The Best of Reform Judaism Magazine: Death and Mourning

By Reform Judaism Magazine

Reform Judaism Magazine is the official voice of the Union for Reform Judaism, linking the institutions and affiliates of Reform Judaism with every Reform Jew. This collection, part of a series, features articles carefully selected by the magazine’s editors on death and mourning. This e-book takes readers through the difficult process of death and mourning through each essential stage – the pain of watching a loved one’s health deteriorate, Jewish mourning rituals, and finally, the healing power of saying Kaddish. The collection includes stories about the personal heartache of losing loved ones, as well as professional advice on end-of-life decisions, burial and shiva, and family struggles around inheritance. Authors include Shoshana Boyd-Gelfland, Rex Perlmeter, Edythe Mencher, Jack Riemer, and many more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: URJ Books and Music
• Release date: Sep 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9780807413654

Book preview

Love IS Stronger than Death

Rex Perlmeter

Though lovers be lost love shall not;

And death shall have no dominion.

–Dylan Thomas

Although I graduated from college with a degree in Comparative Literature, I was unfamiliar with this beautiful but spiritually challenging verse until I saw Catherine, the heroine of the TV show Beauty and the Beast, utter these words with her last breath in the arms of the beast. After that scene, I stopped watching the show. I had never dealt well with loss, even when it was fictional. And the idea of love being stronger than death seemed the stuff of fairy tales.

I now know otherwise. Love IS stronger than death, and does not die.

My wife, Rachel Hertzman, and I have four children—Jackie, 24, Sarah, 21, Nathaniel, 13, and Mitch, who will forever be 17. Last January 31, Mitch, Rachel, and I watched the movie The Kids Are All Right. Mitch went to bed after e-chatting with one of his sisters about whether Annette Bening rather than Natalie Portman really deserved the Academy Award. (Movies are a big deal in our family.) The next morning, Rachel woke Mitch as usual. In the shower, he experienced a catastrophic cardiac event and was gone before reaching the ground. Rachel and I found him together, and our world—as we then knew it—came to an end.

In the immediate aftermath of Mitch’s death, the surviving five of us literally clung to one another. We needed to cocoon ourselves in the home that had been filled with the sound of his laughter and, at rare times, his anger—usually at the Baltimore Ravens when they’d blown another chance. Sarah came home from college, Jackie left her apartment and moved back in with us for three weeks, Nate took off a week from school. Rachel and I removed ourselves from the stuff of our daily lives, stumbling through the fog of a world in shards and feeling the first stirrings of redemptive gratitude for the friends helping us to get through those early, nightmarish days.

We recognized that we needed to work hard to learn how to remain a close-knit family without Mitch. He’d been the Perlmeter/Hertzmans’ mellowing, bonding catalyst. The others of us are—each in our own way—hard-wired to be pretty intense about life. I’d always been in Type-A careers—as senior rabbi of medium and large congregations and now as a mission-driven organizational rabbi. Rachel, while more low-key about her pulpit and teaching work, is nonetheless a worrier in the day-to-day management of our lives. Jackie, Sarah, and Nate each bring individual reactivities to school, work, and relationships. Mitch, however, was unique among us. His go-with-the flow mentality lightened the atmosphere at home when the intensity of one among us threatened to get out of hand. He made us all laugh with his colorful descriptions of events at school and the antics of his friends. He couldn’t stay angry, and in the rare instances when his relaxed nature backfired on him (as in cases of mysteriously missing homework), he poked fun at himself and smiled. He had an immeasurable capacity to move on.

How could we possibly continue to be a family without Mitch that resembled the one we’d become with him?

Thankfully, we soon discovered that Mitch had planted seeds of his loving presence in each of us, and in doing so, had sown the possibility of healing.

Jackie had internalized Mitch’s clarity about what really mattered in life. She devoted the first months after his death to staying close to home, making us and her friends her first priority; the rest, she realized, is just commentary.

Sarah is our adventurer. The active center of her life had always been in communities of friends across the country and, even, the globe. In the wake of losing Mitch, she, too, began to live by his legacy—generously offering her presence to the family she’d always loved and taking joy in it.

Nate is learning to find greater pleasure in just being—that’s Mitch all over!

Rachel and I also reexamined our priorities through Mitch’s eyes. The day after he died, Rachel said to me, We can’t live in the world of ‘might-have-beens.’ We have to learn to deal with the one we’re in now. It felt as if this instinctive wisdom had been whispered in her ear by the son who had become our guardian angel. She began cutting back on commitments outside the home to focus more steadily on our family’s and her own emotional, psychological, and spiritual needs. She took primary responsibility for our increased attention to family time, especially once I’d returned fully to work. Family meals, always important to us, received a new emphasis, as did daily communication, just to check in with one another and process what each of us was going through. Her love and focus on what really mattered held us all together.

For me, choosing my life through his eyes meant making a huge career decision. I had been a candidate for an organizational position of significant national scope. Even before Mitch’s death, strains of that candidacy were manifesting themselves in our family and in my conduct. Within a few days of losing him, it became crystal clear to me that I had to withdraw my candidacy. The responsibility to which I aspired was one which others could fill as well or better. My responsibility to be part of my family’s journey of healing was incumbent upon me alone.

Together, the five of us are making a new version of our family that is true to Mitch’s spirit. We acquired a small getaway place—a site for the family to retreat from the craziness of our daily lives. We have also reestablished our former tradition of family vacations, about which we’d become more careless in recent times. Helping us to make these get-aways are financial assets given to Mitch at his birth; our trips of renewal have now become a tribute to his memory. Our first family venture was to Harry Potter World, inspired by our son who so loved the stories of the boy who lived. We also deepened our connections to a place where it’s summertime forever—perhaps the first love of Mitch’s life outside the family, URJ Camp Harlam in Kunkletown, Pennsylvania. Mitch loved the way that, at camp, community becomes family. He had his first kiss there, he made his best friends there, and he learned to be