Looking at loss through a Jewish lens
Stress is caused by wanting the present moment to be different from what it is.
Go ahead, read that sentence again. I’ll wait.
We wish someone weren’t ill, the traffic would move faster, our boss would be less exacting. We might wish to be doing something else entirely.
It’s so easy to be pulled away from the present moment, reminiscing about past experiences and either longing for their return or unnecessarily re-experiencing a trauma. Oppositely, we spend time anticipating the future and conjuring up all sorts of imaginary scenarios that may never come to be. But “the now” is all we really have. We have this very moment to shape or to simply notice what is. And then it’s gone. We let it pass in order to welcome a new present moment.
I can’t even guess how many times in the last few weeks I have wished that our house were still exactly as it was pre-storm. And even now, I still halfway believe that living in this apartment is temporary and we will be going back home in only a matter of time. I think it will only be when I can let go of our house that I will be able to “move on.” I don’t know how to do that yet, though writing about it here helps me a great deal.
A friend advised me, after reading yesterday’s post, to liken this grieving process to the unexpected death of a loved one. First come shock, followed by denial, longing that it weren’t true and that the person were still with you. I am stuck in this phase right now. I suppose eventually it will become easier to accept what has happened, let it go, and be content with good memories, especially as new experiences come.
As an empath, I sometimes have trouble separating myself from the narrative of a book or a movie. I lose my present surroundings and truly feel that I am in the world of the story. It seems as if it’s happening to me. It can be emotionally difficult for me (and for those who live with me). When I was woken up that recent August morning to the reality of water slowly seeping into our house, I immediately recognized the same feeling of internal panic as I’d experienced in reading books about war or survival or watching any movie’s chase scene… “Mayday, mayday… the worst is here… instant action needed… life forever changing right now… you only have moments… go!”
It’s the surprise and absolute shock of this situation that makes it difficult because there was no time to mentally or emotionally prepare ourselves for such a large change. It’s not like we methodically sorted and carefully packed each room and then put our house on the market, straightening up every time there was a showing. We had no 60-day wait to close, nor a thoughtful search for a new home. In this situation, our intentions had nothing to do with the change brought upon us so suddenly.
I’m hung up on this thought that I want to go home. I want to walk the 3 blocks home from school with my Sweet Girl, carrying her backpack and listening to stories about her day. I want to unlock the door that sometimes needs a little extra push, and start preparing dinner while SG does her homework at the kitchen table, getting her little finger prints on the glass each time and almost always forgetting to put away a pencil or a folder. I want to hear the mailbox lid make its familiar clunk when our quirky mailman, Bruce, drops in the day’s letters. I want to sit in our sunroom and watch the rain as I write this. These moments were all perfectly imperfect.
* * * * *
There have been many times in history that people have had to quickly pack up a few belongings and leave their home, possibly forever. There are several recent books published about the Underground Railroad, describing the risks people took to gain freedom and escape persecution. The current Syrian refugee crisis is another unfortunate example.
I often think of the multitude of Jews who, not very long ago, were woken in the night by SS soldiers and forced to leave their homes in a matter of minutes with whatever they could carry. Their homes were overtaken and could not be reclaimed after the war. I also often ponder the Passover story many times a year. When I was a child, my grandfather would lead the kids around his house with a sack over his shoulder, enacting the story as if we personally were escaping from Egypt and a life of slavery. And now, each year, at some point during our Passover seder, we go around the table and we each mention what we would take with us if we had to leave our homes and lives behind. It evokes humorous responses from those under 5 years of age, but consistent answers from everyone else. We would take our loved ones, our photo albums, and sometimes something that belonged to a family member who is no longer with us. We are hanging on to a collective memory.
Exile is a theme that repeats itself often in the Torah. Adam and Eve must leave the Garden of Eden. Moses spent all his life in exile. Then there were the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Romans, all the way up to the Nazis, who used violence to drive the Jewish people from their lands. Jews have been exiled from England, Spain, France, Italy, Vienna, Russia, Germany. (One source cites 109 countries we have been kicked out of, not that there’s a contest we’re trying to win.)
