It’s the same every morning, only more and more terrible. While David Levy does his exercises, he listens to the latest griefs over the radio. Drought has cut to less than half the livestock of some village in northern Kenya; desperate herdsmen are forced to slaughter their scrawny cattle. In Indonesia, an earthquake kills hundreds. In this country, millions lose their jobs, can’t make payments on their homes. Families are forced to move in with relatives or, sometimes, live out of their cars. Yesterday NPR told of 100 people killed by a truck bomb; the day before it was villagers found tortured and be-headed. A roadside bomb kills a soldier, a villager. Soldiers come home with brain damage, without legs. And for each of the dead or damaged, a hundred lives are turned upside down, families broken, children left without parents, parents without children. Chaos, the chaos that engenders loss of meaning, enters the world.
Finished with his exercises, he remembers in his prayers the dead and the living. He mourns the dead and worries for the living. But why talk to God when the kind of God one can talk to is, in a sense, the problem in the first place? If he could accept a world in which things just happened—tsunamis buried villages, cancer cells were fruitful and mul-ti-plied, bombs exploded, and razor-sharp shards of metal went every which way, into the bodies of the just and unjust alike, and all was what it was, period—if he could accept that, if he could acknowledge that justice is not built into a sacred patterning of things, then there’d be no point speaking to God about anybody’s grief. It isn’t that suffering wouldn’t matter—of course it would matter to the sufferer and, out of human sympathy, to others. But it would be of no sacred significance. And it’s this idea of the sacred that’s boxed him into a corner. Though who’s to say God is at the root of the sacred? Maybe sacred is a human creation.
And look—hasn’t the world always been this way? Vale of sorrow, vale of tears. It’s only the imme-diacy and fullness of knowing—e-mail, news streaming on his iPhone—that’s all that’s new. So what is it that salts and sours his eyes beyond his control?
Claire says, — David, you’ve been like this since we said goodbye to Sarah.
They’re having breakfast together in the country kitchen they had built a few years ago in their house in Cambridge. Every day he feels the tension between this sun-filled room and the weight of suffering he carries.
—Are you saying, he asks, that only personal losses should be sufficient to account for someone’s sorrow? Is that what you’re telling me?
—Please! Don’t be so high and mighty. Of course not. I know you too well for that. You’ve always grieved for everybody’s sorrow. I respect that in you. But since Sarah, since Sarah’s death, there’s been a difference. Shouldn’t I worry?
To take away the sting, Claire puts down her coffee cup and kisses his cheek.
The tragic Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav tells us that every day for an hour, we are to break our heart before God, break open and speak our pain. David cites the authority of Reb Nachman to his wife. Claire nods, she knows about Reb Nachman. She says, granting the hour of breaking open your heart, All right, but what about the rest of the day, David? Doesn’t Reb Nachman say we are required to be joyous? He lost both his sons, he lost his wife, he suffered and died young from tuberculosis, yet he told us that joy is a mitzvah.
Unlike David, Claire is not even Jewish. But she knows Nachman. She’s smart, an intellectual historian at B.U. That’s where David met Claire, auditing a grad course in Nietzsche that she was teaching. Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, she studies them not for truth content, life-truth, but for what they can tell her about believers. Is she too smart to grieve? No. He has seen her grieve.
Of course it’s not Nachman’s beautiful, mad vision, vision of a God before Whom we are instructed to weep, that makes David grieve, that washes over him, wave upon wave. Often, when he’s by himself, he lets go, he weeps, he begs God to comfort the Afghan girls who, on their way to school, had acid thrown in their faces, flesh gouged to the bone. The men who burn with acid the faces of those girls feel justified, holy. Ideology excuses violence, excuses it even for those who have not been victimized.
Not that he suffers only for anonymous victims he hears about over the radio. What about Jim Welsh in their book group, whose MS—or is it ALS?—keeps getting more debilitating. First his wife Jane had to help him off and on with his coat; now his arms flap like empty coat sleeves at his sides, and his speech has become a gnarled whisper. Or Jennifer, David’s administrative assistant, who’s had one miscarriage after another.
Or Jeremy, of course; always, always there’s Jeremy. Jeremy’s photo is in front of him as he says morning prayers. One prayer tells him, “Serve God in joy.” It doesn’t say how.
Over coffee before they each leave for work, David to the importing firm he runs in downtown Boston and Claire to B.U., Claire puts a hand over his hand.
—I get it. Sure. Joy is hard to come by. Honey? I feel sad losing Sarah, too. Espe-cially after Jeremy. But let’s be thankful for Lisa. Let’s be thankful for our Danny, thankful Danny’s okay.
