A Few Thoughts on Life and Death: Yom Kippur Yizkor Sermon 5786
Wednesday, August 6 was a hard day for me. I had just returned from a lengthy and wonderful vacation with my family. During our trip, my father learned that his younger sister, my aunt Madeline, had died. My uncle delayed the funeral so that we could return in time. And so, the day after we came home, we drove out to central Jersey to celebrate Madeline’s life and mourn her passing.
My Aunt Madeline was a vivacious, fun, always-energetic woman who never missed a Bruce Springsteen tour in her whole life. Although she battled cancer for years before she succumbed, I always felt like she could beat it. It was a shock to me when I learned earlier in the summer that she was close to the end. Madeline had a great career in teaching, a loving family, three sons, three grandchildren and counting – but I felt angry when she died. She was one of the best people I knew. She deserved more years, more chances to hold her sons and play with her grandkids. She was only 65 when died. Despite all that she had accomplished, the legacy that will live on because of her, I did not feel that her life was yet complete.
The evening after the funeral, I received a text from my best friend from childhood, Malaika, letting me know that her mother, Ginger, had died that morning. Her mom, a massage therapist, craniosacral healer, and overwhelmingly loving person, had been a constant presence in my life since I was in middle school. She, too, had been sick, though I was very surprised when my friend told me in June that she was going on hospice care. Thankfully, I had the chance to visit her in Chicago this summer, never saying goodbye but knowing that this was probably the last time.
During my visit, Malaika kept bringing drawers full of pictures, knickknacks, and old things down from the bedrooms upstairs. Ginger, in her hospice bed in the middle of the living room, would hold the drawer in her lap, sifting through the material objects of her history. When I asked what she was doing, she told me, “I want to get through all of this before I go so that my family doesn’t have to.” She wanted to finish this task, to finish this life, with a sense of completion.
Ginger, like my Aunt Madeline, was 65 years old when she died. Although her death wasn’t a shock when it finally happened, because she’d been in home hospice for about 7 weeks, Malaika told me that it didn’t make a difference. Whether it’s expected or not, it still sucks. A lot. Malaika told me that even though her mom wasn’t afraid of dying, she wasn’t ready to go. She was really bummed about it. She wanted to stay. She had a lot more life to live. She wanted to be with her daughter, her grandsons, her husband, her knickknacks, her everything. She wanted to live.
Last night, in the sanctuary, I spoke about this question: what makes a life complete? How does a person know when they have done enough, achieved enough, to let go? I told the stories of two very different lives: Havi, a 2-and-a-half year old who died of Tay-Sachs disease, and Daniel Kahneman, a 90-year-old who chose to end his life in Switzerland. I concluded that there is no such thing as a complete life. Judaism teaches us that each day is a universe, that each day has infinite possibility. Some of us know in our kishkes when it is time to go; most of us never have that great privilege. All that we can do is live hayom, this day.
The question that I pose today, as we approach the Yizkor service, is a little different – not how we know when our own lives are complete, but how we keep on living when others’ lives are cut short.
When it comes to grief, it is music that is usually my container. The album that has had the most influence on me over the last decade is Carrie & Lowell by indie-folk artist Sufjan Stevens. The 11 sparse songs track Sufjan’s experience of losing his mother, Carrie, after years of struggle. The gentle instrumentation, heartbreaking lyrics, and intimate musicality bring me to tears every time, tears of pain and of relief. So I was surprised to read that, ten years after its release, Sufjan Stevens feels ashamed of this album.
“I think this album is evidence of creative and artistic failure from my vantage point,” Sufjan said in a recent interview. “I was trying to make sense of something that is senseless. I felt that I was being manipulative and self-centered and solipsistic and self-loathing, and that the approach that I had taken to my work, which is to kind of create beauty from chaos, was failing me. It was very frustrating. And for the first time I realized that not everything can be sublimated into art, that some things just remain unsolvable, or insoluble. I think I was really just frustrated by even trying to make sense of the experience of grief through the songs.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could sing the right songs, say the right words, wait the appropriate amount of time, and find that the grief had left? But in all of my conversations with mourners over the years, I have yet to meet someone who has told me that the grief went away. That it was sublimated into anything – art, music, writing, worship, relationships with others. Sufjan says in that same interview, “Time is a salve, but it offers no solution really, especially in dealing with pain and suffering and death. And I think what I realized is that grieving is eternal and you never really get over it. It just moves around within you and transforms you, but it never goes away.” Or as my mentor, Rabbi Abe, once told me, “It doesn’t get better. But it gets different.”
