Beshert

It’s over. Death Month has officially ended. I’ve flipped both our house calendars to September, the free one from the SPCA and the yearly one with pictures of my niece and nephews and their dog. You can stand down, those of you who have kept vigil with me. Your support is appreciated.

What are the teachable moments from Death Month, as President Obama would say (not about Death Month obviously). What are the lessons learned, as one of my former bosses would say as she drilled down to the micro level about some lost case that had struck me as more or less a crap shoot.

Sarah’s death wasn’t a crap shoot, but it still feels very, very arbitrary, invalid, and filled with whatifs. Is it better that I can ponder those whatifs without crying so much now, that I have a little more distance and am a little less emotional? Or is this rumination — without so much upfront depression — just some kind of sick hobby?

One of the things I ws ruminating on during Death Month was the question: Was Sarah the love of my life? I arrived at this question kind of backward, because I started thinking, how can I possibly go through this grief experience twice. Once for Max and once for Sarah. It seems like that would be too much to bear in one lifetime.

Now, of course Max is the love of my life in terms of being my “soul mate,” my beshert as the Talmud says, my romantic partner and the only person in the world who would put up with me on a day-to-day basis. But it feels like the love I have for Sarah was so intense and so unconditional. And her love for me felt so unconditional too. I felt..so completely adored. Yes, as she entered adolescence she was less interested in us, more moody, more apt to want to watch YouTube, more concerned about her boyfriend. But I always felt like I was so important to her, every single day.

I ended up Googling “Can your child be the love of your life?” and I discovered that a lot of other people had debated this subject because it had appeared in some way as the plot of a TV show (which I didn’t watch except for the first season.) So apparently this is not an original thought. But I’m glad that other people have thought that too.