—Don’t you think I am?
She adds, — By the way, honey. Danny, he’s coming for the weekend. He called.
—Danny’s coming when he’s so busy? Claire? Did you ask him to come?
—I always ask him. Of course.
At once David is delighted, but suspicious. Is Claire so upset about his grieving that she feels she needs to bring Danny home? Danny’s finishing his anthropology dissertation at the University of Chicago. How can he get away for a weekend? And at once David begins to worry: the plane—will the cargo be adequately inspected? He sees an explosion in the middle of the sky. And what about the air circulating in the plane? Suppose someone has flu.
Reb Nachman said, “All the world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to fear at all.” He knows it’s a mistake to carry too large a load over that bridge—yet it seems that every day the load grows heavier, breath comes harder.
_____________
When his first wife, Sarah, was dying last month, Claire and he flew out to California. Ostensibly it was a trip to see Claire’s sister in Santa Monica. Really it was to say goodbye, and of course, Sarah knew. It wasn’t just David who needed to say goodbye. Claire, too. Over the years, Claire and Sarah had become very close.
A funny thing: Sarah made Monroe—her second husband, husband of 25 years—keep David and Claire outside while she put on her make-up. Even dying, and she knew she was dying, she wasn’t going to be seen looking awful! They stood in the garden and looked mourn-fully out over the lawn, over the roofs of other houses, all the way to Catalina. Then, with a paisley silk scarf around her shoulders to give her dash, another, bright golden, as a turban to cover her bare skull, Sarah was ready for them. Monroe came out to the garden to call them in. Monroe, something of a dandy, sporting a small, neat mustache, wore a maroon silk shirt streaked with ointment and liquid.
Monroe, David, Claire, sat around the hospital bed Monroe had set up in their living room in Pacific Palisades, in the house Sarah had always wanted, by the plate-glass window looking out over the ocean. Monroe and David, wanting to help, hovered clumsily.
Sarah rolled her eyes at Claire. — These men!
Claire laughed and shook her head.
—Claire, dear, can you fix my scarf? At long last I’m a good kosher wife, hair all cut off.
—You’d never know it! Claire said, as a joke, not a lie. She fixed the scarf. Taking Sarah’s head between her palms, she held her cheeks, kissed the scarf on her head.
—Look at these husbands of ours, Sarah said. Running around like chickens with their heads cut off. Relax, relax, kids, I’m not going anywhere today?.?.?.?Still, still, Sarah said to Claire, her words thickened by drugs, as she fingered the plastic tube of her IV, still, these men are okay.
—But don’t tell them, she stage-whispered. It’ll go to their heads. Still?.?.?.?we’ve had pretty decent luck, Claire, in the husband depart-ment. Could have done a lot worse.
Now she sighed.
—But then?.?.?.?there are other departments.
Thinking of Jeremy, David was sure, Sarah had stopped smiling. She wouldn’t meet their eyes. Eyes drooping, half unaware, she plucked at the wires to the monitors, playing an inaudible music.
—Monroe, dear? Can you make sure it’s okay??.?.?.?down there? Her words were slurred. She pointed to the valley of blanket between her legs.
Just then Lisa walked in. Their daughter, David and Sarah’s. She’d flown in from Cleveland. She was silent. Always gentle, she tiptoed to the hospital bed and kissed her mother’s cheek.
Monroe lifted the sheet to take a look. — It’s fine, he said. The catheter is just fine. I know it feels peculiar. But it’s fine.
—You know! My big shot. If you really knew! My mother at the end used to raise her forefinger and say, “God should only destroy my enemies the way I’m destroyed.” Ha ha. The trouble is, my enemy, it’s my own body, that’s my enemy. But whatcha gonna do? Whatcha gonna do? Good afternoon, Lisa darling. Don’t look like that. Shh, sweetie!
She smiled at everyone. Then, as if she realized, ahh, she didn’t have to be the life of the party, she closed her eyes and slid under the opiate. David looked at her face. Bleary. Soft as a girl’s but no longer the face of a girl, as he no longer had the face of a boy. When they first met, they had been boy and girl.