For some, finding meaning in death is powerful. Creating a non-profit organization, dedicating a foundation in a loved one’s name, committing to acts of tzedakah for their sake – all of these are beautiful ways of honoring memory. But as Rabbi Ken affirmed on Rosh Hashanah, attempting to place too much meaning in loss can be dangerous. When we spend too much time asking why something happened, we risk losing ourselves to swirling speculation and depression.
I asked my friend Malaika if she sees her mom in the world. She said, “Not really.” Her mother’s friend reached out at some point since her passing to say that a butterfly had landed on her shoulder and she knew it was Ginger. “I don’t think my mom was that butterfly,” Malaika told me. Then she paused, reluctant to say something that she worried would be too trite. “But there are things that I do, things that I say, that remind me that in some ways, I am my mom. My mom is in the world because she’s in me.”
Before she died, my aunt Madeline gave my dad a treasury of stories about the character Madeline, whose name was spelled the same as hers. She told him to give it to my children, Yara and Raz, who spent many afternoons playing at my aunt’s house in New Jersey over the last few years. My dad brought us the book just before Rosh Hashanah. Now, every night, Yara demands at least 5 Madeline stories before bed. Although the stories in the book have nothing to do with my aunt’s life – she never, in fact, lived in an old house in Paris that was covered in vines, nor did she and her siblings sleep in two straight lines – I feel my Aunt Madeline’s presence when I read to my children. How brilliant – my aunt’s work in the world was to teach children, and by giving this book to my dad to be used after her passing, she continues that effort. She is in the world because she’s in those bedtime stories.
I don’t think it’s fair that my aunt and my friend’s mom died at age 65. But fairness, as it turns out, isn’t really an operating principle of the universe. We want to believe that God is just and that the righteous will be rewarded with long life, as our Torah teaches. But cancer doesn’t care about justice or righteousness. It doesn’t care whether someone is 2 years old, or 65, or 120. Cancer doesn’t wait until a person’s life is complete, nor do car collisions, heart attacks, mental health crises, or drug addictions.
And, indeed, much of our Yom Kippur liturgy understands this. Although the broad theology of the day seems to suggest that our actions determine our fates, many of our prayers, on closer inspection, say something different. The soaring Unetaneh Tokef, which Harris will chant shortly, asks: Mi v’kitzo u’mi’lo v’kitzo? Who will die at the end, and who will die before their end? The question itself implies that many will leave this world before their “time” – before enough years have passed to let them do what they wanted to do in the world. God decrees these things, it seems, with the impartiality of a shepherd, without much regard to the person’s merits or deficits. The great hope comes at the end of the prayer: U’teshuvah, u’tefillah, u’tzedakah, ma’avirin et ro’a hagezeira. “Repentance, prayer, and acts of justice lessen the severity of this decree.” Notice the language here: no matter how hard we repent, how much we pray, how much we give, we have no guarantee that the decree will change. Perhaps we can shift the needle a little bit, but, our liturgy reminds us again and again, we are not, in the end, masters of our own fates.
And so, for us, the living, it can be helpful to remember that our sages have always known that the world doesn’t quite make sense. That God does give us more than we can handle. And so I again come to the question at which I always arrive: how, then, should we live in the face of death?
For Sufjan Stevens, it’s not about sublimating grief or strong-arming your way through it. But it is about survival. “Sometimes survival requires sensitivity and openness, and even subservience,” he has learned. He says, “I think I’ve just become a lot more subordinate to the chaos of the world around me and less inclined to fight it, because I’m starting to learn that you cannot create change by force: You just have to move through it, and be open to transformation.”
As we turn to the Yizkor service, and to lifting up the memories of all those we’ve lost – those who died at their time and those who died way too early – I pray that each of us seek not a sense of completion but perhaps one of transformation. I pray that each of us finds a way to move not past but through. To see our loved ones in the world just as we see God in our world: in our stories, our family members, ourselves. In this way, may their memories be for a blessing. Gmar chatima tova.
