The rhythm was unmistakable, my wife N— told me some time afterward. Everyone took turns wielding a long-handled spade, pulling earth from one of the nearby mounds and lifting the soil into the open grave.
She heard the fling and patter of shovelfuls of dirt upon our son’s pinewood coffin. Once the entire surface of the lid lay covered with loose soil, we recited Kaddish: an ancient prayer composed in Aramaic, often associated with the rites of mourning in the Jewish tradition.
yit-gadal v’yit-kadash sh’may rabbah
“Magnified and sanctified, may His great name be.”
Perhaps N—-’s observation was a genius act of discerning liturgical onomatopoeia; citing the prayer for vocalizing the sound of filling a grave.
The pre-Common Era origins of Kaddish had not availed the prayer to the bereaved at graveside nor to mourners marking the anniversary of a loved one’s death in synagogue. It was a prayer that scholars recited after a session studying Jewish sacred texts.
Contrary to popular belief about the prayer, it is not a dirge of unaccountable grief. Rather, the prayer reads as an outspoken gesture of praise toward Providence.
One might entertain such whims of a wandering-mind latching onto of the sound of dirt flung and scattering, especially while watching others fill her four-year-old son’s grave with soil. So immense a grief that it blinds the senses. Imagine the embrace of a blizzard, what disorients one from place and time, as well as presence of mind.
After we said Kaddish, my father pointed out the February sky overhead: a hazy, celestial tableau of clouds. On either side of the mid-afternoon sun hung two patches of multicolored spectrum: a far too exacting symmetry or design to call the segments of rainbow each equal distant from the sun, a mere coincidence.
The rainbow appears in the Bible after the great flood that nearly destroyed civilization. Providence called the rainbow a sign of the promise not to destroy the world ever again. Bible commentators say a rainbow signals Providence’s mercy after a punishment has been meted out.
Considering what we witnessed Elazar Refael endure while afflicted with a brainstem tumor: a 4-month hospitalization, neurosurgery, tracheostomy, thirty doses of radiation, and a couple of brushes with death by asphyxiation —how could I not see this experience as Divine chastening?
Was it also just happenstance that rainbows lasted as long as the time it took the backhoe loader to fill up our boy’s resting place? The rainbows vanished just as the last bits of earth were scraped onto the filled grave.
After 30 days had passed, my wife channeled her focus and energy into gardening, which involved remediating the soil around our home. The ground lying in the immediate perimeter of the house was littered with cement chunks, glass, nails and just about every other debris related to construction one can imagine.
We had purchased and relocated to the ranch-style abode only months before Elazar was diagnosed. Our recollection about those intervening months remain lodged in such a heavy fog.
Only the very moment a Providence St. Joseph’s ER physician informed us about the dark mass found at the base of Elazar’s skull, do those months come into surreal focus.
Had N— not committed herself to planting and nurturing life, she led me to believe, the grief would have swallowed her whole.
I am thinking of the late poet Allen Ginsberg—how could I possibly avoid it? He titled a book-length poem, “Kaddish”, honoring the memory of his mother, Naomi.
Composed in the frenetic, frenzied diction of the Beat Writers who followed in the poet’s wake, “Kaddish” reads in layers of elliptical phrasing; a style suggestive of a sanity’s stretched seams, barely keeping things together. Naomi suffered a debilitating mental illness, revealed in the poem through a number of harrowing scenes.
Except for a few scattered references to the Aramaic prayer transliterated into English, the poem mostly comprises a short, anguished biography of Ginsberg’s mother.
The poem’s mid section illustrates content I would consider most relevant to Kaddish. A multitude of benedictions first addresses Providence, then acknowledges many of the agonizing experiences endured by Naomi as she battled paranoia and psychosis. The driving force of the listed blessings mimics the energy of the Kaddish’s call-and-response framework.
Blessed be He who dwells in the shadow! Blessed be He! Blessed be He!
Blessed be you Naomi in tears! Blessed be you Naomi in fears! Blessed Blessed Blessed in sickness!
Blessed be you Naomi in Hospitals! Blessed be you Naomi in solitude! Blest be your triumph! Blest
be your bars! Blest be your last years’ loneliness!
As I mentioned earlier, the Kaddish’s reputation as a liturgical statement of grief has been well cemented in the Jewish community. Ginsberg’s worthy effort at restoring the laudatory character of the prayer should be noted here, albeit, he adapts a liturgical formulation drawn from the Passover Haggadah (a book of religious texts that format the meal celebrating the Jewish nation’s liberation from slavery in Egypt).
I forbade the hospice nurse from shutting off the oxygen concentrator after he had confirmed Elazar’s vitals had ceased. The machine chugged along at a decibel or two quieter than a lawn mower; however, I could not countenance keeping watch over my son’s remains within an ear splitting silence while waiting for the Jewish burial society to arrive and retrieve his body.
N— and I sat on the floor of our moderate-sized bedroom, shrunk to a hovel-scale quarters; Tetris-spaced by Elazar’s twin bed, a ventilator, oxygen tanks, rolling stand-up tray, pulse-ox and, yes, the log-cutting oxygen concentrator. With prayer books open on our laps, we recited Psalms as a gesture of comfort to Elazar’s newly unsheathed soul.
At one point — and I say this without risking exaggeration — I felt the sensation as if Elazar were circling my legs like an overly affectionate cat. Three nights later, as N— I sat at the table chatting, she felt Elazar lovingly caressing her cheek. I was the last of any in our family to interact with Elazar the night before dying in his sleep. Aside from losing our son, it had further grieved her that she didn’t have a chance to kiss him good night.
The Jewish tradition teaches that the soul of the deceased wanders back and forth for three days from the place of death and the grave where the body is entombed. We haven’t felt our son’s presence since that night, but his absence gnaws on our hearts each day.
Death is a scavenger of sorts, and I suspect Allen Ginsberg knew it. The last section of “Kaddish” features a description of the cemetery where Naomi’s remains were buried. Interspersed between phrases rings the sound of a crow’s call, along with cries addressed to Providence. To the end of the poem the pace is passionately urgent and will not yield to the stupor of everyday, waking life.
—
Previously published on Medium
—
Shutterstock image