_____________
David’s breath became deep, hot. Decent luck in the husband department. Sarah was letting him off the hook, telling him it was all right, all of it. Their angry marriage—when they were practically children. She was 18, he was 20. A dancer with big eyes, a junior at Barnard. He was a senior at Colum-bia, a revolutionary with long, curly black hair—knocked around that spring by the police when, one 4 a.m., they stormed the administration building the students held. They broke his granny glasses, hauled him off to jail. Too scared to occupy the buildings herself, Sarah told him she was proud of him. Those days Sarah wore her long hair in a ponytail that trailed almost to her waist. They went to old movies, attended emergency committee meetings together, waited in line for standing room at the Metro-politan Opera. They slipped into the second acts of Broad-way shows after intermission. They had pet names for each other. He read William Carlos Williams (“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”) to her. They attended demonstrations against the war in Vietnam. They were going to lead a wild, beautiful, sexual, revolutionary life. They weren’t going to be trapped in bourgeois torpor. They would live passionately in an uncreated America. They would create it.
Two months after meeting, they subwayed down to City Hall and married, both of them dying to get away from their families. For godsakes, they’d neither of them ever lived away from home! How could such a marriage not self-destruct? A romantic ideology can take you only so far. They fought and fought. She became pregnant with Lisa. And that scared her. They had so little money. Sarah was still at Barnard; David took a part-time job but started grad school. Sarah stopped pretending to encourage his revo-lutionary ideals. Like his mother, she complained about their poverty. David had come from a family with very little money. Money was what his parents fought about. Night after night they yelled. His father lifted his hand to slap. He never slapped, but he shoved, and his mother would crumple to the carpet in a theatrical faint. Getting up, she put out her nails to scratch.
Married, Sarah and David snarled and snapped. Or brooded, wouldn’t look at each other.
Sarah had never had to consider money. She was used to expensive clothes; her family traded for a new Cadillac every year. There were trips abroad. It turned out she didn’t want to give that up. The romantic choice she’d made frightened her.
—Don’t you see? she snapped. This can’t be La Bohème anymore. It can’t be romance at the barricades, I’m pregnant and I’m a college student.
David pretended—pretended to himself—to be morally outraged. It was the ultimate betrayal. He’d expected to live in graduate-student poverty. Now, with a baby coming, he had to make money or take it from her parents, and that he couldn’t stomach. Her parents were continuing to pay her tuition. That he accep-ted—nothing else. He dropped out of grad school, got a job, through Sarah’s father, with an im-porter in downtown Boston, tripling his wages. They packed up and moved to Boston. How peculiar: he found he actually liked the work. And he was good at it! Still, he made Sarah pay.
All this was 40 years ago. Now Lisa’s son—his grandson Jeff—is entering middle school. And that afternoon last month, Lisa, their beautiful, smart daughter, eyes shining wet, sat by her mother and stroked her hand and whispered to her, though Sarah was asleep.
Suffering in his own life, in the lives of those he loves, seems incommensurable with the suffering he hears about every morning. Those villagers, the Afghan girls. Still, suffering is suffering; loss, loss.
And then, as if that weren’t enough, there’s the suffering we bring upon ourselves. To think how he coated with ideo-logical veneer his fear and anger as a young husband. How we torture ourselves and those closest to us with vanities! He tortured. He openly resented Sarah for pushing him into the business world. Then he discovered that, secretly, she was taking money from her parents! He became furious. She felt entitled to the best. He felt entitled to judge her with contempt.
What happened to their love?
He: — What are you so glum about? You never talk to me anymore.
And she: — Me! You ignore me completely. All you do is play that stupid guitar.
His teeth were clenched; you money-hungry bitch! He slammed fist into palm. Choked, hot-faced, whirling with rage, so thick with guilt that when he heard her weep into a pillow, he threw his new guitar across the room. There! He heard its sounding board split. Oh, the board might have been repaired, but he felt so sick looking at the crack that he held the guitar by its neck and smashed the damn thing over and over against the desk. They both wept. They mourned all night. Next morning he buried the corpse of the guitar in the trash.
After Lisa, they had Jeremy. Then, wanting very different lives, they sepa-rated. So peculiar. A strange blessing: within a year or two they were better friends than they had ever been lovers; for the next 35 years, brother and sister except that one terrible year. On Thanks-givings, at Passover seders, they were almost always together, an extended family—
David, Claire, and Danny, his son with Claire,
Sarah and Monroe,
Lisa and, when she grew up, her husband Arthur, their son Jeff,
Jeremy—as long as there was a Jeremy,
Sarah’s mother (after her father died),
Claire’s father and her uncle and his family. On and on—at least 15 at the table extended with plywood, covered with cloths. Once upon a time.
_____________
For an hour, two, they watched Sarah sleep in the room with glass wall, lovely room looking out over the Pacific. Noises came from her throat. She woke, she slept again. Somehow, they were ashamed to look at one another—he, Sarah, Monroe, Lisa. Strange. Dying was making them ashamed of expressing anything, even grief. Especially grief. Grief they swallowed. Seeing her enmeshed in tubes and wires, pain blurred by morphine, animal sounds coming from her throat, David asked himself, as five years ago he had asked himself when Jeremy died, Is it all worth it? Dear God! The whole deal, going through life, putting your children through a life that ends this way—is it really worth it?
