We are going to a funeral this afternoon, and before we go, I want to consider the lessons I have learned this winter -- before the rabbis wrap it all up for me and say it better than I might. This has been a long winter for a family that is dear to us, and I have had the privilege of being part of the exhausting experience of helping someone at the end of his life.
This would not be how the family would frame this. And of course everything is in hindsight. But that is what we were doing: we were staying by his side while he went through a long and difficult decline. Throughout the whole series of hospital stays and moves to the rehab centers, there was always hope, of course. There was hope that he would be able to get strong again and be able to get back home to real life. But the hospital stays were very hard on him and the rehab was only occasionally uplifting. He struggled with great anxiety and this definitely made everything harder for both him and his caregivers.
But those are not the lessons I am talking about. I am really thinking about love, and what it is and how it works. We all know there are many kinds of love. The most obvious one, in this case, was the love that this family shares. This family has a culture of making connections and nurturing them. Starting with their own nuclear family, and then their larger family, and then people who they adopt along the way. This family is loved by people all over the map. They take people in and they pay attention and they keep track of details and they make a point of visiting and they remember everything and they ask good questions and they really, deeply care. They have an instinct for relationships. They know how to love.
There are things that are hard for them, the idea of losing each other (for example) is almost unthinkable. So this process of declining health due to aging and infirmity was incredibly painful for the family. It was hard on the aging person and it was even harder on the daughters.
Because this family is so good at love, and they are so interested in the lives of others, they find themselves in the middle of a lot of people who love them. This is where I come in, and where some of my closest friends come in. We wanted to be there for this family because they are always there for us, or they would be if we needed them. This outer circle kind of love is also something to ponder. I am sure it is not uncommon, and yet I don't know of too many examples in our culture.
I mean, we live in suburban Northern Virginia. This is a place of isolation and strip malls, a cultural desert in so many ways. In our case, the connection began because we all belong to the same synagogue. This group of close friends has spent years (mostly in the past now) doing intense amounts of work in support of our temple: serving in leadership positions, teaching, singing, helping in so many ways. And we bonded over this work, years ago. I have to give the synagogue a lot of credit for providing a place for us to do something long term and meaningful together -- long enough to create friendships that will last us until the ends of our lives, without a doubt. For many years, the main topic of conversation between us was temple business. Temple gossip, temple intrigue, temple crises. Rarely anything about religion, but not never.
In past postcards, I have described this group of friends that I am referring to. It has several names: the Friday Club (after my grandmother's friend group), Beach Babes (because we take retreats, and our first one was to a beach), Babes (because it is amusing), and Four Musketeers (one of our fathers named us that, and he is right). This group, as it turns out, has incredible strengths and talents. I have come to see that we are powerful. We are powerful because we are smart and hard-working but that's not what makes this feel different. What makes this different is the amount of time that we have put into creating the relationships we share. We have built something, without really thinking about it, and now I feel like we are a force to be reckoned with. We have been preparing for times that we don't even know about yet.
And was this one of those times. We have had a little practice, when one of our moms declined and died a few years ago. We stayed in touch and we did what we could to support the caregivers/mourners. We learned a lot about how much it means to each other to be available and attentive.
In fact, I don't have time to finish these thoughts. I have to go pick spinach and get some sweet potatoes ready for dinner tonight. We are hosting Shabbat dinner for the family and I should get up and do something. More on this later.
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