Last Sunday, three days before Rosh Hashana and the new moon solar eclipse, my grandmother had a stroke.
The stroke caused significant damage to the right side of her brain, leaving her left side paralyzed. She can’t swallow, which means she can’t eat or drink.
My grandma has her memory and awareness. She knows who she is, and where she is. She knows who we are. She acknowledges us when we visit.
She remembers her early childhood and recent news. Her mind is as sharp as it ever was. She can communicate, although the paralysis on her left side makes her slur her words.
The only thing she seems not to know (because nobody explicitly told her) is what happened to her and her prognosis.
The blood clot in her brain is inoperable — a function of its size and location and her age, which is 99.
As a family we have had to come to terms with the inevitable: my grandma — a Holocaust survivor who has proved her tenacity and resilience for over 99 years — will not bounce back from this.
So we are just waiting for the inevitable.
Finding Comfort and Certainty in Ritual
Ironically, I’ve always been someone who is “good with death” — or so people tell me. I’m not afraid of the emotions that come with loss, and I am a strong space-holder for others in their grief.
As I’ve reflected on this over the past week, I’ve realized that perhaps one reason I’ve been comfortable with death is that death is final. It’s not ambiguous.
In the Jewish tradition, once a death happens, there are rituals and routines—clear steps to follow in the aftermath.
I like rituals and routines. They bring me comfort and a sense of certainty.
This past week, though, has been mired in uncertainty. I feel trapped in a weird limbo where I know the inevitable is coming but I don’t know when it will happen.
I’ve become friends with a new type of grief: anticipatory grief.
The grief has affected my brain and body. My focus, concentration, attention, cognition. My ability to think clearly and write coherently.
It’s affected my mobility and my strength. In the gym, weights I was able to do with ease just last week are suddenly a struggle. Teaching a yoga class, I struggle with the most basic poses. My balance is off.
Well-meaning people might advise me to let go of my routines. Skip the gym. Skip the writing. Take care of yourself, they’d say.
What they are missing is that this is how I take care of myself.
My routines and rituals give me a reason to get out of bed when I want to stay under the covers and ignore the reality of the inevitable. They give me a structure to hold on to even as my world seems to crumble beneath me.
They tether me to the land of the living, even as part of me is dying.
This is something I learned from my grandma. Beyond what she went through in her early life, she has lived to an age where she has watched most of her friends die before her. She has always continued to look forward, to focus on what’s next, to stay immersed in life.
In times like these, it’s the ordinary, everyday rituals that keep me moving forward, that remind me that life goes on, even in the presence of death.
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