Life is Your Story

Have you ever returned to the home of a loved one after they have passed? To the room they most enjoyed? The study, the kitchen, the bedroom, the garden? When you return to the stillness, the silence, you find yourself looking for them. You search the place from bottom to top, hoping for another chance to see them, hear their voice, touch them, laugh with them. There's a hat or jacket or blanket or pen or book or laptop that they last touched.  Their scent is still in the air. Something left undone, lingers on a desk or kitchen table. They are nowhere to be found, yet, still, you remain seated, as if waiting for a play or show to begin. You ask yourself the same questions that have been asked for ages, for all of time, where has my friend/parent/lover gone? Will I ever see them again? Do they know I love them? What was the last thing I said to them? What was the last thing they said to me? And it goes on and on. There is something comforting about visiting a place that was sacred t...

The Jewish New Year is quickly approaching. There will be honey and Challah and prayers and rejoicing. There will be families and loved ones and grandparents with grandchildren and aging parents with their own children. There will be laughter and jokes while enjoying dinner and lunch and walking home together arm in arm, hand in hand with the people most important to you. But there will also be fresh cuts that will turn into raw scars and never fully heal. There will be lasting images of the end of a life well lived packed with pain and suffering that served as a great injustice and indignity to the person that they were - a person who cared for you with every molecule of their soul and left this world too soon and too brutally. And you won't forget because you can't forget. Just when you think you may be having an okay moment, your stomach turns and you feel as if you are going to be sick except you are sick already - sick, exhausted, beaten and torn and there is...