{"id":643,"date":"2013-08-18T21:36:37","date_gmt":"2013-08-19T01:36:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/?p=643"},"modified":"2013-08-18T21:49:30","modified_gmt":"2013-08-19T01:49:30","slug":"the-revolving-door","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/?p=643","title":{"rendered":"The Revolving Door"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I know. You think I\u2019ve forgotten you. You think I have no more adrenaline, let alone drash. You have given up.<\/p>\n

Little do you know how often I have thought of you these past months. Scraps of paper with things I wanted to say, things I wanted to tell you, have long since turned into scribbles that are longer comprehensible to me. I have had to throw out many such notes in the past weeks.<\/p>\n

Let me explain. It was a spring and summer in which I lived life in a revolving door. On the one side, life. On the other side, death.<\/p>\n

Judaism allows me to honor this fact: Death of a beloved leaves an indelible mark.<\/p>\n

Death has a sting; it transforms the living. Judaism asks us to remember the dead as a matter of course. Remembering is built into our liturgical year.<\/p>\n

I think we do this, in part, to invite transformation. We sit shiva<\/a>, we mark shloshim<\/a>, we travel through a year of Kaddish, we acknowledge yahrzeits<\/a>, we attend Yizkor<\/a> services.<\/p>\n

Today, a grieving husband told me: \u201cIt creeps up on you. You never know when it is going to strike.\u201d Yesterday, he said, he sat down to dinner alone. \u201cShe wasn\u2019t there. I cried.\u201d<\/p>\n

That terrible wave of recognition can stop your breath at any time.\u00a0 It can freeze life inside the reality of death.<\/p>\n

On April 28, my friend Anne went to the doctor for a stomach problem; she was told cancer had run amuck in five organs. She died within weeks.<\/p>\n

She had decided to forego treatments that could give her more time.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do I want to do,\u201d she asked me. \u201cThrow up all the time? Be too sick to talk or think? I\u2019ve seen friends do that. Not me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anne was one of the most irreverent, acerbic Christians I ever knew. She complained that God was taking too much time to take her. She told me she wanted visitors who could tell her a good joke. She said she\u2019d wanted doctors with a sense of humor.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo much for that,\u201d she remarked dryly.<\/p>\n

Anne left this word with grace. She filled it with grace.<\/p>\n

We lost Ruth, too, after years of struggle with ever more regular blood transfusions. The last time I saw her, I fed her mashed bananas to mask the bitterness of the medication she had just taken.<\/p>\n

In those last days she reached out to me like a child. I wasn\u2019t always sure she knew what she was doing. I responded as if she needed me to hold her, just in case she did.<\/p>\n

It was a spring and summer of loss and life.<\/p>\n

One of our congregants is quite unexpectedly expecting again. We named her first child a little more than a year ago. Now her son, Anderson, is walking, a sturdy blond boy.<\/p>\n

His mother, the grandchild of Holocaust survivors, is a woman whose ebullience and generosity heals. Alone her presence gives life. Her children, I think and pray, will take after her.<\/p>\n

Forgive me my absence; I was learning lessons about death and life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Let me explain. It was a spring and summer in which I lived life in a revolving door. On the one side, life. On the other side, death.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[148],"class_list":["post-643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-shiva-yahrzeit-yizkor"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=643"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":660,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/643\/revisions\/660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrenalinedrash.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}