Category: Death

The thought flashes into my mind rarely enough that I’m surprised when it does. I’m surprised at the flood of anguish, surprised how quickly it subsides.

Three times a year, maybe four, I’ll hear something or read something or think of something that reminds me of my dad, and I’ll get an automatic impulse to call him.

As soon as the impulse arrives, a wave of grief appears and washes it away. But the grief sticks around.

I first met that grief five years ago today.

It had been lurking for some time, but as my father got sicker, it began to venture out. In the week before Dad died, it got bolder. It became a vague, unwelcome presence and then a more insistent one.

And then, on this day five years ago, Grief kicked down the door.

That morning, I trudged up the long hallway in my parents’ house to see my dad. The hospice nurse asked me to wait for a moment while she checked his blood pressure.

Less than a minute later, she uttered a phrase that was absurd on every level:

“Your father has no blood pressure.”

Grief prepared to burst in while I tried to make sense of what the nurse had just said.

“You mean he’s gone?” I asked.

She said it again. “He has no blood pressure.”

Grief slapped me hard in the gut.

It made no sense. I understood that my father had been dying, but for him to actually die? Absurd. He was too gregarious. Too alive to die.

Alvin Weinstein managed to be both stubborn and open-minded, silly and urbane. He was a brilliant lawyer who excelled at the scholarly analysis of law and at the combat of trial. He was a remarkably talented classical musician who could explain the logic behind Paganini’s music and play that music with passion. He spoke four languages – and could tell fart jokes in each.

He was a fighter. An infantry officer. He had always been there. How could he be gone?

Five years have passed. Grief began to relent. It’s now a dull ache rather than a screaming raw nerve, but it’s still strong enough to surprise.

I’m surprised by the impulse, however fleeting, to call my father. I’m surprised that his name and long-ago discarded telephone number are saved in an iPhone that hadn’t been built when he died. Maybe I should delete it. But I won’t.

Five years.

A lot has happened. A pandemic. Two presidential administrations. Family weddings. Successes. Disappointments. Things too sad to type.

There’s an artificial heaviness – a phony significance – to the number five simply because it’s half of 10, and our numerical system is based on 10. That quirk of mathematics splashes into life, and we assign special meaning to the number five. We think we should feel something at five years, and at 10.

I do feel something: Sad. A similar sad, I suppose, to six. I’ll let you know then.

Today is Yom Kippur. My least-favorite holiday. A grim and joyless day in which we unworthy humans beg a skeptical God to forgive our sins.

In the Yom Kippur of my youth, the pages of prayerbooks promised that God was just and merciful, but everybody knew the “merciful” stuff was a load of crap that some rabbi put in because it was good PR. We knew we lived our lives under God’s disapproving, disappointed gaze, and that we pissed Him off in a million different ways every day.

(And yes, the King of the Universe, Blessed be He and Blessed be His Name, used the pronouns He and His.)

The only joy the day offered was when it ended. It is a solemn day, so awesome and frightening that angels tremble in terror. We humans observe it by fasting. From sundown to sundown, we neither eat nor drink. I remember watching grownups, deprived of coffee, arrive at synagogue bleary-eyed. As the day wore on, they became increasingly cranky. By the time services ended, their stomachs grumbled and their heads throbbed.

In time, it hit me, too, and interrupted my prayers:

“Elohenu ve-Elohe avotenu ve-imotenu,”

Gosh I’m hungry…

“Elohe Avraham Elohe Yitzchak ve-Elohe Ya-akov. Elohe Sarah Elohe Rivkah Elohe Rachel ve-Elohe Le-ah ha-El hagadol hagibor ve-hanorah,”

And I’d kill for some coffee. Really, is He gonna smite me for drinking some coffee? What’s the past tense of smite, anyway? Smit? Hey! Concentrate on the prayer!

“El elyon, gomel chasadim tovim ve-kone hakol, ve-zocher chasde avot…”

Is this a headache, or what? Does taking Advil count as “eating?”

Afterward, we’d rush home where we were fortified by bagels and coffee and family. Our good humor would return and we’d laugh and eat and tell stories and eat and critique the rabbi’s sermon and eat. There was joy in family and in home, but certainly not in the holiday.

I REMEMBER FOUR WORDS from services: “Who shall wax rich.”

