Rabbi Janet Marder

Shemini Atzeret Yizkor 5767

Unfinished Stories

            A man in his mid-thirties comes home to visit his mother, who is seriously ill. Like some mothers and sons, they have a complicated relationship. He is single; he is involved with a woman from California who is separated from her husband; his mom has some concerns.

            This is a true story, part of an autobiographical account by Jonathan Franzen, an acclaimed American novelist. Here is an excerpt:

            “The last day I ever spent with my mother, at my brother’s house in Seattle , she asked me the same questions over and over: Was I pretty sure that the Californian was the woman I would end up with? Did I think we would probably get married? Was the Cailfornian actually divorced yet? Was she interested in having a baby? Was I?

            “My mother was hoping for a glimpse of how my life might proceed after she was gone. She’d met the Californian only once, at a noisy restaurant in Los Angeles , but she wanted to feel that our story would continue and that she’d participated in it in some small way, even if only by expressing her opinion that the Californian really ought to be divorced by now.

            “My mother loved to be a part of things, and having strong opinions was a way of not feeling left out. At any given moment in the last twenty years of her life, family members in three time zones could be found worrying about her strong opinions or loudly declaring that they didn’t care about them or phoning each other for advice on how to cope with them.

            “Whoever imagined that ‘LOVE YOUR MOTHER’ would make a good environmental bumper sticker obviously didn’t have a mom like mine. Well into the [nineteen-] nineties, tailing Subarus or Volvos outfitted with this admonition and its accompanying snapshot of earth, I felt obscurely hectored by it, as if the message were “Nature Wonders Why She Hasn’t Heard from You in Nearly a Month” or “Our Planet Strongly Disapproves of Your Life Style” or “The Earth Hates to Nag, But…” 

            Like the natural world, my mother had not been in the best of health by the time I was born. She was thirty-eight, she’d had three successive miscarriages, and she’d been suffering from ulcerative colitis for a decade. She kept me out of nursery school because she didn’t want to let go of me for even a few hours a week. She sobbed frighteningly when my brothers went off to college.

            “Once they were gone, I faced nine years of being the last handy object of her maternal longings and frustrations and criticisms, and so I allied myself with my father, who was embarrassed by her emotion. I began rolling my eyes at everything she said.

            “Over the next twenty-five years, as she went on to have acute phlebitis, a pulmonary embolism, two knee replacements, a broken femur, three miscellaneous orthopedic surgeries, Reynaud’s disease, arthritis, biannual colonoscopies, monthly blood-clot tests, extreme steroidal facial swelling, congestive heart failure, and glaucoma, I often felt terribly sorry for her; and I tried to say the right things and be a dutiful son, but it wasn’t until she got a bad cancer diagnosis, in 1996, that I began to do what those bumper stickers admonished me to do.”

            Our lives are made of stories. That is part of the story of Jonathan Franzen and his mother. Like all of the stories we bring into this room today, his is poignant, filled with longing, and profoundly unfinished. When you love someone, the story doesn’t end, even when death removes the person from your life. You go on loving, in absence rather than presence; you go on wondering about, yearning for, sometimes struggling with, the person who is gone. 

            This weekend, at Simchat Torah, Jews around the world share a story about the end of life. We read the last words of Deuteronomy; we see God call Moses up to the summit of Mount Nebo , where he can see the whole land of Israel spread out before him, across the Jordan River . We hear God say to him the saddest words in the Torah:  ‘”This is the land that I swore to Abraham, to Isaac and to Jacob, saying ‘I will give it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you shall not cross there.”    

            Moses dies in the land of Moab , within sight of the place he has envisioned and searched for these 40 years. He dies, as all of us do, with dreams unfulfilled and goals unmet, knowing that others will go on to a new place where he will never walk.

            Part of the pain of coming to the end of life is worrying about what will happen to those who survive us. That’s why we have the Book of Deuteronomy – a speech that lasts for 33 chapters, in which Moses pours out his anxieties and advice to the Israelites who will go into the Promised Land when he is gone. He wants to know what Jonathan Franzen’s mother, with her obsessive questions, wanted to know:  that his children will be okay without him – that they will be settled and safe; that their lives will go on; that they will continue to hear his voice in their heads, guiding and directing them in difficult moments. He wants to feel that in some way he will still be part of their story.

            Amazingly, he still is part of our story, the Jewish story. Jews who study Torah still speculate about Moses, question him, revere him, struggle with him. The life ended long ago, but the relationship goes on forever – a lesson we convey most eloquently when we read the last words of his book tonight, and without a moment’s pause, launch ourselves into Genesis once again.

            Writes Jonathan Franzen: “I…finally started to love [my mother] near the end of her life, when she was undergoing a year of chemotherapy and radiation and living by herself. I’d admired her bravery for that. I’d admired her will to recuperate and her extraordinary tolerance of pain. I’d felt proud when her sister remarked to me, ‘Your mother looks better two days after abdominal surgery than I do at a dinner party.’ I’d admired her skill and ruthlessness at the bridge table, where she wore the same determined frown when she had everything under control as when she knew she was going down.

            “The last decade of her life, which started with my father’s dementia and ended with her colon cancer, was a rotten hand that she played like a winner. Even towards the end, though, I couldn’t tolerate being with her for more than three days at a time. Although she was my last living link to a web of Midwestern relations and traditions that I would begin to miss the moment she was gone, and although, the last time I saw her in her house, in April, 1999, her cancer was back and she was rapidly losing weight, I still took care to arrive in St. Louis on a Friday afternoon and leave on a Monday night.

            “She, for her part, was accustomed to my leavings and didn’t complain too much. But she still felt about me what she’d always felt, which was what I wouldn’t really feel about her until after she was gone. ‘I hate it when daylight-saving time starts while you’re here,’ she told me while we were driving to the airport, ‘because it means I have an hour less with you’.”   [From “My Bird Problem” in The New Yorker, Aug.8 and 15, 2005].

            It is reassuring, somehow – to know that we Jews can continue to love Moses, a cranky, irascible old man who repeats himself and harangues us unmercifully in the book he left behind; and that Jonathan Franzen can love and admire his difficult, critical, opinionated mother.

            Even the most loving relationship isn’t perfect. We get annoyed, impatient or resentful; we’re preoccupied and neglectful; people disappoint us and we know we disappoint them.  These are the things we feel guilty about later, when they’re gone. The blessing is that our stories go on, and that wounds can be healed even when life has ended.

            With death, and the distance it brings, our irritation diminishes; compassion expands. – including compassion for ourselves. We try to understand why they were the way they were, why they sometimes hurt us even though they didn’t mean to.  We come to see how much they loved us, how they gave to us as best they could. We find, more often than not, that we can forgive them for being real, imperfect human beings, just as someday, we hope, others will find it in their hearts to love and forgive us for our flaws.

             We remember them all today: the ones who were easy to be with and so very easy to love; the ones who drove us crazy sometimes; the ones who brought out our best and most beautiful qualities; the ones who saw us at our worst. We miss them; we ache for them; we wish with all our hearts that we could have them back, even for one more hour.

            And so we hold them close, loving them in absence, cherishing them in memory; telling and re-telling their stories, weaving them forever into the unfinished story of our life.