Such blind hatred of one people or another has never made any sense to me. When I heard Brene Brown speak a couple weeks ago at the launch of her book tour, she described it with the metaphor of a circle. The ability to imagine any one group of people as not fitting in or not belonging inside the circle is what allows a mental shift to take place. You somehow symbolically place any group you want outside the circle of inclusion, normalcy, and “everyone else” and don’t allow yourself the mental ability to redraw the circle. It’s a short thought experiment but a very dangerous tactic. It’s simple to conclude that if they aren’t inside the circle as we are, they must not be human.
I can only imagine what it must have been like during the destruction of the Second Temple. First, the dedication to fight for what you most treasure, along with the trauma of failing and watching its destruction. Then either having to flee from all you know or perhaps being able to walk through the rubble and wonder how it could all change so suddenly.
The Jewish People are resilient. Time after time, country after country, we have taken our traditions and started again. Worship and routine may have altered, but the community ideals remained and people kept their faith and found new ways to adapt. The quicker they were able to adapt to change, the more their new communities flourished.
I feel gratitude for the stories of our shared past. If an entire People can undergo this experience of sudden exile over and over and over again, I can do it too.
The random destruction in the path of Harvey’s waters is no comparison to purposeful hatred and violence. In fact, we could even say that the flood waters called forth countless people to reach beyond themselves to engage in helpful actions and community service. In Jewish tradition, this is called tzedakah. It’s not a choice; it’s simply what we do. It’s not “charity,” but creating “justice” and doing what is right. It is a moral obligation to reach beyond our own needs and care for our fellow brothers and sisters. More than only money, we give of ourselves with our compassion and our heartfelt recognition that the other person needs something to “make it right again.”
Throughout the time of slavery before the American Civil War, during the Holocaust, and most likely in every instance in human history where there has been unfair oppression of anyone, there were many individuals who stood up to “do the right thing” and helped despite the certainty that they would be severely punished for it. But reading about it in a history book and witnessing tzedakah in action (and what’s more, being a recipient of it) are completely different.
As I sat in synagogue this year for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, it struck me that almost the entire service reminds us to focus on our actions. We ask God for help, we are grateful for our lives, and we praise God for many things, but the prime focus of these Holy Days is on our free will, our human hearts and minds that make choices every single day. Did we stand up to injustice? Did we welcome the stranger into our home or our conversation? What do we do, what actions do we carry out, with the gifts we have been given? We read that what will come in the year ahead directly corresponds to our actions. We humbly recognize that we are not perfect. Therefore, we spend serious time remembering our failings of the past year and searching for ways we can move into the future having learned from those mistakes.
The Jewish People (and this is the case for many cultures and religions) frequently and purposely invoke our collective history as a lesson in how to live. We remember the stories of generations before us because their experiences teach us strength, wisdom, humility, faith, and they help us to shape our values today. We are a People with a long collective memory, often seeking lessons and meaning from our past. Interestingly, given our track record, we don’t tend to look toward the future much, nor do we all agree about what that will look like, because our focus is on this moment right now. The concept of tzedakah reminds us that there is much to do right here, right now.
The blessings of my present situation are almost too many to count. Yes, we had a forced exile of a sort in a panicked situation, but we had no violence or hatred. It was unexpected, but we now have the luxury of peace and healing and there is no rush to move forward until we are ready to. And unlike the historical examples above, we had overwhelming love and support in the days following the storm and we still do now. We can return to our destroyed house as many times as we want to look around and to try to make sense of what has happened. This grief is not for the loss of a unique soul and their treasured life, thank God, but for a collection of inanimate walls and floors. How’s that for perspective?
We really did choose what we said we would, having to rush out at the last moment: my grandma’s hand-stitched Sabbath tablecloth, my great grandmother’s rolling pin, photo albums and meaningful artwork, SG’s blanket, a little food for the journey. It’s reassuring to know that those annual hypothetical answers were rooted in truth.
We appreciate those moments that give life meaning. We notice the budding leaves in springtime and the first orange leaf in fall. We savor another birthday as an opportunity to acknowledge growth and life experiences and to attempt to begin a cycle anew. We decide how to shape our days, our seasons, our life, as if time were a bucket and we could toss in whatever our hearts desire. These special moments could take place at any address in the whole world. It is not where they take place, but simply that they do. No matter how we travel, we don’t ever have to leave them behind.
Just as we are symbolically broken open during these holy days and we stand before God in judgment solely for our actions, good and bad, we can mentally crack open our home and symbolically extract the memories of the most important actions and leave the rest behind.
