The Blessing Of A Broken Heart

I live with contradiction. A friend once said to me: Our children are our teachers. In death, Koby is teaching me more than I have learned from anyone alive. I live knowing that suffering teaches wisdom and a depth of infinite compassion. I live with the horror of my son's brutal death and the immense, magnificent beauty of the wadi intimately tied together. The Zohar says that you can have a heart with a chamber of pain and a chamber of joy joined together. That is my heart. When you died, I couldn't eat anything for three days. My friends begged me to eat something. Finally, I said: "I'll eat watermelon." I didn't remember that I had eaten watermelon at your birth. But as I ate it, I remembered being in the hospital room with you the day after your birth. I nursed you and held you to me, and then ate the watermelon my friend Ella had brought me. As the sun rose and the birds called out to me, a chorus of cheeps and squawks, you and I nestled together like a mother bird in her nest with her baby bird, and I felt that the whole world was nursing or suckling. Now after your death, the watermelon reminds me of fertility, a pregnant belly, the rosy flush of creation. But a circle has closed. I eat watermelon again. I am giving birth to your soul, a soul free of the constraints of body, a soul that can fly up to God and bask in delights. It is a hard labor, a labor that will continue for months, for years, maybe for a lifetime. The morning after the funeral, I woke with a pounding headache. I lay in bed, crying, and my friend Leah, a nurse, came up the stairs. She said: "Here take this," and tried to hand me a valium. "No," I said. "I gave birth without drugs and I'll do this withoutdrugs." I want to feel the pain. If don't, I will always be living in the land of suffering. I feel that if I go into my pain and truly experience it, swim in it, there is a chance I will emerge on the other shore of my loss, still pained and struggling, but with a different vision.