To the New Decade

Cuz we're all sick of the last one.

FD likes to go over the events of the year in December, has been obsessing about this for about a week. Between the two of us, without a blog to record them (for this is not that kind of blog), we try to remember what has happened to us and to the people we know. It's a long list of remembers.

I've just come from my mother's house, refreshed from a nap on her sofa. The day has started, as usual, at nine in the office, but I cut my afternoon hours to go to the funeral of a close friend, an expected passing. In our community it is tradition, following the service, to follow the mais, the dead person, to the grave, literally walk behind the casket. These days bodies are flown to different destinations, different cities, even countries. So we walk behind the hearse in the cold, the rain, whatever the weather, to say goodbye.



Our friend wasn't a rabbi, he was just a regular guy, but special of course, to us.

The rabbis of two synagogues eulogized David, spoke of his faith and acceptance of disease, this gorgeous, positive man, his sweet-disposition, how he and his family moved to Chicago thirteen years ago. He helped build two synagogues, two renovations of older buildings, one edifice now more beautiful than the next.

The rabbis of each shul claim him. It wasn't with money, although I could be wrong, but surely with time, that he gave of himself. Everything takes time, all worthy projects. They speak of him in one of the new synagogues, and after the speeches, we follow our friend, on foot, to the next.

It's really cold, and me being a cold kind of person anyway, cold-intolerant, wearing a short, fall jacket, could easily opt out of the march down the busy street, but it doesn't feel like an option. Maybe reading the stories from the Holocaust, the survivor tales, has changed me. I make an association, cold is an obstacle, nothing more or less, and of course, this isn't Poland, dead of winter, 1942. And that awful awareness of the elements and the coldness of death, too, disappear.

I meet up with FD at the destination, and he greets me with, "I felt I had to walk, even though it's really cold; that it was an honor to accompany him." Right there with you, dear.

We walk together to the car in no particular hurry and he continues, "Let's stay together the whole day. I won't go back to the office. I'll go with you, wherever you're going." He knows that I'm picking up my mother, taking her to visit my father in the hospital, but there are errands, things to do. The day is full like every other day.

"Sometimes," he says, as we buckle ourselves in, "I think you don't need this kind of thing as much as me, just being together, that I'm not so necessary."

Such bait. I reassure, explain that this isn't so, and why. You might call this emotional intimacy.

We swing over to the grocery store to pick up an anniversary cake for my parents. I blank on the year, how long they're married, but have the number 64 in my head (wrong), so I tell the woman behind the counter, "Just write on the cake . . ."

Mom & Dad, 64?

FD picks up champagne and sparkling grape juice, not sure if they'll let my father have a little champagne or not, and flowers, tulips. I pick out some cards, one from us, one from my mother to my father, forgetting to buy one from my father to my mother. Neither of them is in a position to buy the other anything.


We pick up Mom at her house. She's waiting at the front door. She doesn't know we're going to have a little party in the hospital room to celebrate her anniversary. FD and I are very excited.

Dad is sitting up in a chair, dressed. His hair is getting kind of long, in the hospital eight days. He's happy for the company but short of breath, six words to a breath, at most, sounds a little like the Godfather. He suggests, as we begin to sign the cards in front of him, that we get some post-its, write on these so we can recycle the cards.

You see, everyone's green these days.

But the cards are good, spot on, and we save them, so we sign them and hand them over. We don't stay long because he has work to do, it is time for rehab and if he isn't rehabbed, then what is he doing here, anyway? We want to keep him out of the hospital, but we're in no hurry. Every new decision is stressful. It's hard on my mother to shlep here every day. And she's lonely living without him, vulnerable, too.

It isn't easy staying awake on the drive back to the house, but I can't say this, of course. I flop on her sofa, asleep before I've even closed my eyes. While I nap she brushes off an old winter dress coat of hers because I've complained about being cold in my jacket, and haven't bought a new coat for myself in twenty years.

I wake up in a start and eventually ask FD. "What must it be like for her to see me age like this, crash on her couch like I just did? I was out for an hour!"

"We see our kids getting older," he philosophizes.

Not the same. Anyway. We start recollecting, without a blog, the year.

There have been other friends who are now gone, young people, at least we think so, one who left us at 50, suffering in silence, telling no one about her disease. A teacher. We call teachers in our community, stars. These are our stars. We lost a star.

