There is death in life, and it astonishes me that we pretend to ignore this: death, whose unforgiving presence we experience with each change we survive because we must learn to die slowly. We must learn to die: That is all of life. To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death, of a death where chance plays no part, of a well-made, beatific and enthusiastic death of the kind the saints knew to shape…. It is this idea of death, which has developed inside of me since childhood from one painful experience to the next and which compels me to humbly endure the small death so that I may become worthy of the one which wants us to be great.
Rilke
Ironic
How in subtle ways
Everything is now infected
Everything has a tinge of the elegiac
It infects all joy
After a year of Kaddish
Nothing is the same
Felt most acutely in shul
Hearing the mourner’s kaddish by others
Each one reverts me back to Dad then Mum.
Once you have been bitten by the loss
Your visual acuity is distorted by reality
The absence and the memory of what was
The lacuna in the heart
Disallows further abandonment
The luxury of enjoyment in the face of
The obscenity of death is no longer affordable.
As if we, the witnesses to the little details
The jokes the quips and the gestures of the departed
To which others less close were unaware
And must now preserve them in memory
And what of the millions?
How do we mourn them on a galactic scale?
Does God cry for them in our absence?
Does he participate in the mourning like in Eichah Rabba?
Is mourning built into the very fabric of creation?
Like Galut and Geulah?
I muse about that very first desire
Within the depths and recesses of the divine mind
An internal reverie of what if…
What if… I created the world….
That initial desire…
Did He not predict Auschwitz?
In that moment that reverberates every moment since,
The desire and the death incarnated into the DNA of every fibre of creation
Manifesting when the grim reaper appears.
The few adepts tapped into it and ended in heresy or madness
Unable to live normally with such an intuition
Unmasking the emperor behind the curtain
The rest of us numb ourselves with gadgets, chatter,
politics and various drug recipes.
This day I feel the mourning built into my DNA
A grief, for all the antecedents, all those who suffered before me
And realizing my progeny must go this way too
Awakening to the same awareness upon my departure.