They’re from a liturgical poem called Unetanneh Tokef, a key part of the Yom Kippur service. It dates to the sixth century and is very heavy:

“On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who shall live and who shall die; who shall die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning. Who shall rest and who shall wander, who shall live in harmony and who shall be harried, who shall enjoy tranquillity and who shall suffer, who shall become poor and who shall wax rich, who will be degraded and who will be exalted…”

The whole business of dying by water and fire and sword and beast and stoning – stoning! – freaked me out, and the idea of dying by thirst was terrifying. But “wax rich” always tripped me up. It wasn’t the rich part so much as the “wax” part. On this holy day, when I was trying to atone, hoping that God, who knew all my thoughts and deeds, would look favorably upon me, I was thinking about wax. And wax things. And waxiness. And The Karate Kid – “wax on. Wax off.”

Wax rich? Where’d they get “wax?” Sorry, God.

“…but Repentance, Prayer, and Charity mitigate the severity of the decree.”

It all seemed to be about severity. About mitigating awful stuff. If I repented and prayed and was charitable, maybe I still wouldn’t wax rich, but at least I wouldn’t die by beast. I could live with that.

FIVE YOM KIPPURS AGO, my father died. Certain observant people tried to comfort me by saying it’s a blessing to die on Yom Kippur – that because God forgives sins on this day, my father was “pure” on the day of his death.

Meh.

I know they were trying to help, but my father had just died. The only purity I knew was grief.

I never liked this day. I always thought fasting got in the way of its meaning. I always thought the idea of God spending a day each year making a list of who shall live and who shall die made no sense. I reject the idea that death and sickness are punishment for our failures.

While I like setting aside time to be introspective – to consider how we are living our lives, to evaluate what really is important – I always had a hard time with the way we did it.

My dad’s death made this already joyless day even more bitter.

For the past few years, synagogues all over the world have livestreamed Yom Kippur services. You can go to services in New York, in London, in Miami, all without leaving home. Last night, I went to Santa Monica – from West Hollywood.

The service was joyful. The music – which we would have rejected as inappropriate in the synagogues I grew up in – was uplifting. Joy was utterly lacking in the Yom Kippur of my youth. In fact, we would have rejected joy just as we would have rejected music. It would be…somehow frivolous.

This year, it was meaningful.

I don’t know why I went. Maybe out of habit. Maybe out of fear. Maybe because uttering the words and hearing the melodies reminds me of something I am or was – or of something I did or didn’t do.

The Yom Kippur of my youth was about sin and punishment and deprivation. No wonder I never liked it.

On this Day of Atonement, I pray that I will be kind more often than not. And I pray that all of us hear the music more than the grumbling.

A homeless man died alone on a hot sidewalk outside my gym on Tuesday.

The Los Angeles Police Department put a little plastic tent around the body, I guess to provide some degree of dignity to the body of a man who was denied it in life. A lone officer stood nearby, waiting for someone from the coroner’s office.

As the officer waited, a guy I sort of know showed up at the gym. He saw the cop on his way in, and he made a joke:

“They’re looking for you,” he said.

“Somebody died,” I told him.

It took a moment for my answer to register. I stepped outside to go home. I paused for a moment, trying to think of a prayer or a word or something appropriate to do, when my acquaintance emerged.

“What was he, a bum?” the guy asked me.

I told him no, the dead man was a person.

“Yeah, but a bum,” my acquaintance said.

I glanced toward the body and then at my acquaintance.

“No,” I answered. “He was a child of God and he died this afternoon, alone on a hot sidewalk, with no one to grieve.”

My acquaintance blinked a few times and went back inside. The temperature on the sidewalk had cooled to the mid-90s, and the man had been dead a few hours. No use staying outside.

Dozens, maybe hundreds of homeless people live in the alleys and sidewalks of that neighborhood, an easy walk from stores that sell shoes for more than $2,000 a pair. Those shoes are so far outside my realm of experience I don’t even look at them.

I pay the homeless people who inhabit those streets about the same attention.

Yet on this sticky Tuesday afternoon, I was touched by the death of a man I doubt I’d ever met and doubt I would have paid attention to.

He and I breathed the same air, lived in the same city. Our shoes padded down the same sidewalks.

