress. The hotel. The money for the hotel. The fraying marriage. All of it. One long pity party for myself. And then I had the most beautiful dream in the world.
In the dream, I had landed at an airport with my four small children under five (the husband didn't even show up in the dream). I was alone, and frantic about something, perhaps missing luggage, and I walked away from my children to seek help, telling Cameron, my eldest, who was five, to watch the children, and then, as soon as I was steps away, the dream played a trick on me, and I was lengths and lengths away from them, and stricken, as I realized I had left my children absolutely alone in an airport. I started to run back to them, and looked over at one of those moving sidewalks that carry you through airports to your gate and there was my dead grandmother. And people, it was her. It was real. It wasn't a dream at all. And she looked at me and she comforted me. She made me feel loved and at peace and I suddenly knew how silly all my internal kvetching about the unfairness of the dress and the hotel room and all of it was, because what really mattered was love. And I looked forward at my children and suddenly they appeared as they now are, as twenty year olds, and the four of them were gathered at the corner of the airport, talking and laughing. Try as I might, I could not see their faces, because it was my future children, but I could see the girls tossing their long beautiful hair, and more importantly, I could see that they had grown up and were friends. They were a family.
And I looked at my grandmother and she was love, and that was my past. And I looked at my children, and they were love, and that was my future. And I woke, in my present, and I didn't care a whit about where we stayed at my sister's wedding, or whether I looked good in the dress, because my present was also love, and family.
I believe my grandmother came to comfort me. And when my children were old enough to hear about that dream, I told them that is what I know about life after death. That my grandmother came to me to comfort me. That was not my darkest hour, but my grandmother, and my mother, and my children--my family (those who are my relatives as well as my chosen family)--have been the answer to my darkest hours. I don't believe my brain created that dream for me, I believe my grandmother came to see me.
Nonetheless, I wonder that I wasn't able to create from that dream, and from all the books I read, and from other sources, such as the story of the angel Lailah, stories for my children that were rich and comforting about death, and memory, and how we carry the dead in our hearts. How sad and spare my approach has been. Having insufficient tools myself, I worry I have failed to give my children stories by which to die. I seek them now in order to make sense of my own impending death, to find truthful meaning which will stand me in good stead in the long dark nights ahead. I hope that I can find more stories to pass along to my beloved people now, including, eventually, the story of my death. I want to show them what I hope to have, a death that is peaceful and without fear. In many ways, this spiritual journey is the most important journey I have undertaken. I can hardly believe I waited so long to embark, and it terrifies me to think that I could have been taken, on any day in the last fifty-two years, as my neighbors in Jamaica Plain were last Friday, without warning, without time to think.
Tonight, at bedtime, I am going to read a story called Cry, Heart, But Never Break, by Glenn Ringtved, to my children. In the story, death comes to a small, snug house where four children live with their beloved grandmother. The children know that death has come for their grandmother and they try to stave him off with strong coffee, black like the night, but finally he is ready. He tells them the story of two brothers named Sorrow and Grief, who have a heavy, gloomy life until they meet two sisters, Joy and Delight, whose days were full of happiness save for a shadowy sense that something was missing. One day the brothers and the sisters met. Sorrow fell instantly in love with Delight, and she with him. It was the same for Grief and Joy. Each couldn't live without the other.
I think you understand what happens next, just as the four young children, listening to Death, understood too.
When Death leaves their house, he says to them quietly, "Cry, Heart, but never break. Let your tears of grief and sadness help begin new life."
This is a Danish children's book, and you may think it is too dark for boys who will turn six on Thursday. But the Danes are a bit ahead of us on this one, and my children have all now asked me what happens when you die. I owe them an answer, and I want my answer to be one filled with love and poetry.
Lilah tov, good night.
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