It’s probably nothing, Dad. I’m doing acupuncture.
Have you seen a doctor?
It’s nothing. Really.
When Jeremy died—in just over a month, diagnosis to death—Jeremy took the world with him. Nothing seemed beautiful. It was a dead world. David loved Claire, loved Danny and Lisa, but they couldn’t take away the sense that the world was dead. He mourned not only his loss but the loss for Lisa and even more for Danny, who had loved his big brother fiercely. Sarah he couldn’t speak to, not for a whole year, and he still doesn’t understand why. At the time he thought he was aggrieved because she had known, a week or two earlier than he, how sick Jeremy felt, and she hadn’t told him. But that wasn’t it. Maybe it’s just that when he spoke to Sarah, he experienced her grief compounded with his, and it was too much to bear.
Then, slowly, as the grief remained but the world returned, he was able to be her friend again. The change occurred at the unveiling of Jeremy’s headstone, a year after the funeral.
_____________
Maybe—and isn’t this what Claire means?—he listens to the griefs of the world not for their own sad sake but to give him justification for a priori mourning, something in which to ground, lend legitimacy to, his sorrow. If this is true—isn’t that shameful? The suffering he hears about is real in itself, must be attended to for its own sake. When he hears over the radio the wife of an Army sergeant, a soldier who returned home from Afghanistan with brain damage from the shock of a roadside bomb, he wants to comfort her, to help her husband get better treatment. In the end, he finds their telephone number—they live in Newton, just a few minutes from his home in Cambridge—and calls to offer sympathy and ask if she needs anything. He spends an hour on the phone, listening to her tell him how wonderful her husband had been, how much he has deteriorated—and he sends this stranger a check and gives her the name of an effective lawyer. But how many calls can he make? How many checks can he send?
_____________
Friday afternoon when David comes home early for Shabbat, Claire is working—working at the dining-room table so she can spread out around her laptop documents on the youth movement in Germany in the early 20th century. Der wandervogel, groups of nature-loving youth, and their connection to later Nazi youth movements. There are Xeroxes of essays, photo-graphs, journals—their pages held open with clips. Other documents are bookmarked on the Web.
He pours them glasses of white wine and sits watching her work. He leans over to kiss her forehead, smell her skin. She hooks her hand around her neck and says,
—Sit a couple of minutes. I’m just finishing.
For just a moment, looking at her taking notes, it’s 1976. He walks into a graduate class at B.U. and there she is. He’d found Claire McCann’s name as instructor of a graduate course and called her—might he sit in? He’d taken the few courses he needed for business. He’d been made vice president in charge of marketing at the same small import firm he got his start with. Soon he planned to start his own company. So he took courses in management, in marketing, in accounting. He had no intention of finishing an MBA. Claire’s course, Nietzsche in the Context of Modern European Thought, was just for him. Claire was 30, the age of most of her students. He was pleased by her simple, lucid explan-ations. He was pleased by her broad mouth, open face with high cheekbones, her smart eyes.
He’s still pleased just to look at her. And she’s still teaching him.
How funny the difference between David then, in 1976, and David eight years earlier. By 1976 he was making good money. All that conflict with Sarah over money!—and look—by now it wasn’t an issue. His success made him wonder: was his drama of purity, his indiffer-ence to money, a fake?
When out of habit—no, out of the vestiges of radical identity, faithfulness to an image that had once defined him, and certainly out of irony—he would joke, I want you to know, Claire, you’re sleeping with a wild-eyed socialist, she would laugh:
—It looks to me as if at least five days a week you’re something of a clear-eyed capitalist. Hmm. Do you think there’s a contradiction? But we’ll let that go. I know you, David. What you are is a good man.
He was flattered, and loved it that she was sophisticated enough to say something that simple.
Now she shuts her laptop, straightens her papers, turns to him.
—Danny called from Logan, he’ll be here any minute. So? Are you happy?
—Of course. You know I am. But what did you say? Did you make him think I was in a terrible state?
—He’s got research to do at Widener.
—Right. Right. And there’s no such thing as interlibrary loan.
—Honey, look: the thing is, don’t you maybe need to see someone? Get pills prescribed? I’m talking turkey with you. It scares me. You’ve never been sad like this. Except of course after Jeremy . . . You, my adventure capitalist.
He takes her hand. — Thank you for your goofiness. But this isn’t depression.