Only about five weeks ago we lost another dear friend to a heart attack, 62. Playing raquetball. We escorted his body to the cargo hangar at the airport; he had a ticket to Israel for burial in the holy land. His mother, already there, reportedly said,
"I can accept it. I just can't believe it."

The week after that we heard that yet another member of the community had passed away in Spain, and the Spanish authorities want to embalm the body, not a Jewish tradition, unless the community, the family, comes up with $70,000 for transport on a private jet. Somehow this money is found. But an important person talks to another important person and the commercial airliner takes the body, as is.

And so it goes. Two of my uncles leave us, one younger than my father, one older.

People lose jobs, people lose lives, and we understand that 25% of all Americans are in danger of losing their homes. We watch, experience these statistics like everyone else, and worry.

Meanwhile, (K"H*) my brother-in-law has a new lease on life, a new kidney, not an easy find in your sixties, and my father, although gasping for breath, has a fistula and with the help of dialysis, could live for many more years. My grandson, an infant, has a heart that is whole. The surgeon who sewed it up is a doctor without borders who does this surgery on 13 year olds in impoverished villages, children who have not, until their surgery, lived a not-blue day in their lives.

We've had many new babies in the family, and marriages.

We have this idea, in my culture, that it's all decided, everything that happens to everyone in the world is decided on the Jewish New Year, a holiday that rolls around in September or October, depending upon the lunar cycle. We take off time for the holidays, look deeply into ourselves, our behavior, the things we've done, that which we haven't done, and we apologize, mainly to one another, for our greatest deficits, which we feel are communal, social. Then, ten days later, we fast for twenty-five hours, face our King, own up to our garbage, vow to do better, and hope for the best.

But since everyone else reviews their year at the end of December, some of us do this, too. We look back to look forward, as the snow falls and the temperatures drop into the single digits.

And it's New Years.

To you and yours, may it be happy, healthy, safe, and full of love,

therapydoc

*K"H means, basically, the evil eye should leave you alone.

That Circle of Life

For transliterations and definitions of phrases in this post, skip down to the end.

My Uncle Max passed away just the other day at 88.

He was a stalwart of this Chicago family, a proud American with a good name, a name known here and across the ocean for good deeds and charity, a legacy we could all emulate. Proud spouse, proud father, proud grand-father, even prouder great-grand-father, I saw him flirting with the very youngest in the family, a very little one, only a few weeks ago.

Carl Whittaker, a father of family-therapy, when training young clinicians would always say:

This work can get emotionally trying; flirt with every infant you see.

It's safe to generalize from treatment to life most of the time.

Original Chicago frum, my uncle seemed secure in his place in the secular world and secure within our little ghetto without walls. Most of us in the family are like this, and most of us have stayed in Chicago and have lived here a long time, unless we've wandered in post-matrimonially from another town, in which case the family does its best to make a person feel as if he's never lived anywhere else. Not the most numerous, surely not few, we're just your run of the mill people-people. We cover home-makers, social workers, lawyers, doctors, psychologists, teachers, administrators, principals, writers, directors, stock-brokers, book-keepers, artists, scientists, insurance brokers, recruiters, and kashrut-mashgichim. No baseball players or soccer moms, as far as I know. I'll probably get into trouble for leaving someone off the list.

An organic system, we do our best to be there for one another for happy occasions and sad ones, too, and when we neglect to do that, try to give one another the benefit of the doubt. For none of us are perfect and family is a good place to practice this sort of thing, giving the benefit of the doubt, which, I'll say it right now, happens to be apropos of nothing in this post, but is a Jewish world view that applies largely to marital therapy and relationships. So I tend to throw it in when it works, the benefit of the doubt, even if the directionality of that relationship within the family or the tribe, for that matter, has yet to be empirically established.

Anyway, I remember when my parents reached my stage of life, how they started going to a lot of funerals. They had a funeral to attend a week, it seemed. The parents of their friends were passing on, and they had to deal with the funerals of their own parents, my grandparents, too.

As they aged, their health and the health of their peers declined. My mother would say, "Do you remember So and So? He's in the hospital again, and when Dad and I visited him, his wife_____ was there, and she's not doing so well, either."

Your parents slowly, systematically run out of friends their own age, and before you can blink, you're going to more funerals, too, more often than you once did. You're in the same boat, and not immune, and you start to think, Pretty soon my kids will be here, too, and it'll be my generation they're talking about. Death happens, strikes a family, and there you are in the shoes of your once middle-aged parents.

