The Missing Handle: Finding Meaning When There Is None to Be Had

By Robert J. Eisen

Ricky died. What do we do now?
This book is based on the journal kept by the author in response to the death of his twenty-eight-year-old son. The text offers a diary of the experience as well as how the mourning was processed from a Jewish perspective. It offers questions and counsel for anyone who has (and, who has not?) experienced the death of a loved one. It looks at what happens when life is experienced up close and personal, forcing us to ask questions we always thought belonged to someone else. What is it like when you look in a mirror and wonder how what you have been saying to people for so many years is yours to hear as well? It approaches the process of mourning from a personal perspective, offering reactions and responses which most mourners experience, but rarely embrace (which is necessary for the healing process).

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Dec 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666750263

Robert J. Eisen

Robert J. Eisen is a graduate of Syracuse University and Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion. A member of the Rabbinical Assembly, he served congregations in Rochester, New York; Raleigh, North Carolina; Buffalo, New York; and Tucson, Arizona. Living in Phoenix, Arizona, he is the rabbi emeritus of Congregation Anshei Israel in Tucson, Arizona.

Book preview

Introduction

His life ended the same way that it began, with a phone call.

July 6, 1989. 6:30 am, the phone rang. It was my mother-in-law: Bob, this is Esther. Don’t get excited, but Debby is in the hospital, she has gone into labor.

Don’t get excited? Don’t worry? What was I supposed to do? And yet, even in that nanosecond when I wanted to scream as loud as I could: What is going on? A certain sense of calmness prevailed. I could not help but think that something I would never be able to explain was going on.

I was in Raleigh, NC when the call came. My wife, Debby, was with her parents in Rochester, NY. We had been in Raleigh for three years. We loved the area, and the congregation was wonderful. However, over the course of those three years both my mother-in-law and father-in-law were diagnosed with cancer. A pulpit with a congregation in Buffalo (an hour from Rochester) had opened up and I had just that week learned that I had gotten the job, which would begin August 1. Debby was visiting her parents and we had decided that it was best for her to just stay there. I would pack up the house and arrange the move. Everything seemed to be falling into place. But then I got the phone call. After a very difficult pregnancy (where we thought we might have lost him very early on) Ricky decided it was his time to enter the world . . . two months