Lifecycle

For One Who Did Not Want Ritual Mourning by Jacqui Shine

How do I mark a loss that leaves no ritual trace? You imagined for yourself no mourners crowded together over the earth becoming your body, no weeping against the rising murmur of grief that holds everyone, no rending of cloth, no resisting and difficult assent to God’s perfect judgment. My body struggles to keep from standing up into your memory, my tongue to keep from blessing your name in those strange syllables. In no moment and in every moment, the rising and weeping and struggling move nonetheless through my veins, fever dreams my spirit cannot forget.

From: Beside Still Waters, available for download and purchase

The fact that death comes for all of us doesn't make it any less painful. While words cannot bring your loved one back, they can sometimes soothe the wound. This Loss & Mourning Booklet includes poems, blessings, and prayers to bear witness to your grief. 

Dinner Alone (After the Death of a Spouse) by Helene Armet

Sitting alone now
eating dinner:
tempted by the simplicity 
of an easy yogurt
the speed of a
bowl of cereal.

Fighting it alone now! 
Chop, slice, dice, sauté.
I learned to cook to please him, 
laying my culinary soul at his fork
sweetly blessed
by a clean plate and a kiss.

Moving ahead alone now 
through an odd, disorienting light,
a partial eclipse of my being,
towards an unknown destination.
Pieces of my broken life 
falling at my feet.

Repair this alone now.
Learn to use tools,
new tools, power tools —
any tool, really.
It would please him…
the repairs and a successful journey.

From: Beside Still Waters, available for download and purchase.  

In Memory of a Hurtful Parent by Rabbi Robert Saks

O God: You know my heart. Indeed, You know me better than I know myself.

My emotions swirl as I say this prayer. The parent I remember was not kind to me. His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger, and of dismay that a parent could hurt a child as I was hurt.

Help me, O God, to subdue bitter emotions that do me no good, and to find that place in myself where happier memories may lie hidden and where grief for all that could have been, all that should have been, may be calmed by forgiveness, or at least soothed by the passage of time.

 I pray that You, who raise up slaves to freedom, will liberate me from the oppression of my hurt and anger, and that You will lead me from this desert to Your holy place.

From: Beside Still Waters, available for download and purchase. 

Broken Open by Rabbi Jay Michaelson

When life is full of ease, spirituality is like cotton candy—fluffy, airy, and unserious.... 

And then something happens. Someone gets sick, or a relationship ends. Or a pet dies, or I lose my job. Or a friend dies unexpectedly.

And then we go searching for meaning. Not answers necessarily... but significance, meaning. Now the self-satisfied smirk of the critic melts into something less sure of itself. What can be understood in the midst of this tragedy, about the fragility of the human condition or the impossibility of holding onto it? And what are the forms which, over the years, people like me have created to contain this grief?

Thus pain becomes a gate to the recovery of the spiritual tones of living. I fail; I lose; and so I grow closer to the parts of myself which feel more authentic, more connected. Spiritual paths may not be as sophisticated or arch as other ways of being. They may be mocked in the pages of the Times. But at some point, most of us find ourselves broken—and hopefully broken open.

It’s easy to be cynical about this sudden return to religious, spiritual, philosophical, or artistic homes long abandoned. We seem to be spiritual equivalents of fair-weather fans, clinging to a tradition or practice in our moment of need, then discarding it once again, when the moment of crisis has passed. Really, though, we are just flawed humans. To admit our inconsistency is only another necessary surrender. Fine, we are inconsistent. What do we sense to be true when we are at our weakest, our most open?

From: Beside Still Waters, available for download and purchase.