First one of your mother's siblings might pass away, then another. Then another. In my family, when the third maternal sibling passed on, I heard my mother say to my father, "We're really starting to lose numbers, Sid."

And a baby would be born.

I got the news about my uncle while sitting in a snack shop on Burbank, eating lunch (grilled fish sandwiches) with my daughter, my son-in-law, my son-in-law's sister and his mother, my machetainistah. We're in this shop, sitting at a table by the window because all we have is ambient light, daylight streaming from the window. You never know when the electricity is going to go out in Los Angeles.

It's uncanny that when I'm out of town. I won't get any calls unless I'm sitting down to eat with a bunch of people that I haven't seen in six months. But I take the call today anyway, because I've left more than a few rather distressed folks back in Chicago with these words: They have phones, I have a phone, where I'm going.

Patients know I want them to call me when certain stars are in alignment. So I answer the phone and it's my mom.

Lemme call you back in an hour? I ask.

She says no and tells me that Uncle Max has passed away. Max is her sister's husband. This is a shock, although he's 88 and sure, he's been sick. With the news my face drops, the way faces always do when they get the news that someone has passed away. My mother is telling me to please inform the family, to tell everyone by way of a family email shout-out. Give the cousins the details of the funeral.

I assure my mother I'll take care of it. Everyone at the table in the snack shop understands; they have heard the, Oh, no! caught the whisper, Uncle Max! and they want details.

I have no trouble telling over a few things about my uncle at the table, describing his way with the family, his passion for Israel, his professionalism. My appetite is gone and I don't really want to finish lunch, but it feels wrong not to eat, not to pick up, change topic, for we had been talking about choices in life before this interruption, something happy, something important to my son-in-law's sister. So we jump back to that and in minutes the mood is light and good.

I have a rabbi who says that a Jew has to be ready to jump from a wedding to a funeral, from a funeral to a wedding, to switch from happy to sad, from sad to happy, on a dime. True enough, all well and good, and he knows that that works-- as long as you're not suffering from some disorder or another.

We bury our dead quickly, so the next day, while my daughter is driving the kids to school, I'm in the front seat making plans with FD to broadcast the eulogies from his cell phone. The idea is to get to Coffee Bean after we drop off the kids, wait for the call. My daughter notices me get upset and asks about it. I hate not being at the funeral, I tell her. Predictably, the broadcast doesn't work out. Reception makes it sound like FD is on the subway, not in a synagogue.

After I give it up, my daughter wonders about my relationship with my uncle. We weren't close, especially, it seemed to her, didn't run to visit him and my aunt every week or anything like that when she was little.

And she's right, of course. It's all natural and good, his passing, the way things should be. I remind her that she hasn't known her aunts and uncles for as long as I've known mine. Just as they've watched me grow up, I've watched them grow older, too.

We're all in this, none of us avoids this rich, if depressing process, the many colors of aging. What is important to us as young people is less important in our later years when we inevitably obsess over the physical gifts we've taken for granted, lost. And yet we find that some of the things we always treasured still reign supreme, indeed are the only things that become important in the end.

When I last saw him he was sitting in a chair in his room in the rehabilitation center praying a very long afternoon service. One of his granddaughters had come to visit from New York to see him and to attend a different family funeral. He flashed that huge smile of his when I walked through the door, the smile I think of when I imagine him walking through the door of my childhood home, when he and my aunt would come to visit.

I had to leave to get the work before he finished his prayers.

therapydoc

Chicago frum rhymes with Chicago BOOM, and refers to the orthodox Jewish community.

kashrut mashgichim- This is Hebrew, rhymes with GOSH-ROOT SLOSH-WICK-HIM, plural for the food specialists who certify that an eating establishment is really kosher. I'm not going into what kosher means or how to pronounce it.

machetainistah I think it's Yiddish, rhymes with GOTH-EH-RAIN-HISS-DUH, and refers to the mother of your son or daughter-in-law.

The Speaker at the Funeral

I'm not obsessed with death and dying, I'm really not. But I'm in that age group. The parents are getting older, some are passing on. So there are more funerals than there used to be, more survivors of lost loved ones to visit or call. Sometimes we hardly know them, but we visit anyway.

So much worse than losing a fish, parent loss. Let's be real.

When you visit people in these circumstances, you avoid saying stupid things. You try not to say things like, It's better this way, a timely loss, if ever there was one; he suffered so much.

Not for us to say! The survivors know what went on in the hospital, they know the history of the illness. They know what it was like care-taking their parents, or not care-taking their parents. Is it ever timely? For whom? Best to assume not.

