I devotedly await the impossible.
If only Ben could come crashing through my kitchen door on his skateboard again, I’d be able to return to my life the way it once was. Mind you, it was not always pleasant.
I’ve known the agonizing experience of wrestling my 220 lb. adult son in the throes of diabetic hypoglycemia and the torment of bear-hugging him while a grand mal epileptic seizure ran its course. And I can assure you that combating the devastating impact of not one but two chronic diseases in my child’s life is, like his death, an event for which no parent can adequately prepare himself. My family experienced both.
The days and years of Ben’s life were few and troubled. When ten and a half years old, he begrudgingly surrendered his childhood to the pernicious demands of juvenile diabetes. Gone were the yesterdays and tomorrows of his childhood. His hopefulness for a normal future, his expectations of success and for long life became bleak. Ben acceded to the basic requirements of diabetic care but insisted he live his life on his own terms, free to experience each day as if it were his last. I’ve never known anyone more able to live in the urgency of the present tense than Ben.
I‘ve never loved anyone more, but Ben and I clashed often. I feared his diabetes. He largely ignored it. Believe me when I tell you we did not welcome the additional burden of epilepsy with which Ben was diagnosed just after his eighteenth birthday.
Parental bereavement takes no days off. This year I will commemorate the three thousand, two hundred and eighty-fifth day I have been grieving for Ben. The 24th of Cheshvan, 5761, corresponding to November 22, 2000, the day before Thanksgiving, was the last day I spoke to him, touched him and marveled at his gift for living life.
On the eve of Ben’s yahrzeit, I will light a ner neshuma, a memorial candle, this year for the ninth time, a practice I’ve done since Ben’s life ended after twenty-two and a half years. But as important as I recognize this “light of the soul” to be for Ben’s aliyah, it does nothing to soothe the pain of my loss. Maybe it’s unreasonable of me to expect that it should. There is, after all, no balm for parental grief.
Its pain worsens as the gulf that separates us widens. I return older each time. Ben remains twenty-two years old as he was then and will always be. Instead of recalling his young manhood, I tend now to think of him more and more as the little boy he once was. He has missed so much of life. I don’t think any number of yahrzeit candles can illumine the darkness that shrouds the life of a bereaved parent.
Though of my past, I grieve for Ben at my side one day at a time, every day of the week, month and year. He must remain an eternal zikaron, an everlasting remembrance. That is, I suspect, the way of most, perhaps of all bereaved parents. Ask any one of us how it works.
“I know what you mean," noted a friend of mine, a fellow bereaved parent. "It's been 28 years for me. I can't imagine the days!! Yet I still grieve and always will. I don't want a day to come when I can't remember her face or things she said and did.”
Contrary to the well-intentioned but wayward counsel of some consolers, I don't wish to put Ben’s death behind me. I hold it in front of my eyes. It neither blinds nor causes me to stumble. Even though I’ve never put much stock in the old platitude that “time heals all wounds”, I do worry, however, that someday Ben’s death will feel more like history than yesterday’s tragedy. So, I refuse to surrender his memory to the amnesia of time. Though I believe I did the best I could for him, I’ve considered the possibility that guilt might be hiding behind my grief, that somehow I may have failed Ben in his life.
I think a lot about that. I am, however, certain of one thing. My grief, like that of others who have loved and lost their own Bens, remains my steadfast companion.
So, as I approach the three thousand, two hundred and eighty-fifth day, I pray Ben that you dwell in the heavens high enough to see me searching the starry skies for your passing shadow.
Alan D. Busch
