A year now, and the sun is out. We close around your grave, around the shroud-covered headstone, commemorate your life with ours. Dad cries. He still struggles to accept your loss. Sandy cries, too. I put my arm around dad’s shoulders. See your name etched in granite behind the cloth.
The rabbi reads from his worn prayer book. Again. More burials than he probably knows. Reads (Psalm 81):
what is man that You have been mindful of him, mortal man that You have taken note of him, that You have made him little less than divine, and adorned him with glory and majesty
We read the Mourner’s Kaddish facing east. Turning our bodies to Jerusalem. You avoided politics, but I couldn’t help thinking of the dead there, the uncertainty they are living with. In Israel. In Gaza.
A “little less than divine.” The phrase stays with me.
I struggle to stay focused. Not to be angry. To remember the way you hugged us with all of your being, every fiber, every muscle and tendon.
A “little less than divine.” I am, as Heschel writes2, dogged “by a question (I am) unable to fathom.” A question without answer, or one that is without easy answer. I live in doubt, a perpetual questioning. I wish to believe, to see the beauty of the world as the sign of a divine presence as Heschel says, but struggle to construct a divine that allows such horrors, that would allow you to fade out of sense, to lose what made you you.
I read your name on the granite stone, the marker of your burial next to your mother. I hear the rabbi tell us to focus on the good, on your Mandelbrot, your sheer joy each time you would see us, but I struggle to get past those final visits when that joy had turned to distrust, to confusion. You did not know me, and I cannot understand how a divine would allow such a thing.
Death is inevitable. We cannot live forever. As sentient beings, we are forced to come to grips with our impermanence. We are not gods, but there is majesty in our being.
https://www.sefaria.org/Psalms.8.6?lang=bi&with=Talmud&lang2=en
Heschel, Abraham Joshua. Man Is Not Alone: A Philosophy of Religion, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1979, p. 79.