Someone probably loved him once, even if brie􀂁y. He once was an infant, with the promise of new life. I imagine enjoyed the same things most people do: A slice of cake, a cold drink, a hot shower. I wondered when he last enjoyed any of those. I wondered about his final hours, and whether he even had the comfort of a breeze.

I am ashamed that I didn’t give him the consideration in life that I gave him in death.

A FRIEND IN MY BELOVED MAINE REMINDS ME that I once told him it was unfortunate that he believes people are innately good.

It sounds like something I would have said.

I was wrong.

Not that I think all people are good, because some are rotten. I have witnessed acts of kindness that are as tiny as they are sublime, and petty cruelties that manage to be mammoth. Philosophers – people far smarter than I – are still chewing over the state of humankind.

Whether people are innately good or bad doesn’t really matter, though. Whether we are prisoners, princes, or paupers, we all have intrinsic worth, and we deserve dignity.

Here’s where I was wrong: I told my friend it was unfortunate that he believes people are innately good. Wrong, wrong, wrong. If he believes people are good, he sees them as good. He sees their value, their beauty, their humanity.

When we acknowledge the humanity in others, we connect with them, if only a little. When we do that, we make our own lives better and we make the world a little kinder. Maybe, in fact, by seeing people as good, we help them become good. And if we don’t, well, a sunny outlook sure is better than a sour one.

A HOMELESS MAN DIED ALONE, sweating on a hot sidewalk, in one of the most glamorous cities in the world on Tuesday.

I don’t know about the afterlife or about God, but if there is either, I hope the man who died alone on a hot summer afternoon is welcomed by a chorus of angels.

I hope those same angels crush my callousness and awaken my own better angels – and all of ours.

Just before 7 a.m. on this day one year ago, I awoke in a guest room in my parents’ house. I padded up the long hallway to a little set of stairs and took a few steps. My mother and father slept a few feet to my right, but I turned left to another room, to greet the Angel of Death.

“Good morning,” she said.

Her French Caribbean accent made the words sound like burnt sugar, and her smile was kind.

But she lied. It was a very bad morning.

My father was dying. Cancer had spread to both lungs and his liver. He had pneumonia. His kidney – cancer had invaded the other, and a physician who was more technician than healer had removed it 13 months earlier – was failing.

Now, a hospice nurse with a soothing accent, a gentle manner, and a bottle of morphine tended to him.

We had tucked a hospital bed into the corner of his bedroom, and he had slept through the night. My father was too weak even to turn, and the nurse asked me for help turning him on his side.

Nearby, my mother slumbered alone in the bed she and my father had shared for decades. I worried that moving my dad would wake her. Reality was ugly, and I wanted her to have the comfort of sleep.

The nurse agreed. She went to check my father’s blood pressure.

She came back and said this: “Your father has no blood pressure.”

“Does that mean he’s gone?” I asked.

A simple nod would have sufficed, or a yes. Instead, she said it again.

“He has no blood pressure.”

I knew he was dying, but it took a moment for me to understand what she meant. And then the tumult. Telling my mom. Telling my older brother, who also had spent the night in the house. Calling my sister and my younger brother.

I stepped away from the chaos, to the quiet of the family room. It’s usually a boisterous place, but for a few moments that sad morning, it was just me. I sat down and hyperventilated.

I remember being surprised at my reaction – hyperventilation. I figured maybe I’d cry or something, but that didn’t come until later.

For now, I’d gulp air.

Today is a year. My family and I have gone through the things people go through in a year: Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays. They have been less joyous, and sometimes unspeakably sad.

The all-encompassing grief that washed over me in the days after my dad died is unsustainable, and has subsided a little. I’m even happy sometimes. Then I feel guilty for feeling happy, and then I feel silly for feeling guilty for feeling happy. And sometimes I’ll see something, or hear something or smell something or think something, and a wave of sadness will hit me. I go all weak in the knees – my legs literally lose their strength – and my eyes flood. And then I smile.

I’m used to it. Not over it.

Alvin N. Weinstein was 87. He had a good life. He managed to be both urbane and silly. He spoke four languages, he was a brilliant lawyer, he was a virtuoso musician.

People tell me he lived a long life.

I agree.

But it wasn’t long enough.