The intersection of the personal and the parsha:
The story of losing a child during the year cycle of parashat Shmini and Passover.
(Read the letting go poem)
On February 27th, my husband and I got a text message from our social worker. A baby boy had been born on Friday and the birthmother chose us to be his new family.
On March 28th, the same social worker sat in our living room and told us a different adoption plan would need to be made and that Raziel would no longer be our son. That our children would not get to have this baby as their little brother.
And as quickly as life had changed just one month before, it changed all over again.
My dad always used to marvel at coincidences. He was a fairly confident atheist, with perhaps some agnostic leanings in his later years. Signs, serendipity, coincidence, the hand of God...whatever you want to label it...seems to follow my family around.
Raziel’s birth was no different. He was born on the Hebrew date of my dad’s 3rd yahrzeit, and we got the phone call in the English date of his death. He was taken into interim care custody on his one month birthday and the day the social worker finalized the decision to take him away was my grandmother’s birthday. I told all of my friends about the coincidences and said: I don’t believe in signs and fate and shit like that, but if I did, this would be a pretty convincing evidence!
And I haven’t even told you all of them...have I mentioned that today would have been my parents’ anniversary? Or that his birthmother’s best friend and brother is named Robert? Or how my mother found her birthfather’s family on 23andme just this past February? Or how I was in sHuL with my mother, saying Kaddish for my dad and my Oma as Raziel’s birth mother named him J’elijah and about how I got the phone call about Eliyashu when I was with my mother and my grandmother after the first time I had been to visit my grandfather’s grave...and that Eliyashu is named for him, and that he was an Eli?
But all the coincidences and the signs didn’t convince the universe to let me keep Raziel as my son.
My old therapist compared grief to waves in the ocean. The image has stayed with me as I have now experienced more loss in the last 3 years than I even came close to experiencing in the previous 37. Some days, the waters are calm. There’s just a soft ripple against me. And some days the undertow is fierce, the waves are harsh and high and it threatens to take me down, literally drowning in my sorrow. And the most important part for me, that I’ve added to the metaphor, is that I am 85% water and it’s impossible for me to escape the influence of the tides.
Extending the ocean metaphor, I tried to think of what the different waves feel like and came up with this:
My five wavelengths of grief—
- Isolation and drunkenness
- Longing for nechama and shalva
- Public grieving: Blogging, posting, and minyanim
- Written on my body: rent garments, tattoos and taboos
- Transforming loss into creativity
These waves are the feelings that wash over me when I remember my dad, and when I remember the baby I called Raziel Benmosche, after my father. They are also the grief and fear of anticipated loss, as I face raising black boys in a still broken America.
And unlike Kubler-Ross and her DABDA of linear process, my waves keep coming. And there may be some predictability, like yahrzeits and holidays, but most of the time, I just feel the pull of the water. I feel the stacked up years of good intentions and the strange fire offerings of love. And then I remember that children are lost, that people die, that stories have been written to teach me to stay in my place and do what I am commanded.
And I turn to the abusive face of the patriarchy hiding behind the image of an almighty god and say: No. I will not listen to your commandments. I will grieve for my child. I will come to your houses and seek comfort among friends and I will retell the stories...because I grew up in these stories. And they are mine. Even the ones that suck...like this week’s parsha.
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