We visitors know nothing, virtually, so when we visit, we try to listen and learn, practice waiting for a mourner to talk. Maybe ask a few questions about the deceased. It's an art, a meaningful shiva.

I understand that a wake is a very different experience. At a wake (correct me if I'm wrong, please) one raises one's glass. It's a very different type of send-off, more cheerful. The purpose is for everyone to "move on." If that's possible.

Survivors have a million decisions to make, no matter the culture. Like who's going to speak at the funeral. Functional families resolve problems well, so decisions like this one aren't that hard. Yet, there you are, grieving a loss, and you have to decide, Who's going to officiate? Who's going to speak? These are things to think about, and they're not simple.

It's more than who's speaking. In some cases, it's how Who is speaking.

My friend lost his mother last week. I missed the funeral but wanted to visit him. I hesitated, had only one free day, and that day wasn't exactly free. When would be a good time?

That morning I had bolted out of an IRB* meeting at 10:00 a.m., grateful that we finished up and no one sustained a fatal narcissistic injury. I got out of the meeting ego in tact, full of love and compassion for humanity (really) and had to make a choice.

Do I pay the visit right now? Or do I wait an hour or two? I didn't have to be at the office until one o'clock, but had plenty on my plate. Maybe my friend wanted to nap. Maybe he wanted a minute to check email. Maybe he was eating a late breakfast.

But I dropped all the rationalizing and drove over.

It was just me and a rabbi visiting, a man little older than me, someone I'd known all my adult life. He had officiated at someone else's funeral earlier in the morning. At his age (those ten to fifteen years he has on me make such a difference) it's funeral to funeral, literally, or funeral to shiva, or shiva to shiva, visiting people in their week of mourning. Occasionally you get to do a wedding, too, if you're a rabbi, or other happy occasions.

But the rabbi has already been visiting here awhile, and he gets up to leave, and it's just the two of us. My friend, who has lost his mother, is joking, complaining that it's kind of boring sitting shiva. You can't work. And you can't play, really, although you might sneak in a game of solitaire on your phone. You can't watch t.v. Oprah is out. Many more can'ts than cans, in the spirit of the event. You're mourning.

Since I missed the funeral he regales me with praises of the young rabbi who spoke. The rabbi is his son. His son, he tells me, worried that he couldn't officiate at the funeral, not because he didn't know the protocol, that they could teach him. He worried he couldn't do it emotionally. He loved his grandmother so much.

My friend told him,

When you get emotional, just look at me. Look at me. I won't be crying. Look at me and Zaidie at my side. We won't be crying. It'll be okay. We don't cry in public. We won't be crying, Zaidie and me. And you won't cry, either.

So powerful, I thought. Look at me. I won't be crying.

And the kid does fine, of course. He's better than okay, better than fine. He rocks. He speaks with sensitivity and gratitude. He conveys who his grandmother is, he brings her to life in this way. This is her. Bubbie.

My friend is still glowing from his son's speech days later, from this person, the man he has become. And I'm thinking, Well of course he's wonderful. Look at his parents.

"Sorry I missed it," I say. "That's what it's all about. Conveying who the person is, that essence. And you're amazing, giving him that tip. Look at me. Look at Zaidie."

So much to learn here.

Those of you who have been reading this blog might remember a discussion we had on stoicism. My position is generally against it. From what I've learned about grieving, from the books and my years of practice, crying is good. Too much holding it in, too much dignity, bad. All is relative, of course, but if a person is on the fence and wants to err on the emotional safe side, if it's time to grieve, grieve.

So someone like me will say, Go ahead, grieve openly if you want. Tell people why you cry. Tell the world. It's okay to cry. If you don't cry, it'll catch up to you. Not that that's bad. But it can be inconvenient.

As my friend's story illustrates, however, grieving doesn't have to be public, and shouldn't necessarily be public. It's okay if it is, sure. Who among us hasn't been to very, very, very sad, weepy funerals? They're fine, and they do us all a world of good in this crazy way, the way that grieving is good. We should feel bad when we lose people. While we grieve the deceased, we can throw in a few tears for other people, too, even for ourselves.

But it's fine, too, to hold them in for awhile, those tears, especially in public if you think you're going to look pathetic.

It all depends, and I imagine you're about to tell me all those depends, when you comment, depends on many things. But public displays of almost everything can be contagious. You know that. And maybe the deceased doesn't especially want that contagion. Maybe the deceased would prefer a wake.

