“First, there is no such thing as normal grief. Each grief is not
only original but as much originating as commemorative. Second,
grief never resolves. It simply becomes a tributary stream of the
mighty river of memory which is what gives presence its flavor.
“Youth may be intense, but experience twines together more strands
and weaves a more complicated fabric, full of figure and ground
reversals. That’s not an accidental figure, either. As we lose
those we’ve truly loved, we can identify with the ground. We
become for ourselves figures who are on the way to the ground. We
may even find some real ground to stand on.
“It’s an adventure in which pain has a leading part to play, not
only as nemesis but as guide. To grieve is not only to read the
book again knowing the ending, but to discover that the book is
rewritten as we reread and that it richly repays the work of
rereading not once and for all, but over and over again. Grief
makes links of our losses.
“In the intensity of our griefs we are intensely alive. Grief
complicates us and the complexity points paths beyond what we have
been. These paths point forward to our loss of ourselves and to
degrees of healing renunciation along the way.”
Benjamin Aaron Midbar stopped, arresting the torrent of words, with
a movement of his whole body that culminated in a lift of his
eyebrows upwards.
“What is so often forgotten is that what is helpful to the grieving
person is his grief. Efforts to forestall it, to limit it, even to
channel it, to moderate it are attacks just where the bereaved
person is most sensitive. There is no comfort. Was it real? Did
I have ever what I now have lost or was it all some sort of
delusion, of which I should now be ashamed since it no longer has
a place?
“These are dark and deep questions that trouble the mourner’s soul.
His grief is the guarantor of his capacity to have made what was
good good and so to have put himself in the position of being able
to lose it and so to engage in the struggle to reclaim that part of
him of which it was made. The mourner has to rebuild his house
from the ashes of his devastation to accommodate more of himself
than he knew existed.
“He is left squarely with the choice between self-creation and
self-destruction. That is why the struggle goes so deep and
arouses so much anxiety in the spectators. We all either recognize
ourselves in it or shrink from the self-recognition. Every
rethinking of ourselves shows us a stranger where we thought ourselves
most familiar and familiar where we found ourselves previously
most estranged.”
“I don’t know how to describe B.A. Midbar,” said Ralph Seligson of
the Union Theological Seminary Graduate Program. “Half truck
driver, half-metaphysician doesn’t get it, because if you put B.A.
at the wheel of a big rig, you might suiddenly discover that it
seemed to be turning into the chariot of Ezekiel. You do know that
he was a football star in high school, refused to play in college,
married a ballerina, had two daughters, got divorced and took to
the road as a truck driver for the next fifteen years?
“I can’t get it out of my head that he once told me that he was
never interested in grief until grief got interested in him. The
thing about him is his weight, the bulk, the presence. It’s
bodily, but it also has to do with the body of his experience, the
body of his capacity to experience. Above all, I think he is a
very shy man.”
“What was it like to drive a truck? It’s hard to say,” Benjamin
Aaron Midbar mused. “I didn’t really start thinking and feeling in
any way I could clearly know as mine until I was more than forty
years old. When I was driving the truck, I was just driving the
truck. It was dull, boring, tedious, just about getting this or
that from here to there. It was different each day, but monotonous, too.
“I might easily have driven the truck off the road. I think every
trucker thinks about it and some do it. When I thought about it,
it was without either passion or indignation. It was like trying
to think about righting a wrong when, not only don’t you have a
clear picture of what’s wrong, but you can’t really allow yourself
to believe yourself.
“Why didn’t I drive the truck off the road? Maybe it wasn’t
anything more than inertia. One time I was making a run with some
equipment for a freezing plant in Wisconsin. I stopped in Chicago
because the rig needed some work. I went to the art museum. I saw
a Van Gogh painting of a circle of convicts exercising in a prison
yard. It was green.
“I stepped back from it and it seemed to me the circle of men were
all one flower. There was an image hidden in the painting that
organized all its parts. The freshness of the flower as against
the convicts’ unvoiced despair took my breath away. I got to
thinking about Van Gogh and wondering why he cut his ear off.
“I never figured out why he did it. I don’t even know if he knew
why he did. But whatever he meant to accomplish by it, it seemed
to me that he didn’t get it done. That was when I stopped thinking
about driving the rig off the road and that was when driving the
rig at all started to become unbearable. Nancy was living with the
kids in England.
“I realized not only how much I missed them, but that there wasn’t
a thing I could do about what I’d missed. There wasn’t any way to
fill the hole in. It was a hole. That was all there was to it.
It was a hole and it was in me. I think that was when I first
realized that there was anything at all in me.
“I don’t know if this makes any sense, but I felt the presence of
an absence, where before even the absence had been absent. That’s
where I still am. I experience myself as the presence of an
absence, an instructive lack. It’s not a question of getting rid
of the hole. It’s a question of furnishing it so that it becomes
a home. Even then, it’s open, so that we are never our own
masters.”
“I’ve heard myself described as an expert on death. No. I’m no
more an expert on death than anyone else alive. Death is every≠where.
Death is in everything that lives. Each one of us is born
with clear title to a death. There is no challenging this title.
Yes, I work with people who are dying and with people who are
bereaved.
“But, if we scratch the surface just a bit, we realize that each
and every one of us works with people who are dying and with people
who are bereaved. We are all involved in the project of mourning
our own passing. Death is not a dirty word. Only we have driven
the culture of death underground. Then we are baffled by our
rootlessness.
Benjamin Aaron Midbar scowled. “What I am talking about are
practical matters. These are really the most practical matters
because everything we do depends on the attitudes on which we base
our doing. Even the meaning of the word ‘practical’ has been
uprooted to the point where it means ‘material.’ The sadness is
that most of us pass our lives in self-imposed internal exile.
This death-in-life is what makes it impossible for us to use death
to establish our own measure.
“I can’t tell you the story of my life, because I can’t tell myself
the story of my life. I can’t tell you what I do, because I can’t
tell myself. If I have anything to offer, then it is this
bafflement. I’m almost sixty-five years old and just as lost as I
ever was. But I haven’t lost my sense of loss. The most complicated and vexing attachment is my vexed attachment to myself. There is a comfort in the
fact that it is not only temporary, butalso probably illusory.”
“I don’t know what ever possessed B.A. to go for rabbinical
training at age forty-five. I don’t know why they threw him out,
either. All I’ve heard from him, though, is that, as he sees it, he was at fault. Personally, I think it made him. It removed an inhibition, without dislocating
him from the tradition,” reflected Ralph Seligson.