Death's Anniversary

Seems to have been a sweep of the malach hamavet (Angel of Death) in my hood the past few weeks. We're hearing eulogies about people we never expected would fail to make it to their next birthday parties, and it is a little scary. There's something about winter, too, that makes death all the more sad, all the more gray and gloomy.

Therapy is always rich, should be at least, and when a young patient walks in and looks you in the eye and says, "They killed my father in the hospital," you know you're in for angry, pathos-driven story. People go to the hospital because they are sick, some are literally at death's door. Then the slightest error, or fate, or something somehow goes awry, and there we have it, the worst of all possible outcomes.

We could have kept him home for this, they say.

Most of the time it isn't that cut and dried, the fault, the blame. The parents of kids who overdose, for example, never let it go, the thought that they could have done something. They rarely blame anyone else. It is clear, in their heads, that they messed up somewhere along the way. There's no convincing them otherwise, not for that first decade. Time helps, hushes the self-badgering to a whisper. Death and Time, clearly in collusion, buddies.

This happens to be the 43rd anniversary of my brother's untimely death, and the third anniversary of my father's. They died on the same day of the Hebrew calendar. There's no blaming anyone for either passing. Every year, not surprisingly, like clockwork, like most others who have lost loved ones, the week or two before Death's anniversary, I begin to sink. I told someone the other day that the word is pensive, thoughtful, mindful of the meaning of the life of someone who can't answer our questions anymore.

That's what anniversaries are about, thoughts and memories.

And thoughts, we know, are intrinsically tied to emotions, so there you go.

So we light a candle on the anniversary, or two in my case, and say a few special prayers, share a few memories with people who remember.

The memory that comes to my mind is how my father reacted when he saw me dressed up for a wedding.

Last week I bought a new dress for the upcoming marriage of my youngest son. Out of nowhere, driving home from Lord and Taylor, I pictured my father looking at me in the dress with approval, with love, the sight of me a reflection of him, for sure, but warm and happy nevertheless.

My father loved nothing more than this, a celebration for something truly worth celebrating. He loved putting on his tuxedo and dancing, gracefully, at somebody's wedding.

And to be honest, I loved that tux.

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