The Beauty of What Remains

February 14^th  is a day of love and loss; Valentine’s Day and the anniversary of the Parkland shootings where seventeen were murdered.  It is an extreme example of a kind of duality that exists with every death; the comingling of love and pain.

In my role as the senior rabbi of one of the world’s largest synagogues I have officiated at more than one thousand funerals.  One of the things people often dread most about funerals is that moment of final, physical letting go.  The carrying and the lowering of the casket. The turning of the spade. The thunk of earth on wood or metal six feet below. That is when the duality of death is most visceral and real; painful and beautiful.

Take, for example, these reminiscences of the writer Marcie Hershman, which appeared in the New York Times. It wasn’t until her grandmother’s death that she really learned what it meant to carry a loved one with love.

When she was a little girl, it was, of course, her grandmother who carried her.

“Put your foot right on top of mine,” she’ d say. “That’s good, mamelah. Now come stand on me with the other one.”

“But doesn’t it hurt you, Nanny?”

“Hurt me?” With a laugh she smoothed the loose strands of blond hair into my ponytail. “Why, you’re so light, you weigh nothing. You’re like a pinch of air. Other foot on top, come on—up! That’s good; balance on me. And put an arm around my waist so no one falls.”

Clinging to her grandmother’s familiar wide warm body, giggling and gasping, little Marcie spun with her in giant circles across the dark parquet floor of the living room. They danced on and on, unequal partners who in those moments absolutely loved all the inequalities. Her grandmother would sing in a loud and clear voice, spinning Marcie for a long time—heads thrown back, legs stepping, arms pumping, fingers intertwined.

Years later it was Marcie’s turn to carry her grandmother.

I stood up with my brothers and two of our cousins and went to an alcove off the main chapel of the funeral parlor. I’ d thought of pallbearing as gloom, oppressiveness, darkness, a struggle to remain upright under both a physical and atmospheric—an impossible—weight.

That narrow box of a world with all light extinguished, all weight given over, yielded only effort and loss. Pallbearing was connected to destruction. But as I lifted the casket it was—she was—so light. She weighed nothing, like a pinch of air. I’d  been afraid that I wouldn’t be able to hold her up. But she was so light, held by the six of us. I had no idea it would feel like this to be a pallbearer; gentle. Cradling. Maternal.

I never before knew how the loving kindness in the act overflowed, how it returned to fill the hearts of those who raised the casket and carried it to its measure of earth. I wanted to carry her safely. Carrying now was a responsibility given over to me—it was completion and connection.

We lifted—and my arm was pulled downward, but that was all. As we slowly moved into the wind, I didn’t buckle. For how absolutely steady Nanny’s last weight was; how perfectly still. How little it asked of me. Only that I carry her gently. As so many times she had on her own carried me.

That’s really all they ask of us—our parents, our lovers, husbands and wives, our children and dear friends. That we carry them gently in our lives as they carried us in theirs. Not with crushing sadness, for they do not wish such weight upon us. But with lightness and warmth.

God bless them for the memories they left for us that make the duality of carrying them with joy in spite of pain possible. The wisdom and love they bequeathed us. The joy and comfort they brought to us as they carried us through life so that now we might carry them forever in our hearts—without bitterness, without crushing sadness. When someone has loved us well and long, we need not buckle beneath the weight of sorrow. Instead, we can carry them with us with gratitude, completeness, and joy.

And what about us? Are we learning the lesson about life that our loved ones’ deaths have come to teach us? What are we leaving behind for our own families and friends to carry with them when we are gone? For just as surely as we carry the people we love, so too will we be carried by the people who love and remember us. Will they carry in their hearts and Minds’ eyes the certain knowledge of our unfailing love?  Will we leave behind for them memories of laughter, wisdom, goodness, and generosity?  Will their memories of us bring them joy?  Funerals are a profound reminder that our loved ones will carry us in death only as gently and lovingly as we carried them in life.

“Put your foot on top of mine,” Marcie’s grandmother would say, “Other foot on top, come on—up!  That’s good! Balance on me.  And put an arm around my waist so no one falls.  That’s good mamelah.  That’s good.”

Excerpted from the new national best seller The Beauty of What Remains; How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift, by Steve Leder.