At Izzy’s deathbed, I began with “Elecho,” I cry out to you, words from Psalm 30 calling from the depths, hoping for God’s renewed presence. The melody is haunting, pleading as it rises and falls on “Adonai be a help for me.” It hooks the heart, even as it cracks my voice.
Izzy, it was clear to me, was dying, although it was also clear that Evie, his wife, was still hoping that he would hang on. The signs were there--the wasting limbs, the faded voice, the shallow breath--but she had remarked that he looked so much better than he had at the rehab earlier in the week.
The phone rang. It was a granddaughter, one of the beautiful young women whose portraits crowded the table next to the hospital bed. Evie said, “Our rabbi is here--one of our rabbis, the singing one. He’s brought his guitar and is praying with us. Rabbi, say hello to Ayelet.” Obediently, I took the phone and greeted her., asking where she was studying and letting her know how fond I was of her grandfather. When I handed the phone back, Evie told her she would call her back when I had left.
What to sing next? My hand turned pages and found “Hard Times,” the Stephen Foster classic I had learned from a Bob Dylan record. A kind of secular prayer, it acknowledges that hard times are indeed upon us, and orders that “Hard times come again no more” and that they should stop “hanging around my cabin door.” But we know that it’s hopeless to insist, that hard times have arrived and are unlikely to pass in this 72-year-long marriage--a marriage that only death could do part. It was a magical love in which Izzy’s only substantive complaint on his deathbed was that the couple had married only in September when the wedding could have been in July: they had wasted two whole months of conjugal bliss.
Imagine--from my perspective as a person who couldn’t make his marriage last past its twentieth year--that after 72 years of marriage, they wanted more. And given that likely there wouldn’t be more in the future, they were content to imagine that they could have had more even before they did get married. This overwhelming desire for her husband troubled Evie. Her son had admonished her: it’s not fair to ask him to stay any longer, because he can’t. But it was still so hard for her to acknowledge that the end was finally here. She could not accept it.
“Well, what if both are true?” I suggested. “Perhaps you can tell him that you want him to stay but that you know that it’s impossible.” People so often struggle to hold such contradictory truths in their minds at one time, but Evie’s heart seemed to take over and she knew that both were true. But that was a day later, when he was no longer talking, just breathing, presumably hearing, his mouth open into a jagged rectangle, his unshaven chin bristling in a way I had never seen, even in rehab. The day before, the day with the guitar, he was still communicating. To my chaplain’s eye, he was already actively dying, but the nurse had not yet been there to make that determination. And to communicate it to Evie. Neither of those things falls into my purview.
So after “Hard Times”--”tis the song, the sigh of the weary,” what would I play next? Clearly, the time had come for a prayer--a formal Jewish prayer rather than a secular one. The obvious choice was the vidui, a prayer that offers the dying person an opportunity to acknowledge that they’ve made mistakes--or, in the common parlance of received religion, that they’ve sinned--in their life and that this is a final opportunity to pray for atonement. I sensed that even if Izzy was ready for this prayer, Evie was not, so I hesitated, which allowed her to suggest that I sing the Mi Shebeirakh, the blessing for healing that we so often offer at a sick person’s bedside. Evie, still recovering from a fall that fractured her hip and left her in terrible pain, very much needed a Mi Shebeirakh. She loved in particular the beautiful version by Debbie Friedman that we had sung the week before, when she still hoped that Izzy would bounce back.
But today Izzy shook his head--did he also wave his arms?--not clear in my memory, but he made amply clear with whispered words and physical gesture that there would be no Mi Shebeirakh. So what to do? I plunged precipitously, perhaps recklessly, “Izzy, would you like the Vidui.” I asked in a pointed way I almost never do, perhaps (as I look back on the moment) because I felt that this might be the last opportunity for him to say the Vidui himself, rather than having a rabbi read it on his behalf, or perhaps because I sensed that this was what his refusal of the Mi Shebeirakh meant. Before he could respond, however, Evie exclaimed, nearly as vociferously as Izzy but louder, “NO!”--the pain of acknowledging that Izzy’s life was now wholly in God’s hands, that he would die within days if not hours, was simply too much for her to process.
So an impasse--of my own making? Perhaps, but by offering the vidui, I did lay the blockage out in the open. Evie, with the help of the nurse, of her kids, and of Izzy himself as he became quieter and weaker and eventually stopped talking all together, gradually got there. But that would be tomorrow--what about today, as Evie sat by Izzy’s side, protecting him, guarding him for now from the inevitable conclusion? As we remained in silence, I recalled, in a moment of grace, how often I had seen Evie and Izzy holding hands like the friends and lovers they had been for more than 72 years. And I also recalled how wistful I would become in those moments, as I was reminded that my own estranged wife and I would not be holding hands after 70 years of marriage. And as I write this I also recall how much I loved holding hands with my sons, their paws growing bigger and bigger until they became the size of my own and no longer sought the warmth and safety of my grip.
So it was The Beatles, “I Want to Hold Your Hand”--“When I touch you I feel happy inside.” That reality had not changed for Evie and Izzy in 72 years, and those words resonated in Izzy’s face as he mouthed them and feebly squeezed his wife’s hand for the two minutes or so the song lasted. As I sang, Evie’s face glowed with love and suffering. Time, in that odd way it occasionally does, slowed down, even stopped as the image of the two lovers became fixed in my memory, holding hands in the face of immense loss. And somehow I knew that for this unity to emerge from the disjunctive impasse between his need to die and her need for him to keep living, God--grace, the universe, my own unconscious--had sent me something for them to agree on: when in doubt, hold hands.
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