Getting through that speech without breaking down isn't stoicism, it's good public speaking. The young rabbi, while delivering his eulogy, knows that for him, this isn't the right time to cry. He waits for the right time. He can wait.

Like everyone, stoic or not, there really is plenty of time to cry.

therapydoc

*IRB stands for Institutional Research Board, and is often called the OPRS, Office for Protection of Research Subjects. It's the ethics arm of an institution, there to protect people who might participate in university approved research protocols.

Can You Cry Too Many Tears?

This will be a long one. Settle back and relax.

Today is the holiday that the Jewish people (those who observe it) dread for three weeks. Some people dread it all year long. FD says there should be a holiday that everyone dreads.

I'm not sure I follow his logic, but ours is certainly the religion for everything.

Tisha B'Av, the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av, is a day that marks destruction. Like every holiday there are certain laws to observe. The law specifically associated with this holiday is about tears. Crying.

You're supposed to make yourself cry and get in touch with the loss of the Holy Temples of Jerusalem, built and destroyed by conquering nations. We lost the first in 586 BCE, two thousand, twelve hundred years ago, to the Babylonians who desecrated the holy walls and holy vessels; the second in 70 AD to the Romans who seconded the motion.

We grieve the martyrdom of people of other eras (think Spanish Inquisition, for one) who died rather than convert, and we remember every pogrom, especially the Holocaust.

Our history is full of tears.

On Tisha b'Av we get in touch with the loss of holy land and what are thought to be the dwelling places of the Old Mighty. (That's how my grandfather referred to Him. ) When we're in Israel we say that prayers are a local call. The Jews trace a relationship and ownership to the holy places of Israel to Biblical times, fifteen hundred to two thousand years B.C.E.

In any case, a huge mosque sits atop the spot that Jacob wrestled with an angel and won but walked away, limping.

This is also where his grandfather Abraham said to the Old Mighty, "Sure, you want my son, you can have my son, my only son from this particularly incredible mother, Sarah, my helper, my friend, my companion, the woman who has grown old with me. "

The midrash (an explanation, also a few thousand years old) tells us that Isaac was no baby at the time he was offered as a sacrifice per the Old Mighty's request. Sarah, when she heard about the possibility that Abraham would do this, had a heart attack, probably at the age of 103. We think Isaac was thirteen years old at the time.

Bound, his father readying himself with a knife for slaughter, Isaac looked up at the sky and the Old Mighty opened up the heavens so that His young servant alone could see beyond the stars. The tears of the on-looking angels fell into his eyes, which is the reason Isaac is said to have been near-sighted for the rest of his life. Most of his descendants are, too.

Anyway, the angels cried and the Old Mighty had mercy and crying is a theme in our culture.

I believe I told you that my mother said, "Cry, it feels good, it's good to get them out." I'm sure she said it in Yiddish, too, but I've forgotten the Yiddish.

And I've told you that there is not an infinite number of tears. Eventually you will stop. If you need to cry, cry. At least I don't think there's an infinite number of tears. I could be wrong. Has anyone done the research on this? I don't think so.

The rabbis say, Cry, for sobbing is all that the Old Mighty really does hear. In other words, He's sick of words. And who can blame Him? We are all talk, are we not?

Which is why talk therapies, especially rational therapies tend to work, but it's also why we need them to talk out our many obsessions.

But there IS such a thing as too many tears, if not for this holiday.

The story goes that a woman could not stop crying for the loss of her husband. She was irreconcilable. Her family brought her to the holiest rabbi in town who told her that she shouldn't be sad. Her tears went to good use. The Old Mighty gathered all of her tears in a cup, every one of them, and when a terrible calamity threatened destruction to the world, he used her tears to avert the tragedy. This calmed her down.

She could stop crying.

So sometimes it's good to cry, and sometimes it's best to stop. I used to tell my kids what my mother told me, advice I hope they will tell my grandchildren, that they should squirt out a few tears now and then, maybe every day.

I still tell my patients this. But this doesn't apply to people who can't stop crying, like the woman in the parable. So without a rabbi to tell you the importance of your tears, how do you stop?

Therapy's an interesting process.

Sometimes it helps to look over your life and find the things that you forgot to cry for or weren't mature enough to cry for or had been taught that you shouldn't cry for, but you should have cried for when they happened. You should have cried at the time but you didn't.


