for David: a Gold Star dad
From the online newspaper Haaretz (the land) on Israel's Memorial Day, I thought this was exquisite as a father's endless grieving, almost despairing, statement about going on with life after the death of his son.
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Israel Memorial Day - - Over the Abyss
After the first years, during which the pain is acute and terrible, come years in which the wound begins to be covered over by layers of reality and the everyday. There are things that need to be done. There’s work, there are relationships with family and friends. There are all of life’s obligations and also its joys. There’s coronavirus and there’s politics and there are – by contrast – new babies that are born to the grieving family. There are even distractions from the pain. For a few moments here and there, one seems to forget it ever happened.
Slowly, amid the endless negotiation with life, a way emerges to live with the loss.
Over our wound, above our private abyss, reality seems to spread a tenuous, flexible fabric and we, the mourners, learn how to go forward on that fabric, which is stretched above the abyss.
And we go forward on it splendidly. Heroically, you might say.
Almost all the bereaved families I know live heroically.
Uri Grossman during his military service. Credit: AP
Yes, we live our life with all our might. We fulfill all our obligations, in the family and at work and in our studies and in all the spheres of our life. Many of us help people who are in need of help, we are active and involved and creative –
But the truth is –
On hope and despair in the Middle East
The plague is a formative event. When it fades, new possibilities will emerge
How to talk of hope when reality brings so much despair
that there is no fabric above the abyss.
We pretend there is – but there isn’t.
All the good and important deeds we do to stay above the abyss cannot undo the abyss and the force with which it affects us.
I say “abyss” because I have no other word to describe that. The absolute void, that dead suction.
It is impossible to describe, impossible to comprehend.
David Grossman.Credit: Gonzalo Fuentes / Files / REUTER
Because in the place where death is, logic is not. Death, and especially the death of a young person, flies in the face of our familiar logic. I cannot truly fathom the fact that Uri, my son, is gone. It is simply incomprehensible. In my eyes, in the eyes of the father I was to him, in the eyes of everything I think about fatherhood and motherhood, it makes no sense.
In the most literal sense – it is unacceptable.
And even if I know the fact, the fact of his death, I do not really know it. Not in the way I know the other facts in my world. Ultimately, this fact is sealed, impervious. Its import becomes known to me for a fraction of a second, and then shatters again into shards of incomprehension.
Sometimes I think – if we dare to truly understand what happened to our loved ones, if we touch even for an instant, with all our whole being, the core of that fact; if we allow ourselves to gaze into it in a way that allows no defense against it – the abyss will swallow us in a heartbeat.
We too will be turned into not.
This is perhaps the greatest task, our life-task, of those who have experienced a loss like this: to learn how to go forward on the fabric that guards us against the fall abyssward.
And to know that there is no fabric that is guarding us.
And even so, to go forward on it
and to fall time after time,
and even so, to go forward.
And even amid the fall,
and within the abyss itself
to go.
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Thankfully, life has not taken me where David Grossman has been and, irretrievably, is and will be as long as life endures. One of my early memories as a pastor is a parishioner, a mother who had lovingly, even dotingly, raised her handicapped son from his birth to his inevitable early death of related causes at age 18. The Mothers' Day next after that, her own mother had telephoned to remind her that it was a day to go out for Sunday Dinner and celebrate. She had responded, "Mom, I love you. But I'm no longer a mother." Her anguish in her loss was indescribable.
There are events that change who and what we are. I'll always be human, male, White, American, a U S Navy officer. And maybe a priest, I hope so. But I'm no longer a son. Or a grandson. I was a grandson until I was nearly 50 and a son until after I was 75, can you believe that?! I'm still a nephew, barely. I'm a brother, husband, father, grandfather, uncle, friend. Since I was 22, Daddy, Dad, Granddaddy, Papa, Joe calls me Pop, have been key senses of who I am, the self-IDs most indescribably intense and that stir agonizing worry. A call from her college that my daughter has fallen or been thrown from a horse and is in hospital. The phone rings and my son says he has been in a motorcycle accident and is in an ER hundreds of miles away.
That dark night May 2018 wee-hours drive following the screaming ambulance that was taking my oldest daughter, unconscious, to Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola, it looked as if my time had come, and I thought, and said over and again to Linda sitting beside me as I drove, "If I lose this child I will no longer know who I am". Three years ago next month. It didn't happen, and I still have Malinda, and my others, and nephew Joseph after the lightning strike, and God, if involved, has indeed dealt gently, and I still know who I am. But it isn't Game Over, I'm still here in life that is fragile, risky, moment to moment as much Chance as Opportunity. Each night at bedtime I hesitate to turn my cellphone off lest a loved one need to call me. Or, The Call come. Every parent knows that fear.
During my childhood, World War Two, there was a "military star" system, the number of Blue Stars in the front window of a family's home told how many family members were serving in the military. What every family feared most was a Gold Star: a Gold Star signified that a family member had died, been killed, in the War. That's where David Grossman is in his Haaretz essay that brought me here this morning.
Numerous times I've said and written my observation that everything I've experienced in life, good and bad, joyful, sorrowful, horrendous, exuberant, has helped me in my life as a priest and pastor, when I need to more than sympathize, when I need to be able to empathize because I've been there. As a pastor I buried sons and daughters for parents inconsolable in their new state of being. And I'm very much aware that I've not had every experience we humans can know.
If you noticed in the top picture, on each side of Uri Grossman's grave there's a plastic chair, a stool to sit on. Knowing that he's sat there trying to understand the incomprehensible, I've got Uri's dad in my heart.
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