Sadly Happy Birthday

     

I found the poem following this brief note, part of a Shabbat service, posted in the Widow’s Sisterhood group this morning.  

Dear Will.  

I have been thinking so much about you and about how you would have disliked this trip so maybe I can take some pleasure from being on my own. I have also been learning, as I deal with my own intestinal issues, how brave you were to do all that traveling while taking anti-diarrheals every day. Bodies break down. (Isaiah 40:6-7) I am thankful this morning that haven’t lost both a husband and a child. My friend Alexis, who lost her son last year, texted me last night that her husband had died shortly after entering hospice. Our choice to be child free saved me from that sorrow, though I know there were times you kind of wanted children. But you would not have been a good dad because you were so fierce about how everything should be done and I would have been a terrible mother, I am so delulu in the malulu. For example, even though I think my anger is under control, my hard voice is still upsetting people and got me yelled at by a tall, gay pastor while I was on Iona. (And oi, did I wish you were around to talk to about that.) It would not have been good for me, with my narcissism and anger issues, to have children.

Fortunately, most of the people on Iona understood my grief situation and why I was breaking into tears at odd moments. Most of them agreed when I said, “Grief never ends.” 

My friend Stacey texted me a picture of your birthday greeting in the Bulletin. It wasn’t a good picture as it was a photo of a photo and badly edited, but at least I remembered to get it in once I got to Scotland.

I’m going to the modern art museum today. That’s one thing you would have liked. Then tomorrow I head to San Francisco for the opera. Yeah, it’s a weird-ass trip with way more travel than I like. Trains are great but there’s no train over the Atlantic.

This poem is how I’m feeling today as I hold you in my heart.

Judah Halevi was a Jewish poet, living in Spain about a thousand years ago - translation has been attributed to Chaim Stern, around 1930.

It’s a fearful thing to love
what death can touch.

A fearful thing to love,
hope, dream: to be —
to be, and oh! to lose.

A thing for fools this, and
a holy thing,
a holy thing to love.

For
your life has lived in me,
your laugh once lifted me,
your word was a gift to me.

To remember this brings painful joy.
It’s a human thing, love,
a holy thing,
to love
what death has touched.