Unthinkable Dreams: The Year That Mom Died and the Towers Fell

By Yeshaya Douglas Ballon, Malka Drucker and Nadya Gross

Yesh Ballon's mother died two days before the 9/11 attacks. Always an iconoclast, even in death, Jean Hymson Ballon found a way to make things more interesting than they had to be. With air travel halted, the rituals for honoring and mourning her death were upended, propelling her family into chaos, conflict, and deeper grief. Unthinkable Dreams: The Year That Mom Died and the Towers Fell is the chronicle of the drama, discoveries, and occasional delights that one family experienced in the months before and after their matriarch's death.
An important part of this journey was discovering how to listen to their dying mother speak when much of her words made little rational sense. Yesh Ballon describes the surprising emergence of his mother's spirituality; how his relationship with her blossomed, even as her body and mind withered; and how this connected to his own spiritual journey. As he probes this difficult time, he opens his heart and demonstrates how embracing compassion can move people from separation to connection, even though the route is neither straight nor continuous. Above all, Unthinkable Dreams is a book about healing, and a model for harvesting from the past, in order to plant seeds and leave a legacy for the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Aug 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781666714135

Yeshaya Douglas Ballon

Yeshaya Douglas Ballon, spiritual mentor, teacher, artist, and retired architect, received certification from ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal as a Mashpia Ruchani (Spiritual Director) and as a Vatik (Sage-ing® Mentor). He is editor and author of A Precious Heritage: Rabbinical Reflections on God, Judaism, and the World in the Turbulent Twentieth Century (2017).

Book preview

Part 1

Havdalah

הבדלה

Separation

Death—it won’t come soon enough to do me any good.

—Jean Ballon

Separation

In Hebrew, the word for separation is havdalah. It is also the name of the ceremony at the end of the Sabbath that marks its separation from the ordinary days of the week. It is said that every death—no matter how long it has been anticipated—is a sudden death. The moment of death marks a havdalah—a separation from life.

The stories herein relate the events that preceded and followed that unique moment for my mother. Havdalah becomes particularly meaningful in our story, because after the physical and emotional separations that were caused by Mom’s death and the subsequent terrorist attacks, months later our family finally had the opportunity to reconnect at a havdalah ceremony held in her memory.

Separation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. From time to time, we all need opportunities to be alone for relaxation or for productivity. In dealing with my mother’s deteriorating condition and ultimate death, I occasionally found the respite I needed in different forms of meditation and in grabbing the time and space to journal. It was a form of separation that provided great comfort. There were times when I was disconnected from my own feelings—sad, but unable to cry. Ironically, I found it beneficial to disconnect in order to reconnect.

For the most part, our family’s feelings of separation in the months surrounding my mother’s death were unpleasant—feelings of loss, alienation, loneliness, and disorientation on the part of my mother and on the part of those around her.

Mom’s sense of isolation and intense need for connection began a few years before her death, as she searched for the people and the environment she wanted around her in her final days. She seemed unable to settle in a place that provided everything she desired. Even being near my sister proved insufficient, as Mom bemoaned feeling imprisoned in her senior residence. Exacerbating that social isolation was the steady erosion of her physical and mental faculties. Mom’s decreased mobility and her increasing difficulty in expressing herself furthered her sense of isolation.

As painful as Mom’s death was, our sense of loss didn’t begin there. As adult children tending to the needs of a parent with diminishing capacities, our loss began when the dependencies flipped. Parenting our parent implied that the true parent was no longer that icon of support and protection. In that sense, it felt as if our parent was already gone—certainly that role had faded away. As an adult child/caregiver, I experienced an incipient sense of being an orphan. Mom, too, may have begun to mourn the loss of her role as provider and nurturer. Each time we would help her prepare for sleep, each time we would leave her behind as we quietly exited her room, my sister and I had that sense that we were the parents putting our child to bed. But the satisfaction that a parent would feel was replaced by increasing sadness.

As siblings living hundreds, and in the case of Jeff, thousands of miles apart, our physical separation posed challenges. For one thing, the primary burden of caregiving was on Muff. When Mom had a medical episode, it was Muff at her side. We did connect by phone and occasionally gathered together in person. That usually helped, but there were also emotional divides that were harder to overcome. A big schism between Jeff and me erupted as mourning rituals were compromised and thrown into confusion after 9/11.

After the loss of a loved one, I have often felt a profound sense of separation, not only from the departed, but also from virtually every other person who is not experiencing that loss. Many people, out of fear or ignorance, find it difficult even to speak to someone in mourning. Others lack the empathy to provide support. When Mom died, the world around us was so filled with grief over 9/11 that the loss of a single aging parent seemed trivial in comparison. Being surrounded by people who could not see into my world made me feel that much lonelier in my