So for example, some little kids, upon the loss of a parent are told that it's okay, they'll be well cared for and they need not cry. They're told they should buck up at the funeral. Be a man, be adult. Be strong. Kids grow up thinking this is the way we're supposed to be all of the time. Strong.

Then they wonder why, having stored up so many tears, when they find themselves at a vulnerable place in life, that the floodgates let loose and they feel as if they're drowning in their own tears. I tell these patients they have to mourn those old losses.

They're not all deaths, either, these losses. You know how to list your losses. Loss of innocence, loss of love, loss of functioning, loss of health, loss, loss, loss. Talking about losses puts those tears into place.

Stoicism can be a problem. Stoicism helps when you get rejection letters, and it's never good to feel sorry for yourself, really, so stoicism has it's place. But holding back feelings as a general approach to life can definitely be a set up for problems.

Therefore it is nice to know that most cultures build in ways other than stoicism to handle Big Losses. (We'll talk about the smaller, annoying losses as they pop up in other posts. Let's talk about the big losses here).

The psych literature tells us that Jews handle death nicely, so it's convenient that I'm Jewish. Maybe there are some universal truths for everyone in our customs and laws.

Let's start with a funeral. I'll go back to Aunt C's funeral. You last read about her when I visited her in the hospital. It made me feel so good, connecting with Aunt C, even though I knew she was heading towards hospice. Anyway, she passed away soon after that post.

In our culture, at the funeral service people lclose to the person who passed away talk to an assembly of friends and relatives (like in most cultures I think). My aunt had eight eulogies, one more beautiful than the next. One of my aunt's children, cousin Bobbie, said to me, Mom would have loved the service. She would have loved what we said, and she would have loved that the day was sunny and everyone came out to say goodbye.

At the funeral everyone is supposed to ask forgiveness from the mais, the person who passed away. So that's therapeutic for the community of mourners, too.

Then there's the shiva. If you're a mourner, a first degree relative or spouse, you stay home from work for seven days so that people in the community can visit you and you can talk about the life that's lost. People cry, sure, but it's hard for them to cry non-stop when there are so many visitors.

It's not a law that a mourner has to cry. You can tell who's in mourning because the males don't shave that first week and everyone in mourning tears their shirt before the funeral and wears it all week long. Crying during shiva isn't a requirement. It doesn't have to be.

So when my cousin's mom passed away, her sister, my mom, sat shiva with her two only other living sibs and my cousin Bobbie and her two sibs.

I cooked. The community cooked. Jews are all about food, at the end of the day. Food is life.

My cousin Bobbie had an incredible relationship with my aunt. They really were best friends. Now that the formal ritual is over, the funeral, the seven days, the month, she's into the year of grieving for a parent. In that year you don't buy new clothes or go to movies or concerts. I am quite sure my cousin cries often for her mother, expecting, when she picks up a ringing phone to hear my aunt's voice.

It's very surreal, you know. One day you can talk on the phone to someone, and the next day you can't. I'm sure my cousin picks up the phone to call her mother, starts dialing, pauses and puts the receiver back into the cradle.

Now that we're a couple of months past the shiva, she's probably crying a lot. She's supposed to stop after the year is up.

Because there is this prescribed grieving, at the end of the year a person does feel that the job is done. They can stop crying. Not for good, of course not. But the person who has passed away has been accorded respect, and a mourner feels he or she has truly mourned.

Immediate losses are hard for most people, especially that first year, and tears come often if we let them, whereas once they're a thing of the past, it's harder to remember, harder to grieve.

Which is why this holiday, Tisha B'Av is so hard for most people to wrap their heads around. It requires reflection, memory, a very long memory. For Holocaust survivors the loss still feels immediate. For the rest of us, it's harder.

But what do we do about it when crying is getting old already? That's the problem for most people. People who come to see me usually don't have to make themselves cry. They can't stop crying. And, depending upon the person and the context, too much crying can make one sick, not better.

Which is why the docs are forever telling you, Take these medicines. Happy is better. (My motto, by the way). I can't say, Take these medicines because I'm not a medical doctor.

But for the record, if a medical doctor recommends medication, I'll support that decision. And legally, therapy docs have to tell you to get a med eval, a medical evaluation to see if you need medication if you can't stop crying.

So consider that. And sure, get therapy. Grieve the past losses. There is an endpoint to the grief and suffering in any one person's past. Clean out some of it with a caring professional.

There aren't enough rabbis in the world, certainly, to take care of all of those tears.

Copyright 2007, therapydoc