Karen’s hand seeks mine under the table. Our fingers entwine and we hold on for dear life. So tight do we hold on to one another that the tips of our fingers turn white as parchment.
It’s Friday night and we’re having Shabbos dinner at one of our best friend’s homes. One of the other guests, a fine and sensitive person, has just launched into a long and detailed account of a man who’s searching for an organ. He will die soon if the transplant does not take place. Karen and I remember how we waited fruitlessly for a lung for Ariel. A lung that never materialized.
“I think I’m going to throw up,” Karen whispers to me.
I hold her hand even tighter, as if this is a cure for nausea.
Should I break in, somehow halt the story, perhaps embarrass the story teller? There’s no way he can know what effect he’s having upon us. No, we just have to sit and wait it out.
We are rigid as pilasters in our seats. We pick, pick, pick at our food.
As always, Karen and I are among friends, wonderful generous people, but we are isolated; as it says in the Torah about people who have conracted tzora’as, we are “michutz lamachaneh,” literally: “outside the camp,” forever outside normal human discourse, speaking our own private language for which no dictionary can or should exist.
Devorah: Thaks so much for your comment. Please accept our condolences on the loss of your father. We are sure that he was a special man. We are not, by the way, always sad. We do manage joy too. Take a look at: How I Married Karen.
I stop in here occasionally, and I read, and I'm sad, and I understand.
In some ways (though not all, nor many I suspect) losing my father has been similar. I hear tales of chronic illness that can be fixed in this or that way, and I think…if only my father could have had that option.
glen … i happen to be the founder of the feet in mouth club 🙂 thank you for your kind response!!!! have a great week!
yours very sincerely,
alan d. busch
>Be thankful that you will never be able to relate.
This isn’t the first time that I have put both feet in my mouth and I suspect that it won’t be the last. I am sorry for your loss. This is one club that no one chooses to join.
dear robert, …
thank you for your thoughtful response, and just maybe having been divorced from ben's mom almost a year before tragedy befell us, i never did have any chance to share my grief/bereavement with her … i have pretty much borne it by myself … but i ask your forgiveness if i seemed like an insesitive dolt …
very sincerely yours,
ben's dad
dear glenn …
may i suggest you take a look at http://aol.com/fitterthanudad/toc.html before you draw any more conclusions …
sincerely,
alan d. busch
Alan:
My friend Glen has articulated the issue eloquently. Once you have lost a child, there is a part of you that is forever cut off from normal society. You exist in a different sphere. Have you noticed that there is a word for children who lose parents: orphans. Wives who lose husband: widows. Husbands who lose wives: widowers. But no word exists (in English) for parents who have lost a child. The word does not exists, I believe, because it is a concept so terrible, so beyond ordinary imagination, that language collapses. We who have lost children live in that awful place that is "beyond human discourse." I appreciate your asking and delving into the matter,. I should try and be more accurate.
Alan,
When you have experienced what we have, the club of bereaved parents, you see things with glasses that are a different prescription than other people. I often joke that we are "damaged goods". Our eyes have witnessed things, which one should never see, and our ears have heard things that no one ever should hear. We are forever tainted by our experiences and by the situation, which has befallen upon us. My wife and I can relate to Robert's message in a deep way. In a way that only a bereaved parent can. Be thankful that you will never be able to relate.
dear robert and karen …
shavua tov …
i have read what you have written, i do sympathize as well as being able to empathize, but i must confess my confusion as to what you mean by saying that you and karen are “forever outside normal human discourse.”
it seems clear from your characterization of the storyteller that had he known about ariel, he most probably would not have told that story … so the issue here is clearly not with him.
please forgive my probing, but do you mean that you and karen have chosen to not have “normal human discourse” by which i think you mean simple, ordinary conversation or is the experience of ariel’s passing so disabling that you no longer wish to converse on levels below that of the tragic profundity of a child’s death? God I feel these questions to be so awkward!
actually i think the problem here is mine. i guess i am not quite certain what it is you do mean by “normal human discourse.”
please forgive me if my questioning is too intrusive or if i seem insensitive which i am certainly not!
yours very sincerely,
alan d. busch