I emerge from these days of reflection with the intention of appreciating the dwelling we had, which provided shelter for the three of us to grow and to share experiences together. I recognize that it was simply a backdrop for our memories, not the memories themselves. I will adjust over time to accept the reality that we are not going to be living in the exact same house with the same furniture and walls and layout. We are already making new memories within other walls. I will work on letting it go.
We look to the stories of the past for meaning and we honor those experiences, but we focus not on the feelings of pain or loss they evoke but on what we have collectively gained from each experience, what lessons and memories we choose to carry forward. It is only by looking to the past that we gain the perspective required to shift our perception of the present.
Perhaps I am not really stuck in the denial stage of losing the house. Maybe I am re-experiencing the shock of the storm itself and begrudging the effort it will take to start anew. In that case, I will recognize and honor those emotions and give them the space within to do whatever it is that emotions do before they go on their merry way. (This may require the purchase of some art supplies.) And I will do this keeping in mind that this may be difficult, but it is nothing like the horrors in the history books.
As we begin to think about designing a new home, I aim to make choices that intentionally create a space for our treasured memories of the past, our blessings in the present, and our (hopefully) bright future. It will be acknowledged as the container for bedtime stories and birthday parties, but those moments will never be attached to any physical structure. What sustains us will always be what we carry within us.
At first, I couldn’t understand what all the fuss and looks of sympathy were exactly FOR. We’re completely safe, we are financially comfortable, nobody was harmed. It’s only “stuff,” right?
It feels like nothing is clean. We packed up our clothing and belongings with lightning speed to get them out of our mildewing house, but I still feel that I need to wash everything again. Twice. The apartment washing machine is ripping up our brand new sheets. We still need to buy a vacuum and I miss the zen-like satisfaction of vacuuming the house. The kitten is into EVERY. SINGLE. THING: cabinets, containers, trash cans, the tubes behind the washing machine, and she waits for the door to open so she can bolt outside. The bathrooms and closets have the dimmest lighting I’ve ever seen. There is no space in the apartment to get a moment to myself. I can’t find a safety pin or our iron and we don’t have a corkscrew. I can’t stand the electric stove. I need to restart my computer 2 or 3 times a day to get the internet to work. The neighbor next door is noisy exactly when I’m trying to get SG to sleep. There are tiny ants that must hang around every day waiting for a cat to drop a morsel of food. I miss feeling settled and comfortable and knowing where everything is.
It’s all a long process of waiting. Waiting to hear back from the insurance company. Waiting for furniture to be delivered. Waiting for school to finally begin. Waiting for the maintenance guy to come unclog the sink and re-attach shelves that fell from the wall in the closet. Waiting for the survey company to get some numbers to the architect. Waiting on the backlogged permit office. Waiting for our 6-month lease to end so we can move somewhere else. Waiting to see what property values will be in 3 years. Waiting just to see if we change our minds about what we want.
A mother always fiercely guards her young, and SG has dealt with an abundance of change in a very short time. Moving around from garage apartment to friends to grandparents to other friends to a temporary apartment and finally to this apartment where we will be for I-don’t-know-how-long, I would imagine she likes being in one place no matter where we are. She has always needed to be close to us, so this smaller layout must feel comforting to her, as much as it frustrates her parents. She is very unsettled by not having all her belongings and not getting to decide what was chosen to be here with her and what was sent to storage.
The loss of our home because of a completely random, meaningless natural disaster (and it’s a separate discussion about whether warm oceans bring hurricanes) and the savageness of it just baffles me. Our Sun is going to explode in some billion number of years, ending life on Earth then, if not long before from some other asteroid collision or from greenhouse gasses or who knows what, but that seems abstract and even like fantasy fiction. These current circumstances, along with the recent swath of other natural disasters like fires and earthquakes, seem apocalyptic for no real reason.
In the remediation phase a couple days afterward, I intended to be there solely to watch the process and to take photos for insurance purposes, but it quickly became obvious that you can’t rip out cabinets and closets without packing up what is inside them. It was a mad dash and I have never packed so fast. These hands were holding many items at once, but always tape and a big marker for the boxes and a pen and small notebook. First I donned cheap plastic disposable gloves and threw out the waterlogged items. We were fortunate to have friends alongside us, helping us toss and take pictures of everything. Things like books and stacks of magazines are already heavy, but waterlogged, they are like boulders! I know that we started with at least 2 boxes of the large, black contractor trash bags and that we ultimately ran out of them. That is 200 huge plastic bags full of items that we accumulated slowly over a period of years. Everything in the bottom drawers or cabinets had to go. Toiletries, clothes, paperwork, art supplies and artwork, Tupperware, DVDs, games, books. The list seems endless.