—Oh? Then what would you call it?
—Well, I’ve gotten older. I see what’s up. I mourn. If someone’s depressed, it means he can’t find anything in the world worth loving. But the mourner has lost something he loves. Something precious. A depressed person sees no-thing precious. He wants to wipe out the world. It’s meaning-less, worthless. His own life feels worthless. Maybe after Jeremy’s death
I felt that way for a time. But now, that’s not me. Is that me? For instance, I love you, Claire.
Even as he says this, he knows he’s sweet-talking, not being honest. Oh, what he said was true enough. But he’s not acknowledging how strong the dark feeling is in him: Dear God, he said to himself when Sarah was lying there connected to life by tubes and wires, as he said to himself when Jeremy was lying in a coma in the ICU, is it worth it? To go through a life that ends this way, early or late, is it worth having life for yourself, giving it to children you love? Fool! As if there were a choice! But even then, watching this son, this young man he loved, begin to die, he didn’t feel that life was worthless. It’s because he so intensely wanted life for Jeremy that he grieved, that afterward he mourned.
And so Jews say, May his memory be for a blessing. Let it be his life we remember.
For an instant, David sees Lisa and Danny, Sarah and Monroe, sees Claire and himself, and two of Jeremy’s friends, sees them as if he were a camera outside and above—all holding hands in a prayer circle just outside the ICU. He remembers Lisa starting to weep and Sarah becoming very upset at this, because to weep was to admit the possibility that Jeremy could die.
—You can’t go back into his room if you’re like that, Sarah said to her, to all of them. When we go back inside, we say to ourselves, Jeremy, you’re going to be fine, you’re getting stronger and stronger. You’ve got to put positive energy into that room.
So David had to weep in silence. In his curtained-off section of the ICU, Jeremy lay in a coma. Just before the doctors induced the coma, Jeremy had asked in his slurred speech, — So what is this? It’s so strange. Dad? I keep feeling . . . I’m at a place between worlds. Am I going to die?
—No, no, David said. Of course not, of course not.
Sitting by his bed, Sarah stared at her son. She stroked his head. Unconsciously she pumped her left hand with her right, as if her left hand were Jeremy’s heart, as if she were keeping it going. Oh, she knew.
David began a prayer for healing in Hebrew:
—May the One who blessed Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob bless and heal . . .
Lisa touched his hand.
—Shh. Shh. You’re upsetting Mom.
David didn’t understand.
—Any prayer in Hebrew Mom associates with a Mourner’s Kaddish. She told me Hebrew has to do with death.
—This prayer has nothing to do with the Kaddish, Lisa.
—I know. And Mom knows. But please?
He prayed silently for healing. But he was already mourning. Afterward, for the prescribed 11 months, almost every day, he found a service at some synagogue where he could recite the Mourner’s Kaddish, a praise of God in memory of someone you’ve lost.
The minyan at synagogue was healing. For others were also in mourning. David remembered the story of the Buddha telling a mourner, a mother who asked for help with her grief, to go from door to door till she found someone who had suffered no losses. Finding no such door, perhaps she was appeased by the commonality of grief. It’s almost the definition of the human. Helpless before grief, we can mourn together.
_____________
Just in time for lighting Shabbat candles and making a blessing over the wine, Danny appears with computer and overnight bag. He puts away his bags. They stand at the kitchen table and David offers Shabbat blessings, then lays his hands on the head of his son and blesses him, this big, hefty son, taller, broader, by many inches, than his father.
David says, — But, you, you’re the real blessing. How good to have you home with us.
—And how’s Andrea?
Danny is half-living with Andrea.
—Andrea’s great. How are you, Dad?
—Oh, me? Okay. I can imagine what your mother has been telling you. She thinks I’m depressed.
—And? So? Are you depressed?
—Your mother informs me we’re supposed to be joyous. It’s true. Especially on Shabbat we’re supposed to be joyous. That’s especially easy when I see you.
—Well, good. I’m relieved. Sure, Mom told me you’re going through stuff. But that’s not the only reason I’m here. I didn’t want to spoil the surprise by telling you over the phone. We need to talk about a wedding?.?.?.
In a rush, the weight of breath eases. Now David’s lungs fill with joy as irrepressible as grief.
But at this moment of unexpected joy, David also knows. Knows that this beautiful son, this gift to them and gift to the future, this young man who may, please God, carry, thousands of years into the future, our genetic codes, our cultural codes, has been, since the moment of his conception, a hostage to life. And because they love him, they can’t help offering him up.
Until Jeremy, David hadn’t really understood: All the children are Isaac. And sometimes the ram is nowhere to be found.