With Conscious Eyes

I made two shiva calls this week to a young man whom I do not know well. I sat with him for hours. When I heard of the manner of his loss, I was compelled to go: I could only imagine the kind of pain he was in and every part of me wanted to get to him to comfort him. He had had an uneasy relationship with the deceased, and throughout our visits he spoke very candidly and openly about that. On the first day his rabbi came by, and our mourner absolutely sank into his arms, overwhelmed by his grief and his pain. I've never really seen anything like that kind of surrender to both sadness and to comfort and I began crying. Then I was worried that I shouldn't cry, so I tried keeping it in and gave myself a viscious headache from the effort. I had to leave because my head was pounding and my heart was hearting and I was confused by the many, many emotions I was feeling. I was also upset that I couldn't hug the mourner -- I wanted to hold him so, to rock him like a baby, to help him through. But such is negiah.


On the second day, my rebbetzin came to visit. She began speaking of the wisdom of chazal, of how the halachot of mourning are meant to guide us through the experience with conscious eyes. She told of how shiva makes us look directly at what we are going through but surrounds us with people to comfort us in our pain. Then on the seventh day we are compelled to get up and re-enter our lives.

I had to leave the room briefly at the point, and for the rest of the afternoon I couldn't stop the tears from leaking out. Why didn't my family have chazal when my brother was killed? Here is what happened to us. My brother was violently killed two days after I turned 12. My parents -- understandably -- fell apart. But they never looked at what happened, never faced it. My dad has fared better than my mom. He can tell stories about my brother, laugh about him, cry about him now. My mother is still in shock. She has been in shock for 27 years.

The problem is I was a kid, and the truth is that when he died, my parents abandoned me. I know they didn't mean to do this, but they did. I wandered around his funeral by myself. I wandered around the house by myself. No one spoke to me about how I was feeling or what I was going through. No one checked in on me or was concerned with me to the degree they should have been.

I was very close to my brother, although for various reasons he hadn't lived at home for many years already (he was much older than me). He was killed at night. We had just come home from dinner in a restauran and the phone was ringing. It was a telephone call from a state trooper many states away. They had airlifted my brother to a large city hospital with a neurology unit and he was on life support. My parents told me to go to my room. They decided to take him off life support in the middle of the night after the doctors assured them there would be no hope of him recovering from his vegetative state. My brother was breathing on his own but brain dead. My father wouldn't let my mother come tell me until morning, but I knew -- I'd been awake all night listening.

I didn't mourn my brother because I didn't know how. There was no one to guide me through it. Some aunts and other family members tried to comfort me at the funeral, but that isn't so much when I needed it. I really needed my mother, and she just couldn't be there for me. I realize now that about a year after that my first very, very serious depression began. It last until I was 21, the first time I went to therapy and took Prozac.

Two and a half years ago I started going to therapy. I started going because I was deeply, frightenly depressed. I was scared for my life actually. I was falling apart. I had been raped and desperately needed to talk about it, although it took me almost a year to get a round to the topic (that's how scared I was of it). I'm doing better with that, although I still feel much panic and fear and shame, which is so, so sad. Anyways, somewhere in the middle of talking about all this with my therapist, the topic of my brother pops up. I insist I've gotten over it, I tell the story very forthrightly, let's move on please. Then a few weeks later, it pops up again. Same routine. Then again, then again. Then I break down about it. Then my friend's father dies.

I know that my rebbetzin's words were for my friend, the avel, but I felt like I was meant to be there to hear them, too.

I've gained ten pounds in the past six weeks. That's how I deal with feelings I can't handle: I numb myself by eating. My dead brother has been present with me everyday for the last month. I have no mechanism for facing this sadness. Scratch that: I have no mechanism for feeling this sadness, because I realize I've been trying to NOT feel it for almost thirty years. Since Tuesday, my rebbetzin's words have been in my ears, echoing: conscious eyes, conscious eyes. As painful as this is, I just have to feel it. I just have to feel it. He's dead, he died, it's terrible, terrible, and I am so, so sad. Can I have a shiva now? How do I get through this? How do you open conscious eyes? Because I need to, I need to mourn.