My eye caught a flicker of movement across the way. A large, lonely figure sat in the darkness. Pastor Henry would remain there for several more hours, watching over the homeless like a sentinel, until the overnight guy arrived. Then he would bundle up, go out the side entrance, and walk home.
I had a sudden urge to get to my own warm bed. I pushed through the door and blinked, because it had started to snow.
I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chatted all the way;
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow,
And ne’er a word said she;
But, oh! The things I learned from her,
When Sorrow walked with me.
ROBERT BROWNING HAMILTON
The End of Autumn
“Something happened.”
It was the Reb’s daughter, Gilah, who had called me on my cell phone, something she was unlikely to do unless there was trouble. The Reb, she said, had suffered a setback, maybe a stroke, maybe a heart attack. His balance was off. He was falling to the right. He couldn’t remember names. His speech was confused.
He had gone to the hospital. He’d been there a few days. They were discussing “options.”
Is he going to be…? I asked.
“We just don’t know,” she said.
I hung up and called the airlines.
It was Sunday morning when I arrived at the house. Sarah greeted me. She pointed to the Reb, released from the hospital and now sitting in a recliner near the back of the den.
“All right, just so you know,” she said, her voice lowered, “he’s not so…”
I nodded.
“Al?” she announced. “You have a visitor.”
She said it loudly and slowly enough that I could tell things had changed. I approached the Reb, and he turned his head. He lifted his chin slightly, pushed up a small smile, and raised one hand, but barely above his chest.
“Ahh,” he expelled.
He was tucked under a blanket. He wore a flannel shirt. A whistle of some sort was around his neck.
I leaned over him. I brushed his cheek with mine.
“Ehh…mmm…Mitch,” he whispered.
How are you doing? It was a stupid question.
“It’s not…,” he began. Then he stopped.
It’s not…?
He grimaced.
It’s not the best day of your life? I said. A lame attempt at humor.
He tried to smile.
“No,” he said. “I mean to…this…”
This?
“Where…see…ah…”
I swallowed hard. I felt my eyes tearing up.
The Reb was sitting in the chair.
But the man I knew was gone.
What do you do when you lose a loved one too quickly? When you have no time to prepare before, suddenly, that soul is gone?
Ironically, the man who could best answer that was sitting in front of me.
Because the worst loss you can suffer had already happened to him.
It was 1953, just a few years into his job at the temple. He and Sarah had a growing family: their son, Shalom, who was now five, and their four-year-old twin girls, Orah and Rinah. The first name means light. The second means joy.
In a single night, joy was lost.
Little Rinah, a buoyant child with curly auburn hair, was having trouble breathing. Lying in her bed, she was gasping and wheezing. Sarah heard the noise from her bedroom, went to check, and came running back. “Al,” she said, hurriedly, “we have to take her to the hospital.”
As they drove in the darkness, their little girl struggled terribly. Her airways swelled and tightened in her chest. Her lips were turning blue. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The Reb pressed the accelerator.
They rushed into the emergency room of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Camden, New Jersey. The doctors hurried the child into a room. Then came the wait. They stood alone. What could they do? What can anyone do?
In the silent hallway, Albert and Sarah prayed for their child to live.
Hours later, she was dead.
It was a severe asthma attack, the first and last of Rinah’s life. Today, most likely, she would have survived. With an inhaler, with instructions, it might not even have been a major incident.
But today is not yesterday, and the Reb could do nothing but listen to the worst imaginable words-We couldn’t save her-told to him by a doctor he had never met before that night. How could this happen? She had been perfectly normal earlier in the day, a playful child, her whole life before her. We couldn’t save her? Where is the logic, the order of life?
The next few days were a blur. There was a funeral, a small coffin. At the grave site, the Reb said Kaddish, a prayer he had led for so many others, a prayer which never mentions death, yet is recited on the anniversary of a death every year thereafter.
“May God’s great name be glorified and sanctified
throughout the world which He has created…”
A small shovel of dirt was tossed on the grave.
Rinah was buried.
The Reb was thirty-six years old.
“I cursed God,” he’d admitted when we’d spoken about it. “I asked Him over and over, ‘Why her? What did this little girl do? She was four years old. She didn’t hurt a soul.’”
Did you get an answer?
“I still have no answer.”
Did that make you angry?
“For a while, furious.”
Did you feel guilty cursing God-you, of all people?
“No,” he said. “Because even in doing so, I was recognizing there was a greater power than me.”
He paused.
“And that is how I began to heal.”
The night the Reb returned to the pulpit, the temple was packed. Some came out of condolence. Some, no doubt, out of curiosity. But privately, most wondered the same thing: “Now that it’s happened to you, what do you have to say?”
The Reb knew this. It was partly why he came back so quickly, the first Friday after the mandatory thirty days of mourning.
And when he rose to his lectern, and when the congregation quieted, he spoke the only way he knew how-from the heart. He admitted that, yes, he had been angry at the Lord. That he’d howled in anguish, that he’d screamed for an answer. That there was nothing in being a Man of God that insulated him from the tears and misery of never being able to hold his little girl again.
And yet, he noted, the very rituals of mourning that he cursed having to do-the prayers, the torn clothing, not shaving, covering the mirrors-had helped him keep a grip on who he was, when he might have otherwise washed away.
“That which I have had to say to others, I must say now to myself,” he admitted, and in so doing, his faith was being tested with the truest test there is: to drink his own elixir, to heal his own broken heart.
He told them how the words of the Kaddish made him think, “I am part of something here; one day my children will say this very prayer for me just as I am saying it for my daughter.”
His faith soothed him, and while it could not save little Rinah from death, it could make her death more bearable, by reminding him that we are all frail parts of something powerful. His family, he said, had been blessed to have the child on earth, even for a few short years. He would see her again one day. He believed that. And it gave him comfort.
When he finished, nearly everyone was crying.
“Years later,” he told me, “whenever I would go to someone’s home who had lost a family member-a young one, particularly-I would try to be of comfort by remembering what comforted me. Sometimes we would sit quietly. Just sit and maybe hold a hand. Let them talk. Let them cry. And after a while, I could see they felt better.