The large task of emptying the house done, it was time to shift our focus from where we’d been to where we were going. I think it was the very same day of the storm that we rented an apartment sight-unseen over the phone (but this is not an article about my eyes). We were largely guessing what furniture would fit based on a drawing in a brochure. We didn’t even know how long we would be “homeless.” The apartment complex had one unit available and so we took it, assuming rental places would be hard to find in the coming days since half the city was probably displaced. (Turns out that we probably could have been more selective, but I felt happy to have that decision taken care of.)
We eagerly anticipated the day we could move in to the new apartment as a start toward feeling settled again. I had reserved two storage units over the phone during the storm, with one hand covering my other ear because a neighbor was being airlifted from her roof by the Coast Guard at the same time. I expected an exact science, that they would arrive and get delivered and picked up as planned. (That did not happen.) We had done laundry, tossed our trash and food, packed our belongings, and left the borrowed place behind that morning. We arrived at the apartment and there was our storage unit, there were our movers, there were the keys… only the new apartment was a disaster. Such a mess! There had been a big mistake… someone had dropped the ball. The old carpet needed to be ripped out, the walls were in the middle of being painted. It would be a few more days.
We are mostly settled now. SG has finally started the school year in a new building and a month later than expected. I am writing thank you notes, sorting paperwork, and helping at SG’s school. Every day, one of us goes over to the house to collect the mail or to check to see if the pile on the front lawn has lessened or disappeared. Today, as I left the salon and drove away, I ended up at the house again, this time not purposely. I have made that 5-minute drive from the nail salon to our house perhaps 100 times, so I subconsciously did it again. When I realized it, I simply parked my car in the driveway and started at the place, trying to make sense of it all.
As I was paying and leaving the nail salon, another woman was also walking out. I hadn’t even noticed her. She looked at me compassionately, put her hand on my shoulder, and said good luck and that she’s so sorry for what we are going through. That’s when I realized that the other guests had been listening. What an experience of community this city has had! There have been heartwarming stories of strangers helping strangers all over the place. Then, the woman who had been sitting next to me came forward and gave me a hug.
Not much has become routine yet. From the time we wake up in our new bed to new surroundings, to getting dressed and out the door, through the day, almost everything is a first. First time to find the mail room. First time to use the oven. First time to talk with FEMA. First meeting with a builder. First time to order dinner to the apartment. It all requires a lot of brain function. Where are the tools and the stamps and our shoes?
A couple weeks before the storm, we got a kitten from the Humane Society. Probably not the best time to do that! After the first couple of days, we discovered she had ringworm and had to give her medicine and baths and wear protective clothing and gloves when we visited her in a bathroom area. We had to keep her apart from our other cat.
When we were staying at a friend’s parents’ apartment for a week or so, the kitties stayed with some (super awesome and nice and especially understanding) friends. Finally, we moved into the apartment and we STILL weren’t able to take them back because it was a mess. It took us a few days to assemble furniture and unpack and get a bed delivered and finally it was ok for us to sleep there. The next day we picked up the cats and they have been fantastic since. Maybe they bonded while they were together. We are teaching the kitten what NOT to do and she’s very smart. I think she can even read! When I’m typing on the computer, she is sitting here looking at the screen like she’s following what I write. She even plays fetch.
I have started reading novels again, which feels wonderful. We are trying to decide what the right thing is to do with the house. We still have a gigantic pile of our belongings on the front lawn, but most everything else looks normal when I drive over to pick up our mail. The pool is back to normal and we should probably go use it.
Before we dive into all the books I’ve been reading, and boy have I been immersed in some good ones, I’d like to let you know that I’ll be taking a blogging break for the month of August. I’ve got some large projects to focus on, as well as no camps scheduled for Sweet Girl, which means she gets much of my time until school begins in 4 weeks. (Did anyone just hear trumpets?)
Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me
Etta and Otto and Russell and James
The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane
Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002
The Stars are Fire
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
